‘So you decided that planning your death was the first thing you’d ever done that you enjoyed.’ I didn’t sound as if I believed her. I don’t know that I did believe her.
‘Yes.’ She looked at the floor again.
‘And so you told me you had killed yourself.’
She was silent.
‘Can you even imagine how much suffering it causes when people commit suicide? Can you imagine what goes through their family and friends’ brains?’
‘I don’t need to imagine.’
‘It’s not something you just say to people for a game, Butterfly. It’s crazy. It’s the cruellest lie I can think of.’
She didn’t say anything but looked at me with wet eyes, and I could see the shadows on her throat where it was blocking up.
‘I love you.’
‘Is that something you just say whenever, like a way of mollifying people around you?’
‘It’s what I say to you and to some other people as well. Just special people—nobody else.’
I’d seen her like this before. I couldn’t let her get away with hiding behind whatever mechanism she had for protecting herself. I wanted her to break down and vomit up everything, then she could be brand-new.
‘Was telling me that you were dead the only way you thought you could get rid of me?’
‘In a way, yes. You’re a persistent motherfucker. You don’t leave things alone. I tried to do it differently.’
‘To do what differently?’
‘I tried not killing myself. I tried to put distance between us, but you couldn’t understand. Having had my attention, you wanted it all the time, so if I disappeared, you would always come looking, calling me up or texting. You just wanted to know that I was OK. You just wanted to hear my voice and laugh about stuff or tell me about your day. It was horrible because I loved it so much and it fuelled my plan to hide treasure for you. You would follow the trail into my world of clues and writing and I would kill myself and I was excited and happy for the first time ever. But I had to really do it for it to work. I had to really kill myself. I had to believe it.’
‘So what changed? Why didn’t you just kill yourself for real? It might have been easier than all this.’
‘Two things . . .’ I’d asked her a question she knew the answer to. She’d got away with it. She wasn’t going to break down. ‘The first was that I wasn’t ready in time. I’d given myself a date. It was like a rule. I had to be ready for this deadline—March fifteenth.’
‘Why that day?’
‘It was the anniversary of something.’
‘The anniversary of what?’
‘Of my father’s death.’
‘Oh.’ I suddenly felt as though I’d strayed onto untouchable territory. I nodded.
‘And of Komori’s death too.’
‘Shit. They both died on the same day?’
‘A year apart.’
‘Hold on, you never know what date it is or what time or anything. I’m sure if you missed your suicide by a day or two, it wouldn’t have been that bad.’ I was talking as if she’d fucked up by not killing herself. Is that what I really thought?
‘I just wasn’t anywhere near ready. I knew it weeks beforehand. And then I found the door.’
‘What door?’
‘The entrance to the catacombs.’
‘By the plant in the metro?’
‘No. I found that later, after I’d been exploring. It was in the basement of my building.’
‘What?’
‘I was clearing out my stuff—every apartment in my building has its own locker-sized room in the basement, with a door and a padlock—and I saw this door that was different from the others. It was steel plated with two locks cut into it. While I was sorting through my things, a neighbour came down and I asked him whose door it was and he told me it went into the catacombs. I asked him who had the key. He said he didn’t know.’
‘So how’d you get in?’
‘I looked it up on the Internet. It took me about four hours to get it open the first time. Nowadays, so long as I can get a blank key for the lock, I can get through just about any door in five or six seconds.’
‘Where on earth do you get blank keys?’
‘Friendly locksmith. Rue Ménilmontant.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said kind of sarcastically.
‘Coming down here saved my life.’
‘How?’
‘Well, at first I was excited. I thought I was going to find an elite club of militant clock repairers, and I have since met quite a few people like that, but it was the time I spent on my own that was the best. There was something about being contained underground that made me feel good, like I was wrapped up and safe, like there was a world where I could be alive and well, and not need to die. Then I went back aboveground and I wanted to kill myself immediately; I came back underground and I was cured. From then on I knew what I was going to do. I found these rooms behind locked doors that nobody had been through for generations and decided that this was a temporary replacement for my death. I had nothing to lose. If ever it got bad again, I could always kill myself, but for now I was OK. I’d just decide every day whether I wanted to kill myself or not.’
‘Strangely, that does make sense. But it doesn’t explain why you told me you were dead. There wasn’t any need.’ I put my cigarette in the empty yoghurt pot and poured the last drop of water from my glass to make sure it was out, then pushed the pot to the middle of the table for Tomomi Ishikawa to use. She flicked in her ash and it hissed, then she accidentally blew smoke in my face. She wafted an apologetic hand.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know what?’
‘I suppose I do know,’ she sighed. ‘Part of the plan was for you to find my notebooks. I knew I wanted it to be you. You were the only person in the world who I wanted to read them. That was because you have a dark and twisted mind and I love you. And it’s because I needed—I wanted—to share those notebooks. I wanted somebody else to know what was inside. They are the weight I have been carrying around all my life. But for you to read the books, you and I could no longer live in the same world. I wouldn’t be able to stand your pity or your questions. There just wasn’t room for both of us. I had been planning to kill myself anyway. Telling you I was dead seemed like an obvious solution. It wouldn’t change anything for you and it would mean that I could carry on for as long as I felt like—which I didn’t think would be very long anyway.’
