“Yes, I met him,” I say, getting up. “Last week. Monday last week.”
“So you said you’re going to come and watch a movie?”
I don’t remember saying anything like that. I’m about to say, No, I didn’t say that, but Tutti talks first.
“My dad says on Friday night. Can you come?”
“Maybe. I have to ask. What movie?”
“It’s already decided.”
“OK. You said night. What time does night mean?”
“Obviously night means all of the time after you’ve eaten dinner,” says Tutti with a face that says she can’t believe I don’t know that already.
“But I don’t think I can come for all of the night.”
“I don’t mean stay all night. You asked me what night means. I just told you the meaning of night. That’s all,” says Tutti, sounding a little annoyed.
“Oh,” I say.
“I mean we should spend part of the night watching a movie,” she says, back to her usual grinning face. “After you eat dinner at home, come over. We’re not going to do anything else. Just watch a movie.”
After dinner on Friday, there’s going to be a movie watching at Tutti’s house. Can I go? I ask Mum. Her: What time? Me: After dinner. Her: You can go as long as you don’t stay too late. Me: OK. And then, even though she doesn’t ask me anything else, I add, for no particular reason, It’s me and Doo-Wop. Her: OK, I think I have their telephone number, but could you get it from them just in case, and let me know? she asks, looking at the screen of her mobile phone. I don’t know how I’m supposed to be able to find out anything right now, but she sits there staring at the screen and doesn’t look up, and then finally says, It’s work. Something’s come up. Go take a bath. And she smiles.
In bed I close my eyes and think about how long it’s been since I went to see Ms Ice Sandwich. Well, to tell the truth, these days before I go to sleep I’ve been thinking about nothing else, so I don’t really need to try to count how long it’s been, because I already know, but still I count one more time from the beginning, and today makes exactly one week. If I don’t go tomorrow, it’s going to be eight days that I haven’t seen Ms Ice Sandwich. Eight whole days. Compared to the whole summer when I saw Ms Ice Sandwich almost every day. I sigh, feeling funny inside.
All the time when I’m walking, eating lunch at school, staring at the toes of my shoes, anywhere I go, I’ve been wondering why I stopped going to see Ms Ice Sandwich. And in my usual way, I’ve tried to write it down. What I’ve managed to figure out is it’s partly because of that day in the classroom when I overheard those girls talking about her. After that whenever I thought about going to the supermarket and seeing Ms Ice Sandwich’s face, it’s not that I was afraid exactly, and I don’t really know why, but the feeling of happiness that I used to feel when I saw her, I kind of know that I won’t feel it again. Ever since, I’ve had this feeling of something strange pulling me back, and I didn’t go to see her the next day, or the day after that. Even so, Ms Ice Sandwich’s face is still really clear in my mind, I don’t even have to try to remember, because those enormous eyes are always there, and I can still stare at those big, electric ice-blue eyelids. On nights like this I sit at the kotatsu table in Grandma’s room and draw Ms Ice Sandwich’s face in my sketchbook. In real life, our eyes never met—not once—but my drawing somehow has always her standing some place and looking right at me.
On Friday night, I take two bags of popcorn and head over to Tutti’s house. It’s the first time for me ever to go to a girl’s house, and when I bend down to unlace my shoes, the back of my neck gets a bit hot. Tutti takes me into the living room, which has a sofa and smells of curry. I want to tell her I’ve just had curry for dinner too, but I can’t find the right moment and I end up not saying anything.
“Let’s start watching.”
Besides a TV screen there’s a bookshelf and a piano with a dust cover over it and a fish tank (I can’t see any fish in it though) and a cabinet against the wall, and all over the carpet, which is a kind of dark cream colour, are piles of magazines and books. There’s a tall Christmas tree standing in the corner, a silver star at the top leaning to one side. I recognize Tutti’s lunch bag hanging on one of the lower branches.
Beyond, in the kitchen, wearing fuzzy blue slippers that look like mops, I see Tutti’s dad; he waves a hand in my direction, and then brings us a soft drink.
“OK. Let’s get started.”
Tutti puts a DVD into the machine and clicks off the living-room lights. She squeezes into the middle of the short sofa with me on the right and her dad on the left, and we sit for a few moments silently staring at the dark screen.
It’s a foreign movie with the title of Heat. The story is there’s this gang of professional robbers, and because they’re robbers they go around robbing different places, and because of that they get chased by the police, and they escape, and then they get chased again, and I don’t think there’s any need to make all this effort to watch because it’s the same old story as in those movies they sometimes show on the TV in the evenings. I can’t help wondering what’s so interesting, and I keep sneaking a glance at Tutti next to me, and she’s completely focused on the movie and doesn’t notice I’m looking at her. Every time there’s some movement on the screen, a tiny bit of light flickers in the wet part of Tutti’s eyes.
In the film the men talk and get angry, and then there’s this other man, and a woman comes and they have an argument and swear at each other, and there’s this girl about our age or a little bit older who cries, and there are loads of cars, and they drive, and they get angry, and they escape and they run, and then there’s a chase again, and it goes on like this over and over again. I’m trying to watch as carefully as I can, but from time to time a yawn escapes and I strain my eyes trying to read the display on the DVD player to see how much time is left, but I can never quite make out the little numbers.
