Missing in Tokyo

by Graham Marks

  Half an hour later he found Aiko’s scooter, helmet still under the seat, exactly where he’d left it. All he had to do now was find his way to Keiko’s apartment building. Nothing to it. Adam had all day, with nothing else planned, and he could get as lost as he liked. He looked across the road, down the side street leading into the cramped network of sleaze where he’d found Alice; hard to admit it, but there was no point in even thinking about her now.

  Physically turning his back on Kabukicho, he pushed Alice out of his head and focused on the immediate problem – that he only had the roughest idea of how to get to where he was supposed to be going, and had only been there once before, in the dark; plus the fact that the scooter was getting low on fuel and one thing he hadn’t seen since he’d been in Tokyo was a petrol station. Not one. Not that they’d been top of his list of sights to look out for.

  Just how much mileage he had left in the tank was a mystery, but when he’d switched on the ignition, the indicator needle hovered uncomfortably close to empty. If he ran out… he’d work out what he’d do if he ran out when and if it happened. Clamping the helmet back on his head he pulled on the rear brake lever, pressed the electric start, revved the engine as it turned over and set off. Doing what was probably an illegal U-ey at the next set of lights, Adam went back down the road to the next intersection and turned right.

  One street of bland apartment blocks looked pretty much like the next, and the fact that there were convenience stores on a lot of them didn’t help much either, as he couldn’t remember if he and Aiko had been into an am:pm, a Lawson’s or a Family Mart to buy the flowers for Keiko. Things finally began to fall into place when he rode past the Doutor coffee shop he was positive was the one they’d gone to for breakfast.

  He stopped, went back and pulled up outside it, mentally retracing the route they’d taken to get there. Then he checked the traffic and accelerated off to see if he was right. Turning left at the end of the street, and then almost immediately right, he spotted the tree by which they’d parked the scooter and opposite it saw a Lawson 24-hour convenience store; through the window he could see bunches of flowers like the one they’d bought. Adam parked up in the same place, and was prising off the helmet when it occurred to him that he didn’t know Keiko’s apartment number. Terrific.

  Adam looked up at the building, racking his brains. It was either on the ninth or tenth floor; he thought probably the tenth for some reason. And it was on the right of the stairwell as he looked at the building, further away from the tree, rather than near to it … he remembered turning left out of the lift, could picture the street as he’d seen it when he’d looked out of the window. Small clues, but they were all he had and they’d have to do.

  Walking up to the entrance he went over to the panel of numbered entryphone buttons, a row of four for each of the twelve floors, going from 0101 up to 1204. If he had to make a stab at it, Keiko’s apartment was either 0903 or more likely 1003. He pressed the button for 1003. No reply. He pressed it again, for slightly longer, but no one answered. OK, he could’ve been wrong … better try Option 2. He pressed 0903 and a couple of seconds later he heard a man’s voice.

  ‘Hai?’

  ‘Hello … is Keiko there? Kei-ko?’

  ‘Nan des ka?’

  ‘KEIKO.’

  ‘Dare?’

  ‘Sorry … I, um, I think I’ve got the wrong apartment.’

  ‘Nan no yoji desuka?’

  Adam shrugged, pressed 1003 again, just in case, and then stood back near the road to look up at the tenth floor. What the hell was he going to do now? He’d kind of assumed Keiko would be home – she should be home! This was maximum frustration, to have found the right place, be standing in front of the actual building and for Keiko not to be there.

  Did he sit outside until she came back, like some lost puppy? It was a plan, but not one he fancied putting into action very much; this was his last day, and to spend it here would be just so depressing. Keiko could be out all day – for all he knew the shop where she worked was open – and on the other hand, she might come home at any moment. Dilemma, dilemma, dilemma.

  His stomach growled, demanding an answer. He hadn’t actually stopped anywhere for breakfast after leaving the hotel and he had a substantial space to fill. A good compromise would be to go to the coffee shop, have something to eat and then come back and see if anything had changed.

