by Susan Barker
She squeezes my arm and steps into the lift.
My mood takes a nosedive after Katya leaves. There has been a reshuffle in my absence and Mariko has taken my place at the bar. She tells me that I have to join the youngish businessmen Katya had been attending to. I really can’t be bothered and start out being as rude to them as I can get away with. I yawn hugely, pour myself a whisky and scratch at a mosquito bite on my leg – all code-violating stuff. My clients titter uneasily. It turns out they are elementary-school teachers who have come to Osaka to attend a seminar on teaching children with learning disabilities. They regale me with eccentric English (‘I play karaoke every night because I have bachelor freedom’) and I warm to them despite myself. I end up teaching them English nursery rhymes to sing to their kids.
Before long the country-and-western singer is packing away his guitar and the elementary-school teachers get up to leave, in tipsy high spirits. They hand over the 35,000 yen they owe without so much as a flinch and thank me for ‘very much good time’. I escort them to the lift and wave goodbye until the doors shut on their smiley faces. Alone in the corridor, I feel the fatigue set in.
Leaden legs take me to the kitchen. Watanabe is grating cheese onto the counter – an artist’s palette of ketchup and mayonnaise and God knows what else. Poorly aimed projectiles circle the bin; empty milk cartons, eggshells, vegetable peelings. I’m no hygiene freak, but really . . .
‘Hi, Watanabe,’ I say. Was that a glimmer of acknowledgement there, or did I imagine it? ‘Can you make me something to eat? A sandwich would be fine.’
Watanabe nods, nervous tics leaping beneath his skin like tiny, high-voltage fleas. He slaps butter onto bread and adds some cheese. He eyes the floor tiles as he presents me with my sandwich, cut into four dainty triangles. I take it from him, alarmed to feel the hummingbird vibrato of his pulse trembling through the plate.
I bite, chew, swallow and say: ‘Mmmm . . . delicious.’
Watanabe contemplates his trainers. I wonder, not for the first time, if he is mildly autistic.
‘Well . . . thank you,’ I say.
I head off to the bar, but steal a backwards glance from the doorway. Watanabe throws a tomato at the bin. It splats against the wall, spilling seed and watery pulp as it slides to the floor. He can’t have been much of an athlete in high school.
I sit behind the bar, on the foot stool used to reach the Navy Rum and Amaretto, eating my sandwich. Elena comes over and tells me I have clients waiting for me in the karaoke room. Through a mouthful of bread and brie I explain to Elena that I am saving my voice for Talent Search Japan and ask if she would take them instead.
‘They made a specific request,’ Elena says, deadpan. ‘For you and Katya.’
‘Katya’s gone home,’ I say. ‘Would you like to come with me?’
Elena is unenticed. She points at the clock and tells me her shift finishes in five minutes. She tells me she steers well clear of yakuza – she has her son to think of. ‘But you’re quite attracted to gangsters, aren’t you? One of them has bandages on his face. Gunshot wound, I bet. Very sexy.’
I sigh and get up from the foot stool.
Another hour of small talk won’t kill me. I walk past the last drunken dregs in the lounge, ribbons of smoke unfurling from their cigarettes. Low in the background Patsy Cline sings ‘Crazy’, making me nostalgic for another time and place.
The first thing I see through the window of the karaoke booth is the man with the bandages, rigid on the leather sofa, hands in his lap. The left half of his face is masked by plump cotton dressing secured with surgical tape. The hair above the bandages is tufty and fine, like black dandelion fuzz.
The man next to him waves at me. With a queasy jolt I recognize Yuji’s boss, Yamagawa-san. I push open the karaoke-booth door, wondering why he is here.
They rise to greet me, formidable in dark designer suits. Yamagawa’s companion is young, in his early twenties. The clinical whiteness of his bandages is stark against the tanned, exposed side of his face.
I bow deeply. ‘Yamagawa-san! Good evening,’ I say. ‘This must be the first time I have seen you here.’
‘Good evening, Mary. Sorry to call on you so late,’ Yamagawa-san says, with melodious warmth. ‘We thought we’d stop by for a drink. See, what did I tell you, Hiro? Speaks perfect Japanese and beautiful to boot. Yuji is a lucky man.’
