by John Boyne
‘Tak,’ I said, taken aback by his presence for I had never seen him in this building before and was unprepared for a conversation with him. ‘What are you doing here?’ He stared at me for a moment, his thin lips narrowing even more so that they almost disappeared inside his mouth entirely, baring his teeth like a woken watchdog. He was carrying a sealed box, the kind one puts files or books in, and during the silence between us he placed it on a nearby desk, stepping away from it quickly as if it was an unexploded bomb.
‘Hello William,’ he said in an even tone, his perfect English enunciating every syllable as ever. ‘I thought you had gone back to England.’
Tm going tomorrow,’ I answered, straining to see behind him whether his sister was in the office or not.
‘She’s not in there, if that’s what you’re hoping for,’ he said, noticing the direction of my eyes. ‘If it’s Hitomi you want to see.’
‘Of course it’s Hitomi I want to see,’ I said aggressively. ‘What else would I be doing here? Signing up for a language course? What are you doing here anyway?’ I repeated.
He shrugged. ‘My sister had some work she needed to do from home,’ he replied after a pause during which I felt he was trying to think of an answer that would seem plausible. ‘She’s not feeling too well today.’
‘She’s sick?’
‘She’s not sick, she just needs a few days off work. Mental health days, I like to call them.’ I frowned and wondered whether he was suggesting that Hitomi had lost her mind. ‘When you have a cold or have broken your leg or something like that, you take time off work, right?’ he explained. I nodded. ‘You’re physically sick then, you see. But some days you get up and you just know you can’t go in that day. You need some time off. There’s nothing physically wrong with you, but up here …’ He indicated what I had always thought was the empty space between his ears. ‘Up here you just know you need a little time to yourself. I call that a mental health day. Everyone needs one from time to time.’
‘Mental health day,’ I repeated, nodding slowly and wondering whether he was just trying to fob me off. ‘Right. Well I did want to speak with her, Tak, so …’ He sighed and tapped the side of my arm.
‘Look, William,’ he said, ‘I have a little time to spare. Why don’t we get a drink together? Say goodbye in style?’
I glanced at my watch; it was ten past three. I had the rest of the day free. I had hoped to be spending it with his sister rather than him but at the same time, I felt I could hardly refuse. He might let me know how she was feeling, what she was planning to do. I agreed and after putting the box in his car we strolled to a side-street and a bar which was not as busy as some of the other afternoon bars and ordered a couple of Western-style beers for a change. My taste buds had become accustomed to the Japanese variety, however, and I pulled a face at first when I sipped it.
‘I was sorry to hear about your father,’ said Tak after the preliminaries were out of the way. ‘He will be all right, I hope?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know, to be honest with you,’ I said. ‘He didn’t say much in his letter. Just that he hadn’t long left and wanted to make his peace with me before he died. He’s not a young man, you see. He was already quite old when I was born.’
‘You haven’t phoned him to find out what the matter is?’
I felt slightly bashful now. ‘I didn’t want to,’ I explained. ‘Whatever is wrong with him … well I didn’t want to hear it over the phone. I want to see him. To tell him that I’ll be there no matter what. I guess the fact that I’m flying halfway across the world will prove that in some way. We haven’t always been that close, you see.’
He nodded and said nothing for a short time, as if he was trying to take this piece of information in and understand it better. I stared into the white foam popping quietly at the top of my beer and ran my finger along the edge, putting it to my mouth every so often to lick it clean. Eventually he spoke again. ‘Why is that, William?’ he asked me. ‘Why are you not close? You told us that you grew up with just him as a parent.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I did.’
‘I would think that would bring a parent and child closer together, not further apart. He was rough with you, growing up? He beat you?’
‘No, no,’ I said quickly, shaking my head to dissuade him of any such notion. ‘No, nothing like that. That’s not the kind of man he is. No it’s just …’ I thought about it; I wasn’t sure myself. ‘It’s not that we have anything against each other exactly,’ I explained, as much to myself as to him. ‘There’s no specific incident that I hold against him. It’s just that we don’t seem able to communicate at all. He shows no interest in me or who I am or what I want. He doesn’t see me as a person in my own right, but as some kind of extension of some ludicrous family history.’
Tak snorted. ‘And what else are we than that?’ he asked. ‘You don’t believe in ancestry?’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘I guess it’s important, but that’s the only level we seem to communicate on. From as far back as I can remember, Isaac has told me stories about his grandfather. Adventure stories. Histories. I’m sure some of them are true, some are probably exaggerated as they’re handed down. The point is that these stories, this ancestry, is the only thing in which he seems interested. There are no other levels between us. He hasn’t any interest in who I want to be in the future, just who we all were in the past.’
‘And that’s why you left?’
‘I left because I grew up. I needed to get away. But yes, in some way I felt that if there was distance between us, if we communicated for a year or two by letter or by phone, then we would have no other choice but to talk about things that had nothing to do with this great Buffalo Bill legend. He’d ask about me. He’d want to know something about my life. I thought that would happen.’
‘And did it, William? Did it happen like that?’
