by Bruno Noble
I knew that taking ownership of myself and of my public image in a new, different society could mean changing – a liberating, thrilling prospect of reinventing not my essential self but my superficies, similar to the identical modern steel structures that I witnessed rising all around Tokyo, which appeared so different on completion once their facades were clad in disparate materials. I, that inner nucleus of me, had an integrity that persisted, despite the fact that every day, I learnt something new and, probably, forgot something old. I made the distinction between that core, that essential meness and the social coatings, postures and attitudes that I adopted but could discard like a raincoat, a glove or a hat.
While university had broadened not so much my horizons as my self-awareness, my new workplace would increase my appreciation of just how atypical and non-conformist my parents were. Yumimoto was to open my eyes as wide as they could, and to reaffirm my decision to leave Japan for a society that would be non-judgemental and allow me to be myself. I had made friends at university but had never moved past the level of acquaintance, principally because we lived too far away from each other to socialise off-campus, but partly because sexual politics managed to get in the way: the boys didn’t understand that you wanted to keep a friendship at just that level, and the girls didn’t believe that you weren’t in competition with them. I made no attempt to dispel a reputation for being cold and aloof after I learnt that being interested in people could label you a tease, a flirt who reneged on implicit promises.
I stood at my open window and angled it at 45 degrees so that the reflection of the setting sun lay superimposed on Michi’s and Keiko’s bedroom windows, and I reflected on the fact that university had brought me no new, lasting friendships, no friends that I would value as much as I did Keiko, Michi, Taka and, unexpectedly, as if out of nowhere, Margaret.
I didn’t have the degree of intimacy with Margaret that I had with the others, which made for a different quality of friendship – none of the children’s history that tied Keiko, Michi and me, none of the courtship and relationship issues that had hung over Taka and me – but one that grew out of mutual respect, admiration and, I sensed, a recognition of each other’s self-containment, detachment and independence. That Margaret never seemed to care what others thought of her and what impression she made on others influenced me greatly; I attributed this to her Englishness and assumed it was a quality all English people possessed. I considered her a kindred spirit, but never said as much to her; the irony of distinctive and independent spirits being kindred was not lost on me. No longer seeing me at school, Margaret took to visiting me at home and would dine with my family regularly, seemingly unaware that she was the only guest my parents ever entertained to dinner. She amused them by introducing herself as from ‘the nation of shopkeepers’, an image of England that did not match any of the images they had of glorious battlefields, misty moors, empire-line dresses, horse-drawn carriages and miniskirts, some of which they’d got from me. The facility with which my English friend appeared to have assimilated our etiquette – the way she kicked off her shoes and slipped on her slippers on entering our house, and kicked those off in turn before sitting seiza style for long periods on our tatamis, having unassumingly accepted her place in front of the tokonoma – made me proud of her.
Taka had accepted we’d be just friends, best friends, and was no longer David Copperfield to my Dora Spenlow. He had created a circle of friends of his own around which I orbited elliptically, occasionally bringing to his attention girls that I thought he might fancy or that I had heard had a soft spot for him. This, I got the impression, pained him, perhaps because it suggested that I needed to see him established in a relationship in order to consider myself safe from his affections, so I desisted. Taka may have had a fling with Keiko, either that summer after school or later; whichever, I detected a slight tension between them whenever we met in a group, but whether that was because of Taka’s faux pas, as recounted to me so blithely by Michi, or because of a more recent affair between them, I never learnt. If I was extreme in my complete abstention from sex, Keiko was the opposite, reacting, I thought, against the strictness of her upbringing. Had I not known her so well, I would have assumed her to be making a political statement of sorts, but that would have been to give more significance than she did to the string of one-night stands that, to her, were just the scratching of an itch. She would go to rock concerts far from home and, with other like-minded girls, hang about major road junctions where she’d be picked up by men who would offer her a bed for the night. No money changed hands, but Taka would reprimand her all the same. Keiko would just reply, ‘Who’s using whom?’
