by Mo Hayder
‘Climb over it,’ he said. His voice seemed to be coming from the wardrobe.
I put my head into the room and craned my neck, trying to see him. ‘Where are you?’
‘Climb over it, for fuck’s sake.’
I sat on the desk and pulled up my knees, swivelled round, then swung my feet on to the floor.
‘Shut the door.’
I leaned over the desk and slid the door closed, then switched on the light.
‘ No! Switch it off! ’
The floor was covered in handfuls of tissue and paper kitchen towels, all wadded and stuck down with blood. Soaking red tissues overflowed from the wastebasket. Poking out from under the bloodied futon, I could see the yellow handle of a carving knife, the tip of a screwdriver, a selection of chisels. I was looking at an ad hoc armoury. Jason was under siege.
‘ I said, switch off the light. Do you want her to see us in here? ’
I did as he told me and there was a long, bleak silence. Then I said, ‘Jason, let me get you a doctor. I’m going to call the International Clinic.’
‘I said no! I’m not having some Nip doctor touching me.’
‘I’ll call your embassy.’
‘No way.’
‘Jason.’ I took a step across the floor. I could feel the adhesive clack as my feet peeled from the sticky floor. ‘You’re bleeding.’
‘So what?’
‘Where are you bleeding from?’
‘Where am I bleeding from? What sort of dumb fucking question is that?’
‘Tell me where you’re bleeding from. Maybe it’s serious.’
‘ What the fuck are you saying? ’ He hammered on the wardrobe door, making the walls shudder. ‘I don’t know what you think happened, but whatever it is you’re imagining it.’ He broke off, breathing hard. ‘You’re making it up. You and your dumb-ass inventions. Your weird fucking head.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my head,’ I said steadily. ‘I don’t invent things.’
‘Well, baby, you’re imagining this. I wasn’t touched, if that’s what you’re saying.’ I could see him now, in the wardrobe, crunched up against the wall. I could just make out his outline, huddled under a duvet. He seemed to be lying on his side, as if he was trying to keep warm. It was spooky, standing there in the half-light, listening to his thickened voice coming from the wardrobe. ‘I don’t want to hear you even suggesting that – WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING? DON’T STAND NEAR THE WARDROBE! ’
I took a step back.
‘ Stay there. And don’t fucking look at me.’ I could hear him breathing now, a laboured sound as if something was lodged in his airway. ‘Now, listen,’ he said, ‘you’ve got to get someone to help me.’
‘I’ll take you to a doctor and-’
‘No!’ I could hear him trying to control his voice and get his thoughts in line. ‘No. Listen. There’s – there’s a number written on the wall. Next to the light switch. See it? That’s my – my mother. Call her. Go into a phone box and call collect, reverse the charges. Tell her to send someone for me. Tell her not someone from Boston, tell her it’s got to be one of the men from the house in Palm Springs. They’re nearer.’
Palm Springs? I stared at the wardrobe. Jason, part of a family where there were houses in California? Employees? I’d always imagined him as a real traveller, the sort I’d seen at the airport: a battered Lonely Planet under one arm, a toilet roll hooked on the back of a rucksack. I’d pictured him washing dishes, teaching English, sleeping on a beach with just a calor-gas stove and a patched bedroll. I’d always believed he had everything to lose – just like the rest of us.
‘What is it? What don’t you understand? Are you still there?’
An advert for Pocky chocolate wands came on the TV. I watched it for a moment or two. Then I sighed and turned for the door. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll call.’
I’d never made a collect call before, and when the automated operator asked my name I almost said, ‘Weirdo.’ In the end I said, ‘I’m calling for Jason.’ When his mother answered the phone she listened in silence. I recited everything twice: the address, how to find the place, that he needed a doctor urgently and to please – I hesitated at this bit, thinking how odd it was talking about Jason like this – to please send someone from the west coast because it would be quicker. ‘And who, may I ask, are you?’ She had an English accent, although she was in Boston. ‘Would you be polite enough to give me your name?’
‘I’m being serious,’ I said, and hung up.
