Foreigners, Drunks and Babies

by Peter Robinson

  ‘Why didn’t Aiko get in touch with someone?’ I asked Toshi, rather forlornly, as we made our way through the usual crowds on that very cold, rainy, January evening. ‘Why didn’t she get in touch with me?’

  ‘Not the sort of thing a married Japanese woman could do,’ said Toshi. ‘I don’t suppose she got in touch with you at all once she’d married Brook, did she?’

  I had to admit that apart from one New Year card she hadn’t. Stepping into the restaurant, Toshi was immediately recognized by the chief sashimi chef. He gestured us towards a couple of seats at the bar’s quieter end.

  ‘I hope they weren’t living in the house that used to be mine,’ I said, remembering waking up one morning that first winter to find the glass of water left beside my futon all but frozen solid.

  ‘They bought a small house soon after they were married,’ said Toshi as he refilled my bowl from the dripping hot saké pot. ‘But they had also bought some land to build in the country, because Mori-chan was expecting their second … but then I’m told they were planning to live separately.’

  ‘And why was that?’ I asked.

  ‘I hear there was a student …’

  I took another sip of the lukewarm saké.

  ‘Did you ever see the place where she killed herself?’ I asked.

  ‘I did not visit them,’ he said. ‘Brook-san and Mori-chan did not have friends.’

  I was about to repeat Professor Sasayama’s insight about their ability to form friendships, when Toshi’s head of department, Professor Haneda, suddenly pushed through the hanging noren before the sliding wooden door. The chief chef, naturally assuming we were all part of the same drinking party, had asked my neighbour to move up one, and the portly professor sat down beside me.

  Haneda was a fine old Falstaffian sort of fellow who had invited me along to his teahouse on a couple of memorable occasions those years ago when some visiting writer or other would pass through the old capital. In for a penny in for a pound, I thought, so told Haneda exactly what Toshi and I were discussing, and ended by asking him why he thought the whole thing had happened.

  ‘I’m going to say something that will shock you,’ he said.

  ‘I know what it is,’ I risked, assuming the liberty taken would be condoned under the foreigners, drunks and babies rule.

  ‘I don’t believe there’s anything wrong,’ Haneda went on, as if I hadn’t even opened my mouth, ‘with a man having a mistress.’

  ‘Of course, you don’t,’ I said, putting on my most unshockable tone. ‘But you do think there’s something wrong with everyone knowing all about it, don’t you?’

  ‘Naturally,’ the professor came back.

  ‘That’s what went wrong when that Australian colla-borator of yours took up with one of his students. He should never have flaunted her around the conference circuit, should he? How could his wife have not found out? You think she shouldn’t have made such a fuss? But she hadn’t been trained up from birth to play by the Japanese housewife rules. That, you’ve got to admit.’

  ‘I am sure you felt relieved when your friend Brook came along and took her off your hands,’ said Haneda, lifting the saké pot to signal a refill to the restaurant’s chief chef.

  ‘Not at all,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, so he stole her from you, did he?’

  ‘I don’t see how he could have done,’ I said, ‘seeing as she wasn’t mine in the first place!’

  ‘So who’s with your wife now? Jack Frost is it?’ Haneda came jokingly back with one of his genial smiles, pushing some more deep fried fish-spine into his mouth.

  ‘She caught a cold over New Year,’ I said. ‘She’s gone to bed early.’

  Clearly we’d both had sufficient to drink, the rules in abeyance, each overstepping the mark. Toshi was sitting there looking aghast. But why had she done it? Gill’s explanation didn’t make any sense. I was seeing again the dark windows of the Villa, seeing its stones in their waves of raked gravel. But I was never to see those waters breaking, or embrace the produce of that inland sea.

  ‘Aiko-chan, of course, she used to behave as if she didn’t even know what the rules were,’ Haneda said, with the smile of a man who had finessed his point.

  ‘But why should you care so much?’

  That’s what Gill had asked, and come up with her answer.

