Missing in Tokyo

by Graham Marks

  When he got back, Adam thought about sending Charlie an email, but in the end decided not to. It would feel like uttering an electronic whisper, like calling out her name in some vast, empty house with thousands and thousands of rooms, on the off chance she was listening. Blatantly useless.

  7

  Beyond image

  ‘God, man, you look gruesome …’ Andy Cornwell stood staring at Adam in mock horror. ‘Don’t you think dark glasses, a hat and maybe a touch of cover-up might’ve been called for? You know, possibly a ski mask, seeing as you’re out in public?’

  ‘Leave it out, Andy.’ Suzy appeared at the table with a couple of bottles of lager. ‘Why don’t you make yourself useful for once and get another round in before the bar gets overrun?’

  ‘Since when did it become my round?’

  ‘Since you went blabbing about Charlie all round the common room.’ Adam smiled up at Andy as he pulled a chair out so Suzy could sit down.

  ‘I swear to God,’ Andy put both his hands up, ‘I am innocent of the charges being made against me, man – Suzy asked me to zip the lip and I did, honest. Other people buy papers you know, and they don’t all just look at page 3 and the sports reports. Even Steve Apperly, who we all know moves his lips when he reads.’

  Adam grinned, then winced and rubbed his chin. ‘Yeah well, get a round in anyway, would you?’ He held up his bottle. ‘Same again, mate – I’d go but my face hurts.’

  Suzy, watching Andy walking away, got out her mobile and put it on the table. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Physically?’ Suzy nodded as she took a drink. ‘Like I’ve been used as a punchbag, but no surprises there, right?’

  ‘And in your head, rather than on it?’

  Adam nodded slowly, looking out of the pub window. ‘I feel bloody useless, Suze, know what I mean? There’s nothing I can do, except wait for something to happen … feels like, I don’t know … I’m getting totally nowhere.’ He looked back at Suzy, her short black hair shining in the sunlight like each strand had been individually polished, her big, dark brown eyes – each surrounded by thick, curved lashes, their lids glistening with a faint aura of pale gold – staring quizzically back at him. He held up his right hand. ‘I feel like punching something, but I’ve already done that and it does not help, does not help at all. Got any bright ideas?’

  Suzy shook her head. ‘Nope.’

  ‘Well, you’re a big help.’ Adam glanced over towards the pub’s front door. ‘Anyone else coming?’

  ‘Ed and Mickey said they might pop in after their five-aside match. Trisha and Sara and Pat’ve gone into town.’

  ‘Just us and Andy then …’ Adam was getting that a-fag-would-be-a-nice-idea feeling and wished he wasn’t somewhere every other person seemed to be smoking. ‘I nearly sent Charlie an email last night. I looked Tokyo up, it was seven in the morning on Saturday – today – cos they’re eight hours ahead. It’d sort of be like time travel, really, sending a message to tomorrow …’

  ‘You’re rambling, Ad.’

  ‘Kind of you to mention it, Suze … but if I talk I don’t feel trapped in my head, which, as no one in my house is doing much in the way of conversation at the moment, happens a lot.’

  ‘What does?’ Andy appeared at the table holding four bottles and a couple of packets of crisps, and dumped them in the middle of the table before sitting down on the spare chair.

  ‘Sitting round waiting for the phone to ring is driving me nuts, Andy, that’s all.’

  Right on cue Suzy’s mobile began to ring; she grabbed it and Adam reached over to get a packet of crisps.

  ‘I was just telling Suzy, Tokyo’s eight hours ahead of us.’

  ‘They’re a light year ahead of us when it comes to gizmos.’ Andy took a handful of crisps out of the open packet Adam was holding. ‘I always flick through the gadget mags in the newsagent and check out what we’re gonna be getting a year from now.’

  Suzy put her phone back down on the table. ‘That was Trisha … should she buy the red shoes or the pale blue ones. Like how would I know?’

  ‘What did you say?’ Adam offered her the crisps.

  ‘I said see if they’d let her buy one of each.’

