Water Lily (15 page)

He talked to Barry in his head.
Don’t fix the roof. There’s no need. I’ll sort it out when I get back. Never mind a few leaks. No, don’t fix it. What? Barry
asked. Are you serious? Is it the money? I’d get that roof sorted now if I were you. No, said Ralph. Don’t do anything. I’m
serious.

If rain were coming through, the roof would be wrecked. How could he not have checked it before he left? But if anyone went
in while he was away, they’d have to go up into the loft. And if they pressed the switch on the stairs to turn the loft light
on, they would be putting on the twinkling lights strung across the rafters. They’d think he was mad or they’d laugh at him.
He was filled with shame. But he was thousands of miles away and, for now at least, no one could ask him a single question.
He was beyond reach.

He was farther from home than he had ever been. He had made new friends, he thought, and was just beginning. He reached onto
the bedside table for his wallet and fumbled for the photograph of Li Hua. In the dark, if he squinted, he could just see
her face. She looked the same in the dark as she did under light. Plain. A sweet smile, but plain nonetheless. It might be
the way her hair was scraped back from her face into a ponytail or braid or something. You couldn’t tell what it was, but
it wasn’t attractive. He rolled over and as he did so, some-one on the top bunk moved too. Ralph was not alone. The other
sleeper must have been there all the time. A smooth, muscular arm slipped over the edge and hung above Ralph’s face. Ralph
turned to face the wall.

Don’t fix the roof. I’ll sort it out. I’ll sort it out. He heard his thoughts repeat without any meaning and knew he must
almost be asleep.

R
una was thinking of Jun. She was awake but almost asleep and was afraid that when she woke up she would be holding on to the
body of the woman next to her. She clung to things, people, whatever was there in the night. If she was alone, she sometimes
attached herself to the edge of the bed. Kawasaki said that she was like one of those toy koala bears that gripped your finger.
She couldn’t be sure that she wouldn’t roll over in her sleep, fasten herself to the warm, sleeping body beside her. And there
was nothing she could do to prevent it. She never knew in advance that it would be the kind of night when she would need to
hold someone. She would just wake up to find that it was.

She was trying to remember her last day as a teacher, to remember Jun’s face as she saw it on the playing field. But the memory
kept flipping over and instead of her last day at school, she saw her first.

*     *     *

She was cycling into the school entrance, squeezing gently on the brakes. It was a cold afternoon, turning into early evening,
and she shivered as the bicycle slowed. Or maybe it was not so cold and she was shivering with nerves. She hadn’t intended
to be a teacher. After university she was planning to work in a shop until she could think of something better. But she bumped
into a family friend one day at a bus stop and, when he heard she had an English degree and was unemployed, he promised to
put in a good word for her at the private high school where he used to work. She couldn’t say no and then, when they offered
her a job, she was obliged to accept it with gratitude and stick it out for a few years so that the family friend wouldn’t
lose face.

She wore a rucksack on her back and there was something hanging from the handlebars, another bag perhaps. The school drive
curled through tall, wispy bamboo and up to the grey blocks. The concrete twinkled as it passed beneath her wheels.

As she put both feet on the ground to stop the bicycle, she realized she was afraid. She hadn’t paid much attention to school
the first time round and now wished she had spent more time noticing what teachers did to be teachers. But she was interested,
too. What she saw in front of her in the dreary school ground was astonishing, like a circus beginning.

She was looking at an array of blue uniforms and tracksuits, all shapes and sizes, running around, practicing tennis, basketball.
Some girls—the drama club?—stood in a group on a flight of steps like a family having its picture taken, chanting strange
sounds and reciting tongue-twisters. It took Runa a moment to see the heads, arms and legs of the teenagers inside the blue
garments. She turned toward the main building. Music came from two boys on the edge of the field, one seated in front of an
electronic organ. The other stood in front of him and sang scales to the synthesized accompaniment.