‘Well, now I’ve read your books, and I know that you’re living a second life, underground, after death. What now?’
‘I don’t know, Ben Constable. Your curious wandering mind has messed up everything, and I love you all the more for it.’
‘But you wanted me to come here. You wrote “Down here, BC” by the plant in the metro.’
‘That was before you’d read the books. I was pretty confused. I wanted saving and I wanted you to know me at the same time. But it was one or the other, the treasure hunt, or coming to find me. You chose the treasure hunt and I erased the signs. You weren’t supposed to do both.’
And I had this vague feeling of understanding, like I could see a blurred form emerging out of the mist. ‘Oh,’ I said, and there was quiet for an eternity as my brain put it all together. ‘I really am sorry. You are the strangest person I have ever met, Butterfly.’
‘I guess I know that.’
‘The thing is, once I knew you were alive, I had to know that you were all right. I had to understand. My brain couldn’t just leave it at that. There were too many questions left unanswered.’
She pushed her chair back, came and stood in front of me and took hold of my hands; I stood up too.
‘I really never meant for any of this to upset you,’ she said. ‘It was a game for you and me to play together; it was an adventure. I was just so wound up in what was going on in my own sad, twisted brain that I forgot to think about how you would feel. I’m no good at this sort of thing.’ Her
fingers played with mine.
‘What sort of thing?’
‘This sort of thing.’ She put a hand behind my head and pulled it towards her and kissed my mouth. She’d never done that before.
26
A Sticky Situation
Oh. So this is the ending. After all that’s happened we kiss because, contrary to everything I believed, this is just about: sex, or maybe this is love even. Perhaps it’s just a story of two people talking a long and complicated route to getting it on. It’s not what I was expecting, though. It felt good on my lips, but I was disappointed. A kissing end seemed almost cheap and lacking in imagination. This surely wasn’t the point. Part of me wanted to push away, fight for something more intricate, something richer. But perhaps I was wrong. Maybe it was kissing that would save everything.
I kissed her back and our fingers touched again, delicately dancing round each other, and my heart thumped and my body ached. She led me through one of the doorways, left and then right, and I dragged my feet in the dark so as not to trip. I couldn’t see. Nothing, just fingers touching my fingers, and a kind of sad joy that I’d found my friend and that she was alive. I wanted her to be alive. The acoustics changed and we were in another room now. She led my hands to a wall, cold, and turned me round, pushing me backwards, and her hand reached for my face and her tongue kissed my mouth again.
‘Wait,’ she whispered, ‘I’ll be back in one second,’ and she stepped away from me.
Excitement. Sex. Brain. Wait a minute . . . I held my breath; I could feel her backing away. Adrenaline. What’s happening? Panic. Shit, shit, shit. Wait. Think clearly. No. Don’t wait. Move. No noise. Move. Move now. I reached out my hand to the left. Holding my breath, trying to keep my thoughts quiet. OK, a few small breaths. Small, don’t move the air. I bent my knees slightly, shifted my weight. I stepped, one tiny step, and another. No noise. I could hear her still moving away from me. My arms relaxed, they could move fast. My fingers felt the air, my body listened. Balance. No noise. I heard her hand brush on something, feeling the shape of something, lining up, preparing a movement. Bend knees, no breathing, another step, diagonal towards her, to the side. Feel the air—don’t forget she is small; I am lightning. Let her move, she will tell you where she is. Sudden movement (Sorry, Butterfly; I fight), loud noise, metal screech, metal hitting metal, I flinched to protect my eyes, a click, I knew that sound, it was a padlock. I was standing still—great fighting, Ben. All that had happened was she had closed a gate and locked a lock.
‘Butterfly?’ She jumped; I wasn’t where she thought I should be.
‘Sorry,’ she whispered. She was on the other side of the gate.
‘That’s OK,’ I said, and it was. I was alive. She walked away and I wonder whether those were the most exciting four seconds of my life.
* * *
I felt my way around the room. It was about three metres by three metres and entirely empty. I could touch the ceiling with the palms of my hands if I stood on tiptoe. There was one doorway with a padlocked jailor’s gate. The top hinge had been fitted upside down so the gate couldn’t be lifted off its fixings. There was nothing in my pockets. Anything of interest I may have had was in my bag in the other room, plus my cigarettes and lighter, which were on the table. I paced round and tried to prepare my brain for being patient, but after two minutes I was bored.
‘Butterfly!’ I called out (not angry, not shouting). There was nothing. ‘Butterfly, can I have my cigarettes?’
Suddenly I wanted to smoke so badly I could have cried. Nothing. How long was I going to be here? I did the thing which you should never do when you have to wait and started counting. One, two, three, four . . . conscious of every second passing, pretending to be calm. Just wait, I said to myself. She’ll come in a bit. A thousand is sixteen minutes and forty seconds.