Sharon
I came to realise that the club had its own cliques, much as school, secretarial college and the bank’s trading floor had, but they remained contained and, to a relative outsider like me, less than transparent. Jemma patrolled the changing room and was quick to address any girl who stepped out of line; Wanda defused tensions before they had even started with sympathy and tenderness.
Every girl had her story. All stories were different and yet all shared a kernel of pain or rejection or ill fortune. Some girls told you their stories candidly, directly, as though confronting their demons openly was their therapy. Others were talked about in hushed tones behind bare backs. Melanie had left her convent education at 14 when her parents had died, and now worked in her boyfriend’s construction business in the East End three days a week. She was saving enough money for a deposit on a large house in which she and her boyfriend would go on to have fifteen children, she claimed. ‘All you ever need to know about sex, you’ll learn it in a convent, believe me,’ she’d said. ‘Just think, the sisters banned long-handled hairbrushes, roll-on deodorants and certain shapes of shampoo bottles and all we could think of was, Why?’ Honey, Melanie told me, had been trafficked from Laos to Manchester and had escaped and made it to London with just her passport. She lived in fear of being kidnapped again and worked to save for her passage back to Laos where she had left two children with her mother. We had watched Honey apply her make-up and put her glossy black hair up, and agreed that she was probably the sweetest person either of us had ever met and that it was hard to believe that she was over 14, let alone 18, and mother of two children. She had a complexion like silk. ‘And nipples like benedictions,’ had said Melanie, ‘because anyone who sees them feels blessed.’ Frederica was a music student, paying her way through university and saving for conservatoire. She sang and gave private music lessons and had danced topless for the father of one her pupils one evening, without his realising that she was his daughter’s voice coach. ‘But then,’ had said Melanie, ‘it wasn’t her face that he was looking at.’ Bella was a nurse; Angelica, an economics student. All I knew of Gaia was that she was English, and talked so much that it was only after she’d finished that I realised she hadn’t actually told me anything about herself.
Jemima and Betsy were two of the older girls, close friends who applied each other’s make-up and exchanged costumes routinely, and two of the few who saw topless dancing as a career. ‘We’re strippers, darling,’ had said Betsy. ‘That’s what we are. So long as there’s someone who’ll pay us to strip, we’ll strip. We’re not afraid to admit it, are we, darling?’ Jemima had smiled and shaken her head and continued to paint Betsy’s eyelids a cornflower blue, one hand cupping her friend’s chin. ‘Try it. Admit it,’ Betsy had continued to no one and everyone. ‘Be honest with yourselves. None of this I’m only doing it for the money today and I’ll be prime minister and a good mother tomorrow. Be who you are, darlings, and don’t pretend to be someone you’re not.’ Betsy looked up at Jemima looking down at her and they exchanged the most tender of smiles.
If you are someone who pretends to be someone you’re not, can you remain who you are if you stop pretending to be someone you’re not? The question remained with me until the weekend, when I recounted Betsy’s comments to Wanda. I asked, over the sound of a talk show on the TV, ‘
Do you think it’s all nonsense, then, the stories they tell about themselves and the futures they claim they’re going to have?’
Wanda rounded on me. ‘You never question a story. You never ask if their names are real. You never destroy dreams and aspirations. The only thing you know for sure is that whatever they told you was bad, it was a lot worse in reality.’ Gently, as though realising she’d been severe, she brushed my hair from my forehead with her up-held finger. ‘The club is where they come to hide, to be someone else.’
I clutched her finger. ‘It’s where I could be someone else.’
‘Absolutely not!’ said Wanda, with panic in her voice and fear in her eyes.
‘Why not?’
‘No!’ She held me by the shoulders.
I swayed my hips and rolled my shoulders, stepping closer to her in a parody of a sexually provocative dance.
‘I forbid it,’ she said, but her voice was weak.
I stepped away and around the kitchen table and put one hand to my head and the other to my hips, which I gyrated in poor imitation of the girls’ dancing. I waggled my boobs. I stood on one leg and curled the other around an imaginary pole and raised both arms as though clutching it.
