The woman looked up so quickly, at just the right window in the row, that she must surely have known Keiko was standing there. She gave a single nod, then put her head down again and started walking, disappearing out of view under the windowsill, leaving Keiko with her hand raised and the smile fading on her face.
What a peculiar person, she thought, putting her chin in the air. She wouldn’t mention this woman when she wrote to her mother and described the friendliness of everyone she was meeting, but even as she thought that, she could hear her mother’s voice: First impressions are thinner than new frost on a lake. Do not step there. Her mother, who had never stepped on a frozen lake in her life. But she was right. Perhaps that woman—she must be the cleaner—was having a bad day.
_____
Even still, when Keiko went out an hour later, she turned to the right, away from the shop windows beneath her own, not wanting to meet the woman again.
She had planned to use her first morning in Edinburgh learning the neighbourhood, its bus routes and backways, its budget supermarkets and student haunts. Here she was, however, in Painchton, which didn’t have neighbourhoods, as far as she could see; which had—as far as she could see—one street with five shops on each side. Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. The rest of the town must be … She looked downwards towards a field, which might be a park, a road, a grass bank with railings along the top and some distant trees. So the rest of the town must be … She turned and looked up the street, then set off at a stride.
She didn’t get very far. As she passed the shop next door, a small woman with sandy white hair shot out and stood in front of her, clapping her hands and making a series of little curtseys that were almost a dance.
“Keiko, my darling,” she said. “Welcome, welcome. Oh, I’m that glad to see you, you’ve no idea! I was vexed to have missed you yesterday. I’m Mrs. Watson, darling. Mabel Watson, call me Mabel.”
“I am very pleased to meet you,” Keiko said.
“Oh, listen to you!” said Mrs. Watson. “What a beautiful speaker you are. And how long have you been learning English? Because I got a CD of Japanese from the library two months ago. Two months. And played it every night without fail while I was getting off to sleep and it’s still double Dutch. Now.” She gave Keiko a piercing look from out of her small, rather watery, blue eyes. “Have you got everything you need? Did you find your pak choi? Did you find your shiitake mushrooms? Am I saying that right?”
“Did you fill up my refrigerator?” said Keiko. “Was it you? You are very kind.”
Mrs. Watson laid a firm old hand, like a claw, on Keiko’s arm and spoke urgently to her.
“I can get anything at all at the market,” she said, gesturing towards her shop window, where trays of fruit and vegetables were propped up to show their contents to the passersby. “Anything,” she said again. “You’ve no need to go anywhere else. Kumquats, mooli, you name it. I could even have got seaweed—no word of a lie—but I thought you’d be glad of a break from that. And I told them it was a nice lot of fruit and veg you’d be after, not all them sausages and nasty packets of God knows what, but they’d never listen to me.”
“They?” said Keiko, struggling to follow.
Mrs. Watson clapped a hand over her mouth and opened her eyes very wide.
“See now, that’s me,” she said. “But I know you’re all watching your figures. My niece Dina used to eat like a pig in a pie contest until snap!” The little woman clicked her fingers in Keiko’s face. “One day she was eating my profits, sitting there in her wee frilly dress, and the next she was dressed in black and couldn’t manage a grape.”
“I see,” Keiko said, lying.
“Mind you …” Mrs. Watson had been squeezing Keiko’s arm as she spoke and now she pinched her cheek between two cold, dry fingers. “Maybe a sausage or two wouldn’t go wrong. You’re no size at all, are you? You’ll need a wee bit round your ribs to do well here. Come away in now and I’ll give you a banana, keep you going. It’s a cold day.”
Keiko managed to stop her peeling one and standing over her while she ate it up, got away with taking it to go and promising if it wasn’t finished by the end of her walk, she would mash it onto a sandwich with brown sugar and do herself a power of good.
