Fancy lifted her head again and glared. “Body piercing! That’s my worst thing. It’s like the world’s gone totally mad.” Her face was patched with unnatural colours, her lips grey and the skin around her nose yellowish, but a blue flush still blooming high on her cheeks and round her eyes from being upside down.
Keiko clapped her hands. “No scissors,” she said. “To make up for me being so thoughtless.”
She started for the kitchen to begin cooking but Fancy, stopping in the bathroom doorway, beckoned her back. Perfumed steam was spilling out, casting Fancy into soft focus and beading her bright hair. Keiko put her head round the door and blinked through the vapour. Viola was lying almost completely submerged in a heavily scented, deep-tinted bath, just an island of face sticking up. Her eyes were shut and her hair, tame and lank under the water, was swished out in a waving fan behind her head, moving in the slight eddy made by her twirling hands. As they watched, one lock of hair slicked against her neck and she stopped the figure-of-eight dance of her hands, put her feet flat on the bottom of the bath so that her small knees rose steaming into the air, raised one hand to scoop the hair free again, then resumed her pose. She waited until the water had stilled and then began again to trace her hands through and back, through and back, just enough to make the surface plane of the water slide and keep her hair moving.
Keiko stepped back, uncomfortable, as Fancy bent over and knocked gently against the side of the bath, but when Viola opened her eyes she just smiled up at them and moved only to raise her head out of the water.
“Your bath’s great, Keiko,” she said. “Can I put some more salts in?”
“Yes, of course,” said Keiko.
“No, you can’t, you monkey,” said Fancy. “We’ll have to get a licence from the Environmental Health before we take the plug out anyway.” She took the towel from where it was warming on the radiator and tucked the middle of one edge under her chin. Viola stood and turned her back and Fancy lifted the child towards her with one hand under each skinny armpit. Viola felt for the hanging corners of the towel and pulled it around herself. She kicked drops of water from her feet as Fancy stepped away from the side of the bath and swung her round onto the floor, then she scooted off along the passageway towards Keiko’s spare bedroom, huddled in the towel and with her hair plastered in clumps to the sides of her face, already beginning to frizz again.
In Keiko’s future memories, this evening was the last innocent time. The sight of the small girl in the perfumed water, perfect little body and perfect unconcern when she opened her eyes and saw them looking down at her. The choreography of mother and daughter getting her out of the water and back on her feet, and the three of them in a row on the sofa later watching a movie together to make Viola feel grown-up, making Fancy and Keiko feel like little girls again. This remembered evening—even though the sick feeling had already arrived and even though there were times to come when briefly it left her—this warm, glowing evening was the last real moment before what was coming began.
twenty-six
Tuesday, 19 November
Dr. Bryant read slowly, pulling on his nose. Keiko watched him, unsure whether she was tensed against discovery or tensed against a go-ahead, permission to do it, having to carry out her plan after all.
“These look competent,” he said. “Where did you get them?”
“They’re original,” said Keiko. “A friend helped me.”
“An English speaker?” he said, looking up, ready to find incompetence after all. Keiko nodded. He rolled his fingers together, dealing whatever had come of pulling his nose, and then started flicking the pages over again. “Strange fillers,” he said. “Rather dramatic.” Keiko waited for something more like a veto, but nothing came.
“I sometimes think,” she said at last, “that filler questions are so bland and boring, it’s too obvious what they are. These will be much better at distracting the subjects.” She felt sure he would argue with such a definite opinion. He wouldn’t be able not to.
“You could be right,” he said.
Keiko felt her shoulders slump down a little. “You don’t think the fillers are too offensive? Or anything,” she asked.
“Good luck offending the first years,” he said, pulling at his nose again.
“I’m not using the first years,” said Keiko. “I’m using the members of the association who’re sponsoring my accommodation.” She paused. “I’m experimenting on the people who’re funding me.”
“Well, let me know how it goes,” Bryant said. This time he wiped his fingers on the underside of his desk.
Keiko took the papers from him, holding them by the opposite corner from where he had leafed through them with his nose-pulling hand. She kept them clear of her body until she came to a litter bin, then dropped them in it and went to get Viola.
It had been a first dress-rehearsal for the end-of-term show, and Viola came out overexcited and still in lavish feline make-up, with her hair sprayed dark and sticky into a little cake on top of her head. On the bus, she tucked herself under Keiko’s arm and was drowsing before they slowed at the next stop.
“Your wee one’s knackered,” said a woman opposite with a comfortable smile, when Viola’s arm flopped out of her lap and swung loose as they rounded a corner. Keiko looked down at the elongated sweep of her closed eyelids, the black sheen of her sprayed hair, then smiled at the woman, tucked Vi’s arm back into her lap, and held her a little more tightly.
_____
Fancy lay on the waxing table in the back room of Janette’s salon, waiting out the pain before young Yvonne applied the next strip to her leg.
“How about your bikini line, Fance?”
“Bog off and die,” said Fancy. “Who gets their bikini line waxed in November?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” said Yvonne. “Loads of people’ll get it done next month for parties.”
