The Accidental Recluse

by Tom McCulloch

  We sat in silence for too long and finally escaped to MacIntyre’s Bay, Anna and I arm in arm what felt like solidarity more than affection, watching Erin playing with a red kite that dipped and flitted like old memories. It had been so long since I had spent any extended time with them.

  It was Japan where we truly reconnected. Something in the quietude of the people, perhaps, that stillness even among Tokyo’s seethe, where I felt an incongruous sense of space and distance. Here was a place of reflection, somewhere to rest the gaze, awhile, on each other.

  We all felt it. Australia and New Zealand were jettisoned. We went first to Shibu, days of rain on steep, wet streets, the yellow lamps of elegant ryokans behind cypress, calling to each other from our respective sections of the public onsen. Then on to the sake shops of Takayama’s dark timbered streets, yakitori from a booth that Erin insisted we visit again and again, returning to Kyoto and a step back in time to Gion by night, ghost-geishas in soft lantern light, spilling laughter from the little restaurants lining the Shirakawa canal, where Anna and I stood on an arched bridge and she fell in love, though not with me. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘is where I want to live.’

  Yet I wondered what here was. Japan looked in all directions at the same time and never seemed sure where to let the gaze rest. We dazzled ourselves in 360 neon, ate hamburgers in the disorientating pseudo-authenticity of a fifties-styled American diner called Speakeasy, strolled afterwards by the river, along the Philosopher’s Walk in the dusk shadows of a different, deeper Japan, old men and drooping trees, a trace of incense and then a Zen temple emerging from the gloom. I glimpsed Sakyamuni on the altar and asked if I could live here, the gentle eyes posing both question and answer, no more strangeness here than elsewhere, Johnny-san. You can spend a lifetime in a place you were born and never feel part of it, or a minute in somewhere you’ve never been and know that it has been waiting for you your whole life.

  I told the board I was taking a year’s leave. Fatty became interim CEO of Breda Inc. Leo took on Breda Pictures. I don’t think they believed I would come back. When I did, the world had changed.

  The bespoke tour specialist we had been using to navigate the confusion of Japan found us a full-time interpreter.

  Akira Minamoto was twenty-two, fresh from a linguistics degree at Stanford. I immediately took to this gentle young man with the bum-fluff moustache, who was happy to act as chaperone for Erin, grateful, I think, for delaying his entry into the anonymous life-grind of the salary-man.

  Akira liaised with the real estate companies and Anna drew up her shortlist. We spent a week contemplating a forest bungalow in Nagano, the duplex opulence of an apartment in Azabu, Tokyo, and a stunning old, wood-built kyōmachiya town house near Daitokuji temple in Kyoto. Yet in the end it was a seventeenth-century ryokan in Shuzenji, two hours south-west of Tokyo.

  It was raining as we were shown around.

  The ryokan sat in a halo of dense forest, separated from the house on three sides by a long, tapering pond. Anna’s eyes lit up. She instantly adored the bright spaces of the tatami-floored rooms with their sliding shōji screens. She insisted we be taken in the rowing boat to the small island that housed a little Shinto shrine. It was the elegant combination of openness and enclosure which, I am sure, gave her such a reassuring sense of comfort at Shuzenji.

  We enrolled Erin at the American School in Chofu, Tokyo. Akira was retained as a driver and he took her back and forth every day until, exhausted by the epic commute, Erin demanded we move to the capital.

  I felt this was more a reaction to Anna’s shifting attention. The overly cosseting mother that Erin professed to hate but secretly adored was rediscovering herself in the quiet of the ryokan. She was writing again, stranger in a strange land pieces that would eventually be taken on by The Japan Times, and painting too, an ink-wash class at the local college. I think Erin expected Anna to drop it all but she didn’t, arranging instead for Erin to stay in Tokyo during the week.

  Anna had settled. Into that quietude I would be admitted, now and then, to share cautious intimacies.

  ‘If I told you this was the happiest I have ever been, would you believe me?’

  Things like that.

  It was December. We were sitting at a table on the decking separating the house from the pond, holding back the cold with a bottle of Suntory ten-year-old. A fabric canopy angling down from the first-floor balcony sheltered us from thickly falling snow. I stared at the lanterns running along the house, votive light becoming softer. I could believe anything on a night like this.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s not that I’ve never been happy. I may even have been happier, a few times.’ She reached a hand out from under the parasol and let the snow land on her palm. ‘But it was always a bit like this, see, it always melted away . . . Profound or what, eh?’ She rubbed her wet hand on my face.