At the shop next door—A&H McLuskie, Master Baker—the windows were steamed up but, where the condensation had begun to run, there were clear ribbons of glass and Keiko could see two girls in caps and aprons waving at her. One of them held up a pastry and raised her eyebrows. Keiko waved back, lifted her banana, and kept walking, past a closed restaurant called The Dragon Pearl, past a hotel called The Bridge, with baskets of flowers hanging between the downstairs and upstairs windows, and then stopped dead at the end of the row.
Streets led off in three directions, it was true, but the one ahead of her threaded between a meandering string of small houses, in blocks of two together, cars parked outside the garden fences turning the road into a slalom course; there could not be anything very much down there. And the cross street curved back on itself and must lead down to meet the road along the bottom again. She turned left and kept walking.
The houses were larger here, set well back in gardens with trees and lawns. The gates were open onto their drives and the outer doors of the houses themselves were open onto … not porches exactly, but proper little rooms with wallpaper and lampshades and narrow tables with vases on them. Keiko was enchanted and hurried on to look at the next one and the next, and then she was at the end and was, as she had guessed, looking across the broad main road, at the grassy bank and the railings and the trees.
What were those railings fencing off ? She crossed the road and began to pick her way up the bank. Halfway she thought she could hear water and when she got to the top, sure enough, she was looking down at a river, slow and brownish, small shrubs on the far side clinging to the dirt slope with their knuckles exposed and wisps of plastic caught around them. Beyond was the startling green of a golf course, a pair of bright figures marching up an artificial hill. Keiko watched them until they disappeared over the brow and then she leaned against the railings, looking down into the water.
Off to her right, a vehicle stopped and sat with its motor running for a moment or two before moving off again, but Keiko ignored it and went on gazing down at the loops and ripples in the brown water, enjoying the breeze, letting the slow drift of the river mesmerise her.
Then something caught her eye. Something was floating downstream towards her, a kind of raft, thick in the middle and sloughing off at the edges. She squinted, trying to make sense of it. Lily pads? It couldn’t be. Was it a coat of some kind? A bundle of clothing? She blinked and then there were eyes, dozens of them, and teeth too and scraps of fur, all held together with a scum of blood, and Keiko spun away, gasping, and someone was running towards her across the road, dressed in white, hands stained red and dripping, reaching out for her.
three
“No!” she shouted, backing away and feeling her legs buckle.
“I’ll kill him,” said the girl, still running. “I’ll kill him with my own two hands for that.”
“No!” said Keiko again, pressed against the railings now.
“What?” said the girl. She was climbing the bank. “What’s …” She followed Keiko’s horrified gaze to her own hands. “Oh, Christ! Keiko, no!” She put her hands behind her back. “Oh, God, no, you poor thing. Jesus.”
“What?” said Keiko.
“This is food colouring,” said the girl, bringing her hands in front of her again and waving them, shaking a few drops of red off onto the grass. “That,” she pointed to the empty road, “was the effing gamekeeper. I saw him stop, but I couldn’t believe he would really … and he’s been told a million times.” She put her hands on her hips and blew out hard.
She was perhaps sixteen, very thin, wearing fluffy slippers not made for running in, an
d she hopped about a little to shuffle them back onto her feet.
Keiko let go of the railing. “What?” she said again.
“Benny McLucas,” the girl said, “has the contract to keep the rabbits off the golf course. He sells to the Pooles like, but he dumps the skins in the river when he thinks no one’s watching. It’s totally disgusting and it drives me nuts. Kids paddle in that river, Benny, you moron!” She bellowed the last part of this over her shoulder to the empty road, and Keiko could not help smiling.
“Ah, rabbits,” she said. “And food colouring.”
“Definitely no connection.” The girl looked down at her hands again and swallowed. “God, I never saw it like that before. That’s disgusting. Sorry.”
“It is all right,” said Keiko. “Ummm …”
“What?” said the girl.
“You know who I am,” said Keiko. “And I am very pleased to meet you …”
“Blimey O’Reilly,” said the girl. “Fancy Clarke. Social graces, eh?” She smiled suddenly, dipping her head down between her shoulders as if someone had tickled her neck. She was older than sixteen, Keiko realised now, but not much.