The talk show host introduced a rock band. I raised and lowered myself on one leg, repeatedly, my arms still extended upwards, surprised to find myself thinking that I wasn’t as fit as I once had been.
Wanda sat on a kitchen chair with her head in her hands.
Mie
I had applied to Yumimoto, a multi-tentacled beast of a business with an empire that seemed truly global, because it had a subsidiary in England and had advertised for language skills. I joined its import-export division on the same day as Fubuki Mori, a pale and svelte girl of my age, next to whom I felt as Michi must have felt next to Keiko when we had been children. She and I were greeted by Mr Mizuka, the department’s gloomy head of personnel, who escorted us to the 44th floor where he introduced us to Mr Saito whose greatest concern on this, our first day, was to ensure that we understood that he was our line manager and that our careers depended entirely on his benevolence. Once we had committed this extremely important lesson to memory and after we had completed innumerable questionnaires and signed all manner of employment documents, we were set, by Mr Saito, the task of memorising the names of Mr Omochi, the departmental manager to whom he reported, of Mr Hanada, the department’s vice president to whom Mr Omochi reported, and of the department’s president, Mr Fujimoto, to whom Mr Hanada reported.
Our first day passed slowly, with no one telling us when or where to have lunch and when we could leave for home. Fubuki and I looked at each other repeatedly, communicating with a rolling of the eyes and a shrugging of the shoulders, and plucked up the courage to make our way down to a food emporium in the basement after everyone else had left their desks at midday. Come evening, instinct told us it wouldn’t do to leave before Mr Saito, so we read and reread the company telephone directory and an annual report that had been left on our desks and moved our stationery from the drawers on our left to those on our right until Mr Saito yawned and accompanied other colleagues who left the office with muttered sayonaras and mata ashitas.
On our second day, Fubuki and I were introduced to everybody in the department by Mr Saito and by Mr Mizuka who, with the demeanour of an undertaker, only ever repeated what Mr Saito said. I had never bowed so frequently and so low in one day in my life and it occurred to me, as I contemplated the tops of the umpteenth pair of black polished men’s work shoes, that we had been introduced to no women. This had struck Fubuki too, as I discovered when I followed her into the empty, immaculate ladies’ toilets.
Fubuki finished inspecting herself in the mirror, turned around and leant back against the washbasins, crossed her long legs and said, ‘Welcome to our office!’ Indeed, this was to prove our little sanctuary. She added more seriously, ‘Do you think they set out to recruit women when they hired us? Or is it just’ – she sought the right word – ‘coincidence?’
I shrugged. I caught sight of myself in the mirrored wall above the washbasins, standing there, gazing at Fubuki, she looking down on me patiently, bored, probably quite used to the effect she had on people. I stammered as I sought a reply. ‘Er, well, they wanted linguists, and more women than men study foreign languages, so the likelihood was that they’d end up hiring women, I suppose.’
‘But I don’t speak any foreign languages,’ said Fubuki.
‘You don’t?’
‘No!’ Fubuki laughed. ‘Well, I guess that answers it!’ She leant forward, so that I could smell her unexpectedly garlicky breath. ‘We’d better be getting back – or they’ll suspect we’re plotting! By the way,’ she continued in a more sombre tone, as I held the door open for her, ‘why do you think we weren’t introduced to the secretarial pool?’
‘The secretarial pool?’
‘You know, the secretaries, the typing pool on the 43rd floor.’
‘I didn’t know one existed.’
‘You see, maybe we’re not the lowest of the low, after all!’
Not bottom of the corporate heap, then. Not in a row of identically dressed, automaton-like women that I imagined the typing pool to consist of. I couldn’t help but feel a smidgen of satisfaction that leaked from me progressively during an afternoon spent in repetition of the first.
On our third day, Fubuki and I were promoted, as she ironically termed it, to ochakumi, expected to make and serve tea to our colleagues in the mornings and afternoons. On our fourth, we were given some filing to do and, on our fifth, some photocopying, which turned out to be the height of our responsibilities and set the tone, the rhythm, of our corporate lives for the subsequent six months.
