by Susan Barker
‘You need to pull down the back of that skirt. I can see your knickers,’ she croaks.
‘Oh.’ Stupidly, I tug the back of my skirt.
My compliance only encourages her. Her mac crinkles as she prods me in the midriff. ‘What’s wrong with you, you mucky thing?’
I take a step back. If being ancient earns you the right to go round poking and criticizing people, then I guess old age isn’t entirely without appeal.
‘I lost my purse,’ I say.
‘You said it was stolen.’
‘Lost, stolen, whatever.’
‘Your Japanese is dreadful. Shall I fetch someone who can speak English to help you?’
‘No, thanks. I—’
‘I’ll get you a policeman – they’re very clever, these policemen. They’ll put you right.’
‘Really, I’m OK . . .’
But she’s off, her trolley of economy toilet paper bouncing up the kerb behind her. I watch her go, niggled by guilt. It’s a sunny day. Why the raincoat? Another number 157 pulls up, blotting her from view. I smooth down the back of my skirt and climb on board. The driver is old and grouchy, with a toothpick jutting from the corner of his mouth. When I ask if he would be kind enough to take me a few stops without charge, he grunts ambiguously and I go and find an empty seat before he changes his mind.
So far Yuji has been vague about how he is going to get the money together for us to leave Japan. My tongue is bitten to the quick from all the times I’ve had to stop myself from pestering him about it. Meanwhile, at The Sayonara Bar I simmer with boredom. I really can’t be bothered. I forget I am supposed to be entertaining salarymen and lapse into a Zen-like state, or compose haiku in my head. I wander off while my client is in the toilet, or saying hello to another hostess, or rummaging through his wallet to pay me. Katya casts me stern, cautioning looks. ‘What’s come over you?’ she whispers. ‘You’re going to get sacked.’ Which, let’s face it, isn’t much of a threat when my hostessing career is in its death throes anyway.
Last night was one of those quiet nights that has Mama-san hissing at the silent cash register. I did little more than play a few rounds of poker and sing ‘You’re the One That I Want’ on karaoke. I had a lot of time to think about Mariko. Mama-san called me to her office the day before to tell me Mariko had been in contact. Her father needed an emergency operation to remove his larynx and she had gone back to Fukuoka. Mama-san smoked a clove cigarette and spoke in pessimistic, funereal tones. ‘Bad things happen to good people,’ she said, blowing smoke from the corner of her mouth. She sent me home to pack a suitcase full of clothes to send on to Mariko. Packing up skirts and blouses in Mariko’s empty room, I felt her absence very sharply. I took out my kanji dictionary and composed a short letter to put in her suitcase. I wrote I had enjoyed living with her, that I would miss her, that I hoped everything would be OK. Mariko lost her mother when she was a child, and now, at nineteen, she might lose her father too. Mama-san says she is going to move a new girl, an American, into Mariko’s old room. She showed me a passport photo: some girl from New Jersey with overcrowded teeth and a perm. With any luck I should be gone by the time she gets here.
Yuji met me after work last night. He waited in the street outside the bar, glowering into the middle distance as though it had insulted him. He wore a window cleaner’s beanie pulled down over his ears and a scruffy T-shirt and jeans. His moody profile was turned towards a dancer in front of the Big Echo who was doing some kind of cybernetic moonwalk to electronica and pulsing dental-drill samples. The dancer jerked and shifted gears like an automated device, his hair in a slippery ponytail, his face a frozen void. Shrapnel chinked into an upturned silver cap on the floor, tossed casually by one of the passing human parade.
Yuji broke into a grin when he saw me and sent his cigarette end sailing into the gutter. The first thing I thought to ask was what was happening on the money front, but I decided to choke it back for later. Instead I reached up and yanked down the front of his hat and kissed his forehead through the wool. Yuji pushed his hat back in place and kissed me, one hand on the small of my back.
‘Listen. I said I’d meet some friends at a bar. Maybe you should go home – it might be boring for you,’ he said.
‘Your friends? Boring? Never . . .’
‘Trust me, you’ll be bored,’ Yuji said, deaf to my gentle sarcasm.
