Missing in Tokyo

by Graham Marks

  ‘It goes on, “And I finally found the club where they were both working and the kind of manager there told me Charlie never left the place with a customer, that Alice was lying, Suzy.”’ Chris cleared his throat. ‘“She says that Alice and Charlie both didn’t show up for work around the same time, and she hasn’t seen Steve, Alice’s boyfriend, since then either. She says that’s what she told the police when they came round. Like I said, weird day. More later, Love A.”’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Tony looked at the images on the TV screen without really seeing them. ‘What the hell’s going on over there?’

  22

  Cute in accessory

  Adam woke as he rolled over. Strange how you did that, shift from oblivion to a degree of awareness, as if a page had been turned; he lay on his side with his eyes still closed, and breathed in deeply. This wasn’t the kick-start he got some mornings, going from dead-to-the-world to up’n’at’em in a split second; today it was more like the slow, laborious process of bringing an awkward, complex machine to life bit by bit. No rushing, didn’t want to break anything …

  He was aware of a buzzing in his ears, the kind of thing he got after a night of loud, bass-heavy music. Then he remembered he wasn’t in London and hadn’t been out at a gig the night before.

  He was in Tokyo.

  He opened his eyes. But where in Tokyo?

  Adam stared at the cream-coloured wall an arm’s reach away and tried to put all the vid clips and sound samples scattered around his brain into some kind of cohesive order before he did anything like sit up and admit he really was awake. The club … he remembered that. The Gaspanic. Beer. Lots of very friendly people, Canadians, guys from South Africa and the States, even some actual Japanese. More beer. Music, dancing.

  Lying in this bed he didn’t remember getting into – had he managed to somehow find his way back to the New Economy? – Adam caught a scent and flashed on a mental image of a smiling face, pale, heart-shaped, framed with the straightest, blackest hair. The girl in the club. He turned over on to his back.

  The girl in the club. Sitting up, legs underneath her and leaning back against the wall of the room, looking down at him. Smiling.

  Adam blinked and did a real cartoon double-take. ‘Uh … ? Oh, hi …’

  ‘Kakko í!’

  ‘Right …’ Adam was suddenly aware the girl was wearing a short, skimpy white vest with the words IT’S ABOUT TIME! screen-printed in blood-red on it. And nothing else. He pushed himself backwards, sat up and rubbed his stubbled chin; what next? He remembered embarrassingly little about last night – he glanced down at his watch, and this morning – and if she’d told him her name he’d forgotten what it was. He pointed at his chest. ‘Adam.’

  She nodded, smiling, and patted herself with her right hand. ‘Aiko.’

  ‘OK.’ Adam nodded, looking around the tiny room he’d woken up in. ‘Aiko … nice name, short and sweet …’ He turned back to the girl, noticing that one of the shoulders of her vest had fallen down, exposing part of her breast. ‘D’you, um, like speak English at all, Aiko?’

  ‘Engrish?’ Aiko shook her head; the vest fell further down, a crescent of dark brown skin slowly appearing. ‘Le.’

  ‘That’ll be a no, then …’ Adam knew he was staring. ‘… jeez, wonder how the bloody hell I managed to negotiate myself back here?’ He dragged his eyes away, noticing an untidy pile of clothes on the floor next to the bed. His clothes. All of them, it looked like, as he wasn’t wearing a damn thing under the sheets. So … OK … him and this really fit girl, in bed, together. And so far he couldn’t remember anything. He couldn’t remember if they’d done it, and if they had whether he’d been a total disappointment cos of all the beer. That had never happened to him before, but he’d never been so amnesiac drunk in his life, though, weirdly enough, he didn’t seem to have a hangover or anything. He heard Aiko say something and focused back on her.

  ‘Sorry, was miles away …’

  ‘Toire ni ikitai no, óké?’ Aiko was nodding and smiling and moving down to the end of the bed. ‘Chotto matte …’

  He watched her stand up and go to the bedroom door, gaze fixed on her perfect, tiny backside. Aiko opened the door and walked across the narrow hallway into the bathroom opposite, closing that door behind her. Leaving him on his own. Adam tried to stop smiling but he couldn’t.