Sharon
I led for a while not so much a double life as two half-lives. I felt complete, as close to fulfilled as I had ever been. I spent Mondays to Fridays working in the bank and Friday or Saturday nights dancing in the club. There existed the veneration of money in both, an intense sense of its significance, though I could understand the banknotes in my fists better than I could the flickering green numbers on the bank’s screens in their context of the fortunes of corporations and national economies. The same men, the same pairs of eyes on me: in the one, narrowed, darting, stealing glimpses of my cleavage as I deposited trading slips on desks and measuring my legs as I marched the aisles; in the other, admiring, candid in their appreciation of my nakedness. I liked being looked at and I liked being liked and rejected the sense of shame I experienced in admitting that to myself. I liked the thought that we – that I – gave our customers something to think about when they went home to their wives. I would picture them stumbling in the dark, locking their front door behind them, patting and shushing their dog, avoiding creaking steps, brushing their teeth, getting undressed in the dark, cuddling up to their sleeping wives and fumblingly lifting their nighties, all the while retaining an image of me, of whichever part of me had most done it for them. ‘That’s gross!’ Bella had exclaimed, when Betsy had said that that was our job: the creation of mental pictures that held marriages together for another year. But I didn’t see why.
One night a week seeing Gavina, Sarah and Monica and one night a week or Sundays with Dad and Seamus or my mother over home-cooked lunches or dinners or just pottering around Aunt Wanda’s garden. One night in shared domesticity with Wanda, doing the laundry and ironing and baking biscuits that I would leave on my desk for the UK sales team to help themselves to. Saturday mornings, Wanda and I slept till late; Saturday afternoons, I would go clothes shopping, for myself initially but then for Wanda, my mother and my friends, who had decided independently of each other that I had a facility for buying good-quality clothes at low prices and for matching clothes from different shops and competing lines.
Mondays: Sebastian.
We had happened to leave work at the same time one evening; we had walked to Liverpool Street Station and boarded a Central Line train together. Some days after, Sebastian had j
ust happened to finish a conversation with Curtis and head for the door as I finished switching my computer off and shouldered my handbag. On that occasion, we had gone for a drink in a pub. The following time, we had taken a train that we left at Holland Park and dived into a wine bar. The next time, we had left the wine bar for his flat.
I understood that it was a physical thing, our mutual attraction, and our seeing each other rarely relative to most other lovers added to the sweet, delicious tension of the days running up to our nights together. We barely spoke in the office. We gave nothing away. An observant colleague might have noticed that my handbag on Mondays and Tuesdays was larger than the one I took to work on other days; a nosy one might have observed that it contained a clean top and clean knickers on Mondays and a dirty top and dirty knickers on Tuesdays.
On Mondays, I would walk to his desk with trading slips in triplicate, have him sign one and then walk back to my desk via the back office, dripping with anticipation. It would start with hearing his voice on the hoot-and-holler when Kate and Curtis screamed through the static at him for prices. He replied calmly, he murmured and yet was heard, he spoke as though withholding laughter, yet remained collected and professional throughout the exchange. His words were intended for others but his voice, I felt, was meant for me. We would conspire to take the same train to Holland Park without so much as acknowledging each other, seated at different ends of the same carriage. He would hold the Evening Standard open and not turn the page. I would tick the eleven stops off mentally, one by one, groaning when what should have been a twenty-minute journey experienced delays. I would follow him up and out, along a short walk and then up a few steps into a stucco-fronted Victorian house, now divided into flats, the front door of which he had left open after him. A moment for my eyes to adjust to the gloom and up one flight of stairs to his apartment door, that he had also left ajar. A deep, dizzying intake of breath and the step into the apartment and the closing of the door. Grinning, we’d consider each other a moment before embracing, kissing and shedding clothes and inhibitions. I felt a lust as sharp as hunger and a need to satisfy and please as deep as my appetite for my own satisfaction and gratification.