Just around maybe the middle of the film, the gang of robbers decides to do one last job, but it doesn’t go well, and they get into a really wild gunfight with the police. The instant they start shooting, Tutti’s whole body is suddenly bubbling with energy—I can almost feel it just from sitting next to her—and she leans forward in her seat, and I watch her reflected in the light, hardly blinking, as if she doesn’t want to miss even a split second of what is happening, her eyes gleaming as she takes it all in.
The scene is really loud, the men keep firing like crazy at both friends and enemies, it doesn’t seem to matter. Glass smashing, bullets hitting cars, and on top of that people screaming. In the middle of all this, the robbers are hauling bags of stolen banknotes on their shoulders, trying to get to the getaway car, and they’re desperate and firing their guns over and over, but as there are far more police than robbers, and more policemen appearing all the time, one of the robbers gets shot and falls to the ground, and someone else is injured and tries to crawl away but then stops moving, and only two members of the gang manage to escape. It must hurt getting shot by one of those long black guns, I think. Blood comes spurting out, and I wonder how that feels. I wonder how heavy the bags were stuffed with all that money. When they use the money will somebody know that it was stolen? I’m thinking about all these things as I try to keep watching all the action and confusion on the screen. Finally the gunfight ends and the car drives away, and then all of a sudden it’s a completely different scene and Tutti lets out a big sigh, grabs the remote, and pauses the DVD.
“Isn’t that cool?”
Tutti’s face is shiny with the light from the TV screen, one half of it is sort of blue, and she looks kind of different from the usual Tutti. Her nostrils are a little wider, and she is very excited.
“I really love that scene!” she says confidently and looks right into my face. “What did you think?”
“Well,” I say, shifting my bum a bit on the sofa. “It was a bit, kind of, violent.”
Tutti looks at me like she’s saying what the hell
was that? and sighs. Then she makes her eyes all narrow and glares at me.
“Well, obviously it’s violent,” she says, turning right round to face me and speaking super slowly and carefully as if she’s making sure I understand every word. “Anyone can see that. I mean the sounds. It’s the sounds that are really awesome, and also what they do with their bodies when they shoot the guns.”
“The sound was definitely awesome,” I say.
“And the shape of their bodies?”
“The shape of their bodies was awesome too.”
“Right?”
In my mind I’m hoping she isn’t about to ask me exactly what part was awesome, and my heart’s thumping, but it looks like she’s satisfied with my answers, and she laughs happily.
“I’ve been watching that gunfight scene at least twice a week for years now.”
“Honest?”
“Honest to God. Anyway I just love that gun battle so much, I can’t stop watching it.”
“Is it because you want to do it that you like it so much?” I ask, without really thinking.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I thought it might be because you want to try running around shooting a gun like that.”
Tutti stared at me, her mouth open in shock. “No! No way! How could you even think something like that? The point is, even I don’t know why I love that scene so much.”
I nod without saying anything.
“I’ve seen tons of movies with gunfights, and they’re all amazing, but I haven’t seen any with such awesome sound. And I like that they really give it all they got.”
“Yeah, they really give it all they got,” I say, nodding gravely.
“Anyway, I like it so much I can do this,” says Tutti, standing up and moving several piles of magazines from around the sofa to the side of the room, clearing the widest path between the sofa and the TV.
“Are you ready? Watch.”
She picks up the remote and presses the REWIND button until she’s got the disc to the right place, then presses the PLAY button and tosses the remote onto the sofa. Here we go, she says, and the very next moment that the gunfight scene starts, Tutti is in front of the screen—I’m not sure how to explain this—but she’s begun to act out the actions of the people in the film, and every single one of her movements is exactly, absolutely perfectly, the same as on the screen behind her, and her timing is amazing.
I’m totally stunned and I sit there watching Tutti with my mouth hanging open. She syncs her movements with the sound of the gunshots on the TV, and posing her body in the same way as each of the robbers and the policemen as the screen changes, she keeps on shooting. She stretches out her arm and blasts her gun over and over, then in the next instant crouches down to avoid the fire, throws herself into a body roll, then just like the people in the movie she does this clatter clatter clatter thing with her gun, then brings it back up high, braces her legs, and starts firing even more furiously. Tutti’s eyes as she glares at her enemy are incredible. Of course, you can’t see a gun, but there is the sound of Tutti firing, her performing each person’s movements with absolute precision, and she’s playing several different roles, going from one to the next without stopping. She never gets lost, she’s acting every sound, every person, everything is there in her movements. It’s perfect, maybe too perfect. In fact, seeing how perfect she is, I begin to feel a little bit scared and I want to shout enough! or stop!, and the words have climbed up into my throat but I swallow them back down, and I don’t know why, but I can’t take my eyes off Tutti. The gunfight scene is long. It’s so long that for some reason I find myself wanting to cry, and I suddenly remember Tutti’s dad, and I look over and I see he’s got his head tipped back, his mouth open, and his neck is on the back of the sofa and he’s fast asleep. He looks exactly as if he’s just been shot by Tutti, and this thought makes me feel even more like crying, and the gun battle is getting even faster and furiouser, and as I watch Tutti, as she continues to fit her movements perfectly to the sound and the action, I realize that I’m kneeling on the sofa with both of my hands over my chest, my fingers tightly locked together.