A group of girls with pigtails leapt around in some kind of cheerleading routine. At intervals, they screamed the school name
and followed it with an earnest
one two three
! in English. Runa looked for somewhere to leave her bike and when she turned back the cheerleaders had formed a human pyramid
in her path. She didn’t know what this meant. She smiled, uncertainly she felt, and said hello. The tiny girl at the top bent
her knees and with a look of intense concentration, somersaulted to the ground and took Runa’s heavier bag. Her expression
was serious. She walked alongside Runa to the entrance of the main building. The other girls stared and whispered but not,
Runa thought, unkindly. They were curious.

She met the principal and assistant principal in an airless office with vases of almost-dead flowers on the shelves and an
electric fan whirring near her ear. She drank a cup of over-stewed tea and signed her contract. Her right hand was a little
numb from cycling in the cold air and caught on the paper as she wrote. Then she pressed her wooden name-stamp into a pad
of red ink and printed it onto the contract. A man from the school office came to present her with a chalk box. She was waiting
to be found out. She didn’t feel like a teacher. She was only twenty-four and didn’t feel like an adult at all.

The head of English took Runa’s bags and led her, silently, across the playing field, behind a row of trees, and over a small
road to the teachers’ apartments. He switched on the light in the flat and they blinked together in the fluorescence.

It had a nice musty smell, as though no one had lived there for years.

“A little stuffy,” the teacher said, almost to himself, and he went to open the window.

There was a small bunch of violets on the table, in a scratched glass tumbler that might have come from the school canteen.

“How pretty. This is lovely.”

The man moved to the doorway, nodded awkwardly.

“You must be tired. If you need any more help, don’t hesitate to come over to the staffroom. There’s usually someone there
till ten or eleven at night.”

Runa looked out of the window. She could see directly into the main school building. It was dark now except for a long, bright
stretch of windows on the first floor. She saw people moving around, conversing, heads bent over desks.

“Thank you for your kindness.”

Then it was the next morning. Overnight Runa had turned into a teacher. She was in the staffroom, introducing herself to the
rows and rows of people at desks, bowing and promising to do her best. At that point, of course, she hadn’t met Jun Ikeda
of class 5–7.

*     *     *

She rolled over, lay on her front, and folded her arms under her head. These memories embarrassed her when she saw how she
had behaved afterward. She needed to find Jun inside her memory of the school. She needed to get back into the classrooms.
Runa visualized the blackboard, the little desks, her register, tried to recall her first sighting of Jun Ikeda.

She was in the classroom. She had to teach from Ministry of Education textbooks.

Hi, Fred, I’m Hanako.

Hi, Hanako, I’m Fred.

It’s nice to meet you, Fred.

It’s nice to meet you too, Hanako. Say, would you like to play tennis with me?

Yes, I’d love to. I really like tennis. Tennis is my favorite sport.

Great! Who’s that man over there?

That’s Mr. Smith. He’s a history teacher. He likes tennis, too.

These were the smallest children, the twelve-year-olds. Runa wanted to teach them some real English but she was beginning
to forget it herself. And it would never be allowed. It was easy teaching similar dialogues to the ones she had learned when
she was at school, but it made for dull lessons.

When that class ended, Runa had to walk to the other side of the school. She had been asked to cover a fifth-year boys’ class.
As she moved through the corridor, she noticed that the blackboard in each classroom had the same phrase written on it.

Little did I think that it would rain this morning.

Five classrooms in a row, all saying the same thing, like roadside billboards coming up with large slogans. As she passed
the first classroom she saw the sentence and thought nothing of it. By the third room she was asking, who is saying it and
why did they not think it would rain? And who would be listening to such a sentence. By the time she had reached the fifth
room, the one where she would teach, the sentence had become nonsensical.