  An hour later nothing had. Still no one home. Adam bought a cheap biro from the store, took a napkin as he left and wrote a short note, in capitals, which spelled out the hotel where he was staying, its telephone number and his name. God, he hoped Keiko was going to understand the message when she got it. Locking the helmet under the seat, he wrapped the key in the napkin and posted it in apartment 1003’s post box. He was done. All over now bar the flying home.

  Walking away he felt completely deflated. An undeniable sense of failure descended on him, clinging like wet clothes, almost impossible to shake off. Nothing had worked out, really, except that it didn’t look like Charlie was in any kind of trouble. A result of some sort, he supposed. And he’d found Alice – though, as it turned out, she didn’t want to be – but he’d lost Aiko and couldn’t see how he’d ever find her again. God, how depressing was that thought? And of course he was to blame for all the crap that was going to be dumped on him from a great height.

  A week ago – only seven stupid days – he’d been so damn sure of everything, so positive he was doing the right thing. So self-righteous about the fact that it was him actually doing something while everyone else sat in a virtual coma doing sweet FA. And what had he achieved? Apart from spending a lot of his dad’s money, and a fair chunk of his own, he had to remind himself, not a huge amount. He’d go back home, get his ear chewed off, be grounded for ever, and be broke till God knew when paying his dad back. He’d still be at college, still be with Suzy … what the hell was he going to do about Suzy?

  Adam stopped. This was SO depressing! He had got to stop doing this shit to himself. Really. Maybe he should just go to a bar and get rat-arsed. With a 5:00 am start the next day? OK, maybe not rat-arsed, just bladdered. He could go back to the Gaspanic, you never knew, maybe Kenichi and Ayumi would be there. With Aiko. And then again, maybe not, but anything would be better than mooching around, mentally digging a hole for himself to sit in and metaphorically slit his wrists. He checked the map and found the nearest subway station was Meiji-jingúmae.

  Coming out of a side road Adam found himself in a crowded nightmare of a street that looked a lot like Camden, except the road was so narrow and jammed with so many people that you could hardly move, every centimetre of space packed with posters, cheap jewellery, expensive retro clothes, food, ‘I went to Tokyo and all I got was this lousy T-shirt’ type of shops, girls yelling at the crowds through small plastic megaphones, boys standing holding up signs saying that, whatever it was, you could find it at Thank You Mart for only ¥390. It was extreme shopping for the under-25s. Retail mayhem.

  As Adam wove his way through the mass of bodies it made him think this was what it would be like for a blood corpuscle as it was pumped through a vein or an artery. When he reached the end of the street and found himself on a main thoroughfare, flanked on the side opposite him by a massive wall of trees, he realised that he hadn’t been pushed or shoved once by anyone. Like they all had personal radar, allowing them to avoid bodily contact. He looked back the way he’d come and wouldn’t have believed it possible if he hadn’t just done it.

  Making his way down towards the subway station, he began to notice something odd. There were a lot of really weirdly dressed people, all going his way; all, now he looked more closely, girls. It was like everyone was on their way to a really incredibly serious fancy dress party, and for all Adam knew, they were.

  In front of him was a girl with her hair sculpted so that she looked like some 3D version of Sonic the Hedgehog; her friend, dressed all in black, was wearing incredibly high-heeled black vinyl ankle boots and
a black vinyl pillbox hat. Both had dead white face make-up and matt-black lipstick. Looking back Adam saw other similarly dressed girls, and up ahead, at a set of lights, costumed figures were streaming across the road to join even more of them.

  There were platinum-blonde girls in bondage kimonos wearing wings made out of real feathers; there were girls who looked like a cross between a Victorian housemaid and a road accident victim; and groups all dressed identically, like cult members who’d been recently let out of an Institute for the Unhinged Fashion Victim. There were stylish, absolutely beautiful girls, scarily ugly mutant punks and the simply bizarre, genderless look that defied description.

  What the hell was going on?

  Did he care?

  Not really. Frankly my dear, as his dad was so fond of saying, he couldn’t give a damn. Adam carried on walking up the road towards the subway.

  33

  True love why is it shine small like that star?