“Blimey?” said Keiko.
“Fancy Clarke,” said Fancy, poking herself in the chest with a forefinger and leaving a smudge of red on her white apron. “Very pleased to meet you too. Now, listen. You want to come over to mine and have a cup of tea and some chocolate. Seriously. You went pure white then.”
Keiko hesitated.
“I don’t want to breenge in,” said Fancy. “I’m sure that lot”—she flicked her head back—“have nearly chewed you up and spat you out already.”
“Breenge?” said Keiko.
Fancy tutted. “Wade in and take over,” she said. “I’ve been here too long.” She guided Keiko—one arm behind her but not touching—across the road and through a shop door, through a room with a counter and a photocopier, sequins and feathers, cardboard cutouts of cats and rabbits, a wall of hats, and out to a back kitchen. A cake was cooling on a wire rack and beside it sat a mixing bowl splattered red up the sides. In it was a lump of some white substance beginning to turn pink along the cracks on its surface.
Keiko and Fancy both stopped and stared.
“I know it’s icing,” said Fancy. “I made it myself. But my God it looks …” She shuddered.
“I’ll finish mixing it,” said Keiko, “if you make the tea.”
_____
She invited Fancy to her own flat, to repay the kindness. She was happy to. But as she left, with another swift look at the shop—stacks of coloured paper, hangers of sober coats and trousers in plastic covers, racks of pink fur body suits with tails—she couldn’t help smiling. She would send an entertaining letter to her mother, all about Mrs. Watson and her mooli, the view of the golf course just like home, the Pooles (who she was sure were going to be delightful even if their cleaner was rather sour). But she was looking forward to the university in the middle of the city far away from cakes and rabbit catchers.
She reached the corner, the bottom of her own street, and stood hesitating at the edge of the open space where the grass began. Was it a park or a field? If it was a park, was it permitted to walk across it? Was it a “village green” of the type she had read about? It had no flowerbeds or pathways, just an absence of buildings, except for what looked like an abandoned gas station and body shop, painted a very peculiar colour. But that was on the other segment of the park, beyond the road that cut up through the middle. On this side there was nothing. She should walk around the long way, she supposed, until she knew.
While she was deciding, a young woman came out from under the Pooles’ awning, tucked a package into the tray of a stroller, kicked the brake, and set off up the street. A package of what, Keiko wondered, quickening her step with a little skip. Fancy had said something about the Pooles. What was it? What would be behind those paper blinds now that they were opened for the day? As she drew close, she arranged a smile on her face and peeped around the edge of the window.
The blank square from last night had burst into shrieking colour. So many colours, from the sleek liver that was nearly black to the crumbling white fat tucked over rolled roasts like blankets of snow, pork winking and opaline with its oily hints of rainbows, sausage slices in flat, pink tiles on their tray. But most of all, and louder than everything, there was a throaty red bellow of blood. It coated a jagged mountain made from cubes of stewing steak, gluing them together, oozed from a coiled pile of ground beef, pooled under racks of ribs, beading the rough-sawn edges of the bones.
Keiko felt her stomach clench and rise but could not drag her eyes away. Then a hand—a paw!—pale and bristled, reached into the window and twisted up a clod of ground beef, leaving the heap seething. Keiko looked upwards and saw, behind the haunches of ham and festoons of sausages hanging on hooks in the window, the snout and jowls of a pig—its mouth wet, its skin in pale folds, its eyes swivelling to hold hers even as its face turned slowly away. She saw the dozens of rabbit eyes floating in scraps on the brown river, and the ground came up under her back with a thump.
She didn’t faint. Of course not—she was on her feet again, scrabbling at her door before the first of them had time to reach her. It was the pig! Huge out here on the street, towering over her and broader than tall, leaning forward, reaching out with its greasy hands. She stepped back, pressing herself against the door. When he saw this, he shuffled backwards too, bowing his head, his jowls bulging out around his chin. She turned away, got her stairway door opened and closed again at her back before anyone could stop her. She ran up the stone steps two at a time, clawing for her key, and let herself in.
