He lifted her up and dragged her towards the escalator, swaying and singing at the same time. Once he’d managed to get her up to ground level he even managed to get the station staff to help him. He waved in fake drunkenness and thanked them profusely as they staggered out into the neon-flared dusk.
Toshio made sure to take a different route home, resting regularly; even though the girl was light, it was a difficult journey. When he finally reached his apartment Toshio had never been so grateful for his elderly neighbour’s deafness, which was usually a problem rather than a blessing.
Once inside, he removed the disguise and her street clothes and bound her hands and feet with strong nylon cords. Then he placed her on the futon of the room that would now be hers. She showed no sign of regaining consciousness and her face seemed very peaceful. “I need you. Your place is here with me,” he whispered to her.
Toshio studied the newspapers and scanned the TV news programmes for the next few days. There was a brief flurry of interest in the disappearance of the girl, who he now knew was a secretary called Ayame Oguchi. The police had no leads, so either they had avoided being caught on CCTV, which was unlikely, or his disguises had worked. Or maybe the authorities just didn’t care enough about one more missing girl. Surrounded by people on all sides, she was still lost to them.
The news coverage subsided before the week was out. Ayame had been in Toshio’s flat ever since; nearly six months. He washed her, clothed her and fed her. From time to time, he raped her.
Toshio ignores the sobbing coming from the bedroom; he must remember to fix her gag later. He sits straight down at his computer, still naked, and begins to type furiously, afraid that he might lose the words, the phrases, the images that thundered through his mind as he reached orgasm.
In the second week after he’d brought the girl home he discovered quite by accident, after his lust had got the better of him, that sex created an avalanche of creativity in him. He’d written an entire volume of short stories within a fortnight – for which July’s Akutagawa Prize might be his – and was now nearly halfway through a long novel.
The story was all there – the mother killed when the bomb drops, the two children struggling to survive in the ruins, the eventual return of the soldier father, crippled but alive, to care for them – and all the tiny incidents and events surrounding it came so easily from his typing fingers.
He glanced ruefully at the shelves to his left, at the six novels written over 10 years; the ones that were so hard won, the ones that nobody wanted to buy or to read.
Turning his attention back to the keyboard, Toshio know exactly what should come next. It has to be the right word; the perfect word to follow the previous one. When he hits the keys, the perfect word appears. He writes in elegant simple language, owing every word to his muse.
MIRRORCLE
The one eye is exactly the same as she remembers it. The rest is a ruin. She turns away from the one small mirror that she still keeps in the apartment. For how much longer it will remain in one piece she cannot say.
Three weeks used to be so short a time, but now it is eternity mixed with forever and plastered over with endless millennia.
Just 21 days since it happened; since the surgeons first laid their hands and their cold, uncaring steel on her. Twenty-one short, endless days since she had suffered the loss of her future and her husband.
A face lost forever to the cruel kiss of hot tarmac; a love abandoned forever to the cleansing fervour of the flames. The same squealing song of death and despair replays in her head every day that she continues to go on living.
The apartment, though large, is far too small for a prison. The sickness of hospital air still clings to her. It is something that she cannot wash out no matter how hard she tries. It will always be with her through the years of pain ahead, the endless days of rebuilding and remodelling. But she wants her own face back - not one that can be bought off the shelf. Their cost is too high.
But she knows a place where she can find her face.
The door creaks in painful protest as she puts her weight against it. Swollen in the damp of last winter, it is reluctant to let her enter the place of her salvation. The old attic room was the last domain of her grandmother, the hideaway where she used to spend her days muttering over her memories of old Europe, recapturing beauty and love in a fine-spun web of evocations.
Grandmother would understand my quest, she thinks. She’d know this was the right thing.
She brushes the heavy dust from her spider-kissed hair, searching for the tell-tale glint in the close, gloomy space. A hint of her grandmother’s perfume still lingers in odd corners, even after all these years.
Moving past the never-opened trunks, the treasures from another world now sunk beneath a sea of years, she spies the tell-tale shape. She coughs through a shroud of dust as she pulls back the heavy cloth from the objects she has been seeking.
A constellation of light breaks over her as the sunlight dashes for freedom after being trapped on the bright, hungry surface of the glass for a single moment. It reminds her of the jewels of glass strewn across the road and embedded in her soft flesh, leaving a souvenir sketch-map of scars.
Her hands grope forward to lift the first of them. She smiles back at herself from the moving mirror, from the happy preparations for her 18th birthday; the day after she had felt a man inside her for the first time, she remembers. She watches the girl’s slow, contented movements and chokes back her bitterness. No man would want her now.
There are a half dozen of them. Clean and perfect and shining in the weak sunlight that filters in despite her best efforts to exclude it. Mirrors, but not mirrors.
A gift from her grandmother. Living portraits: how absurd. She had laughed at the time but the wise witch woman was right, after all. “You may need them some day. You may,” she had said and patted her grand-daughter’s head indulgently. “Keep them safe.” And they were safe.