  There had been no one he recognised at the Gaspanic. No Kenichi, no Ayumi and definitely no Aiko. He’d looked, everywhere, but the early afternoon crowd had hidden no surprises. So Adam had left; why stay? Out on the pavement something had drawn him down the street to the Hobgoblin British pub and a seat at its long wooden bar.

  Where he’d had a couple of beers.

  And a couple or three more.

  He’d talked to an American software designer sitting next to him at the bar, but mostly he’d nursed his beers, thinking about going to the vending machine and buying a packet of fags, staring at a football game on the widescreen plasma TV, remembering everything he could about the last kiss, trying to recall exactly how Aiko had looked as her face came up to his, her eyelids fluttering like the wings of small creatures. Torturing himself with the fact that it now looked like it really had been the last time he would ever be with her.

  If he couldn’t figure out a way of getting in touch with Aiko, how the hell was she ever going to find him? Always assuming, after what she’d been through, that she wanted to. Would she have gone to the police after Yoshi let her go, or just gone home and tried to forget it’d ever happened? His only hope was that Keiko would understand his note and pass the information on to Aiko. And if she did, sitting in a pub getting pissed was not going to help.

  Adam sat up; he should be back at the hotel in case she phoned, was what he should be doing. He looked round and saw that his American pal had gone without saying goodbye, which said a lot about the quality of his conversation. The man’s empty Guinness glass and a screwed-up paper coaster were still on the bar. Along with a book of matches and a soft pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes. The real Yankee deal, like his dad had smoked, when he’d smoked, not the ‘made under licence’ excuses for American fags you got sold in England. He picked up the packet and shook it. Empty. Then one last cigarette rattled into sight. He opened the book of matches. One left.

  It was a sign. No doubt about it. The condemned man’s last cigarette.

  Adam shook out the Lucky, broke off the match and struck it, the sharp smell of sulphur stinging his nostrils. He looked at the cigarette. What the hell, it was only the one. He wasn’t going to buy any more. He held the match up to the tobacco and inhaled, the smoke hitting his lungs like a slow punch, making him feel light-headed and numbing his fingertips. He exhaled through his nose, tapping ash into the nearby ashtray and taking a second, deeper pull. Oh yes.

  A picture flashed in his mind’s eye. Alice. Alice and her gold-toothed, diamond geezer dealer. He looked down at the Lucky, smoke curling artistically up from its grey-red tip. Pot. Kettle. Black.

  He stubbed out the cigarette, drained his bottle and left the pub.

  Back at the hotel there was one message waiting for him. A Suzy Barrett had called. Oh, God, reality really was knocking on his door, demanding to be let back in, but there was no way he could face a long-distance phone conversation with Suzy at the moment. No way. Adam screwed up the note and dropped it in the rubbish-bin-with-sandpit-ashtray by the lifts and went up to his room.

  He put the TV on for company and took a long shower to wash the day off, get rid of the smoke’n’beer aroma he’d picked up at the Hobgoblin and de-stress. He thought he might get changed, after drying off, and go out for one last sushi or noodles or whatever, but he felt completely knackered when he came out of the bathroom. Instead, wrapped in the kimono-style dressing gown he’d found on the bed when he came in, Adam lay, propped up on a couple of pillows and channel-hopped until he found the only thing worth watching: a baseball game.

  He had no idea when he fell asleep, but when he woke up he was cold, still lying on top of the covers; the game was long over and had been replaced by some kind of Japanese Parkinson-style chat show. Not bothering to check the time he climbed out of the kimono, put on a T-shirt, turned off the TV and the lights and climbed back into the bed. He was fast asleep again in seconds.

  Adam knew he’d had this dream before, quite recently. A phone was ringing and he had this very strong feeling it meant something important, but couldn’t for the life of him think what it was. And then the sleep wall cracked open and he heard the ringing for real.

  But he didn’t have a phone in his room.

