There’s been no writing to Russia for a long time now – she’s been too busy unpicking the seams of the old life. When people ask about her plans it’s always the same answer: travel; a place she can lock up and leave; no worries. Whenever there is silence the words repeat in her mind: Doh Sveedanya; Doh Sveedanya; Doh Sveedanya. До Свидания; До Свидания; До Свидания. Is it like Au Revoir or Auf Wiedersehen? Until we see each other again?
If he walked into the kitchen on the last morning he would see all the cupboards empty and the doors standing open. She checks they are clean and dry and closes every one, waits in silence for the friends who are coming to help her move. The heat builds in the glass box at the back of the house and she opens all the doors and windows and turns on the fans. Flies come and huddle in corners.
When everything has been loaded and everyone else has gone she walks through the empty house for the last time. In the last few years she has slept in every room.
One more turn around the garden, over the stone bridge he wrestled into place, past the pond where the ducklings went for supervised swimming, round the veg garden where he dug out tombstones of rock from under the new raised beds. She looks back up at the house, half-afraid the new people will come before she’s ready. He used to stand there inside the glass box watching her and the dog go round, straining for a sight of them between the hedges when he should have been lying down and resting. She’d wave to him every time she came into view and he’d relax. Sometimes he’d be looking and looking for her in the wrong place and she’d have to jump up and down to catch his eye. The illness made him anxious about things. She didn’t want him to have to worry about her.
Once, she was so tired she lay down at the edge of the bottom field wanting for a minute to think of nothing, just to look up at the blue sky and feel the flattened grass and the earth beneath it holding her up and then the water in the ground just seeping through. The dog came and sniffed at her face. Suddenly she thought how it would look from up in the house: he’d think she’d collapsed and died down in the field. She jumped up and turned to him to wave but he wasn’t there. If he tried to follow her he’d run out of breath. His heart would start to bang and skitter. She ran back up the hill, leaving the dog behind. When she reached the glass box she slowed down. The birds flicked away from the seed feeder. She looked inside and there he was on the white sofa with his eyes half-closed and his mouth half-open. He’d always had a bad habit of looking dead while he was sleeping: it used to be such a joke. She held her breath and stared until she was sure his chest was still rising and falling.
It is time to leave. The car is ready; she has been all around in silence by herself to say goodbye and yet at every step she feels he stands behind her; she doesn’t want to leave him here alone. The new people came to mow the long grass yesterday and cut the daffodils to stumps. She has tried stopping time but these people don’t want the same things: the seasons change; the planet hurls itself once more around the sun.
She goes back into the house by the front door, pushes it shut against the heat and light outside and sits at the bottom of the stairs in the cool dark, waiting to feel it is all right to leave and lock the door behind her and drop the key through the letter box. To go out and never come back in.
How much of him, how much of her, will stay here in the paint on the walls and the plants in the garden? She puts a hand on her head and a hand on her heart and waits for something. She doesn’t want to say goodbye, not in any language. She only wants, somehow, to keep him safe.
When it comes to her, so simple and so comforting, she jumps up and opens her arms in the hallway. She knows exactly what she wants to say: ‘Don’t stay here. Please come with me.’ And she holds the front door open long enough for him to pass.
PULLING OUT
Eluned Gramich
The first thing I said to my mother when she met me at the airport was, ‘Where is Toru?’ I hadn’t seen my mother for over a year, but I’d spoken to her more than enough on the phone. By contrast, I hadn’t heard anything from my younger brother during the long months of my graduate study in London. In fact, he hadn’t even signed the New Year’s card my mother sent (a simple oversight according to her, but one which caused me considerable hurt at the time). I arrived at the airport eager to see Toru, to clap my eyes on him, as the English saying goes, and examine any changes that might have occurred in my absence. Out of everyone I’d left behind in Tokyo – family and friends – it was Toru I was most keen to see. I thought of him as a tool I could use to measure my personal improvements: a mirror to reflect my transformation. If he was the same as I remembered him, eating pink candies soaked in soy milk out of his ‘special’ mug at eighteen, I might be able to help him now where I couldn’t before. Or if he’d changed, grown up, then we might become allies and friends, if not equals exactly, because, naturally, I would always be the eldest.