‘Please!’ I protest, all flattered scepticism. ‘It’s not late at all. I am delighted that you came.’
Yamagawa-san glances at the door. ‘Will Katya be joining us?’ he asks.
‘I am afraid that Katya is not here,’ I say. ‘I could fetch another hostess if you like . . .’
Yamagawa-san’s smile burrows right down to his gold-capped molars. He rests a hand on the bandaged guy’s shoulder. ‘Ah, well,’ he says. ‘We’ll just have to do without the Ukrainian tonight. Let’s all sit down, then. Mary, allow me to introduce Hiro, the prodigal son.’
For a second I think Yamagawa-san means ‘son’ in the biological sense, then I remember that he refers to all his employees as sons.
‘Nice to meet you,’ I say.
Hiro extends his hand and we share a wordless handshake. He betrays nothing in the way of emotion, and a blank stare deflects my smile. From what I can see of his face he is not that bad-looking. The bandages cover his injuries thoroughly and give no hint as to their nature. Burns? Cuts? Is that left eye swollen? Morbid curiosity demands I know.
‘Well,’ I say, sitting opposite them, ‘how are you both for drinks?’
The leather of the sofa is cool and sticks to the back of my knees.
‘A hostess with fiery hair brought us whisky,’ Yamagawa-san says, pointing to a crystal decanter and four empty glasses. ‘Where do girls with orange hair come from? No! Don’t spoil it for me. I want to imagine a land of flame-haired beauties.’
I laugh and pour two triple measures of whisky for Yamagawa-san and Hiro. Yamagawa-san pours one for me.
‘A toast,’ Yamagawa-san says. ‘To the return of my prodigal son.’
We clink glasses and ‘kampai’. There is a lull as we sip our whiskies.
‘I suppose you are itching to know what happened to Hiro’s face, Mary,’ Yamagawa-san says.
‘No, I . . .’ I am caught off guard. For one irrational moment I fear that he read my mind. ‘. . . It’s none of my business.’
He chuckles at how flustered I am. ‘Hiro, perhaps you should explain to Mary what happened to you.’
Hiro looks at me. ‘I was in a car crash. My face caught fire.’ He speaks with the bored detachment of a student reciting from a textbook.
‘Boy racers, eh!’ Yamagawa-san says.
I swallow a dry pocketful of air. It must have been horrific. ‘I am sorry . . .’ I say. ‘I hope you make a fast recovery.’
‘He will be scarred for life,’ Yamagawa-san assures me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say again.
Hiro looks entirely unmoved by any of this. He takes a packet of American Spirit cigarettes from his jacket pocket, lights one, drags on it and exhales towards the ceiling. Yamagawa-san unwraps a cigar. He holds it in front of his mouth until I realize that he is waiting for me to light it. Apologizing, I scramble to rectify my inattentiveness.
Yamagawa-san picks up the laminated song directory from the table.
‘Do you want to pick a song to sing?’ I ask.
‘No,’ Yamagawa-san says, turning the pages. ‘We each come into this world with a small amount of dignity and I am not going to squander mine singing into a machine.’
‘Hiro?’ I ask him purely out of duty – he really doesn’t come across as the karaoke type.
Hiro looks at me like I’ve asked him to paint his tongue blue and do a Maori war dance. Why choose the karaoke booth if they both find it so objectionable? Yamagawa-san taps a number into the remote. It appears digit by digit on the box above the karaoke screen. The artist and title flash up: Madonna, ‘Material Girl’. He hands me
the microphone. ‘We would be really honoured, Mary, if you could sing for us.’
On stage I grip the microphone self-consciously. The intro starts up, as do the disco lights on the edge of the stage, splashing me with colour. The lyrics glide across the bottom of the screen and I strain to sing in key. In the low-budget video a Japanese girl in a wedding dress skates about on rollerblades, tossing Monopoly money into the air.
Yamagawa-san claps his hands out of time, his cigar clasped between his teeth. Hiro breathes smoke about like a dry-ice machine, his good eye heavy-lidded with boredom. My singing is joyless and I do not dance. I may have been railroaded into this, but I still have some degree of free will.
‘Good,’ Yamagawa-san says as the song fades out.
I step down from the stage.
‘Wait,’ he says. ‘We are not finished yet.’