  Shit! Not in his room … he sat up, groped for the bedside light, gave up and stumbled over to the desk in the pitch-black, patting the darkness to find where the phone was. Picking up the handset he discovered no one was there. Adam stood in the red glow from the digital display on the front of the TV, looking at the silent phone and then at the display. For some reason it said 05:10; then it said 05:11. And finally everything made sense; that had been an alarm call and he had just over an hour to get to Ueno Station.

  He put down the phone and turned on the lights. Funny though, because he’d never ordered an alarm call. Adam could almost hear his brain creak into gear as he worked out that this must mean it was Simon Palmer who’d booked it. He must really want to see the back of him.

  With almost no packing to do, he was downstairs at the reception fifteen minutes later and handing over his key. Stopping for a moment, he did one more final check on passport, airline ticket, train ticket and his Passnet card before bowing a thank you to the receptionist and walking out of the hotel and into very early-morning Tokyo. It was a cool, cloudy day and he now had forty-five minutes to get to Ueno and catch the train to Narita. And four hours left in Japan.

  Standing in one of those interminable mono-queues, the kind that were apparently supposed to be the fastest way to move people, Adam wondered if there was ever a time when these monster airports weren’t busy. Like it was 7:30 in the morning and the place was already packed out and buzzing. He shuffled forward, in that chaingang way these queues made you do, eventually came to the end and then found himself handing his passport and e-ticket to a blonde, English, permatanned woman in a Virgin Atlantic uniform. It was a shock not seeing someone with pale skin, oriental features and straight, black hair.

  By just after eight o’clock he had an aisle seat, a baggage check, his passport and a ticket stub. He turned to go through to Duty Free and found himself looking at Aiko, standing twenty metres away, just beyond the final check-in desk.

  This, he thought, is when the alarm call really happens and I wake up.

  But it didn’t. Behind him he heard someone ask if he might move so they could get to the desk he was still standing next to, and he realised he was holding his breath.

  ‘Sorry …’ Adam looked over his shoulder and pasted a smile on for the middle-aged woman behind him. She didn’t smile back.

  For a moment he felt like he’d forgotten how to walk, then, stuffing his passport and other papers into his small backpack, he broke into a run, still not quite sure this wasn’t the most astonishingly realistic dream he’d ever had in his entire life. Any moment now, he was almost sure, the person who looked exactly like Aiko would turn out to be someone else entirely.

  ‘Hello, Adam.’

  It was her. Adam came to a halt half a metre in
front of Aiko, reached out and touched this person he couldn’t possibly ever see again. ‘How did you –?’

  ‘Keiko tex me, very like two o’clock, about message. I couldn’t sleep, I was awake and call her … but I think too late to ring hotel. I ring at six today, but they say you go already to Ueno. So I come. You OK?’

  ‘Me? Yeah … yeah, but it’s you, what about you? What the hell happened? I mean, I thought you probably wouldn’t want to talk to me again after, you know, getting kidnapped by some scuzzy yakuza.’

  ‘You want coffee maybe?’

  ‘OK.’ Adam looked at his watch: just under an hour until they called the flight. ‘Coffee’s good – you want a miso soup maybe?’

  Aiko smiled. ‘Had some.’

  Adam took her hand; holding it felt like the missing piece of the jigsaw had just slotted back into place. He looked around for a coffee shop and saw one over to their right. ‘How d’you get here, anyway? How’d you know where I was checking in?’

  ‘Got cab, and not too many plane go to London right now. Also, you not so hard to see.’

  They found a table and sat down, still holding hands. Getting a coffee would mean letting go and he had so little time. ‘Tell me what happened, Aiko … what did Yoshi do to you? Alice said he just let you go.’

  ‘You saw Alice?’

  Adam nodded. ‘I lucked out, found her in Kabukicho, that office where I s’pose they took you? She’s so messed up …’

  ‘You feel bad?’

  ‘Yeah. She wasn’t always like that … it was like talking to her evil twin.’

  ‘Not your fault.’ Aiko reached over, ran her finger across his lips and then stroked his cheek. ‘What happened to you here?’

  Adam shrugged. ‘Not a lot … Yoshi’s way of saying goodbye.’

  ‘That Yoshi no good, but Alice must like it to stay.’