‘Where is he?’ I asked again when my mother didn’t reply. She looked younger than I’d anticipated. Her hair was cut short and she was wearing earrings in the shape of watering cans.
‘He’s not well,’ she sighed. ‘He sends his apologies.’
I couldn’t imagine Toru being thoughtful enough to send anyone his apologies, but I left it. I handed over the trolley with my things and we set off towards the metro station, me walking slightly ahead with my hand steadying the uppermost suitcase. When we stepped outside, I inhaled the cool autumn Tokyo air and felt like jumping for joy, as they say in the West. Of course I refrained from doing any such thing. I smiled to myself and thought, I’m back.
Our apartment is severely small. During my schooldays this was a noticeable, daily obstacle to family happiness, especially my mother’s. Even when I was a child with no particular desire for privacy, I’d pick fights with my brother over a coffee table or the corner shelf in the bathroom. My mother had to clear away her work files to make room for jigsaws and card games, and if she wanted to stretch her legs out on the sofa, she had to live with one of us sitting on her feet. When my father was still around we lived in a house with enough bedrooms for each member of the family and an extra room downstairs for guests. It’s one of Mum’s favourite complaints about my father that he’s obscenely rich but hasn’t given us a single yen. He’s in Hong Kong, managing an international company. She insists he must be rolling in it, but, being dissolute, irresponsible and supremely awful in character and looks and everything else, Mum insists he’s spending it on booze and women and fast cars. Though how she knows anything about him at all, seeing as they haven’t been in contact for twenty years, since my fourth birthday in fact, I can’t say.
Mum used to sleep downstairs on a pull-out futon, falling asleep in front of the TV. Since I’ve been in London, however, she’s been sleeping in my room. She asked my permission. ‘Of course, go ahead,’ I told her. I didn’t give it a second thought. But when I lugged my two oversized suitcases into the apartment, I almost collapsed in shock. The apartment: my home. My bedroom. I hardly recognised it. It was still impossibly narrow, of course, especially after the shared house in London, but that was the only familiar thing about it. The furniture was new – not the comfortable Japanese-style heated table and foldable chairs with their browning corners – but new, western, sharp-edged. There was a lot of metal showing, lacquer and glass. The curtains had been replaced by blinds; the gas stove was now electric. The fat mahogany cupboard which held my mother’s futon had vanished, and a display case of ceramic figurines stood in its stead. In one corner, a humidifier was chuffing away, blowing out rose-scented steam.
‘What’s been going on here?’ I said.
‘Oh, not much. Well – what was it like before?’
‘What’s that?’ I asked, pointing at a ring of plastic flowers draped across the wall.
‘You mean that? That,’ she said, colouring, ‘is my Lei.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Hawaiian flower chain,’ she said. ‘Didn’t I mention? I do Hula now.
To relax. Meet new people. It’s only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. And of course they run a special all-day class every Sunday, except national holidays.’
‘Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays…’
‘I’ll make tea. Then you should sleep.’
‘What does Toru do?’ I said. ‘When you’re away doing … that?’
‘He looks after himself.’ Her voice changed suddenly, adopting a stern, argumentative tone. I would come to realise that this was the voice she always used when I tried to talk about my brother.
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘He says he just doesn’t feel like leaving his room. He’s not up to it.’
‘Call him now. Maybe he’ll come out if he knows I’m here.’
‘You must be exhausted after your flight,’ she said. ‘I’ll run the bath, shall I?’