  No, I never was … but I didn’t dislike Aiko as much as some. There were moments when it did seem she had no friends at all. I never heard anyone speak warmly about her. Even her husband appeared to have patronized her. People used to think she was using them. Perhaps she was. But that’s not unusual. She may have used me back then, used me to keep up her English. Much good would it do her … Maybe the difference was I didn’t mind being used.

  But the Protestant missionaries had. They had appeared to resent the fact that, as they put it, she had been granted the chance to study for a year in Idaho thanks to their good offices; but while she’d been out there Aiko hadn’t so much as sent a postcard and, come home, there wasn’t even a ‘Thank You’. Yet, as far as the missionaries were concerned, she simply hadn’t learned the appropriate manners. Nor did this seem to be a question of her faulty English. She didn’t seem to know how to behave in Japanese for that matter, when, for example, she was with her professors.

  ‘Ah yes, but then she might well have imagined that being married to an English gentleman, she wouldn’t need to know the rules,’ I suggested.

  ‘Maybe that was her biggest mistake,’ Toshi added in a voice implying that I might refrain from confronting the man with whom he was obliged to work.

  ‘She died for love?’ I wondered out loud. ‘I mean out of despair?’

  ‘Well,’ said Toshi, ‘that would be one interpretation.’

  ‘She died because she was too proud to live,’ Haneda said with a definitive flourish.

  ‘I take it that’s a compliment,’ I said.

  Haneda called for the bill. He was doing the math, as he’d say. Toshi and I handed over our thirds in the shape of a couple of brown and blue notes.

  ‘Karaoke?’ Professor Haneda suggested as we paused at the end of the passage leading from his favourite bar.

  I looked across at Miyazaki, dearly hoping to continue our frustrated exchange about what had happened. But Toshi’s face said he was caught. He would have to stay on for the sentimental show tunes sung into the small hours.

  ‘I really had better be getting back to my wife,’ I said, opting for my usual excuse as we emerged into the rainy neon night.

  ‘Ah, yes, your wife!’ said Haneda. ‘Very well then, I look forward to the next time we can do this. It’s always good to keep up with the gossip. Goodnight.’

  Out in the main thoroughfare, I hailed a taxi.

  ‘Kitanohakubiya-chō, ni itte kudasi,’ I said.

  ‘Hakubiya-chō?’ said the taxi driver.

  ‘Hai,’ I said, and slumped back in the seat.

  The Japanese words for left, right, straight on, and stop were among the first Aiko had taught me. Since the taxi drivers didn’t have anything like ‘the knowledge’, you had to direct them to where you lived. So, with the aid of those words, and arigatō gozaimasu, I managed to have myself deposited just a couple of blocks past the little railway station. The rain was turning to snow as I tried to step out of the taxi and unfurl my umbrella in the same movement, heading off into more narrow dark streets with as much self-possession as I could manage.

  So what had become of us all? The persons in their photographs, already dated fashions, people with their vitaes of achievements, the vanity mirrors and dental floss, people with birth family bereavements, the ones you had left, or who’d left you, without a backward glance, the others you were pleased to be rid of, the ones you had tried to love? Walking back through the streets of Kyoto past the drinks and pornography dispensers, along the road towards Toji-in, to the house where I’d first visited Jack Frost all those years before, I couldn’t help brooding on it all.

 
So they thought Aiko had married the wrong gaijin, the wrong alien, wrong outside-person … Both Haneda and Gill had said as much.

  Jack Frost’s house, which Gill and I had been lent for that night, was also traditional, built just after the war, with a single Western-style room. As I approached it from the direction of Toji-in, the narrow pathway through the garden seemed more overgrown than when we had last stayed. It had snowed the night before and even though the ground temperature had risen, melting it all downtown, the air had remained below zero. Cowls of droopy snow, tinged a faint blue in the darkness, remained on the bushes and shrubs. An orange electric bulb glowed above the sliding front door. Showers of refrozen snow, mixed with the freezing rain, tumbled around me as I came up the path towards that familiar silhouette of a one-storey building. I slid the door open and stepped into the genkan with its cupboard for shoes on the right.