‘Butterfly, I don’t want you to forget about me. I’m hungry and thirsty, and a bit cold, and I want to smoke and I can’t see anything, and I could do with going to the toilet, I mean I could hold that for a while, but not forever, and I think you don’t want me to die here, and I wish you’d come and talk to me some more. I’m sorry I was being difficult and trying to make you say stuff you didn’t want to talk about. We could talk about other stuff if you want.’
One thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and three, one thousand and four . . . I needed some temporary strategy for not going mental and I feared that I was going to go mental very quickly. I hadn’t even been here for half an hour and I couldn’t trust my brain anymore. I lay down and stopped myself counting. Then I heard the door that we had come through. I heard it bang closed through the stone tunnels and the dark. Tomomi Ishikawa had gone.
* * *
At four thousand six hundred and twenty-two I heard her bump the lock. She came in clumsily, carrying things. I waited. She was moving around. And then she spoke, not close by, but calling to me from another room.
‘I had to go out and get some stuff. I wasn’t really prepared for visitors.’
I didn’t reply and she carried on pottering about. Then a couple of minutes later a torch beam shone past the gate, illuminating my cell.
‘Ben?’
‘Yeah,’ I whispered.
‘Look, you won’t like this, but I don’t really know how else to do it.’
‘Do what?’
‘Come up to the gate and look. I’ve got a gun.’
I put my face up to the bars and there she was, smiling and waving a pistol at me. Where the hell had she got a pistol from?
‘You need to move back from the gate and stand in the corner with your face to the wall and your hands in the air.’
‘Jesus, Butterfly!’
‘I just want to open the gate for a moment and you’re bigger and stronger than me. I don’t want you to overpower me, and I don’t want to shoot you, so you have to do what I say. OK?’
I walked to the corner and put my hands in the air. I heard a key and her cosh before the lock clicked open. She put something in the room. The gate closed and the lock clicked. ‘OK, you can move now.’
On the floor by the gate was a bucket with a lid, inside was a roll of toilet paper, a blanket and my bag. Tomomi Ishikawa backed away from the gate and leaned against the wall opposite. ‘Your cigarettes are in the bag,’ she said.
I don’t know where the calm comes from at times like these (not that this sort of thing happens to me often), but there’s a kind of resignation to not being in control that makes everything all right, once you let go of the idea that you could make a difference. It was nice having the light and it was nice having Butterfly there.
‘You know you’ve gone mental, don’t you, Butterfly?’ I said. ‘You can’t take people prisoner. It’s the first sign of being utterly and dangerously deluded.’
‘I’m buying time. I need to work out how to get us both out of this.’
‘That’s easy. You put the gun down, open the gate, and then we walk out into the sunshine and find a nice terrace and drink a coffee. None of this will have happened. It’ll be a story, just like your other stories, except in this one nobody dies.’
‘You think that everything can be explained away, don’t you? That eventually everything will all become clear and then we will be able to laugh and it’ll all be better.’
‘I’d like to understand what the hell is going on, but I’ve suspected for quite a while that nothing you could say would satisfy me. And when I really think about it I know that we don’t need to understand stuff to move on. We can be whatever we want. We don’t need answers.’
‘Hey, that would be beautiful if it was true that you were so cool. But you’re making judgements all the time, trying to decide what’s true and what’s not true. When I tell you lies you believe them, when I tell you things that happened you assume they’re lies. All your behaviour towards me is based on the presumption that everything I wrote in my notebooks was made up. Right?’
‘I . . .’ My speech stumbled, a
s my ready-made answer didn’t work anymore.
‘Is that what you believe?’ she asked.
I was certain that everything she had written was fiction. I’d had moments of doubt, but I knew it was made up. But when she shut me in this room I was ready to fight for my life. This was a major inconsistency—a smart lawyer would take me apart in seconds. What did I actually believe?
‘I don’t know what I believe, Butterfly. I don’t think what you wrote is word for word true and that leaves the possibility that it was all fiction. I can’t imagine you really killing those people. I think they’re fantasies, where you put yourself in positions of power, where the boss is the small girl and she has the power to decide who will die and when. I like the idea of you taking back control in a life that was laid out for you. But I don’t think you really did those things and I don’t understand why you locked me in this dungeon.’
‘You ask me questions like “why?” but you don’t listen to the answers. To understand why you’re in this room, you have to imagine that I did do all those things: suffocate, slash, stab, burn, poison . . . Imagine now that somebody knew it was me—that I’d killed six people—and that I’d successfully gone into hiding, but that person had come and found me and now wanted me to come out of hiding and lead a normal, happy life. I think even in your determinedly blind innocence, you can see that this simply cannot happen. For the first time in my life, I’m actually interested in living and you are inconveniently in my way.’
‘But you told me everything was lies.’
‘What?’
‘One time when you were drunk you told me everything you said was lies.’
‘Well, I don’t remember that, but I would have thought it was perfectly obvious that it’s not the case. There have been lies and there have been truths.’
There was nothing I could say to this. I had thought she might attack me. I had moved to defend myself. I must think it possible that she killed those people and if she had, and I knew about it, I could see that I actually was a very real inconvenience. I rummaged in my bag and found my cigarettes.
Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa Page 25