  I wiped my face, poured us a refill from the emptying bottle and raised a glass. ‘I’ll take it!’ I announced.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your fierce affection.’

  She giggled and raised her glass. ‘To fierce affection.’ Then, after a moment, ‘Do you think my daughter hates me?’

  ‘I think your daughter is thirteen.’

  ‘She probably won’t like the painting.’

  ‘Of course she will.’

  ‘No, I don’t think I’ll bother.’

  I looked again at the inkbrush painting on the table, intended as a Christmas present. A winter landscape, two rolling hills to the right and a smaller one to the left, a winding river between. Two dark figures on the extreme left held hands. It took skill to create something so simple. She’d spent all day on it, sitting under the eaves of the little Shinto pagoda on the island in the pond, wrapped in her red duffel coat. She went there daily now, snow or rain, rowing across.

  ‘I don’t think she wants to be here.’

  ‘She’ll be fine. When I was her age I wanted to be a cowboy. Helluva way from Inveran to Dodge City.’

  ‘The Bandy-Legged Kid!’

  ‘You betcha, perfect for riding a horse.’

  ‘Anyway, what I mean—’

  ‘I know what you mean. I’m just saying we could give her all she wanted and she’d find a way to complain.’

  ‘You think we’re doing ok? Are we good parents?’

  She registered my surprise. I never allowed myself to think of myself as Erin’s parent. ‘Far as I can see.’

  ‘But you’re blind as a bat!’

  ‘So what’s your excuse?’

  Such was the pattern of our intimacy. Deflecting in humour what we might have discovered, had she the patience to wait as I searched for the right word and if I believed I could ever find it.

  ‘There’s still plenty you see, though,’ she added, cryptically, reaching across and squeezing my hand.

  I had a sudden, disorienting feeling that Duke was close. I knew as I looked at Anna that she was thinking about him as well. Then, just as quickly, he was gone.

  When we first moved to Japan we talked about Duke a lot, what he would have thought about living here, would he have enjoyed it, trying to establish his presence in a place with absolutely no connection to him.

  ‘You know what we should do,’ I said, ‘when Erin breaks up for the holidays?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Go skiing. She loved that trip they went on. Fancy it? I’ll get Akira on the case.’

  ‘You’ve never skied in your life.’

  ‘Rather that than have her moping around.’

  ‘How long do you want to go for?’

  ‘Weeks. Months. I want a log cabin and a big fire and I want to drink whisky and read you haikus.’

  Her smile flickered, faded. I watched her gaze move to the island, the outline of the low pagoda just visible on the edge of the light from the ryokan. I thought I knew what she was concerned about.

  ‘Don’t worry. You can paint there, same as here. A new perspective.’
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br />   Niseko was a cluster of villages at the bottom of Mount Yotei on the island of Hokkaido. We bumped north to Sapporo on a tin-can turbo-prop, white-knuckle air pocket drops over the Tsugaru Strait. The journey was almost as nerve-jangling as the high-speed zip to Niseko in a Toyota LiteAce van, a custard yellow lozenge skittering between high walls of snow on both sides of the road.

  Erin softened. Perhaps it was the terror of the journey, like some kind of shock-therapy, or simply being somewhere new. She transformed into a little girl again, for a while, delighting in her mother’s presence and mine, laughing at my stiff-limbed snowplough as she carved elegantly past.

  We spent the evenings in our cabin, afternoons too after Anna twisted her back and skiing was too painful, despite the codeine. Board games by the fire or just reading, watching strange game shows. When Erin slept we talked about where we were going and where we had come from, going to meet it again, Inveran, out there beyond the glistening snow on the edge of the light.

  ‘Do you think we’re running away?’ she asked.

  ‘Staying in the same place can be much the same.’

  ‘I used to think that I’d always end up back there, one day. I’m not so sure now. Maybe it’s too much like admitting your time is up. I had a cat that did that once, took itself off to die. Imagine knowing that.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just a reconnecting.’

  ‘But reconnecting means that you’ve lost something, misplaced it. I’ve never felt that. I feel closer to home than I ever have. You think about it more, when you’re not there. It becomes more present, somehow.’

  ‘I wonder what Erin thinks about when she thinks of home.’

  ‘That’s what we’re building at Shuzenji. A home for her.’

  She leaned towards me on the sofa. Rested her head on my shoulder so I could not see her eyes.