There, her faces; all of them. Her youth, her pain, her loves - all trapped within the glass, swimming silently through the paradise of her past.
The smiles, the shining eyes, the sighs, the lustrous hair. They are all there in front of her. They belong to her because they ARE her. They will be hers again.
The pain cuts short her rare attempt to smile.
In rage and impatience she hefts the weighty objects above her head, hurling them at the floor. They strike the edge of an upturned table and explode into a multitude of sharp, bright shards. She feels one chip the hard scarred skin of her face; it draws no blood from the thick armour.
The dusty floor is covered with precious gems; so painfully precious. A million chill splinters of mirror, each containing a fragment of her face, a memory of her real self, from the time when she could live in the world instead of shutting it outside herself.
Tiny pieces of herself stare up from the floor, captured inside their waiting worlds. Now her work can begin.
She begins. She weaves and fashions, creates and contours, all the while muttering a psalm of profound thanks to her skilled ancestors. She thanks the gods that she learned her grandmother’s lessons well, despite – perhaps, because of – her mother’s very vocal disapproval.
After many hours the work is done, her magic concluded, and she lifts the thing to cover the remains of her face. She sighs with deep pleasure, contented with her handiwork and exultant at the return of hope.
She finds a small hand-mirror of her grandmother’s, just an ordinary mirror, and gazes at herself, admiring her masterpiece. A mirror maze melded into a mask that will allow her to become whole once more. Her glamour recaptured in the face of a thousand pieces.
Now she can face the world once more.
The low heavens brush her shoulders with expectant, misty rain as she steps out into the thick air. Even at this quiet hour, the street is alive with passing figures.
She pulls her coat round her, touches her miraculous mask one last time and walks down the last few steps. Sh
e begins walking, going nowhere.
Expectantly, she turns her face to the passing pedestrians. Pieces of faces move and jostle on the shining surface. They are all her but yet none can agree with another on where it should sit, who it should smile at or glance playfully towards. Expressions melt into each other, struggling to re-form and create a meaning in their moods, becoming grotesque.
So good to be among people again. She can feel the strength of their company, their lives, flowing into her as she moves into the press of the crowd. A feeling very like her memory of happiness begins to invade her marred soul. The crowd is a comfort, a support, a touchstone of normality. A way back to who she was. A way to be who she is.
A familiar face appears, bobbing among the crowd’s myriad mouths, eyes and noses. Dora. She was one of the very few who visited her in hospital. One of the very few that had stayed a friend to her. Think how this true friend would delight at seeing her whole again, able to smile like everybody else. She presses further into the crowd, shouting to her. Head turned away, Dora doesn’t hear but rushes on, intent on her mundane errand.
She must speak to her. This would mean so much to both of them, another bond of lasting friendship and another entrance to the world she had thought gone forever.
There just ahead, Dora crosses the road, waving to someone on the other side. She shouts again, following her. Surely Dora is close enough to hear now. But her voice is drowned by the screeching of a car’s tyres as it pulls up sharply.
The heavy machine barely touches her, merely knocking her leg. The man’s voice, ugly and harsh, is more of a shock as she lurches slightly to one side.
The mask, jolted by her unsteadiness, slips from her face. She attempts to halt its descent but its weight makes it too fast to catch. Striking the floor, the marvel she had moulded shatters into smithereens, the tiny fragments lost forever as they slide swiftly across the hard paving.
Screams pour from her endlessly as she stumbles forward. On her knees, she sifts through the shattered shards of her face; a face she will never be able to rebuild. From one silver sliver an eye, a bright blue perfect eye, returns her gaze, unaware of its fate.
Her sobs choke her, lungs heaving painfully for a breath that will not come. Her friend hears at last and turns to see her as she wants no-one to see her ever again.
She lifts her head and looks to the sky, the last light of the day fading swiftly from it. She wishes more than anything that she could escape up into the air, be lifted far above the winding pathways of her hell.
The phantoms called people, those who had plagued her all her life, boil at the edge of her vision as her face and mind evaporate up into the high skies.
LOVE BOX
Rie and I met at a social event organised by our company and we knew of each other’s desire immediately.
In our haste to discover each other, we fled to the nearest place available to make love in this overcrowded city. Hastily and, we thought at the time, unwisely, we found ourselves in a nearby capsule hotel.
The 5,000 Yen cost of the room, and a sizeable bribe for the man behind the desk to forget he’d seen Rie, proved to be a very small price to pay for entry to paradise.
Both wonderfully supple and eager, Rie proved to be the perfect companion for lovemaking in such a small space.
Our room – barely three feet by three feet by six – seemed dauntingly cramped at first; particularly as, unlike most hotels of this type, there was a small door rather than just a curtain at the entrance of the room.
But Rie’s flexibility proved to be a revelation. The positions that we attained that first night were both surprising and various. Our mutual joy arrived quickly but our desire was not easily sated; we got very little sleep that night.