‘I don’t mind.’ It was stupid, but I was hurt by his not wanting me around. Seeing him was the high point of my evening. Given the agony of hindsight, I should have just gone home.
‘OK, but I warned you . . .’ Yuji said. ‘Hey, I contacted a friend in Seoul today, a Korean I knew in high school. He said he’d put us up for a few days . . .’ Something distracted him. He glanced agitatedly over my shoulder. ‘Who is she staring at?’
I followed his gaze beyond the robot cabaret, to the girl leaning against the wall of the Big Echo, one leg bent, the heel of her leather boot ground into the wall. Her lips were frosted white, and she was bleached and bronzed so severely she looked like a film negative of herself. She stared at me with fight-picking eyes.
Yuji laughed nervously. ‘What’s her problem?’ he said, and led me away.
Taku Taku was a spit-and-sawdust live house I had never ventured inside before. It was pretty much as I’d expected: black walls papered with flyers for local bands, a small stage, punk kids and hoary rockers. That Yuji’s image-conscious friends would want to meet here struck me as plain weird. They’re more into hiphop, if anything.
They were sitting at a table by the bar, in hooded tops and gold chains, knees as far apart as they could get them. One wore a vest that showed off his sleeves of tattoos: inky engravings of sky-blue waves, lizards and panthers, decorating arms muscled from bedroom press-ups and free weights. After a round of cool nods in my direction, they treated me like the girl who wasn’t there. They had this way of shunning me with a slight tilt of the shoulders, of speaking too fast for me to keep up.
Exiled from the conversation, I passed the time lighting cigarettes from the butts of their predecessors and sinking back the drinks Yuji supplied me with (guilt cocktails – he could tell I didn’t relish the role of invisible girlfriend). I people-watched too. There were some hostesses clocked off from the Copa Cabana, two pogo-ing tourists with Canadian flags conscientiously sewn onto their rucksacks, and a skinny meerkat of a boy hovering by the stage. I was bored, waiting it out until I could be alone with Yuji. People must have seen me sitting mutely and judged me a dumb blonde, unable to speak a word of Japanese. Let them, I thought.
At 3 a.m. the bar was nearly empty; perhaps we were even the last people there. I was drunk by then and as I stood up to go to the toilet I felt that strange sensation of double gravity you get climbing out of a swimming pool. As I stumbled into the toilets dozens of girls greeted me, rosy and rumpled, each in a brown A-line skirt identical to mine. My reflection bounced from every surface, the ceiling, walls and cubicle doors. I twirled and they twirled. I smoothed my skirt and they smoothed their skirts too. Then I went to unload a few cocktails.
Washing my hands, I met my gaze in the mirror above the sink. My eyes had that gently roving look and the rest of me was flushed. I was curiously ashamed, as if I had stayed in and secretly got drunk by myself. By the door was a sofa, its ripped vinyl cover patched up with duct tape. I sat down and shut my eyes, instantly plunging myself into a dark, nauseous roller-coaster ride. I opened my eyes again. It was time to go home.
The door to the Ladies had swung shut during my woozy consultation with the mirror. I went to push it open, but found it stuck fast. I pulled for a while and then stubbed my toe in a half-arsed karate kick. Realizing it was locked, I hammered with my fists, shouting to be let out. Guitar noise wailed in disheartening reply. The bar staff had begun wiping down tables and closing up the bar when I had left. They might have locked the toilets without checking they were empty first. I told myself not to panic, that Yuji would notice my absence and ask some
one to go and check that I was OK. It might even have been his idea of a practical joke. I sank back down on the sofa and, against my better judgement, shut my eyes again.
Minutes later I was crouched over the toilet bowl, retching in a stomach-cramping reversal of what had made me drunk in the first place. When it was over I found my condition much improved. I went over to the basin and splashed my face, red-eyed and sobered. I cupped my hands, brought some chlorine-tasting water to my mouth and swilled it about over my teeth. Now that the room had ceased to sway, being locked in the toilets all night began to seem a depressing prospect. In the bar, the music stopped.