She felt so strange and dizzy entering the classroom that it took a moment to compose herself in front of the boys. She wasn’t
used to this kind of energy. She was not used to the smell or feel of the room. In shape and size the room was identical to
her first-year classroom, but it felt a different color, a different place because of the older boys. And all through the
lesson she was aware that one boy, quiet though seeming confident, watched her closely. She didn’t know if she felt good or
bad, only that she felt something, intensely. She looked out of the window at the sunshine on the roof of the gym, the girls
playing tennis, and wondered how likely it would be to rain. Not very likely, she thought, on such a crisp blue day.

But that boy may not have been Jun Ikeda. She didn’t know him then. He could have been any fifth-year boy, ex-cited to have
a young female teacher for one lesson. Never mind. She could make him be Jun. She turned the boy in the classroom into Jun,
watching her, and felt better. She pulled her bedding close to her skin. Jun Ikeda seemed younger every time she thought of
him. Sometimes it bothered her and sometimes it didn’t. It was connected with being alone.

She could never help but miss the last person she had slept with.

She opened her eyes, pulled her shoulders back to stretch them. She had been dozing so she sat up to be sure that she couldn’t
drift off again. Her body was not quite catching up on sleep, but her mind was trying to catch up on dreams, regardless. It
was morning. She was lying alone on a crumpled futon, on a boat. The sea was making her mind go soft. She rubbed her forehead.
All this rocking made her head hurt.

Around her people came and went, dressing, talking, putting on lipstick and fiddling with lenses in their eyes. They looked
like teachers from the school. Each face some-how resembled one she used to see in the staffroom. She half expected to hear
the electronic chime, the principal’s voice in the corridor. Imagine if they had come after her and were now on the boat.
It would be impossible to escape.

S
he was flicking through the pages of a magazine. It looked like some fashion thing and the models were Western. There was
a cup of tea or coffee in her right hand. Ralph stood beside her, wondered whether to sit down or wait to be invited.

“Good morning, Nanao. I trust you slept well.”

She looked at him and nodded. Had she understood? He would ask again, to be sure.

“You-sleep well?” He shut his eyes and tilted his head onto his hands to mime sleep. He had a sudden memory of playing a sleeping
gnome in a primary-school play and stood upright again, cleared his throat.

“Yes, thank you.”

“You like beauty sleep, I think. I—not need beauty sleep. Me no.” He laughed.

She smiled. He slid onto the chair opposite. It was going well. She thought he was funny.

“So. Are you going to China for anything nice?”

She thought for a moment, as if trying to find the correct English words.

“My friend. To see my friend.”

“Ah. I see. A Chinese friend?”

“Yes.” She put the magazine down and was giving him her full attention.

“A boyfriend?”

“No.” She shook her head, laughing. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“You’re single.”

“Yes.”

“And what are you going to do with your friend?”

“I don’t know.” She giggled. “Nothing special.”

“A nice trip and then back to Japan.”

“Maybe. I don’t have plan.”

A lady of leisure then. She could be a student, though she didn’t seem like the studious type.

“Today is very long,” he said. “Today maybe very boring here on boat. You have plans for today?”

“No.” She shrugged her shoulders, laughed again. It was a shy, girlish laugh. How could he make her want to spend her day
with him? The boat was a romantic place. They had so little time to get to know each other and he mustn’t waste it. He had
an idea.

“I teach you English. Many English words. You want to learn English with me?”

“Ah.” She seemed at a loss for a moment. “No, thank you.” “Just a little? I not want money. I buy you coffee. We have a nice
time. Together. You and me.”

“Maybe-later.”

“Later. That’s fine. You find me when you want to team English. Very useful language. We enjoy ourselves. I look forward to
later.” He winked and gave a friendly little wave as he left. She waved back and returned to her magazine.

What would he teach her? Things they could say to each other that would lead from innocent conversation to flirtation to,
he hoped, bed and marriage. So far he was doing well. He was turning out to be a better flirt than he had thought. If only
he’d had the confidence to be like this when he was younger. Flirting, chatting up women. These were things that other people
knew how to do, or so he had believed. But in those days he was looking for the wrong kind of woman. It was different now
that he knew how to get to the place where the grass was so much greener. But where should their next conversation start?