He points the remote at the control box and taps in a number: 6132. Madonna, ‘Material Girl’.
I shoot Yamagawa-san a look of confusion. Has he tapped in the same number by accident?
He leans back in his seat, watching me in a leisurely way. ‘Once more,’ he says.
It all starts up again: the disco lights; the synthesizer beats; the actress in the wedding dress.
I sing ‘Material Girl’ three times in a row. I am thoroughly sick of the tuneless whine of my voice. Can’t they see how much I am hating this? Yuji will be furious when I tell him.
‘Good,’ Yamagawa-san says after my third performance. ‘Why don’t you sit down and have a rest.’
I sit on the leather couch, short of breath, trying to remember the prerequisite face muscles for smiling. I reach for my whisky. I can’t gulp it down fast enough.
‘Well sung, Mary,’ Yamagawa-san praises. ‘She’s a good singer, isn’t she, Hiro?’
‘Forgive me, Yamagawa-san,’ Hiro replies, ‘but I am a poor judge of these things.’
‘It’s OK. I know my voice is awful,’ I understate, wildly.
Hiro elects to remain silent. I swallow more whisky.
‘Do you find Hiro attractive?’ Yamagawa-san asks, apropos of nothing, except maybe cruelty. ‘Even with half his face gone?’
This turns my stomach. Why humiliate him like that?
‘I really shouldn’t be checking other men when I have a boyfriend.’ My laughter is light and unconvincing.
Yamagawa-san also laughs. ‘And how about me?’ he asks. ‘Am I attractive?’
‘Really, you’re embarrassing me!’
Yamagawa-san drains the last of his whisky. He takes up the remote control again and runs his fingers over the buttons as if picking out a message in Braille. Is he going to make me sing again? I will have to tell him no this time. I will have to tell him my throat hurts.
Pointing the remote at the screen, he looks at me and smiles.
8
WATANABE
The sun smirks down, hot and heavy, irradiating the epidermal cells on the back of my neck. I am three storeys high, flat on my belly like a sniper, gripping the over-jut of apartment-block roof. In the parking lot below the tarmac sizzles. The cars gleam; red Honda, magenta Nissan, blue Toyota with a squirming nest of baby rats in its boot. I never learnt to drive. Traversing this grimy pockmark of a city in a flattened metal box has never appealed to me. Freedom? You might as well be a hamster on a treadmill for all the freedom owning a car affords . . .
Here she comes.
This morning Mary wears her hair in a high ponytail. A majestic fountain of golden jets, resonating in the sunlight like fibre optics. She yawns, a wide and powerful lioness yawn. She wears a pale sundress, tatty plimsolls and no socks. A small leather bag is slung over her shoulder. In the bag is a mobile phone and a dog-eared copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Today, she thinks, I’d like to be by the sea. Mary emits a sigh of discontent. Though it has only been two days since she last saw her Neanderthal boyfriend, she yearns for him – a romantic longing as misplaced as an ectopic pregnancy. Little does she know how his absence keeps her safe.
She resolves to seek him out later this afternoon, to make him a surprise visit.
A pall descends upon my heart.
She sets off across the parking lot and I proceed to the fire escape.
I stick close to the walls, the soles of my trainers slapping against the paving slabs, sending shoeshaped quasars into the echelons of hyperspace. I deftly time my footfalls to coincide with Mary’s. A petty yet pleasurable pleasure. If Mary knew of the valiant exertions I am making on her behalf I am sure that she would be thankful, that she would begin to view me in a new, vastly improved light. Perhaps then I could help her make that first paraspatial leap . . .
We continue along the cherry-tree-lined avenue, footfalls in perfect synchrony.
Among the tree-tops, sparrows perch in twittering clusters. Leaves flutter, green and juicy and rampant with chlorophyll. Fractal patterns explode, microorganisms feast, tiny veins sprawl across leaf surfaces like electrified dendrites. Nature never premeditates. Its erratic rhythm simply pounds on. Since the throat of hyperspace opened before me, my sense of awe has never wavered. So eternally rich is the world I have come to know.
