Tuvalu (19 page)

‘And how long have you been doing this?'

‘Two years. I could get in with a little help from my father but I don't want to, not just yet. Since there's no rush for me to get my degree or enter the workforce I can take my time with it, enjoy it. Quite a few people do that, take a year or more to get into university. I figure why not three? This is the rest of my life we're talking about and I'm quite happy to put it off. I do as little as possible most days. I'm not a bit like the Crown Princess Masako, depressed because she had to give up her diplomatic career and befuddled by the pointlessness of royal life. I don't understand her at all, her nostalgia for work. You'd hope at least royals could do nothing in this world without being made to feel inadequate.'

We walked on in silence, occasionally stopping to inspect plants or signboards, and when we came to the exit it appeared to be roughly opposite the entrance. A bored guard, resplendent in his palace uniform, asked for the tags issued upon entry. Mami handed them over with an automatic smile and we were waved through.

This exit led us onto a wide old bridge. It was a solid, sturdy mass of stone jutting from the perimeter wall and crossing the moat, dividing it cleanly in two. We moved to the left and peered down. In the water below heavy carp flapped along stone walls, churning the edges white. Some of these giant fish were a dull grey, others orange. Mami rested her arms on the railing. Unlike the tourists surrounding us she had no interest in the water. She looked diagonally across the moat towards a high wall on the Tokyo side.

‘I jumped off that once,' she said. ‘That's what I wanted to show you.'

‘I don't believe you.'

‘I did.'

I looked at her carefully, at her lips, searching for evidence of a smile. But there was not a trace of a curve there. She stared at the wall. Made of solid stone blocks, it ran from the city side of the bridge out into the distance.

‘You're crazy, but not that crazy,' I said. ‘That must be at least ten metres high.'

‘I promise you, I did.'

‘Why the—?'

‘Because of a feeling.'

‘A feeling? What sort of feeling could make you do that?'

Mami glanced across icily. ‘What feeling? The same feeling that clogs my throat, makes my heart thud and sucks my lungs flat. That's what sort of feeling.'

‘I've never had it.'

‘When I get that feeling, I cry,' Mami said. ‘I lock myself inside and I cry. Weeks pass with me just crying. I don't go to my classes and I hardly eat. And when crying does nothing to stop it, I do something crazy. The craziest thing I can think of.'

Though sincere, I had the sense Mami was delighting in all this, like a child picking at a scab to keep a prized wound. I tried to picture her running and leaping from the wall but could not see it. For starters, there were three guards at the far end of the bridge. Had the water been deep enough for her to survive, and had she been able to climb back up, they would surely have arrested her.

‘Were you arrested?'

‘I did it late at night. I chose a dark spot without guards, somewhere I could get a good run up, then I walked away and practised my jump.'

Mami found a rubber band in her pocket and wound it around two fingers. ‘I was scared because I knew I was going to do it, that I had to do it. Once the idea was in my head as a way to feel better, it wasn't my choice anymore.' She flicked the rubber band. It shot from her hand and, losing momentum, fell to the water. Carp surfaced from the deep green, their ugly mouths gulping.

‘After that I jumped,' she said. ‘I was lucky. Overstep and I would've tumbled down. Jump too early and I wouldn't have made it. It's steep but nowhere near vertical.'

I dabbed at my nose with a tissue. ‘Did you touch the bottom?'

Mami smiled. ‘That's a secret.'

‘How did you climb back up?'

‘I'm not telling.'

‘Because you don't know!'

‘No. I know,' she said. ‘I know because I did it. If you want to know, you do it.'

The Rainy Season

A
week after Mami's make-believe suicide, Harry asked for another loan. His second request was far more substantial than his first—100,000 yen.

‘I thought you had money,' I said, feeling yet more sweat leak onto my slippery face.

‘I do. I still have most of the first transfer, but I haven't been able to finalise the second. The Japanese bank I'm dealing with keeps wanting to charge a fortune. It's a lot of money to move. I want to get it right.'