“Yeah, well I don’t get invited to that kind of party,” Fancy said. Craig McKendrick’s face popped into her head, but a surge of pain saw him off again. She breathed in a gasp so sharp that the cold air hurt her teeth.
“You’re so polite,” said Yvonne, blowing onto the red area. “The first and last time I did Mrs. McLuskie—when she was off on that golf exchange with all the other old trollops—guess what she said?”
“‘Dearie me, how painful’?”
“She said ‘Ayabastard.’ Dead loud. She’s never been back since.”
_____
Etta McLuskie, sitting in her car in the darkest corner of the multi-storey, was using all the wiles that had deserted her on the waxing table that day.
“No one’s going to put two and two together and build a scaffold,” she said, speaking loud enough for her voice to carry through the open window of her car and into the open window of the car pulled up beside her. “Your … problem was years ago. I wasn’t the Painchton provost, you weren’t the minister. Everyone has remarried, moved house, retired, or all three. We have no connection and there’s no paper trail.”
“I hope you’re right,” the voice came back from the other car.
“We just need till the new year,” said Etta.
“And you’re sure it’s not going to leak? Painchton’s not what it was, I heard. Incomers, folk with no loyalty. Troublemakers.”
“But none of them know,” said Etta. “There’s only five of us, Painchton-born and -bred, who know what’s happening. Of course, there’s newcomers in the town—there’s a vegetarian numpty in the Cat’s Whiskers, for one—but we keep them where we want them. Outside.”
_____
Pamela Shand was in the Cat’s Whiskers with the shutters down, busy pricing stock. Marking down sale stock, actually. Putting half-price stickers on her rack of vegetarian cookbooks, to be more precise than she felt like being. She had got them in when the horse meat scandal took off (which was how she put it
to herself, although she was careful to say struck to others). But the stream of neighbours seeking advice on mung beans had never started, and the Pooles were busier than ever. She heard the bell clank again and again every morning as she stood in the queue at the post office. Just once she had asked Mrs. Watson:
“How can you? You’re surrounded by all that bounty and yet you eat the flesh of the dead?”
“The Flesh of The Dead?” said Mrs. Watson. “It sounds like a movie. Dina always loved a zombie, and she left her DVDs for me. Anyway, Malcolm gets all his meat from Malone’s, what he doesn’t prepare for himself.”
“And where do they get it?” said Pamela.
“Och, who cares?” said Mrs. Watson. “That boy could season a scabby rat and you’d not say no. Rosa Imperiolo tells me some of his special mixture—it’s a shame to put it in a curry.”
_____
In his little study under the stairs, Kenny Imperiolo cocked his head and listened to the sounds of Rosa moving about the house, so familiar after all these years; the creak of a board in the smallest spare bedroom, a faint hiss, the clunk of plastic on metal, and then the creak again. She was ironing. Kenny screwed up his face trying to remember what the level had been in the plastic basket on top of the dryer that morning when he’d gone to the freezer to get his good fresh coffee beans. Surely it was piled high? Didn’t she always leave it until there was a mountain and then groan to herself as she carried it upstairs? She would be busy for hours, wouldn’t come anywhere near him. All the same, he moved a heavy box against the door of his little hidey-hole before he turned his computer on. There were no locks anywhere in this house, never had been—not even on the bathrooms, since that time Michael shut himself in in a tantrum when he was four and Kenny had put his foot through the garage roof climbing to the rescue. He pulled the door hard and the box didn’t budge. And anyway, Rosa never came checking up on him; it wasn’t her way. She was a good, trusting, loving wife who’d never done anything except make him proud to stand beside her, and she deserved no less than the same back from him. Kenny imagined those warm brown eyes of hers narrowed and hard, staring at him, asking him why. Then he shook the picture out of his head and started working.
_____
Sandra Dessing followed Carmen and Melisande into the wood and put the little black bag with the integrated scoop away in her anorak pocket. She always carried it out for everyone to see while she was on the street, but she was damned if she was going to use one on the bark paths at £3.99 for ten. Ahead of her she could hear faint tuneless whistling and she pinched her cheeks and tucked her hair behind he ears. Iain Ballantyne came around the corner with Tig on his lead.
“Hello, hello,” he said. “I was just on my way home, but I’ll maybe turn back and have another wee stroll.”
“Why not?” said Mrs. Dessing. “Nice to see them having a good run and play together.”
“If you’re sure,” said Mr. Ballantyne, and something in his voice made Sandra look away from the dogs and glance at his face instead, right into his eyes.
“Why?” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“We need to talk,” said Iain. “We really need to talk today.” He bent to unhook Tig’s lead from his collar and all three dogs, well used to one another by now, bounded into the trees with their owners following after.
_____
As Keiko held Viola in the warmth of the swaying bus, as Fancy and Yvonne egged one another on in the fug of the salon, as Etta McLuskie stood her ground in the parked car, as Pamela Shand whacked the books with the pricing gun, as Kenny clicked and dragged and deleted, as Iain and Sandra’s dogs raced on into the darkest part of the woods—no one thought of the letters.