It was dark now, and when I got back to the house I didn’t switch on too many lights – I couldn’t help thinking of what it would look like from outside, blazing over the darkened neighbourhood. I didn’t know a customer who could lend me money, it was too cold to sleep in the parks, and I wasn’t sure Mama Strawberry would give me a sub before payday, certainly not a big enough one to afford a hotel. I couldn’t beg from Shi Chongming. After the club I might have to come back and sleep here. The thought made me cold.
It didn’t take me long to find a selection of tools from the store rooms – there were a lot of things in that house if you’d decided you had to defend yourself: a mallet, a chisel, a heavy rice-cooker that you could probably throw if necessary. I weighed the mallet in my hand. It felt good and heavy. I took them all to my room, rested them against the skirting-board, then packed my holdall with a few things: a big sweater, all the notes and sketches of Nanking, my passport and the remainder of Irina’s money. It reminded me of the earthquake kits we were all supposed to have – the few things you’d need in an emergency. I went to the window and, holding the strap, dangled it down, gently, gently, until my arm was straight. Then I let it drop the rest of the way. It fell with a very small bump behind the air-conditioning unit. From the alley no one would know it was there.
While I was standing at the window, suddenly, out of nowhere, it began to snow. Well, I thought, looking up, Christmas isn’t far away. Soft flakes whirled against the thin slice of grey sky between the houses, obscuring Mickey Rourke’s face. If Christmas was near then it wouldn’t be long before my little girl had been dead ten years. Ten years. Amazing how time just gets packed away into nothing, like an accordion. After a long time I closed the window. I wrapped a plastic carrier-bag round my hand and went out into the snow. Using my fingernails inside the plastic I scraped up the dead kitten and took it to the garden where I buried it under a persimmon tree.
50
Nanking, 20 December 1937
I am writing this by the light of a candle. My right hand is painful, a thin burn running diagonally across the palm, and I am cramped on the bed, my feet tucked under me, the bed curtains drawn tight to make sure that there is no possibility, absolutely no possibility, of any light escaping into the alley. Shujin sits opposite me, mortally terrified by what has happened tonight, clutching the curtains closed and shooting glances over her shoulder at the candle. I know she would rather I had no light at all, but tonight of all nights I have to write. I have an overwhelming sense that any history written in these days, however small and inconsequential, will one day be important. Every voice will count because no one person will ever contain or calibrate Nanking ’s story. History will fail, and there will be no definitive Nanking invasion.
Everything I thought I believed has fled – in my heart there is a hole as naked and rotten as in the body of the child outside the factory, and all I can think about is what this occupation has really cost us. It means the end of a China that I haven’t valued for years. It is the death of all belief – the end of dialects, temples, moon cakes in the autumn and cormorant fishing at the feet of our mountains. It is the death of lovely bridges spreading over lotus ponds, the yellow stone reflected in the silent evening water. Shujin and I are the last links in the chain. We stand on the cliff-face, holding China back from a long fall into nothing and sometimes I startle, as if I’ve been awakened from a dream, thinking that I am falling and that all of China – the plains, the mountains,
the deserts, the ancient tombs, the festivals of Pure Brightness and Corn Rain, the pagodas, the white dolphins in the Yangtze, and the Temple of Heaven – everything is falling with me.
Less than ten minutes after old Liu left our house, even before I’d found a way to tell Shujin we were leaving, the terrible screaming of motorcycle engines came from a street somewhere to the right of the house.
I went into the hall and grabbed the iron bar, positioning myself behind the spirit screen, my feet wide, the bar ready over my head. Shujin came from the kitchen to stand next to me, silently searching my face for answers. We stayed that way, my trembling arms raised, Shujin’s eyes locked on mine, as the dreadful thunder of engines funnelled up the alley outside. The noise grew and grew, until it was so loud that the engine seemed to be almost inside our heads. Then, just as I thought it might drive straight through the door and into the house, there came a choked rattle, and it began to diminish.
Shujin and I stared at each other. The sound headed away to the south, gradually faded into the distance, and silence fell. Now the only thing disturbing the quiet was the unearthly echo of our own breathing, hard and hollow.