  He didn’t know where he was, or, really, who he was with, and for a couple of seconds he didn’t care, he just wanted to see this girl again. See what happened next. Then his brain launched a reality check sub-program and the mirage faded. He was in Japan to try and find Charlie, not screw around with someone he’d just met in a bar, and anyway, there was Suzy. Back home, thousands of miles away. In England.

  Across the hall he heard the toilet flush and realised he needed a piss pretty badly himself. Taps ran and stopped, then the bathroom door opened and Aiko was there, smiling at him.

  She pointed at something he couldn’t see. ‘Anata mo iku?’

  ‘Me, go to the loo?’ Or was she asking him to take a bath with her? Only one way to find out. ‘Yeah, please …’ But did he, like her, disregard the clothes thing and not even put his underpants on? Balancing on one leg, trying to get the other one in a small hole never made you look very cool – and then, was there anyone else in the house, or the flat or wherever they were? She didn’t seem to mind strolling about half naked, but … he saw Aiko reach behind the door and then she was throwing him a towel. The girl might not be able to speak English, but she could definitely read minds.

  Adam sat on the toilet in the compact bathroom, so compact it didn’t have a bath, just a shower cubicle and only about a square metre or so of floor space. What should he do? Have a quick wash, get dressed and get back on the job … he snorted at the unintended double entendre, the kind of gag Andy often spent his entire time, back home, trying to work into conversations. Jesus, he missed Andy. He was the perfect person to just sit round with and do totally nothing, and Adam wondered what he’d think of his current situation, what advice he might have. Probably nothing useful, Andy being no more an experienced man of the world than he was.

  Relying on what Andy might or might not tell him wasn’t the way to go here, and he knew it. He should simply get dressed and get out. He had work to do. And she – Aiko – didn’t speak a bloody word of English, so he could hardly claim, later, that this had been a meeting of minds … although he wished he could remember more about whether it had already been a meeting of bodies. Stop it, stop it!

  He got up, flushed and stepped over to the sink. Looking at himself in the mirror, kind of sideways, as he washed his hands and face, he had no idea what he was thinking, what he was going to do. Running the water hot he soaped and rinsed his armpits. No point in leaving the house smelly, right? Or going back to bed with rank pits. He dried himself off on the towel. Anyway, for all he knew Aiko would be dressed by the time he went back to the room.

  As he was wrapping the damp towel round his waist Adam saw a scrunched-up tube of toothpaste on a glass shelf under the mirror; hitching the terry cloth so it wouldn’t fall down he squeezed a blob of paste on his finger and scrubbed his teeth as best he could. He didn’t look at himself while he did it as he didn’t want to have to answer the question, why couldn’t he just buy some chewing gum from a shop when he left?

  Wiping his hands on his thighs he opened the bathroom door. Aiko hadn’t got dressed. She was back in bed and wearing nothing but her smile, the white cotton vest lying on top of the covers. Adam glanced down the short corridor – no one there – before stepping across the hall into the bedroom, shutting the door; whatever he ended up doing, he told himself, he had to go back in to get his clothes. As the door clicked behind him his towel came loose and fell to the floor.

  Aiko’s smile got bigger and she laughed.

  Adam almost picked the towel up – a girl laughing when everything was revealed did nothing to bolster you
r self-confidence – and then saw Aiko pulling back the covers and beckoning him.

  The siren’s silent call. And with no mast to tie himself to, Adam hadn’t got a chance. Aiko was beautiful, quite wonderful, and he could hear Andy’s voice whispering in his ear, saying … it’d be total bad manners to turn her down, mate … and honestly, no matter how hard he tried, as he took the two steps to the bed, he couldn’t think of one good reason why he should.

  And this time he was going to remember absolutely everything.

  Tony Grey’s eyes snapped open. He peered at the clock on his bedside table … 6:55, a quarter of an hour before his alarm normally went off. He swore quietly, closing his eyes again and pulling the duvet over his head. He hadn’t set the alarm because he wasn’t going to work and, after a night like last night, knowing he was going to wake up feeling crap, he’d hoped he could sleep in.