The barman who let me out wore a mile-wide smirk. According to him, the door hadn’t even been locked. I stared past him at the empty bar. The chairs were stacked on the tables and the lights were up full. A boy in a bandanna swept around my feet. ‘We’re closed now,’ the barman said. ‘Your friends are outside.’ I thanked him and walked out into a street of strangers.
I was so mad that for a while all I could do was stand and fume. Not only had Yuji left me, he had taken my purse as well. How was I meant to get home? I roamed the nearby streets, looking in the windows of bars and noodle shops for his stupid window cleaner’s hat. Had he assumed I had gone home and taken my purse for safe-keeping? Had the bar staff told him I had gone? Either way I was going to give him hell when I caught up with him. After an hour of wandering I went and sat in the subway, intending to wait it out until the buses started running. I woke three hours later to stampeding masses and a murderous crick in my shoulder. I was furious. Yuji’s reasons for leaving without me had better be watertight, or I will have to seriously rethink the whole leaving Japan thing. I can’t let him treat me this way.
The bus stops near the bottom of the hill leading to Yuji’s apartment. I thank the driver and step down into the sunshine. The hill Yuji lives on is so steep it can only be tackled with a clownish, forward-leaning gait. Cyclists have to dismount and push their bikes uphill, and when cars drive by I worry that gravity will overpower the grip of their tyres and send them screeching out-of-control. I set forth, wincing as roadside scree studs my bare foot. Developers have dug wide stepped terraces into the hillside for apartments and houses, and each terrace is bridged by sloping bamboo groves, buzzing with mosquitoes and other invisible predators. By the time I reach Yuji’s apartment building my skin is slick with the poisons of the night before. I pause in the lobby, waiting for my breathing to return to normal, licking the salty layer of perspiration from my upper lip.
It has been weeks since I last visited Yuji’s flat. We don’t spend much time there – none at all since the break-in. I prefer to crash at mine, where the futon isn’t the catchment area for dirty plates, and every concave surface doesn’t automatically double as an ashtray. I am amazed he actually noticed the break-in the other week, the place is such a mess. A mad slew of clothes and junk cover the floor, as if demoniac forces came and deranged the room and its contents. In the apartment’s tranquil moments the rustling of cockroaches can be heard as they excavate the landfill site for crumbs. The only decorative touch is a photograph of a mean-looking ex called Yukie on the fridge. She ran away to Tokyo to become a model and hasn’t been heard of since. Katya met her once, way back when. She tells me she was a complete headcase.
I ring the buzzer in the entryway, prepared for a two-minute delay while Yuji drags himself to the door. The intercom clicks wordlessly, and the door opens. Weird. I go inside and walk upstairs, past the mosquito-netted window and the poster with the talking recycling bin. Yuji never locks his door, so I walk right in.
‘Where did you get to last night?!’ I say. I raise my arm, ready to throw my broken sandal at his head.
I get to the living room and scream. A man is pointing a gun at me.
‘Jesus. Shut the fuck up,’ he says with a roll of the eyes.
I shut the fuck up. My legs want to buckle and I will them not to. I have never been this close to a gun before. He is going to squeeze the trigger and shoot me. I know it. I am coursing with adrenalin. Too scared even to blink.
‘That’s better,’ he says.
He puts it away, into a holster inside his suit, and the crashing of the room subsides. The man regards me in the half-light of the slatted blinds, bemused by my mute terror. There is something wrong with him. One side of his face is hideously scarred. Melted out of shape, like plastic left too close to the fire. The eyebrow is gone and his eyelid is a misshapen slit. I realize that I know him, that the last time I saw him he wore white bandages on his face. He was in the karaoke room that time with Yamagawa-san. The prodigal son.
‘Mary, isn’t it?’
I nod. He has a name too, but I can’t remember it.
‘You speak Japanese, yeah?’
Another nod.
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he says.
I stare at his jacket, where his gun rests against his chest. He looks too intimate with the giving and receiving of pain for me to take him at his word. Instinct tells me to stay quiet, but anxiety overrides it.
‘Where’s Yuji?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I am waiting for him here – though, to be honest, I don’t expect him to show up.’