We were married within a few months but found our sexual congress in the marital bed lacked flavour. We returned to our capsule hotel and rediscovered the heights to which our passion could climb. After that, we returned to the hotel regularly, often twice in a week.
Our limbs twisted into unorthodox positions that would daunt the fittest gymnast, but our desire for each other seemed to put the impossible well within our reach.
Ecstasy was easily attainable within our love box and, every time I released myself into Rie, it seemed to eradicate our lives outside that confined space. The restraints of married life, of my position as a salaryman, and of the capsule itself, dissolved into an ocean of love. Anything was possible for us.
It would have been a particular delight to have detailed our daring positions, recording them in our own capsule hotel Kama Sutra to share our joy with all, but discretion dictates that the manual should remain unwritten.
We have been keeping our appointment with love for over 15 years now. It is something that has perhaps gone on for too long.
Rie suffered terrible back pain following the loss of our baby six years ago. The problems following the dislocation of my hip during a road accident last year have not faded. Our bodies are no longer as young and as supple as they once were.
For over an hour now, Rie has not spoken. Condensation and sweat have made the narrow mattress sodden and my beloved has begun to grow cold beneath me. Try as I might, I cannot untangle my limbs from hers.
We last made love at 2.30 a.m. – just after the last of the drunken salarymen retired to his room. It is now 3.50 a.m.: I have grown soft and am no longer inside Rie.
I have only enough mobility to tap feebly on the door with my left elbow. My other limbs are locked tightly in Rie’s love embrace. I cannot draw sufficient breath, doubled over as I am, to be able to call for assistance.
Checking out time is not until 9 a.m. It is possible that we will remain undiscovered until then. I cannot see how they will be able to extricate us even then; I imagine that several of our limbs will have to be broken.
I do not know which is worse; to be discovered like this, knowing the great dishonour it will bring upon us and our families, or to know that our wonderful love box will become our coffin.
Through the tiny window I can see the lights of a tower crane at a nearby building site. They waver as I struggle for breath, fighting back the urge to vomit, and my tears splash onto a patch of semen that has dried on the beautifully smooth skin of Rie’s back.
INTERIOR DESIGN
They moved into the flat just two months after the wedding. Mike would never really think of it as their flat; Jen’s father – rich old bastard that he was – had ‘given’ it to them as a wedding present. Which meant, as far as Mike was concerned, that he would always be there with them, checking and judging.
There was virtually no furniture, beyond the essentials like a bed, when they moved in. Nothing comfortable or familiar and certainly nothing that would induce him to feel ‘at home’. Jen had announced that she wanted to furnish it in her own way and, as she was the one with taste and breeding and money, Mike just went along with it.
Money seemed to drip from every orifice of Jen’s family, whereas his humble job as a very junior reporter for a downmarket daily newspaper couldn’t keep his new wife in the style to which she’d become accustomed. Mike knew her something-in-the-city father saw him as nothing but a big zero and the old man took every opportunity to underline that fact ‘subtly’.
He’d wanted to honeymoon somewhere nice and warm, somewhere sunny, but Jen – ice maiden to her sub-zero core – had insisted they spend time at some trendy ice hotel in the Arctic Circle. Only the sight of her naked body, open before him, had introduced any heat into the occasion. At least that was one place that he and Jen really were compatible – in bed; a mere 14 fucks and they’d decided marriage was the right thing for them, much to the consternation of Jen’s family.
They’d met at a friend’s party. He didn’t know how she’d come to be at such a ramshackle affair and he didn’t care, being drawn to her slightly otherworldly prettiness and her smart way of dressing. “You’re perfect,” she’d told him at the end of the night and, for a short while, he was pre
pared to believe it; because she’d said it.
All his friends thought of them as an odd couple, he knew, but he just felt lucky to have found someone like Jen; so cool, sophisticated and sexy. Someone who was interested in him.
Of course there was a downside. There always was. He didn’t like the flat that much but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, was he?
Worst of all for him was the fact that it didn’t have any outside windows, except for one small one in the kitchen, the light coming from huge skylights instead. But the converted warehouse was spacious, at least, with enough room for both Jen’s art school ideas and his own clutter.
On Saturdays, Mike was expected to accompany Jen on her ‘expeditions’ to town to seek out the latest chic accessory or ornament from exclusive little shops and tucked-away art galleries.
This was obviously the way she was used to living her life. But she confessed she’d never had the chance to ‘spread her wings at home’. Well, thought Mike, you certainly seem to be flapping your feathers about now.
One particularly chilly day in February they found themselves outside a former butcher’s shop that was now an expensive furniture shop. There was some sort of poetic irony in that, he thought.
They had been standing there for a few minutes before Jen spoke. “What do you think?” she asked, extending an elegantly-gloved finger towards the display window.
He stared through the glass at the object Jen was indicating. It was a collection of odd angles and colours that seemed to float in space, not meeting or connecting in any significant way. Yet she’d referred to it earlier as a chair. Mike felt his back aching in sympathy with any poor sod who would be expected to sit in it.
Songs From Spider Street Page 6