by Tobias Hill
For Victoria
Contents
Preface
Skin
A Honeymoon in Los Angeles
Losing Track
Hammerhead
The Memory Man
Brolly
No One Comes Back from the Sea
The World Feast
Zoo
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Preface
‘Skin’ was a winner in BBC’s First Bites radio script competition; an adaptation was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1995, and a shorter version of the story was published in the London Magazine. ‘A Honeymoon in Los Angeles’ appeared in Cascando and in the anthology Cold Comfort (Serpent’s Tail, 1996). ‘Losing Track’ won an Ian St James Award in 1996. ‘The Memory Man’ first appeared in Quadrant (Australia). ‘Brolly’ won the Sheffield Thursday Prize in 1994 and appeared in The Printer’s Devil. ‘No One Comes Back from the Sea’ appeared in Quadrant (Australia) and in the Richmond Review (internet magazine). ‘The World Feast’ appeared in Nieuw Wereldijdschrift (Holland). An adaptation of ‘Zoo’ was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1997.
Skin
1: Pictures
His name was Tomoyasu and he was twelve in the year Japan invaded six countries. He had a photograph of an American spy. Kozo hugged himself when he saw it, thin arms tight around his greed. He didn’t smile. A day later he offered Tomoyasu his softball, straight swap. The softball smelt of crushed leather and cut grass and it was made in the USA. Tomoyasu kept the photo. They swapped shoes, to show each other they were still friends, and no one realised for three days. Tomoyasu stole the softball anyway, from Kozo’s school desk. Kozo had others. Tomoyasu hid it in the bamboos above Seven Stone Children Cemetery, buried under two blue-green rocks. When he came back a week later, he couldn’t find the rocks. He walked home along the train track, singing the Red Dragonfly Song, not questioning his happiness.
His father had sent the photo from the Japanese state of Manchuria in a brown box sealed with hard wax. There were other presents in the box: a letter to them all in father’s fine ‘grass-writing’ script; an American coin with an eagle on it; a necklace of blue stones for Tomoyasu’s mother, and a plastic comb for his sister Natsuko.
There was a tiny hole in the comb, perfectly round, like the doorways weevils made in some grains of rice. When Tomoyasu put his eye to the hole, focusing carefully, he could see the skyscrapers of America. Under the picture it said Empire State in English. The last word was stained a rusty brown where something had leaked into the pinhead lens. Tomoyasu looked up ‘Empire’ in his classroom English dictionary. Sugihara-sensei, the Languages master, had brought the book from England. It was bound in inkstain-coloured card. ‘Supreme and extensive political dominion. The approximate population of the British Empire is now 321,000,000 – Whitaker’s Almanack, 1887’. Tomoyasu asked his mother if the British Empire was an enemy. She was writing the farm accounts and she stopped to laugh. ‘The British Empire? Honey fungus is an enemy, and June drought. Write to your father. He knows about Outsiders.’ He took the comb apart and found he couldn’t put it back together.
Natsuko had died in the silkworm factory. That was after the European war but before the box came. She had worked there every winter with the other town girls, when there was no fieldwork to do. She had lost a little finger cutting open cocoons. She had shown the stub to Tomoyasu because he had asked her to. He thought it made her look like the Yakuza, the Gangsters, who cut off their little fingers as pledges of loyalty, wrapping them in red silk. Her hands became clumsy, as if they had been knocked off balance. She couldn’t eat with chopsticks properly, dropping food like a little girl. After that she couldn’t spin the raw silk into even thread. She brought some home for Tomoyasu, but it looked ugly and he threw it away.
The owners beat her with rice flails, but they didn’t kill her. The spinners slept on the damp floors of the silkworm rooms. The cold killed her, moving up into her through the packed earth and matting. The owners brought Tomoyasu’s mother a full kimono made of black silk. She thanked them; she was grateful. When they were gone she took her clothing scissors and cut the bright black dress into rags. Tomoyasu knelt, put his tongue to the paper doors and watched her through the moisture’s transparency. The scissors sighed brokenly down their long, notched blades. The silk covered the floor like hanks of hair.