I shook my head. ‘It didn’t quite work out the way I planned,’ I said quietly. Tak looked around and with a quick flick of his fingers ordered a couple more beers. I placed my hand across the top of my mine and frowned. ‘I should be getting on,’ I said. ‘I need to see Hitomi before I go.’
‘Let me ask you something,’ he interrupted, ignoring what I had said and paying for the drinks as they arrived; I accepted mine with a sigh but determined that it would be my last. ‘This great communication you were hoping would happen between you. Did you speak regularly on the phone since you came to Japan?’
I opened my mouth to defend myself but found there were no words to excuse my actions. ‘Not often,’ I admitted.
‘And letters,’ he continued. ‘You told him about your life here in letters? You wrote about Kyoto, your job with the newspaper, Hitomi. Perhaps you made fun of the evening you spent with my family and our strange customs?’
‘Tak, don’t be ridiculous,’ I said quickly, injured. ‘Why would I do that?’
‘But you wrote to him, yes? You found a new opportunity to tell him about your life here and that made things better?’
I struggled for an answer. ‘It wasn’t that easy,’ I said, wishing I had never accepted his offer of a drink. ‘You know how much pressure one comes under here. I was working, I was busy, I had Hitomi. I didn’t have time for many letters. I mean I wanted to, but …’ My words trailed off. There were no excuses. I had left home, convincing myself that my relationship with Isaac would improve if we could communicate without his storytelling pastimes getting in the way, but once gone I’d left him far behind me. Tak could see that I had realised this myself and looked a little smug as he continued with his drink, leaning over to stare at a group of office girls who had just walked in. He gave a little whistle and winked at me.
‘Hubba hubba,’ he said in a strange tone, as if he had picked up the phrase from an American TV show and had determined to use it. I was in no mood to play along.
‘Look, Tak,’ I said. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow morning. I have to see Hitomi tonight. She won’t ta
ke my calls. Where is she? Why won’t she see me?’
‘She doesn’t want to go to England,’ Tak said, and his tone shifted immediately back from the confidant of a moment ago to the protective brother, distant with his sister’s suitors. ‘She says she’ll die if she goes to England.’
‘Again with the dying,’ I said with a groan. ‘What’s with that? That’s just stupid.’
‘She’s a superstitious girl,’ he explained. ‘She must have read something when she was a child that said she would die if she went there. I don’t know. She’s always said it.’
‘Well it’s just stupid,’ I repeated angrily. ‘She could die anywhere. Any of us could. Why won’t she speak to me? I … I demand an answer!’ I added, aware how archaic and ridiculous the phrase sounded, but short of standing up and beating it out of him – something which was unlikely to take place – it was all I could think of to do.
‘Hitomi feels …’ He licked his lips and thought about it as if he wanted to be sure that he phrased this correctly. I held my breath and waited for him to continue. ‘She feels that now is a time when you should be with your father. She believes she would only be in the way.’
‘But I love her, Tak,’ I said simply, unsure how he would take such a declaration but he seemed almost moved by it for he reached across and patted my wrist twice, his gesture of support I assumed.
‘I think she loves you too, William,’ he said. ‘But sometimes people need to separate to solve other things in their lives. You need to see your father. You need to be there for him when he dies. And Hitomi needs her own space too. There are things she needs to do.’
‘Such as what?’ I asked, convinced that I knew her and her needs just as well as he did.
‘Such as her own things,’ he said. ‘You are both young,’ he said with a laugh. ‘You’re flying to London tomorrow morning. Well you’ll be there by tomorrow night, am I right?’ I nodded. ‘It’s not like you need to be parted for ever. Just trust in the right thing happening.’ I sighed. This was not the response I had hoped for. ‘Your priority,’ he continued, ‘must be to your family. First and foremost. As Hitomi’s is to hers. Believe in that, William. Trust in it. Let her go for now, and go back to London.’
I sat back and could feel the tears coming into my eyes. The future looked suddenly bleak. I had lost the girl I loved and the next few months appeared to hold nothing but loneliness, sickness and perhaps death. And London. How little I wanted to return there. There was only one thing to do in the time left to me. I signalled the waitress for more drinks. ‘And keep them coming,’ I told her.
When I arrived at Heathrow Airport, I could barely keep my eyes open with tiredness and even though I had just returned to London for the first time in two years, I briefly considered unravelling my sleeping bag in the corner of the terminal and trying for a few hours’ sleep, until I realised that I would probably be still unrolling it when a security guard would come along and move me on. Instead I decided to take a shower in the airport facilities as I wanted to be alert and ready for when I met my father again. Isaac was seventy-four years old by now and had never been a particularly avid driver; indeed, he had sold his car some years earlier so I was planning on making my own way to Clapham. Also, I wanted to surprise him, and was beginning to grow quite excited at the prospect of seeing him again.
Incredibly, almost immediately I began to feel the same sense of cultural isolation in the airport as I had when I had first arrived at Narita. Suddenly I was no longer a stranger in a foreign land, but a native, just like everyone else. I saw other young people wandering around with backpacks, suntanned legs and faces returning from abroad, pale, fully dressed bodies clutching each other nervously as they began their own trips away and I wanted to approach them and tell them about myself. I’ve been to Japan for two years, I wanted to shout. I had a job, a real job, a good job too. I fell in love in Japan, you know. And I’m only back because my father’s ill, I could be anywhere I wanted otherwise. I felt an amazing urge to share my adventures with someone, to tell them my stories, and started to laugh as I thought that’s just what Isaac would do too. Tell a story about it. Turn it into fiction.