“That was awesome!” I say, and I really mean it.
“Yeah, not bad,” replies Tutti, with a so-so kind of expression, but then she looks at me and grins.
Tutti offers to walk with me as far as where the pop vending machine is, so the two of us set out side by side along the street, which looks like a completely different place at night without anybody around. It’s right before the end of summer and you can see tiny black insects buzzing around the hazy white light of the street lights. Tutti has made me perform the gunfight scene with her, and I was really nervous but I gave it a try and I don’t know how it happened but I got so into it that it ended up being around ten thirty by the time I left her house. Tutti’s dad slept all through our scene, he woke up in time to see us off at the door, but then he went straight back to the living room.
“You might have some talent there, I’m not sure yet, but anyway, why don’t you come and practise the gunfight with me again?”
“OK!”
It’s right then I suddenly remember that Tutti doesn’t have a mother. I think of the house I was just in with its messy living room, and Tutti’s dad asleep on the sofa with his mouth open. I’ve never heard anything directly from Tutti about her mum, we’ve never talked about it, but somehow everyone in the class knows that her mother died of an illness when Tutti was very young. I’m pretty sure that everyone in the class must know about my dad too, but not one person has ever asked me about him, so I’ve never talked about him to anyone. As I’m walking with Tutti I start to feel like talking about all that, I don’t know why. There doesn’t feel like there’s all that much to say, and yet I still want to say something about it. But what does talking about it mean exactly, and what should I start by asking, and would the conversation go something like you don’t have a mum, right? and then that would be the end, so really it’d make no difference whether we talked about it or not, and this is what I’m thinking, and in the end I realize we’ve arrived at the vending machine without me ever managing to say anything.
“Thanks for inviting me to watch the movie,” I say. “It was fun.”
“I had fun too.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“You know that was the first time I ever showed me doing that to anyone besides my dad.”
“Really? You know if you did that at school, everyone would think you were totally cool.”
“But everyone’s so good at dance and stuff. And I think probably anybody could do it.”
“No way!” I say, very seriously. “If you’re talking about dance, you mean what those three girls do? What you just showed me, they can’t even compare to you. What you did is so totally way, way more awesome than anything they do.”
Tutti looks a little embarrassed. Then, moving her mouth in a strange way, maybe on purpose, she says, Really? Do you really think so? in a tiny voice, and I say, Yes, I do, really.
“Well, then you’d better come back again and watch. He’s the best—Al Pacino!” she says, a big grin on her face.
“What’s that?”
“You know—the film we just saw—Lieutenant Hanna. Al Pacino plays him.”
“Oh, it’s somebody’s name. I thought it might be how you say goodbye in some other country.”
“That’d be cool too.”
As I start home she waves at me and says, Al Pacino! I raise my hand and wave back and say, Al Pacino! And then all of a sudden it seems very funny and we both burst out laughing at the exact same time, and we get louder and louder until we’re both bent double laughing our heads off. And as we’re laughing, lights appear out of nowhere and get bigger and closer, and a car roars past us.
“OK, I’m going home,” says Tutti, panting, catching her breath, and right at that moment I decide I’m going to talk to her about it, well, I don’t exactly decide, because there isn’t even a second to think
about it, but in that moment all that comes out of my mouth are two words.
“About sandwiches…”
“Sandwiches?”
“No, not sandwiches exactly, I mean, that shop inside the supermarket where they sell sandwiches, that corner where they sell them…”
I swallow hard and try to keep going, but I don’t really know how to explain, so I just go silent. Tutti looks straight at me and says, Yes, I know it, then she stands there waiting for me to find the next words.
“There’s this woman who works at that sandwich counter.”
“Yes, there is.”
“There is, right?”
“There is.”
“There is. And I call that woman Ms Ice Sandwich.”
“OK,” says Tutti, nodding.
“I heard a rumour the other day at school, you know, about Ms Ice Sandwich.”
Tutti thinks for a moment. “About her face?”
“Yes,” I say. I’ve been staring at the ground the whole time, but now I look up at Tutti. “Well… So… someone was talking about her face, and I’m not sure what it means.”
“What it means?”
“Yeah, like what they meant.”
“Perhaps I should ask, what is it between you and Ms Ice Sandwich? I mean, do you like have some kind of a relationship?”
Being asked about a relationship makes me silent again. I don’t have any kind of a relationship with her, have never said anything to her except order a sandwich—and here I am wondering why I’m even having this conversation with Tutti, I don’t have any idea. Just as I’m thinking this, and feeling like there’s nothing more I can do to explain, out comes from me this strange sigh that I don’t understand. Then I say, It’s not exactly a relationship, but… and then I break off… and then I try to explain about how I went to see Ms Ice Sandwich through the summer, and about how she does her job, and all about those cool eyes, and everything.
Ms Ice Sandwich Page 4