‘I see.'

‘My grandmother left it to me about five years ago,' Harry went on, as if to justify his worrying. ‘I wasn't going to use it. But as soon as I landed here I knew.'

‘Knew what?'

‘Knew there was no point in slumming it. With a little capital, Japan's ripe. I'm only staying in Nakamura's as long as I have to.'

We crossed the road outside the convenience store and sat on an old staircase. We had taken to using this staircase for eating. Harry peeled back the plastic wrapping on his bento box, then lifted the transparent lid.

‘Shit,' he said, putting the meal aside. ‘It's hot. They really microwaved it, huh?'

‘You complained that it wasn't hot enough last time.'

‘I didn't know they'd understand.'

I laughed, feeling a stabbing pain in my bandaged nose. ‘When do you need this money by?'

‘Today, if possible. I have the chance to buy toilet seats. They're fully heated and they're cheap, which is exactly what I want. Once I have them the pressure's off. I can get in touch with the guy I know in Ohio—the builder.'

‘Ohio?'

‘Ohio's dying not to feel the cold, unlike Hawaii. I'll need this money for a week. After that I'll repay you 125,000 yen plus a complete set of porn novels, since this is no small favour.'

At that moment it began to rain in earnest, first with a few heavy drops and then as a vertical torrent. The sky above Tokyo had been working itself up to this release. Depthless cloud, hanging thick and low, had blotted out all blue, and occasional hesitant drizzle had only driven the humidity higher, until the city felt set to burst.

Without giving it any further thought—as if this rain were a sign—I decided to take a risk. After all, how could it hurt? I had no reason to distrust Harry. He had repaid my first loan and was serious about money. If worst came to worst I would only lose $1000. People everywhere put far more on the line.

‘It's yours for a week,' I said, water beginning to seep through my clothing.

‘You don't mind lending it?'

‘Not at all.'

‘Great. I'll pay you back 125,000 yen in seven days.'

I shook Harry's hand distractedly. With the rain in my eyes and mouth as I looked up into the grey-white sky, my clothes sodden, I did not care about money. The weather had commandeered all reason. I grinned happily at the forces involved.

‘How about that,' I heard Harry say beside me, voice a whisper.

‘How about that,' I agreed.

My euphoria was short-lived. Humid Tokyo quickly irritated me. The liberal splashing of hot pink onto everything from computers to anti-constipation ads, the lack of consensus on which side of the footpath to walk, the drunken businessmen who fell asleep on crowded trains and let their bodyweight rest on those around them, the use of phones on pushbikes and the fearsome, iridescent lights which tumbled up and down wall-sized ads or burst from nowhere like silent explosions, all infuriated me. I wanted to switch the city off.

Harry went ahead and bought his toilet seats. The stack of cardboard boxes sat in his room, awaiting a next move. I was waiting, too. Rather than pay me back Harry had let the deadline slip, and I was beginning to get the uneasy sense there never would be any money.

‘We have to celebrate,' he said, early one evening.

All I wanted was my 125,000 yen, but I thought it best to placate him. ‘Celebrate what?'

‘The toilet seats.'

We had wandered from the hostel down towards the fish markets where an older Japan—or traces of it—still lingered. Instead of immaculate department stores with well-groomed staff there were only stalls. Various fish—some packaged, some freshly sliced, others swimming—were on offer. Short, vaguely rural types with overalls and gumboots busied themselves inside and around the different shops, pulling in the bright canopies which extended into the narrow street or hefting up sloshing polystyrene crates. Children ran about waiting for their parents to finish up. At one table, a frowning old man speared eels through the head with a metal spike before slicing their writhing bodies into manageable slabs.

‘Celebrate how?' I asked.

‘A snack bar.'