While she was gone, I unzipped my suitcase and took out the gifts I’d brought back. There wasn’t much volume-wise, but I’d put a lot of thought into it. For my mother, I’d first thought of getting a bottle of perfume, then dismissed it as too generic. Instead, I got her an apron with the Union Jack on it and an illustrated guide to British cooking. (I’d folded some of the pages on dishes I’d particularly enjoyed in my time in London.) For my brother, however, I’d got something rather out of the ordinary. I’d actually spent quite a large amount of money on it: over a hundred pounds, and an extra fifty to have his name engraved on it. I unlaced the grey felt bag, opened the sleek black case in which the shopkeeper had so lovingly placed it. It was a fountain pen – the make was Swiss-French – dark green with a golden rim and a discreet marbling effect. It read TORU HASHIMOTO in the Roman alphabet. Seeing his name in alphabet rather than Kanji was strange to me at first, but then good, like a fine tailored suit first looks unfamiliar on one’s body before one recognises its elegance. I ran my fingers across the grooves, his engraved name tickling my fingerpads. I was suddenly impatient to see his face, his expression, when he received the gift. I wanted to see him smile and gasp as he opened up the cloth bag and shining box. He’s never owned a fountain pen before; it would be new to him. An experience we could share. I could show him how to dip the nib in the ink and fill the cartridge the old-fashioned European way; how to write on the side without pressing; how to rub lemon juice on his hands to lift the ink stains.
‘Your bath is ready. You can use your brother’s towel and scrubber for now, can’t you?’
‘Can’t you call him down?’
My mother didn’t look up. I saw she’d changed into her nightdress, and was wearing a fur-lined cape wrapped around her shoulders. She kissed me on the cheek, pressed my head awkwardly against her ear and said, ‘Glad you arrived safely.’
I got into the bath alone. The water was scalding hot; the tap dripped miserably. My brother’s wash bag with the pictures of his favourite alien action hero, Ultraman, hung on the side of the sink. The bag was so covered in dust I could hardly see Ultraman’s laser eyes. We used to sit here together, Toru and I, our knees touching. I always sat nearest the sink so I could splash him with cold water. He wore glasses, too, but not in the bath. His fear of splashing was made worse by the fact he couldn’t see it coming.
I collapsed onto my bed and did not open my eyes again until it was long past noon. It wasn’t sleep, but a sudden loss of consciousness, as if I’d been kicked out of the world for a short period of time before being thrown back into it again by the pressing urge to urinate. Disoriented by the unfamiliar whiteness of my room, the photographs of strangers in Hawaiian costume, I managed to locate my pants and stumbled out into the light. As I ran to the bathroom half-naked, hoping not to bump into my mum, my foot caught on something and I went flying across the landing. I swore loudly, before looking over my shoulder to inspect the offending article. It was a breakfast tray. The object I’d kicked was a glass of orange juice, which was now soaking into the carpet. The tray lay directly outside Toru’s locked bedroom door. There were also two empty bowls with traces of rice grains and miso paste. A balled-up tissue. Dirty chopsticks. A note, scrawled in black felt-tip pen: a list of demands: Fried chicken. Tissues. Strawberry milk. Masking tape. Turn heat UP. I held the note tightly in my hands, like a precious piece of evidence.
‘How long has he been in his room?’
My mother was standing by the front door, putting her boots on, her Lei dangling from one hand. The strong scent of perfume hung on her fur-lined coat. For a moment, with her head down and her glossy hair covering her face, I thought she could be any young Japanese woman. Thirty years old, or even twenty. She had the kind of compact, uncomplicated figure that didn’t betray her age, and it struck me that, were I a passing stranger in the street, I would have turned round for a second look.
‘I’m going out now,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back before seven.’
I handed her the list. ‘Fried chicken again,’ she sighed.
‘Mum? How long?’
‘Since you left,’ she said. ‘I wanted to discuss it with you properly, but…’
‘For a year? He hasn’t left his room for a year?’
‘Isn’t that what I said?’ she snatched the note from my hands and folded it away in her purse. ‘He didn’t have much luck with the entrance exams. He stopped going out, said his friends had all moved into dorms, no one to see, I don’t know. After a while he stopped eating with me and demanded I bring food up to him. Then one day the door was shut. There was a note for me outside saying I shouldn’t come in.’
‘Did you try and reason with him?’
‘Of course. But I also thought that, come winter, he’d have to move out of his room and come down near the heater.’
‘It’s winter now.’
My mother then did an amazing thing – something I will never forget. She wrapped the Lei over her wrist and shrugged. ‘These things happen. He’ll grow out of it,’ she said. I stared at her. I was sure my mother had gone mad.