Tomoyasu got the photo and the comb. Sometimes he missed Natsuko. He got the coin, too. He took it from his mother’s camphor-wood jewellery-box when she was laying food at Natsuko’s grave. She had forgotten about it. Once, when he broke a writing brush and cried, she laughed. She said it was harder to care for a dead child than a living one. Her hair was falling out. She forgot lots of things. Sometimes she would come into his room at night and shout that he didn’t deserve love. Then for days she wouldn’t talk to him or look at him. If he didn’t step out of her way, she would walk into him. Later she would say sorry and try to cradle him. Tomoyasu didn’t care about any of it. It gave him more time for himself. He took the coin with him when he played baseball.
The coin was slim and bright, shinier than Japanese sen and yen currency. Tomoyasu’s father wrote that he’d got it from a spy. The spy had been captured flying a night plane from Korea. The photograph was of the spy and a boy with light hair. The spy and the boy sat on stools in front of a glass counter. There were burgers and slices of fruit pie inside the counter. Tomoyasu knew the colours of the fruit; blue and red, like the shells of lobsters. He tried to imagine all the colours in the photo but couldn’t. He didn’t know the shades of the boy’s eyes or the spy’s hair or the sky outside the wide windows.
The boy had a glass shaped like a jasmine flower, full of dark ice-cream. The spy didn’t have a glass. He had one hand on the boy’s light hair and the other raised in a fist. His smile was very bright in the dim photo. The boy was raising the glass over his head, crook-armed, a trophy. Both of them were wearing baseball whites. There was English on the baseball whites but Tomoyasu couldn’t read it, even with Sugihara-sensei’s magnifying glass. He was the only boy in his class who owned a photo of America.
He put the photo between the stiff yellow pages of his Japanese History text, put the book into his satchel and tugged the strap tight. He put on his baseball whites and left the satchel by the door, where he could pick it up after training. Every schoolday he played sport, then helped in the fields before lessons. He ate a quick breakfast of red beancurd soup. The dog scratched at the door for food. He gave it a wedge of beancurd but it wouldn’t eat it.
It was nearly five o’clock and the frogs were groaning in the flat green tide of the rice paddies. It was still half-dark, so that the rice was really grey, Tomoyasu could only see it was green if he stared at it and narrowed his eyes. His mother had already made him rice-parcels for lunch. There was a dab of pickled plum in the middle of each parcel. He could smell it, sweet and salty, a hidden treasure, even through the dry musty odour of the rice ration. He slid the door shut and ran to baseball practice through the white gloom of waterlands.
‘Fall out! Now, please. Line up by the windows – good, Kokichi. Quickly, all of you. Immediately!’
They were practising slow pitches and low swings, ‘grass cutters’, when Niimi-sensei came into the gym and began to shout. Tomoyasu had paired with Kozo, whose uncle had one eye like a carp’s and who ran a water-trade dockside bar. ‘Water-trade’ meant low-life, Tomoyasu knew. His mother had told him. Kozo threw, pacing it gently, and Tomoyasu struck, moving from the shoulders. They were the tallest boys in the class, already looking down on Niimi-sensei. The Sports master was too old to be a soldier. He had the permanently hunched shoulders of a rice farmer. Sometimes he wouldn’t teach them sport at all, but Confucian ethics; respect, obed
ience, subservience.
‘Kozo, Tomoyasu!’
They ran for the line. Niimi-sensei began to cuff stragglers. The hall became quiet, draining of echoes. Niimi-sensei was looking at the damp morning light filling the high windows. His head shook as he spoke.
‘So slow, mm? It is not enough to be skilful if you lack obedience. Do you understand?’ They straightened their backs, shouted, ‘Yes, teacher!’ in almost perfect unison. He waited for silence again. The shaking had spread to his arms and he folded them tightly across his ribs.
‘If you cannot obey you are not a team. You lack team spirit! You lack spirit!’ His voice had risen from an undertone to a bark. His thin arms unfolded and he began to point out grimacing faces. ‘It is as if you are not Japanese boys at all. It is as if you are American boys!’ The old man was screaming. He stopped abruptly and turned away. He picked out a wooden kendo sword from the rack behind him. He stabbed it against the mats as he spoke, punctuating the sentences. A first ray of sunlight struck him, illuminating his anger. Retorts boomed like the fireworks in the harvest festivals.