  They’d argued like they never had before, last night, he and Sarah. One of those stupid things where, because you were both so emotional, you couldn’t see that you were actually on the same side of the fence – a ‘you said – no I bloody didn’t!’ situation that can so easily go from bad to divorce because no one wants to back down and the word sorry mysteriously vanishes from the English language.

  Lying there, re-running some of the more choice moments before, some time after two a.m., they’d called a truce, Tony frowned. Something was different, missing. The quiet reassurance of another person’s breathing. He looked to his left and saw the other side of the bed was empty.

  He sat up. Had Sarah been so pissed off with him that she’d gone off to the spare room? Bleary-eyed he got out of bed, shuffled into his slippers, fumbled on a bathrobe from a collection that lived on the back of the door and went out on to the landing.

  ‘Sarah?’

  Silence. He stood, listening, as he tied the belt on the robe, feeling uncomfortable and not knowing quite why. Then the pad of feet and Badger appeared at Adam’s bedroom door, tail wagging. Tony snapped his fingers and the dog sauntered over and sat by him to have his ears tickled. Sometimes a dog’s life was definitely preferable to the complications of being a parent and a husband and a bloke, three things, judging by some of last night’s comments, Sarah didn’t think he was much cop at.

  It had all boiled down to when they should get tickets to Tokyo, not whether – although somehow he’d ended up being the cheapskate bastard who was prepared to wait at home and see what happened to his kids. He knew he was taking the full blast of the anger, stress and emotion that Sarah had built up over her parents, that it wasn’t a rational argument they were having. Grangie had finally been taken into the hospice and the sense of guilty relief Sarah felt was almost tangible. Someone else was dealing with the problem now and the focus of her concerns could turn to the children. It was totally understandable she wanted to make up for lost time, just hard to feel you were the whipping boy for all her pent-up frustrations.

  Tony looked down at the blissed-out dog. ‘Have you seen her, Badger?’

  ‘Has he seen who?’

  ‘Jesus, Sarah!’ Tony jumped backwards. ‘Where were you?’

  ‘In the study.’

  ‘All night?’

  ‘All night? Don’t be silly – you said to leave booking the tickets till the morning, remember? I woke up at half past five, six o’clock, and couldn’t get back to sleep … it was morning, so I booked them. We fly out 9:00 a.m. Sunday. First flights I could get. OK?’

  ‘Yeah … fine, absolutely fine.’

  ‘Tony?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry for being a shit last night …’

  ‘S’OK.’

  ‘And Tony?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Why are you wearing my bathrobe?’

  23

  Nudy boy

  It was about five o’clock when Adam and Aiko finally left the bedroom. After an essential, cramped, arousing, hilarious shower in a space designed to fit one regular-sized Japanese person, and not an extra almost-six-foot English bloke, they got dressed. In search of a hairdryer – Adam’s miming skills were improving by the second – they went down the corridor to the main part of the flat. When Aiko had drawn the curtains he’d looked out of the window and discovered they were three floors up in a really massive apartment block, although he still had no idea exactly where.

  Aiko went into the living space first, sort of pulling Adam after her. Like everything else he’d seen so far, the actual physical dimensions of the place were kind of scaled down from what he was used to – ceilings lower, even though he wasn’t wearing shoes, and with stuff cleverly built-in to save space – but the furniture was still normal size. The effect was almost like you’d grown in your sleep.

  Sitting on a small red two-seater sofa was the Japanese guy he’d met at the bar, longish blond-streaked, hair, glasses and a small, wispy beard – Itchy? Was that his name? As they walked in he and Aiko burst into conversation, the guy making a big thing of looking at his watch, tapping it and laughing. Adam just stood there, knowing he was the probable subject, because he thought he heard his name a couple of times. He wondered how much detail was being given over.

  He took advantage of the moment to scan the rest of the flat and saw, off to his left, a narrow kitchen area tidily filled with utensils and cupboards and crockery; to his right there was another room with a blond wood table and six chairs, crammed bookcases lining all the walls he could see. Everything neat, in its place. But then, he supposed, it would have to be, otherwise it would be chaos. Like his own room back home. In fact, you could probably fit this entire flat into half their downstairs floor space in London …

  Behind him he heard keys in a lock and a door opening. He looked round and saw a Japanese girl come in, taking off her shoes and pushing on what looked like shiny silk slippers. Electric blue. She came into the room carrying a large paper carrier bag, smiling and doing a nodding bow in his direction; Adam found himself bowing in return. The conversation now racked up in volume. More laughs, the occasional glance in his direction and all the time Aiko was holding his hand, loose, natural, stroking his palm lazily with her little finger.