  ‘Good thinking, Batwoman!’ Andy leant across the table and clinked Suzy’s bottle with his. ‘Lateral. By the way, did you hear, that bloke Terry whatsisname and the other three who were with Steve Apperly have been suspended for ten days, like you, but Steve hasn’t.’

  Adam frowned. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Cos he wasn’t actually involved in the fight, cos he was lying on the ground moaning the whole time, right? But he’s taking the time off anyway as his right hand’s all bandaged up and stuff and he can’t write or use a keyboard or anything. Did it make a noise when it broke … you know, his finger?’

  ‘I wasn’t listening, Andy.’ Adam made a ‘you dolt’ face. ‘I was a bit preoccupied at the time, wasn’t I.’

  Andy put his empty bottle on the table. ‘What’re you gonna do with your holiday?’

  ‘So not a holiday. There was a letter this morning, from Tyndal, saying he expected all my essays to be handed in when I come back Monday after next. I can think of better things to do.’

  Suzy held up her phone. ‘Which shoes should Trisha buy?’

  Andy ignored Suzy. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Do something about Charlie … my parents just sit around waiting for the phone to ring and as far as I can see, the cops just sit around not phoning them. And my gran’s not too chipper, either, so there aren’t many laughs in my house right now, know what I mean?’ Adam slumped in his chair and attempted to play a tune by blowing across the top of his half-empty bottle. ‘And I get my head bitten off if I try and suggest anything … I just want to know what’s happened to her, Andy, that’s all.’

  ‘Get on the next plane to Japan and show ’em how to do it, Sherlock!’

  ‘I was thinking more along the lines of a sensible idea, Cornwell, something practical.’

  ‘How about another round?’

  8

  My soul

  It was two in the morning – 10:00 a.m. Tokyo time, as the small digital alarm clock he’d reset to be eight hours ahead reminded him. Adam was back home, alone. Suzy had wanted him to go back to hers, but he felt he couldn’t risk not being around if – when – there was a phone call from Alice, the police, or even, hope of hopes, Charlie herself. Under the rules of the superstitious logic which now governed his life, being out in the day was OK, but it wasn’t during the small hours.

  So why hadn’t he suggested Suzy come back to his place? Actually, why had she never been back to his place, never met his parents or anything? He’d spent plenty of time over at her house, in fact had left so many clothes there that Suzy’s mum had even washed and dried them for him. Adam knew the answer, and it wasn’t terribly complex or psychological, just that he felt so much under the microscope at home that he needed privacy. His own space. Which, under the circumstances – still being at sixth form college – was so not going to happen.

  Suzy’s place was the next best thing, a very acceptable substitute for somewhere of his own, because her parents expected nothing of him except reasonable manners, reasonable behaviour and no smoking within ten metres of the house. What did they care what his A Level passes were or which university he was going to go to and what he was going to do when he got his degree? They might be interested, but they didn’t care. To them, Adam knew, he probably came across as a likeable, easygoing kind of guy; with them he was able to be. He liked who he was with them.

  Now he thought about it, though, it was kind of odd that Suzy had never mentioned that she hadn’t met his parents, had never asked to go round to his house. He’d never analysed it before, but theirs was a very cool relationship – as in ‘not hot’. Like, they looked good together and got on really well, but it wasn’t spiced, not a mad passion. Suzy was very practical and down-to-earth about things … like at the pub, just coming out and te
lling him he was rambling. Maybe, in her no-nonsense way, she simply didn’t care whether she met his mum and dad or not.

  His parents were sort of the same. They knew he had a new girlfriend, and his mum had recently made the occasional oblique reference to the fact that he was ‘staying out with friends’ a lot, but she wasn’t that bothered. Them not having met Suzy was all part of the privacy thing – she had to be an enigma, exclusive, a secret. And in the end his parents were actually more interested in keeping up the pressure on him to get the results that would, to use their phrase, put him on the right road for a brilliant career. Right now, though, a brilliant career was the last thing on his mind. In fact, the more Adam thought about it, the less he felt like following the path he felt his parents had so carefully mapped out for him.