‘Baseball, eh? Why should you learn baseball? Does it teach you about the Japanese spirit? Baseball is foreign in spirit!’ The Sports master’s voice was rising again, stretching his features into a bony grin. ‘A game for Americans. For their inferior allies. There will be no baseball in the Greater Asian Empire. There will be no more baseball in this school. The team has been dismissed, by order of the government. Now we will sing the national anthem.’
They sang, not understanding the archaic words, only shivering in the cold gymnasium, astounded, too old to cry. The school team was disbanded. Tomoyasu went and stood with Kozo. The other boy wouldn’t look at him, he concentrated on strapping up his bag.
‘What are we going to play now?’ Tomoyasu whispered.
Koto shrugged. ‘There are plenty of great Japanese sports. My father will teach me. Maybe you, too. This is the right thing. Baseball’s shit.’
He hefted his bag and left quickly. By the time Tomoyasu came out, his friend was running to catch another group of boys, Upper School students. The first schoolgirls were arriving on their heavy-framed bicycles, skirts flying. They stopped in groups to watch the playing fields where workmen were erasing the baseball diamond with long brooms. Tomoyasu passed them with his head down, avoiding the whispering of the girls and the dirt-seamed faces of the workmen.
He walked home along the railway track, mechanically following his daily routine. In the deep shadow of cedar trees he waited for the seven o’clock munitions train. He was very early. The sweat on his uniform cooled against his chest and armpits and he shivered, tucking his hands into the pockets of his trousers. In the left-hand pocket he felt the knurled edge of the American coin. He took it out and thought about baseball.
It was the most beautiful thing he knew. He dreamed of baseball as a dance sometimes, but more often as a stylised battle with two heroes at its centre. Batsman and pitcher, rival champions, as there were in some of the kabuki dramas his grandfather loved. Tomoyasu loved baseball because it was American, the country beyond the end of the world. The enemy. He felt a wave of guilt that left him giddy and wide-eyed. Squatting on his haunches, he balanced the coin on the silvery curve of the track. Carefully, so that the train would catch it dead centre under its galvanised wheels.
When he bent and put his head against the track, Tomoyasu could hear the train far off, a sound no louder than the trickle of water from a tap. He dozed like that, his shaved head on the cushion of warm steel. He dreamed of his father in Manchuria, seeing with abrupt clarity his sternness, the Mongol features of a northerner. His father was standing on a construction site, speaking into a telephone. He was building the Greater Asian Empire and catching American spies at night. Tomoyasu tried to remember if his father liked baseball.
The train blared its horn and he stood up quickly and ran alongside the track towards it. The first carriage was newly painted. At one sashed window was an officer. The officer was wearing a Japanese sword in a simple wooden scabbard. His face was waxy and quite motionless. Tomoyasu wondered if he might not be a decoy. Behind the carriage came batteries of anti-aircraft guns, hooded under tarpaulins. They looked like the bulks of sleeping dragons. Intelligent and powerful. He turned to wave at the sappers in their military khaki, stretching his hands above his head. He felt a moment of joy, without guilt. The sappers laughed with him or at him. He ran back up the track, to the cedars. One of the sappers threw him a cigarette and he tried to catch it.
When he looked down at the coin it had already left the track with a sound like a startled bird, the thrum of wings. It caught him under the chin, a slim silver pain. He felt his skin indent and pressure against his windpipe. When he swallowed he recalled an instant of summer, ice-water sliding against his gullet. He fell, choking. Lopsidedly, he watched a sapper jumping from the train. Pine needles crushed their overpowering scent against his cheek. He tried to blink. The rhythm of the train and the rhythm of his blood became too loud and he was deafened.
He awoke in a Western-style bed, one of many in a long room full of sunlight and dry air. The linen sheets had been tucked in so tightly and the smell of starch was so powerful that he couldn’t feel his torso at all. He lay, disembodied, moving his head carefully to watch a young nurse hold a syringe up to the light, testing pressure. She was talking to a patient, smiling; her teeth were white and very small. She brought the syringe down and uncovered a man’s stomach. On the stomach was a yellow carp. She injected the needle into the carp’s eye. Tomoyasu yelled at her to stop and blacked out at the force of his own voice.