The air is dank and heavy, as though stale laundry and the futon have been respiring, breathing out their rankness. The mutilated gunman stands on a broken minidisc-player and a torn manga comic.
‘Why are you waiting for him?’ I think of the gun and feel a queasy kick in my guts.
The prodigal son gives a crooked smile, all expression concentrated on the good side of his face. ‘What do you think he has done?’
‘He took some money,’ I say. This is the first thing that comes to mind. He said he would raise the cash we needed to leave the country and must have got himself in trouble doing it. Poor, stupid Yuji.
The prodigal son flashes another crooked smile. ‘He told you?’
‘No.’
‘Lucky guess, then. He embezzled some business-loan repayments collected on Yamagawa-san’s behalf. He made it look as though the borrowers were shirking on repayments.’
He makes no attempt to simplify his language. I stall on a couple of words and it takes a while to understand what he is saying. Comprehension is met with fierce scepticism. I know about the loan-collection business. Yuji feels bad enough about harassing these people already without landing them in more shit. He wouldn’t cheat ordinary people. Once we left a restaurant in Kyoto and forgot to settle our bill. Halfway across Gion, Yuji realized and got our taxi to turn round. I was all for keeping the money, but Yuji was adamant. He said he knows how small businesses struggle.
‘It wasn’t the amount he took,’ the gunman says, ‘it was the theft itself that ticked Yamagawa-san off. He expects loyalty from his employees. Under ordinary circumstances Yuji would be . . .’ he slashes a finger across his throat ‘. . . but Yamagawa-san and his mother go back decades.’
‘So you’re not going to hurt him, then?’
He laughs. ‘The loan thing wasn’t his only scam. Some drugs went missing as well. We turned this place over straight away. Didn’t find anything but knew it was just a matter of time. Sure enough, yesterday Yamagawa-san was informed of negotiations made to sell the drugs behind his back. Yuji had approached a long-term client of Yamagawa-san, thinking that a discount would buy his silence.’ He winces, as if witnessing a clumsy and painful accident. ‘Do you have any idea where your boyfriend got his sudden death wish from?’
As he speaks, the chronology falls into place. If this is true, then Yuji’s crimes go back way before this flat was broken into, before he decided to leave Japan. For what other reason would he take such a risk? Whoever informed on him must be lying. I have to find Yuji and speak to him.
‘What are you going to do to him?’ I ask.
Across the room the gunman’s eyes flash darkly. He moves towards me, Yuji’s possessions crunching underfoot. As the distance closes between us his scar is a
ll I can look at. I hear the blood roar in my ears.
‘Look at me,’ he orders. ‘Take a good look at what they did to me. Can you guess how they did it?’
Anger pulls the muscles of his face into a near snarl. Not a finger is laid on me, but his nearness is suffocating. I twist my head away from him. He grabs my face and, fingers gouging my chin, twists it back.
‘With acid,’ he says. ‘It ate through my face. If I have anything to do with it, that is what they will do to Yuji.’
He lets go of me and takes a step back. He is sick: a psychopath who belongs in a secure unit. I will go to the police and tell them about Yamagawa-san and they’ll go round and arrest them all. Drugs, that is all I have to say. They will come tumbling down like a house of cards.
‘Where are you from, Mary?’ he asks.
‘England.’ The word is a spike in my throat. The last thing I want to do is to engage in small talk.
‘England,’ he echoes. ‘What you must do, Mary, is go back to your England. Don’t bother about Yuji any more.’
I want to damage him with the closest thing to hand. Tears smart my eyes. ‘How can you be sure it was Yuji who did all that stuff?’
His brow thickens at this provocation. ‘Listen, Mary. How well do you know Yuji? Has he really managed to convince you he’s the loving boyfriend? That he’s not screwing other women every other night of the week? I was exiled from Osaka because of him. Because of your boyfriend they threw acid in my face and sent me away for something I didn’t do. I had to leave my fiancée behind. They told me if I tried to contact her they would force her back into the brothel that I rescued her from. The night I was sent away she got back from work to find Yuji waiting to tell her I was dead. It was months before I got word to her that I was alive. Months.’