  For a long time he’d never questioned his life. He worked hard, like he was expected to, and he played sports hard too; he always came pretty near the top and, when it happened, it felt good to win. But now, alone in his room, staring at Charlie’s last email message, he didn’t see the point any more.

  Both his parents were smart people, his mum something high up in healthcare services and his father some big cheese statistics whiz in a market research company; not rich, but clever, because in their world it was brains not bucks that counted. Adam looked up at the poster on his wall, the one his mother hated, with the drooling cartoon dimwit saying ‘We don’ need no ejakayshun!’. Rationally he knew he did need it, but what was the point of learning stuff if it didn’t help you do things when things needed to get done? Like finding your missing sister.

  Watching his parents helplessly waiting for events to unfold, rather than actively being involved in the process, kept reminding him that, in the real world, actions truly did speak louder than words.

  Adam wanted to go and wake them up and tell them, remind them of this fact, but it was almost three now (nearly 10:56 a.m. in Tokyo …) and doing that would, he was sure, go down as well as a bag of cold sick. Tiredness settled over his shoulders like a dark, heavy blanket, making him sag, but he didn’t want to go to bed having done nothing, although at this time of night, in this room, there was little he could do that would make any sort of difference. He looked over at the computer. Send an email out to Charlie? No point. She was missing, not sitting in some Internet café thinking about home. He glanced at the clock and wondered what it was like in Tokyo this morning.

  Sitting down at the keyboard, he exited his email and logged on to the Net, Googling the word ‘Tokyo’ to see where he’d end up. He found the weather forecast for the next five days (a typhoon was due, then a couple of over-cast days followed by temperatures and humidity beginning to rise to the low 30s); he read reviews for the top bars and clubs; he checked out a selection of ‘mid-priced’ hotels; he discovered that there were around 200 Yen to the pound, which meant, he worked out, that ‘mid-priced’ was not exactly cheap; and then he found a site that took him on a photographic tour of the city. It looked cool, with its mix of high-rise chrome, glass and garish fluorescent signs alongside elegant temples, exotic white-faced women dressed in kimonos and delicate, precise gardens.

  Adam blinked, feeling like he’d fallen down, eyes wide open, in a sand pit, and he realised he’d been staring at the same image on the computer for so long that the screen saver had kicked in and he hadn’t even noticed. Definitely time for bed. He logged off, shut down and crashed out.

  9

  We offer good sense and technique to you

  Adam woke, rolling over to check the little alarm clock, and found the digital display read 20:05. Eight in the evening? Surely … then he remembered he’d set the clock to Tokyo time and checked his watch. Almost midday. Charlie had been missing for more than a week now. The realisation cleared the last of the sleep mists from his head and Adam sat up, rubbing the heels of his palms into his eyes and yawning so hard it felt as if someone was pulling his face apart.

  Another day.

  Well, half a day if you wanted to split hairs. And what was going to happen? More than likely sod all, just like the last six days. Sod all about Charlie, anyway. Every time it seemed like the moment had come when action would finally be taken, like someone would get on a bloody plane and go to Tokyo, something would happen to stop it. And the something was either Grangie getting worse, or Granpa Eddy falling apart because she was getting worse.

  His mum was an only child – there was nobody else around to help take the strain, to help deal with the emotional nightmare of sick and ageing parents. He could see it was tearing his parents apart, not knowing what to do, and Adam could taste their frustration, like bile rising up in his throat; he felt bad that there were times he wished that his grandparents weren’t there, that they would simply not exist, just for a week, so their daughter and son-in-law could move out of orbit and do something about Charlie.

  God, he felt guilty when he thought things like that. Why wasn’t there something he could do? Because staying in the bloody house for much longer was going to drive him certifiably nuts.

  He sat on the edge of his bed, eyes flitting here and there, brain not really seeing what they were looking at. His gaze fell on his collection of all the different brands of bottled lager he’d ever drunk, up on the top shelf of his bookcase: there was Mexican, Chinese, German, Thai, Czech, American, Japanese, French. It was like a beer atlas, and looking at the bottles brought back what Andy had said to him in the pub: ‘Get on the next plane to Japan and show ’em how to do it, Sherlock!’