Reality is a pack of cards, infinite in number. Our three-dimensional universe is but a single card dealt by the hand of God. Compare this with the fourth dimension – an infinity of cards laid bare, suit upon endless suit, like an everlasting game of Patience. The disparity defies articulation. Dimensional impediments eliminated, my once stunted, embryonic knowledge of the universe has soared into the divine realm. It would be audacious of me to claim that I know as much as God, but I know at least as much as He did when He was my age.
I lurk by the tobacconist’s as Mary purchases her ticket. Commuters glance up from their workaday scuttle to behold this Venus in plimsolls, moving in her aurora borealis of beauty. They stumble on their way, dazed by the encounter.
As Mary walks down to the platform I loiter by the ticket barrier, scoping the crowds. An old man in a green pullover dodders up to the barrier. I rush up behind him as he fumbles his ticket into the slot, and together we pass through, the most unlikely of conjoined twins. On the other side the man wheels round in bewilderment. I guiltlessly stare him down, zipping through his DNA to see his recessive genes for Tourette’s and ingrown toenails. The man shakes his head and walks away. The medication he takes for his Tourette’s cripples all confrontational impulses.
‘Oi! Where d’you think you’re going without a ticket?’
Shit. Just what I need. I keep going, head cowed, hands rammed deep in my pockets. Behind me a station attendant marches to the ticket barrier, boots polished to a military sheen, standard-issue Japan Railways cap perched importantly upon his head.
‘Boy in baseball cap! Get back here now.’
All around me, dozens of law-abiding commuters swivel their heads, their gazes crossing like searchlight beams as they look for this boy-in-baseball-cap. Cursing, I turn round and trudge back to the ticket barrier. Better they get me up here than down on the platform where Mary can see. As I walk towards him the station attendant folds his pudgy arms over his shirt button-wrenching paunch. His expression is stern, but inside he is giddy with executioner’s delight. Down on the platform Mary drags on a Mild Seven and squints down the track for the next train. It is approximately 1.69 km away and due in 29 seconds. Damn this bastard.
‘C’mon, sonny. Either you haven’t got a ticket or you’re training for the Olympic turnstile-barging event. Now, which is it?’
‘I . . . er . . .’
A quick psychogenic scan tells me Station Attendant Morimoto is a bureaucratic zealot with a lowest-common-denominator morality. A dangerous combination. He will exploit my misdemeanour for all it is worth.
‘What are you? Mute? Deaf and dumb? Either you conjure up a ticket for me or you can crawl back under that barrier and come and fill out some forms for me in my office.’
From the platform below comes the rattling traction of tr
ain wheels against track, the headlong squalling of brakes. I rummage through my pockets for my imaginary ticket. Below us, train doors hiss apart. I take a step towards the barrier, ducking down as though I have every intention of traipsing obediently into the arms of criminal retribution. Then I spin round and begin to sprint the fifty metres down the tunnel to the platform.
Behind me Station Attendant Morimoto shouts: ‘Oi! You cheeky scrag! Hey! Stop!’
I whizz past a scandalized old lady with a poodle on a leash. I swerve round a gang of truanting high-schoolers, who cheer encouragement as I careen towards the soon-to-close-on-me train doors. Not far now, I tell myself, my cardiovascular system lambasting every last lung-shattering step. I dive into the carriage, a millisecond before the door mechanism activates and swishes them shut behind me. Relief roars in my ears as the train heaves out of the station.
The inland sea is bruise-coloured and froths around the pier struts. I squint at the sun shining innocuously above; round and yellow as a child’s Crayola rendering. A solar flare leaps out from its swirling photosphere, then vanishes, witnessed by no one other than me.
The sea-front entrance to the Osaka Aquarium is stark and exposed. The only hiding place is an Asahi beer vending machine, which I slot myself behind, squeezing past the wiring, the refrigerator motor chugging gently against my thigh. My hypervision circumnavigates the hulking machinery to see Mary purchase a green-tea ice cream from the refreshments stall. Ice cream in hand, she gazes out to sea, the grey undertow and hypnotic undulation of waves pulling her under.
For a moment Mary forgets herself, mesmerized by 14,792,090 litres of cold, drab water. If this bland feature of the ordinary world moves her so, how awestruck would she be gambolling across the quantum pastures of hyperspace? If she encountered Planck’s constant, or felt an electron whizz past her nose at a quillionth of a coulomb?