The shower was cool and fresh and I washed the dirt and dust of the journey off my body, turning my face up to the spray and brushing the hair back out of my eyes as I tried to readjust to this new situation. Even the shower water felt different to me, the soap the airport provided was cheap and barely raised a lather, but nevertheless I stayed there for about twenty minutes before drying off and changing my clothes. I’d worn a pair of knee-length shorts and a T-shirt for the long journey, but changed into a pair of combats now and a fresh shirt. Too late, I considered shaving my face clean for I had been sporting the same level of stubble for about a year and wondered what I would look like without it but decided against it. Having washed and dressed, the last thing I wanted was to start all over. I brushed my hair and as it had grown a little long, tied it back behind my head before looking at myself in the mirror. This was the new me, I thought. Or rather the old me. The British me. Konnichiwa, William-San, I said loudly, insistently, eager to hear the phrase again and a young man a few feet away turned to look at me, wondering whether I was addressing him. I frowned and, with a quick nod, gathered my things and left.
There’s a strange sense of the familiar, even in a place one hasn’t been to in a long time, and making my way down the escalators beside the Costa Coffee and across the terminal for the walk to the tube station, I felt a strange mixture of emotions, torn between a desperate sense of horror that I was here again and a delight in being among things which I had not thought about in so long. It was only as I stared at the ticket machine, trying to remember how much I should pay for the journey, that I realised what I really wanted was to be able to share this experience with someone and wished for the hundredth time that Hitomi was there with me. I wanted to hold her hand at the wall chart for the underground system that stands beside the machine and show her the different-coloured lines and what they meant, where their destinations were. We’ll be taking the Piccadilly Line to Leicester Square, I would have told her. Then the Northern Line down to Clapham. The tube doesn’t go to the junction but we can get a cab from Clapham Common. She had been my guide for so long, I wanted the opportunity to be hers. To show her that I could be in charge too.
Neither train was particularly full and I stepped out of Clapham Common Station at eight o’clock in the evening. It was late summer and the sun was going down. A small team of cricketers passed me by, laughing loudly, heading for the pub, I assumed. Across on the common I could see a group of teenagers – boys and girls – finishing up their football game and gathering their things where they had used them to make goalposts. I wondered: should this be nostalgic? Is this the London I grew up in? and wasn’t sure. I couldn’t place my emotion, didn’t know what it was expected to be, and so for want of anything better to do checked my watch and calculated the time it was in Kyoto and what my friends there would be doing now, before hailing a cab and giving him the address I had not uttered in a long time.
‘Been away, have you?’ he asked as we drove along, noticing my several bags and their airport tags. I didn’t much want to get into conversation so looked out the window as I answered, hoping he would spot my lack of interest in the rear-view mirror and leave me alone.
‘Japan,’ I said. I’ve been living there for the last year and a half.’
‘Japan, eh?’ he said with a whistle.
The house hadn’t actually changed an iota and yet somehow, it seemed smaller to my eyes, as if time had shrunk it. The paintwork was noticeably chipped, but then it always had been. The curtains on the inside seemed grimy and colourless, and yet we had always owned those curtains. They probably hadn’t been washed in years. The small front garden was relatively neat but would need attention in a week or so; Isaac had often enjoyed working in the garden but had rarely done more than keep it tidy. I used to wonder what it would look like if h
e wasn’t around to do it as I had no interest in gardening at all.
I have always kept a key ring in my pocket and throughout my time in Japan, along with the keys of my own apartment and those of the newspaper office in which I worked, I had always kept the front- and back-door keys of our Clapham house. I have no idea what use I thought I would have for them on the streets of Kyoto but I kept them nonetheless and liked to see they were there. I reached into my pocket for them as I stood at the door and was struck by how empty that key ring was now with just these two left on it. I didn’t like the fact that it was so light and that this house was the only place I had private access to any more. It made me feel like a child again. I frowned and brought the smaller key to the lock before changing my mind. Having not informed Isaac of my arrival, it would probably be too much of a surprise if I just opened the door and marched in. As yet, I still did not know what was wrong with him and didn’t want to shock him into sudden death. Instead, I pressed the doorbell and stepped back, waiting for more than a minute before realising that I had not heard it ring. I reached forward and pressed it again, harder this time, and could hear it sound within the house and then this was it, the point of no return. I stood tall, shook my shoulders slightly and coughed to clear my throat. My stomach churned and the bright light in the frosted glass of the door began to shade slowly as the figure of my father came towards it. He reached up and opened the door and peered outside; it was growing darker now, autumn was not far away.
When Isaac first told me the story about Buffalo Bill, General Custer and President Ulysses S. Grant, I was a little dubious. It was one of the later stories he told – I don’t think I heard it until I was about thirteen and beginning to grow weary of his tales anyway – and the convergence of three such famous men seemed a little too coincidental for my liking.