  Adam stayed staring at the bottles, the words ‘Why not?’ being whispered in his ear by that guerrilla part of his mind he imagined had to be in charge of mad thoughts and idiot behaviour. But, then again, why the hell not? Clearly the real questions here were ‘How?’ and ‘When?’. Trouble was, even though, since he was suspended, he had the time to do it, he didn’t have the kind of cash that would allow him to waltz into a travel agent and buy himself a ticket to Tokyo. And his credit rating would not let him hit the plastic and worry about it later. ‘What have I got in my pocket?’ he heard the voice say, ‘Not a lot …’

  He wondered if this was how it was for schizophrenics all the time, constant two-way conversations in their head, back-and-forth arguments with their other selves. What was he supposed to do? Say to his dad that, as he wasn’t getting off his arse to do anything, could he buy him a ticket so he could go and look for Charlie? Adam didn’t think that was ever going to come true. In another, parallel universe maybe, but not on this timeline.

  So how was it ever going to happen – was he going to have to rob a bank? Secretly borrow the money from the rich uncle he didn’t have? Buy a lottery ticket or two and hope his number came up? There had to be a way, but Adam realised he was very hungry and needed to eat before he could think straight about anything, let alone the fantasy of how he’d get to Japan.

  Adam sat back from the kitchen table and pushed his plate away from him. ‘Fantastic fry-up, Mum. Just what I needed.’

  ‘My pleasure.’ His mum smiled, looking happier than he’d seen her in days. ‘Remember to rinse your plate before you put it in the dishwasher, won’t you.’

  ‘You don’t have to remind me every time.’

  ‘And I don’t tell you every time, just most of the time … and would you mind going through that pile of post over there?’ His mother nodded at a small heap of letters stacked up on the work surface. ‘I think it’s mostly junk mail, but you never know, and it’s recycling tomorrow.’

  ‘OK.’ Adam cleared up his dirty plate and cutlery and picked up the letters, flicking through them. His mum was right, mostly junk and at least four companies trying to get him to switch to their credit card. He started tearing up the envelopes, unopened. ‘Don’t you think it’s bloody stupid the way –’ He stopped, mid-sentence.

  ‘The way what?’

  ‘Oh, nothing …’ Adam had remembered, as he was ripping stuff up, that he sort of knew where his dad kept the spare credit cards various companies s
ent him – an extra Visa, you know, just in case he got bored with using Mastercard – and he felt guilty just thinking what that meant. It meant, if he could get his hands on one of them, that he’d be able to buy a ticket to Tokyo …

  He spent the rest of the afternoon taking the thought through to various conclusions, all of which lived or died on the basis that his dad hadn’t decided to do the sensible thing and cut the cards up and thrown them away. Which he could well have done. But if he hadn’t, Adam couldn’t see that many reasons why he shouldn’t get away with it, at least until the bill came through a few weeks later. By which time he could’ve found Charlie and then everything would look very different.

  Pacing up and down in his room made him feel like a trapped animal, so he took the idea out for a walk to see if he could get any further with it, spot any really gaping holes in the plan, work out whether it was actually possible or just an empty, ridiculous hope.

  After walking for what seemed like ages, Adam found himself coming along the covered pathway that would lead him out of the park on to the high street. Lost in thought and operating on auto-pilot, he’d done the exact opposite of what he’d intended to do, which was not to go anywhere near the places people hung out during the weekend. And up ahead was the reason why. Two of Steve Apperly’s friends, with some other guys, coming his way and looking like trouble.

  With no Deputy Heads or Games Masters around, there were only two logical options: turn round and walk away, or run like shit. Option Two seemed the most likely to work in his favour and, as he took off up the path, back the way he’d come, he tried to work out the best way of losing the wolf pack behind him and getting home unscathed. It wasn’t going to be easy. The park was pretty much open territory, with the odd stand of trees and not much else in the way of places to hide; it looked like he was going to have to rely on speed and hope for the best.