‘You let him ruin his life quietly upstairs for a year and you don’t tell me?’
‘It’s not as easy for him as it is for you.’
‘We’re brothers, for God’s sake.’
She sighed and avoided my gaze as she made to leave, like a teenager escaping a telling-off. This precipitated a wave of anger in me I hadn’t felt in a long while. It seemed my family had all transformed into children while I was away – selfish, silly, mean little creatures living their separate lives like moles scurrying past each other in separate burrows in the dirt. I couldn’t stand it.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked, stopping the front door with my arm.
‘Let me go.’
‘Not before you tell me exactly where you’re going.’
‘You sound like your father.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Calm down.’
‘What are we going to do?’ There was a tremble in my voice which made my mother stop and look up at me. ‘We have to pull him out of there!’
‘Tell me this,’ she said, her expression suddenly hardening. ‘If we get him out of there, will you be the one looking after him?’ I stared at her. ‘I didn’t think so,’ she said and left.
Jet lag had me in its grip. I lay awake in the dark, head spinning. I heard my mother come in at midnight; the bath water running; the squeaking of skin against the basin. I heard her put a tray outside his door and I smelled the faint, tantalising scent of fried chicken. Then the lights went off and all was silent again. Was my mother right, I thought? Had life been easy for me? I tried to recall a time when I’d been desperately sad. I tried to remember the last time I’d cried, for instance. Certain memories did come to me, but I admit they were all mild. Unhappiness was nothing more than discomfort, the frustration of something which didn’t go exactly as I’d wanted. A girl not replying to a message. Missing out on a school trip because of flu. Toru, on the other hand, had been born unhappy. Any visible contentment in him was nothing more than an interval of distraction – cartoons, comics,
computer games – transporting him out of lethargy for a limited time. Teachers would always tell Toru to sit up straight or speak clearly. He had trouble reading and writing. Trouble with classmates at elementary school who’d hide his things in other children’s desks. Trouble with sports, hauling himself over the gymnastics equipment as if his body weighed three tons, as if he carried a burden on his shoulder I could not see.
Toru wasn’t always a well-behaved boy, either. He lied. He stole money from my mother. He threatened a boy in his class with a knife. The incident with the knife sounds worse than it is – or does everything always sound worse afterwards? Especially if you saw it with your own eyes. I was standing in the lunch queue at school when it happened: Toru’s threat was as calm as the hundreds of other conversations going on all around. He held the fruit knife close to the boy’s neck, and he followed it up, not with a violent stabbing, but with a bite of pickled plum. The recipient of Toru’s threat seemed to receive it equally casually at the time. He looked at the knife and walked away. (Later we realised he’d gone straight to the headmaster.) Could he really have believed Toru was serious? My little brother, with his rounded earnest spectacles, his puffy cheeks and podgy stomach? All softness. A body utterly incapable of wielding a sharp weapon. As for the money, well, I admit that was foolish. But foolishness ought to be forgiven. He’d mistakenly believed – like every teenage boy – that he was the centre of the world and that his needs should always be met.
I closed my eyes, moving from one darkness to another. And then I heard him. Toru. I sat up. It was coming from the other side of my bedroom wall. Sounds like a pet gerbil scrabbling in its cage, in thrall to nocturnal rhythms. The hushing of a futon being dragged across the floor and the rustle of bedsheets. A sniff, or something which resembled a sniff. A drawing of breath, perhaps, or a machine springing to life. I pressed my ear against the wall. More undetermined scuffles. Then the tip-tip-tip of a computer keyboard. Rising in intensity. Stopping suddenly. Starting up again. A click. Then another click. Was it a computer mouse? Or the furniture squeaking, the doorframes? I couldn’t tell. I saw him: a muffled form, hidden in a nest of bedding, with no light in his room but the laptop screen cradled between his knees. No matter how carefully I listened, however, my vision lacked clarity. I couldn’t be sure what was going on, the noises being impenetrable, random. There were no words, for instance. No phrase of music. Not a single sound which I recognised as human.
New Welsh Short Stories Page 17