Some, reduced to ash with the rest of the clearings from the grate, were tipped into carriers, tied in binbags, burned again in the council incinerator, tipped out of the back of the truck eighteen miles away and scraped flat by men with masks and heavy gloves against the dust and grit they were spreading.
Some, in shreds, had rotted to compost with clippings and peelings, until the narrow lines of ink were gone. And in the spring when the bin was emptied and barrowed over to the border, there would be no sign in the crumbling brown that any paper was ever there.
Some had been pressed between pages never to be parted again, not even when the executors put the house on the open market and the eaves were emptied after the place was sold. That whole year’s worth of Woman’s Realm would be bound up with brown string and taken away by the clearance companies, sold on to the recyclers, and entered in the bill under sundry other items as “non-confidential printed paper: three bales.”
Some grew pulpy on their way downstream, heavy and sloughing apart, turning to grey paste in the water, one piece tangling itself in a length of plastic twine and floating for miles before the line snagged on a jutting rock and the balls of sodden paper were washed away.
Only a single letter remained, resting again where it had rested for years, behind the radiator, by the door, under the shelf, above the genkan now, as secret as ever—except that Keiko knew.
_____
Murray knelt beside the Harley, waiting just the right amount of time for the WD-40 to loosen the nuts under the saddle but not long enough for it to drip down between the rear mudguard and the battery. Malcolm stood at his bench in the back room, boning and rolling, dividing his store of fat evenly amongst the joints, tying the skin snugly over the pink and white spirals and patting each one before he laid them into the tray for the morning. Mrs. Poole could hear the regular slap of his palm on the skin as he finished another one, but she barely registered such a familiar sound as she snapped her ledger shut and pulled the first bundle of banknotes towards her.
twenty-seven
Wednesday, 20 November
Mrs. Poole was there again the next evening, listening, her hands spread flat on the empty desktop, when Keiko’s phone rang. She cocked her head to catch footsteps or talking, but nothing much came down through these stone floors. She of all people should know that by now.
“I can’t,” Keiko was saying. “I’ve planned something with Murray.”
“Oh, yeah?” Fancy said.
“I’m making him a meal. A proper Japanese meal. The works.”
“Just Murray?”
“Just the two of us.”
“After all Malcolm’s done, feeding you up like a Christmas goose too.”
She had made miso soup, stuffed fish, shaped dumplings. The first two batches, bland and heavy, she threw away but on the third attempt they came out as light as seed heads, as gold as sunshine. That would surely be enough, with the noodles and all the pickles, to make up for no sushi.
She laid two settings at the coffee table before the fire, put an extra pair of slippers on the genkan and put on her kimono, shaking out two months of folds and breathing in the scent of home. Murray arrived right on time, with flowers for her.
“Oops,” he said as she flung the door open and bowed. “Did I get you out the bath?” She smiled. “No really, you look great. And is it shoes off, then?” Keiko nodded and waited while he hopped around, unlacing his boots. “The total Tokyo experience, eh?”
“One night only,” said Keiko. “Starting tomorrow I’m going to have time for nothing except the experiments until Christmas.”
“Not even workouts?”
“I wouldn’t give up the workouts. I can’t tell you how grateful I am. And so tonight is like a thank-you. I want you to have a lovely evening.” She hesitated. “You deserve one.”
He held up his hand. “If we’re going to have a lovely evening,” he said, “could we agree not to talk about … things?” Keiko nodded. “Good. So, tell me what to do then. If you’ve gone to a lot of trouble, I want to get my end of it right.”
“No, no, no,” she said. “No etiquette, it’s too … I wanted to cook for you—just enjoy the food.”
Murray frowned, then smiled tightly. “Too complicated for me?”
“Well, if you’re really interested,” she said, backtracking. “Most foreigners think it’s silly.” She excused herself and went to the kitchen to set the noodle water on to boil. Murray had wriggled himself into a comfortable position on his cushion when she came back and folded herself down opposite him to pour sake.
“I was just thinking,” he said, “for anyone else, there’s not enough furniture in here,” he said, “but I suppose it’s fine for you, eh?”
Keiko looked around at the skinny sofa and chairs, the trolley with the television on it, the stretches of bare carpet.
“Was there much more furniture when you lived here?”
Murray folded his arms. “We weren’t going to talk about things,” he said.
“I didn’t mean to,” said Keiko. “I didn’t know I was.” She smiled at him. “It is fine for me. It’s a shame it was empty so long.” She wondered if this would count as talking again, but he only laughed.
“Hardly empty,” he said. “There was never a minute’s peace.”
“Who was here?” said Keiko, trying not to sound too eager.
“The Traders,” Murray told her. He had finished his sake and Keiko poured him some more. “When Dad was chairman, they used the flat as their gang hut.” He laughed. “That’s what Craig called it. Had the meetings up here and stored all the Christmas lights and Gala stuff and that.”
“The Traders,” said Keiko. “They used this place?”
“Not the whole squad of them. Just the committee.”
Everything, Keiko thought, leads back to the committee.
There was a fizzing noise from the kitchen as the noodle water boiled over, and she hurried away through there again.
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