  But just who left that black portable typewriter lying there on the tatami floor? Tip-toeing barefoot over towards the darker mound in the back of the tokonoma room, still tipsy from that evening’s saké, I stumbled right onto its keyboard. A group of silver keys flew up and tried to print their letters onto my freezing cold toes. I failed to repress a yelp of surprise and pain.

  ‘Is that you, Rob?’ It was Gill’s voice from the direction of that dark mound in the corner.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, then under my breath, ‘and who left that bloody old typewriter there?’

  Ending up in bed this way, together and alone, I would lie there into the small hours, almost invisible under the futon, not wishing to disturb Gill by cuddling up to her for warmth, everything turning endlessly around in my brain as the drink wore off. The pieces assembled themselves in my head, the story forming from snippets of rumour and gossip. There was no way of knowing how true they were.

  ‘You never can tell,’ my old colleague from Chicago had said, ‘why someone commits suicide.’ Inconstancy, anger, pride and despair … and I couldn’t help picturing her still hanging there, suspended by a twisted scarf from the ceiling, head yanked to one side and arms pulled away from her sides. Brook had found her. He must have collected their daughter from the hoikuen after work and taken her back home. He will have tried to get Aiko down, to revive her, take her to the hospital … but it will have been too late.

  ‘Addicted to picnics,’ said Aiko, and so we were, sitting on plastic bags around a tree’s roots in the changeable weather of that warm, wet, distant spring. Our heads eye-level with the haze of shifting grasses, new green tints of leafage for the season, two black bikes leaned against a litter basket, drinking beer in the fathomless spaces, serenaded by unidentified bird noise, in the Imperial Palace Gardens, and I certainly remembered this, though nothing here can be trusted to remain the same for long, least of all the tenuous threads that had held us together, not certainly Aiko herself, returning to the place from Idaho and California, who had taken herself so seriously, who had died because she was too proud to live … And now it was as if I too had grown posthumous to myself, as if I had died and gone into the limbo of those who are in love with the dead.

  Yes, I would have to join her on that isle of the dead, on that isle of the dead in the Inland Sea. From its picture window’s point of vantage, I could see again across its straits through the fog or mist those red-striped refinery chimneys, the coasters, fishing boats, container ships coming and going like threads extending from our lives. We’d been picking our way across that extinct volcano. She had wrung it out of me, my love. But now as Gill turned over, her face to mine in the tatami-scented dark, and I sensed dawn lightening beyond the profile of Mount Hiei, above the Eastern Mountains, it was almost as if that picture window’s point of vantage had vanished in a single night.

  Indian Summer

  Smudged traces of phrases came towards him through the air. The drinkers on the corporation benches were gesturing and talking at each other. Under the canal-side branches, with colours on the turn in that early autumn light, their slurred talk was catching in the leaves – the leaves’ lit transparencies, tinting the scene like a stained-glass window. Each mumbled word had a blurred edge to it, and though this made them sound thick or sticky, the joints between felt fragile, like they didn’t know where the next one was coming from, or quite where their phrases would end. The two of them seemed clearly to understand each other, or be going through the motions, looking into each other’s faces, speaking with an oddly lazy urgency. Passing by, though, he couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. He could catch their words, but not the meaning, as happens on the bus when behind two people in the middle of some talk about their lives. All the words were simple enough, but what was the story? The snippets of talk wouldn’t form into a shape with a background, a point, or an end in sight.

  Then as he came closer, the drinkers on the benches turned out to be women, women of uncertain age, younger, probably, than he would have thought. They could have been homeless, sleeping rough, making the most of the only season when that might seem an alternative to the warmth and shelter most took for granted. He thought how the drink might numb the cold in winter, or it would help the days slide by at any time of year. Both of them clutched an open can of lager, their other hands gesturing broadly as if to help the words come out, like a conductor with an orchestra in a first-time rehearsal of some piece. The flushed-faced women were mottled all over with a warm glow from the oblique rays separated out by that colander of shade formed in the canal-side leaves.