  In the middle of it all Adam heard the warbling ring tone of a mobile. The girl who’d just arrived took a flip phone out of her pocket – complete with a handful of tiny, furry creatures and a couple of metallic badges hanging from it – and answered, including Aiko in the discussion with whoever was calling.

  ‘You OK?’

  For a second Adam wondered if he’d somehow learnt Japanese and could understand what was being said, and then he realised the man – he looked older than him, but it was hard to tell – was speaking to him. In English.

  ‘Me? Yeah, I’m, um … I’m fine, great.’

  ‘Some night, las’ night, yeah?’

  Adam nodded. ‘You could say … to be honest, right? I don’t remember too much about how I got here, you know?’ Adam glanced at Aiko. ‘Where the hell am I anyway?’

  ‘Edge of town, man, nex’ stop is outside city limit.’

  ‘Did we drive or what?’

  ‘No car, man, way too spensive; we came on train.’

  ‘Come to where? I mean, where am I?’

  ‘You never heard of it, man, Rokugodote …’ The man laughed, big smile, lots of teeth. ‘Like a place people live, but tourist don’t go visit, OK?’

  ‘Yeah …’ Adam felt Aiko drop his hand and he saw she was taking the phone the other girl was offering.

  ‘Aiko say you call Adam, like first man, tha right?’

  Adam nodded. ‘Yeah … and what’s your name? I’ve got a bit of a blank about last night.’

  ‘Me? Kenichi, an tha’s Ayumi.’ He pointed to the other girl, and she smiled at the mention of her name. ‘She an Aiko? You know, man, they bes fren.’

  ‘You speak pretty good English, Kenichi.’

  ‘I speak lika dam ugly dog, man! No pretty …’ He grinned and shook his head. ‘Take seat, man, they gonna be long – fuk
u …’ he pulled at his shirt, ‘clowz stuff, you know?’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ Adam sat in an armchair next to the sofa. ‘Not many people here seem to speak much English, where’d you learn?’

  ‘Music, man … CD. I work at Tower, near Shibuya crossing? Listen to stuff all day, read, you know, stuff inside. Ayumi, she like design shoe and stuff, like acca-sessory, an she kinda sing ina band, right?’ Kenichi picked up a pack of cigarettes from the low table in front of him, showed it to Adam, who shook his head, and then lit one. ‘You here doing vacation, man?’

  ‘No … I came to try and find my sister, Charlie … Charlotte.’ Adam sat forward. He suddenly really wanted to ask for a cigarette; he was beginning to feel twitchy about what he was doing – or rather, not doing. He was sitting in some flat, not out looking for Charlie. And then his brain let loose a previously locked-up memory and he remembered he hadn’t gone back to the Bar Belle when it closed to try and talk to the hostesses. He sat back and swore under his breath.

  ‘You OK, man?’

  ‘No, not really, I’m screwing up, big time … I shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘You don’t got wife an kids, man,’ Kenichi smiled. ‘No ring on finger, right?’

  ‘It’s nothing like that …’ He could just hear Andy saying, ‘I think Suzy might disagree with you here …’ ‘My, uh, my sister was working in a club, and then she went missing … and now so’s her friend, sort of. It was in all the papers back home, maybe even here, I don’t know.’ Kenichi shrugged; either he hadn’t seen the story or he didn’t understand what Adam was saying. ‘Basically, I came to Tokyo to try and find my sister.’

  ‘You tole Aiko?’

  Adam looked up at Aiko, who’d now given the phone back to Ayumi, and she smiled at him. He was about to answer when she started talking, not to him, but Kenichi. It sounded emphatic, like she was making a demand of some kind. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Oh, jus I have to tell you Aiko an Ayumi be finish soon, an sorry.’ Kenichi stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray with half a dozen butts already in it.