‘What…?’ Shujin mouthed. ‘What was that?’
‘Ssh.’ I gestured to her. ‘Stay back.’
I stepped round the spirit screen and put my ear to the barricaded front door. The engines had faded, but I could hear something else in the distance – something faint but unmistakable: the pop and spit of fire. The yanwangye is going about his diabolical work, I thought. Somewhere, in one of the streets not far away, something was burning.
‘Wait there. Don’t go near the door.’ I went up to the next storey, climbing two stairs at a time, still carrying the iron bar. In the front room I ripped away a loose slat of wood and peered out into the alley. The sky above the houses opposite was red: snarling flames leaping twenty and thirty feet into the air. Little black flecks floated down, pitted and scarred like black moths. The yanwangye must have come very close to our house.
‘What is it?’ Shujin asked. She had come up the stairs and was standing behind me, her eyes wide. ‘What’s happening?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said distantly, my eyes fixed on the falling snow. The flakes were speckled with greasy soot and, riding on the tide of black smoke, came the smell again. The smell of meat cooking. The smell that had been haunting me for days. Earlier we’d filled our stomach with buckwheat noodles, but there had been no protein in the meal, no cai to balance the fan of the noodle, and I still craved meat. I drew in a lavish lungful of the smell, my mouth watering hopelessly. It was so much stronger this time – it coiled round the house, getting into everything, so pungent that it almost overpowered the smell of burning timbers.
‘I don’t understand,’ I murmured. ‘It can’t be possible.’
‘What can’t be possible?’
‘Someone’s cooking.’ I turned to her. ‘How can this be? There’s no one left in the neighbourhood – even the Lius don’t have any meat to cook…’ The words died in my mouth. The black smoke hung directly over the alley where Liu’s house was. I stared at it in a trance, not speaking, not moving, hardly daring to breathe as a dreadful, unspeakable suspicion crawled into my throat.
51
When I got to the club that evening the crystal lift wasn’t at street level: it was up on the fiftieth floor. I stood for a while in the empty socket it left, my handbag tucked up under my arm, staring up, waiting for it to come down. It was a long time before I noticed a sign printed on A4 paper and taped to the wall.
Some Like It Hot is open!!!!! We’re waiting to see you!!!! Please call this number for access.
I went to the phone box opposite and dialled the number. As I waited for an answer I stared up at the club, watching snowflakes piling up on the front edge of Marilyn’s extended leg. They built into a little ledge, until, every tenth swing or so, the movement dislodged them and they tumbled down, lit by the neon bubbles, glittering the way I imagined children’s play snow did as it fell from Santa’s sleigh.
‘ Moshi moshi? ’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Mama Strawberry. Who’s that? Grey-san?’
‘Yes.’
‘Strawberry’s sending the lift down now.’
On the fiftieth floor I got out cautiously. The hat-check girl, in her dinky yellow and black dress, was cheerful, but as soon as I got through the aluminium doors I knew something was very wrong. The heating was so low that the few girls dotted around the tables were shivering in their cocktail dresses and the flowers were suffering, drooping pitifully in the cold, the water in the vases smelling. All the customers were po-faced, and Strawberry was sitting hunched at her desk, dressed in a slim, calf-length white fur coat, a bottle of tequila at her elbow, staring distractedly at a list of hostesses’ names. Under the little 1950s diamanté reading glasses, her makeup was blurred. She looked as if she’d been drinking for hours.
‘What’s going on?’
She blinked up at me. ‘Some customers banned from this club. Banned. Understand, lady?’
‘Who’s banned?’
‘Miss Ogawa.’ She slammed a hand on the table, making the bottle jump and all the waiters and hostesses turn to look. ‘I tell you, didn’t I? What I say, huh?’ She pointed her finger up at me, making an angry spitting sound behind her teeth. ‘Remember I tell you Miss Ogawa have a chin chin in her panties, yes? Well, Grey-san, bad news! She got tail in back too. You take off Miss Ogawa panties and first-’ She threw her knees apart and jabbed a finger between her legs. ‘First, you gonna see a chin chin here. And round here,’ turning her hips sideways in the chair she slapped her buttocks, ‘you gonna see a tail. Because she animal. Simple. Ogawa, animal.’ Her voice might have continued spiralling upwards, if something hadn’t made her stop. She put down her pen, pulled the glasses to the end of her nose and peered at me over them. ‘Your face? What happened to your face?’