  The day had thoroughly warmed itself through. Light was gleaming brilliantly across the flowing water, dazzling anyone not wearing sunglasses on such an October day. It had been hotter for the season than at any time since records began, or so the media forecasters put it. Perhaps the climate was changing, just as they said, for the better or worse. On the canal – the canalized river – were pairs of swans floating in parallel with the couples that strolled the towpath on their way to town. The lapping water murmured along between banks, following its track past flats and office blocks, in its own valley of human habitation, whispering like a tributary under sleep, bringing clearer notes to air and distance, out of sight most of the time, forgotten about, but on days like these a blaze of light in the midst of life, forming what you might call a point of repair.

  Down the canal-side came the crowds of unknowing, in twos and threes, mothers and babies, foreign languages and accents, the mysteries in lives that are paid so little attention as they pass, and the fear of each other in their differences, the minimal eye-contact, the checking of appearances. It was all like that slight anxiety produced by the sound of the two drunk women on the corporation benches, as if their out-of-focus speech would ruin the mellowed clarity of light, the brightness on the water, this cloudless blue above the town’s transformed industrial quarter.

  But for him this warmth and clarity had its own precarious aspect, its own premonition of a possible disaster. But there was no need to exaggerate. The worst it could be was a mild disappointment. He knew well enough how it sometimes is when you meet up with a person after many, many years. Perhaps that’s why most people let their pasts go. They dread the thought of meeting somebody who might be holding one of their old selves hostage, or they don’t want to revisit the reasons that made them lose touch in the first place. Daunted, those selves would reappear as from cavernous oubliettes – no, not as they were, but with the damage of the years quite clear on their faces, in words, nervous laughter, or looks in blinks of eyes. Staring right ahead, he could see it happening over again in the faint shade of the leaves’ lit transparencies, towards twilight on the last day of their working week, a Friday that had thoroughly warmed itself through.

  And for a moment he was taken aback by this familiar post-industrial scene, the whole warmed-through array lacking any kind of focus, or sense of direction, notwith-standing the canal-bank walk, the distant car noise, or life’s dispersive forces; he could sense the scene those drinkers saw and hear what they had seemed to say aright: that
its leaves were spring blossoms, the warmth like a June night’s, though earlier. And here again were the empty office spaces flanking each side of the waterway by which he was walking, walking once more on an autumn day that might have been forming a point of repair, one of those moments when mind and world can seem to coincide.

  She had sent him a message with her mobile number on it. They had met at one of those unforeseen reunions, one of those funerals when a contemporary finds sudden death in the midst of life. In fact almost a year had gone by since that bitter winter’s day in a crematorium at the far end of the country, when he’d seen her again for the first time in years, so many years, and such interrupting circumstances, after they had gone their separate ways.

  But how strange it was after all those years that they should find themselves living in the same town, on opposite sides of the cemetery, about a five-hour drive from where they grew up, more than thirty years after they had fallen out of touch. And, unexpectedly too, she’d suggested they meet and have a drink after work for old time’s sake. Her husband would be looking after the evening meal, as he did most of the cooking, and her kids were old enough to look after themselves. No, it wouldn’t be a problem – as she said – he needn’t worry.

  But he did worry, and was far too early as usual, approaching the central station where they’d agreed to meet with more than half an hour in hand. So he ducked into an Oxfam bookshop just to while away the time.

  ‘What an Indian summer’s day!’ the lady on the cash register exclaimed, and he managed a word of sociable agreement.

  Running his eye along the cracked spines and titles, mentally ticking off which ones he’d read already, his mind kept returning, as it had for weeks on end now, to those sticky moments more than thirty years before. It had all begun at a Christmas party in an underground club by the waterfront. Down the bottom of the stairs from street level was a cavernous room with a bar, some tables and chairs, a jukebox, and space for dancing. Someone had organized the party, he couldn’t remember who, and the place had been booked sight-unseen, which was a pity because it felt far too big for the gang of friends from twinned boys’ and girls’ schools in the suburbs. They were a strangely shy lot, really, meeting like that each weekend to pass the difficult years of teenage together, but hardly talking or getting to know each other better. They would sip drinks and listen to music, talk about bands and new releases …