Later the doctors came to see him. They spoke with a foreigner in a foreign language. Tomoyasu knew it was German; all doctors worked in German. His father had told him it was the language of medicine. Medicine was good, so the Germans weren’t enemies. This German had black hair just like a Japanese, but his eyes were a dark blue, the colour of temple roof tiles. The German bent close to Tomoyasu and said something that made all the doctors laugh. His breath smelled of pig meat. He gave Tomoyasu back the American coin. It was pinched on one side, like clay, defacing the eagle’s feet. Tomoyasu felt its knife-edge and watched the man in the next bed while the doctors talked.
The man had a tube in his arm and his eyes were covered with a wet cloth. His mouth moved as if he were crying. He wore a hospital shirt, but it had come half-off, tangled with the bedsheets. There were pictures in his skin. His skin was a picture.
A dragon coiled around his right arm, folded against the cables of muscles and ligaments. It had a green moustache and a jewel in its forehead. Golden birds flew round the dragon like comets. The dragon grinned at the man’s chest, where a boy-child rode on the back of a giant golden carp. Waves fell away from the carp towards the man’s ribcage. In the distance, where his heart must be, Tomoyasu could see Mount Fuji, rising out of the horizon like an arrow-head. There were words written there, too, but the characters were difficult and Tomoyasu couldn’t read them. A small berry of blood stood out on the face of the carp, becoming encrusted as it dried.
‘Who is he?’ Tomoyasu asked one of the nurses. She was the one he’d seen giving the injection, and she was very young, only a few years older than Tomoyasu. Her hair was braided into pigtails. She spent a lot of time over the man with pictures in his skin. Now she was replacing the compress on his eyes.
‘He’s a carpenter from Kobe. A skilled man.’
‘Is he dying?’ said Tomoyasu.
It wasn’t what he’d wanted to ask, and the nurse’s eyes widened. ‘Don’t say that! It’s bad luck. Please, just lie back and don’t talk so much.’ She moved over to Tomoyasu’s bed and made him drink some water without moving his neck. ‘He fell from scaffolding. Now he’s hurt, inside. It’s hard to tell how well he’s healing. If anything’s still broken. But he’s an honest worker, a real craftsman, not a criminal. He deserves to live. And he’s so young.’
She touched the man’s arm
, one finger pressing insistently against the wings of a golden bird.
‘Why would he be a criminal?’ said Tomoyasu.
The nurse looked at him, surprised, and then laughed with one hand to her mouth. It made her look like a schoolgirl. Tomoyasu turned away. He had known why. The Yakuza wore tattoos, the gangsters who swore oaths with fingers wrapped in silk. He had known. He’d wanted to keep talking. He wanted to touch the man’s skin or the face of the nurse. There was a cicada’s empty husk, clutched to the windowsill. It was fragile as rice-paper. He watched it until lights-out.
He dreamed of the nurse. She offered him drink. Milk trickled from her lips and forked across her small chin. He woke to the sound of her crying. In the curtained darkness he couldn’t see her, although the room was full of people. Someone had opened a window and the curtains billowed inwards and spread apart. The carpenter was being taken away. The body sagged between two men, one arm trailing on the ground, palm upwards. The tattooed skin caught the small light from the window, colour peeling away from it. Tomoyasu watched until it was gone. The empty bed beside him terrified him. He curled up against his nakedness.
2: Exhibits
National Police Force of Japan
Canal District Sub-Office, Otaru City 446, Hokkaido State
Interim Investigative Report (Capital Offences). Page 11. Report completed by Constable Yasuhiro Abé. Dated: 14 September 1993. Initial report completed by: Y. Abé. Dated: 6 September 1992.
NOTES – (1) Iconography of deceased’s body-tattoos. Chief Constable Murasaki’s convictions on this matter have been borne out by the expert analysis of Dr Jun Tanigawa (Lecturer specialising in Organised Crime in Japan, Sapporo College of Law Enforcement). Her opinion is that the symbolism of the various tattoos suggests an affiliation with the extremely widespread Yamaguchigumi criminal organisation. The tattooist’s signature, three characters near the deceased’s right armpit, was rendered largely illegible by swelling and decay. The first character, ‘Hori–’, is apparently common to the trade names of many tattoo artists.