‘Strawberry, listen, Jason won’t be coming to work. And the Russians too. They told me to say they’ve left. Gone somewhere, I don’t know where.’
‘My God.’ Her eyes locked on my bruise. ‘Now, tell Strawberry truth.’ She checked that no one was listening. Then she leaned forward and said, ‘Ogawa come to Grey-san too, didn’t she?’
I blinked. ‘Too?’
She poured another tequila and downed it in one. Her face was very pink under the makeup. ‘Okay,’ she said, patting her mouth with a lace handkerchief. ‘Time to straight talk. Sit down. Sit down.’ She motioned to the chair, flapping her hand bossily. I drew it back and sat, feeling numb, my feet together, clutching my bag on my knees. ‘Grey-san, look around.’ She raised her hand to indicate the empty tables. ‘Look at Strawberry club. So many of my girls not here! You wanna know why, lady? Hmm? You wanna know why? Because they at home! Crying!’ She held up the list of names, shaking it angrily at me, as if I was responsible for their absence. ‘Every girl who go to Fuyuki party last night wake in middle of night, and look what they see – Miss Ogawa or one of Fuyuki’s gorillas in the house. You the only girl who go to last night party and come to work tonight.’
‘But…’ I drifted off. I couldn’t keep everything straight in my head. My thoughts and images were getting jumbled and coming out in a strange order. ‘You have to explain things to me,’ I said quietly. ‘You have to explain them very slowly. What do you mean? It wasn’t only our house, it wasn’t only Jason-?’
‘I told you! Ogawa animal,’ she hissed, shooting her face forward at me. ‘She go to everyone at party last night. Maybe she think she Santa Claus.’
‘But… why? What did she want?’
‘Strawberry don’t know.’ She picked up the old-fashioned pink and gold pedestal phone that sat on the desk and dialled a number. She held her hand across the mouthpiece and hissed to me, ‘All evening I been trying to find out.’
At about ten o’clock that night, a flock of crows, blown off course, was flung against the club window by a gust of wind. I
still think about those crows, even to this day. It was too late for them to be away from their roost, and it was one of those happenings that you count yourself too sensible to consider a sign. One hit the plate glass so hard that almost everyone in the club jumped. I didn’t: I had been sitting in silence, vaguely watching the birds’ course across the sky, wondering just who in Fuyuki’s past might have had the transforming power that Shi Chongming had talked about. I must have been the only person in the club who wasn’t shocked when the bird hit, and dropped from the air like a bullet.
Strawberry had helped me cover my bruise with makeup and had sent me out to the tables. I sat in a daze, not listening to anything, not speaking, only stirring if food arrived at the table. Then I would eat everything I could, very neatly and intently, holding a napkin to my mouth so nobody could see quite how fast I was eating. There was only a little money left after I’d paid my fares to Shi Chongming’s, and all I’d eaten in twenty-four hours was a nibble of shabu shabu and a bowl of cheap noodles at a stand-up bar in Shinjuku.
There was a tense atmosphere in the club. A lot of the customers, even the regulars, felt it and didn’t stay for long. Odd, icy silences seemed to flit round and at times it became so quiet that I could hear the squeak of the pulley system in Marilyn’s swing. I was sure it wasn’t just that so many of the hostesses were missing. I was sure that the stories of last night were getting round and making everyone anxious.
Strawberry spent most of the night on the phone, trawling her contacts for news. I thought of the strings of police officers who sometimes came into the club last thing at night – everyone knew she was well connected. But for long hours she seemed to be getting no information about what was happening, what had prompted the Nurse’s attacks. It ended up being me who was the first person in the club to learn anything new.