She was leaning against the hall radiator, feeling the warmth of its awkward bulk against her legs, when she heard the soft knock on the door beside her. She opened it. It was the woman in the white overalls, the cleaner, and the fat man (a man! not a pig) was behind her, halfway up the stairs, shifting from one foot to the other.
“Miss Nishisato,” said the woman. “Keiko. Did you hurt yourself ? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Keiko said. “It’s just … jet lag and I tripped on the … I’m fine, really.”
The man turned slowly and began to lumber back down into the dark.
“I’m Mrs. Poole, dear,” said the woman. “From downstairs, and this is my …” She turned, but seeing that the man had gone, faced Keiko again. “I’m sorry we missed you last night.”
Keiko heard the street door open. There was an instant babble of voices and above the rest of them, Mr. McKendrick. “What’s going on? Look, I’ll just go up, eh?” Then the sound of his metalled heels taking the stairs at a smart pace and the sight of his bright, black eyes, through the banisters and then at the doorway, looking from Mrs. Poole to Keiko and back again.
“It’s all this air travel,” he said. “How many times zones between Tokyo and Edinburgh? What you need”—he took Keiko’s hands between his own and rubbed them—“is your feet up a while and then a right good feed of hot dinner.”
“Is that on then, right enough?” said Mrs. Poole.
“Seven thirty tonight,” said Mr. McKendrick. “Traders’ welcome banquet, Keiko. I’ll come and collect you.”
“How kind,” Keiko said. “Everyone is so very good. I should come downstairs and thank your husband for rushing out to help me.”
Mrs. Poole looked down quickly and then said, “My son, dear. Malcolm is my son.”
“Oh!” said Keiko, reddening. “Of course, yes. Well, he was very kind. And,” she went on, rather frantically, “someone is coming for tea. So kind, everyone.”
“Flattering for me,” said Mrs. Poole, with an awkward little laugh. “Not so much for him, eh?”
“Who’s this coming for tea?” said Mr. McKendrick, frowning. “There’s no one scheduled.”
“Miss Clarke,” said Keiko. “From
the … Fancy.”
“Fancy Clarke?” said Mr. McKendrick. “How did that happen?”
“She helped me,” Keiko said. “Benny McLucas was—”
“The rabbit man?” said Mr. McKendrick. “What have you got into, Keiko, on your very first day?”
“I—” Keiko began.
“We’re the ones who’re to help you,” Mr. McKendrick said. “Mrs. Poole and the Traders and me. We’ll keep you right and out of trouble. You’re not needing Fancy Clarke.”
She stared at him. Nothing in her guides to etiquette abroad had covered this. “Am I forbidden from entertaining her here?” she said. “In your apartment?”
Mr. McKendrick started, raised a hand to his head, and smoothed his hair. “Forbidden?” he said, with a laugh. “That’s not a word you hear much. It’s Mrs. Poole’s flat anyway.”
Keiko turned her eyes to the woman who was standing silently by.
“It’s nothing to do with me,” she said and turned to walk away.
four
“Listen,” said Fancy, hesitating in the doorway, “here’s what: will I take off my shoes?”
Keiko shook her head, laughing.
“Yeah, nice try,” Fancy said, pointing down at Keiko’s slippers. “And your face says different too.” She kicked off her sneakers without undoing the laces and left them out in the hallway.
“I’m sorry,” said Keiko. “I was determined to be … but it’s just … I know your feet are not dirty.”
“I know,” Fancy said. “Your hair looks dead clean too, but I wouldn’t stir my tea with your comb.” She was drifting about the hallway looking here and there with little quick darting glances, nudging open the living room door, poking her head into the bathroom.
“And it makes it nice and quiet for the people underneath,” said Keiko.
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