I stared along the stark, small buildings above the stalls, all one room wide, many aluminium and rusted out like the hostel. A nearby two-stroke motor pained my ears. It would, I knew, be a blessing to leave the markets and exchange them for the curve of a female body, for the softness of a female face, even if this femininity came at a price and was a thinly veiled fraud.

‘Fine,' I said.

‘How about that.'

We walked on. It was almost dark, the sky lit by planes. I decided not to take Harry all the way into the city. It was too far. There was a place nearby—nothing special, but satisfactory. If he wanted more he was on his own.

‘By the way,' Harry said, ‘do you have my watch?'

‘Shit, I completely forgot about that.'

‘But you have it?'

‘No, I lost it.'

‘When?'

‘It fell off when I was running to Mami's hotel. Sorry.' I contemplated offering to replace it but on account of the outstanding debt said nothing more.

I led Harry into a small building roughly the shape of a cigarette lighter. We waited for the lift to descend and stepped in. I pressed a pink button and we clunked up to a pink floor. There was hardly room to stand, so cramped was this atrium. Harry pulled open a door with ‘Casanova's' written on it in a fancy, flowing script I found difficult to read.

‘You been here before?' he asked.

‘No.'

‘How do you know about it?'

‘Heard of it.'

The staff chimed a collective welcome and a middle-aged woman, Asian but with blonde hair, greeted us, bowing. I looked around. The drink bar was roughly the size of a chopping board. There were five tables: three out in the open, and two backed up against walls with couches, forming booths. Of these booths, the closest was occupied by a pair of dissimilar businessmen, one well into his sixties, the other in his twenties. The older man was inebriated. Drunkenness showed in his eyes, which—though he was looking at me—seemed to focus on a point somewhere behind my head. I nodded to him, annoyed by his gaze, and he looked away sluggishly.

The booth beside these two men was free and I made a point of staring at it.

‘Everything's pink,' Harry said. ‘Why pink?'

‘Pink's girly.'

The woman with blonde hair gestured towards the empty booth. She was wearing a smooth, tight-fitting dress which thrust her small breasts forward and up.

‘Table,' she said in English.

‘Thank you.' I ordered a jug of beer and Harry sat down beside me.

‘What happens now?' he asked.

‘Someone—a girl—will come and sit with us. She'll tell us how wonderful we are and, if you're lucky, let you feel her breasts.'

‘The blonde woman?'

‘Someone a lot younger.'

‘Good.'

‘It doesn't worry you that we're being played?' I asked after a moment.

‘No.'

Harry stood, crossed to a cigarette machine and purchased a packet of cigarettes. He unwrapped them and lit up. Taking a pretentious, contemplative drag as he returned to the table, he said, ‘I don't have an objection to any of this, even to prostitution for that matter. If a woman wants to sell her body, as far as I can see that's her right. Just like if a man wants to sell
his
body that's his right. By extension, anyone who wants to pay for these services, well, that's their business. I'm not religious. I don't have God or anything like that muddling me up, so it's easy to see things in simple, shall we say … economic terms.'

‘You've been to a brothel?'

‘Many.'

‘And you enjoy them?'

‘You sound more interested than disgusted.'

‘I am.'

‘Okay. All but one,' Harry declared.

‘Which one?'

‘This girl in Thailand. She wasn't wearing anything but underpants, I remember. No top and great little tits. Anyway, halfway through this hand job she makes me put on a condom and straddles me. She hardly spoke English. I went along with it for a while, until sure.'

‘Of?'

‘A bad vibe. That may sound strange but I think of the world as waves—energy waves. Everything in life is made up of waves and waves always take the easiest path. It's all a lot more complicated than that and I won't get into it now, but that's the basic idea. The waves you're giving out, sitting here across the table, affect me; and the ones I'm giving out, in part a reaction to yours, affect you. If you jump up and tell me I'm a prick for screwing some Thai girl then I get bad vibes. I can either take the easy path, which is to get pissed off, or I can resist and keep on giving out good waves. Again, overly simplistic, but you get the idea.'