  ‘Me and you,’ she repeated.

  She lifted her head and offered her lips, her eyes still closed. Me and you, I thought as I kissed her.

  We spent another two weeks in the cabin, then returned to Shuzenji. Erin’s hostility continued to slip away; perhaps she was simply getting older and more mature, or even starting to value the home that Anna said we were trying to build for her, me and you. Day on day, Anna would row out to her island to paint. I even started to take an interest in Breda again, made a few phone calls, before the morning I realised the ‘you’ I had not seen in Anna’s eyes was not me at all.

  It was a Saturday, a steady wind in the cypress. Anna had gone to town with Erin. I was at my desk.

  I had a new idea for a film, The Bruce, a hallucinatory alternative take on the life of the famous Scottish king, a swirl of images that excited me with possibilities but hadn’t settled into coherence. This was my own doing. I’d sit down to work but as soon as an idea began to form I would quickly let it go, as if unwilling to disappoint myself with the gap between ideal and representation.

  So, as usual, I was prowling, tumbler of Suntory to hand. First my bedroom, facing the bed that Anna and I shared most nights now, a source of satisfaction but apprehension as I waited for her mood to shift, as it inevitably would, and she returned to her own room. Then into the kitchen, looking out the long window, where a flurry of blossom-like pink snow suddenly blew past, so fleeting and gone it might never have happened. Onto my favourite room of all in which to kill time, the one we called Kan’ami, after the famous Noh actor. I stood in front of the masks we had started to collect, three mounted rows on the wall of empty-eyed, staring faces. I went through them one by one, trying to mimic their expressions, gurning and grinning as the wind gusted and the timbers of the old ryokan groaned like disappointed punters.

  I took the hint and went outside, onto the wooden deck. As I looked across the pond to the little island with the shrine I realised I hadn’t been there since we first looked round the ryokan, almost a year ago. I thought of it as Anna’s island, a private place she returned from with ever more impressive paintings. If she had been here I would not have gone.

  It only took two pulls on the oars to reach the little wooden jetty. I tied the boat to the mooring pole. She’d cleared the weeds from between the cobbles, and weeded on both sides of the narrow stone path. Fresh-planted geraniums and pansies lit a multicoloured way to the shrine.

  I passed two slender stone pillars, about head-height. Unknown kanji carvings, scoured clean, scrolled vertically on both. Then the shrine, a heavily weathered wooden structure built about two feet off the ground, the walkway running around all four sides reached by three stone steps. A traditional sloping pagoda feathered out over the internal walls, plain solid wood at the base and anonymous, bleached carvings at the top, a lattice strip in-between.

  I peered inside and saw Duke, grinning.

  The framed photograph stood in the middle of the small, square altar, a little jar full of incense leavings directly in front. On each side of the photo two stubby white candles had been lit. At the back of the altar were two identical, mottled ceramic statues of a white fox with a big, bushy tail. Kitsune were mostly benevolent spirits. But they could sometimes be tricksters.

  I could only laugh. I turned my back to Duke and sat down on the wooden platform. ‘Fair enough, big bro.’

  Hours later, mother and daughter now returned from their trip, I still felt that odd light-heartedness.

  I gave Anna a long hug. ‘I’ve been to the island,’ I whispered.

  I felt her instant tension. One long, stretched moment later she stepped back and looked at me. ‘I knew you would.’ She looked at me with such affection that I felt a lump in my throat.

  ‘I thought I’d be angry.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s nothing that I’ll ever be able to do about it, you know. He’ll always be there.’

  ‘Closer than I thought.’

  ‘See! You are angry.’

  ‘No. I’m not.’

  ‘What do you want me to do, Johnny, pretend he didn’t exist?’

  ‘No. I’m not saying that. I’m not saying anything. I just found my brother’s shrine, that’s all. I thought you were past all that.’

  ‘All that?’

  ‘Yeah, all that.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing.’ The thing is I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t angry in the slightest, I was even smiling. ‘I feel like he’s still watching us, like he knows everything that’s going on, like he always did.’

  Anna was looking at me strangely. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said “he knows everything that’s going on, like he always did”.’

  ‘I mean how he knew about me and you. The waterfall.’

  ‘You told him that.’ The colour had drained from her face. ‘When?’

  ‘Well . . . I dunno. A long time ago.’

  ‘I know it’s a long time ago, I mean when?’

  I saw Duke’s photograph and smelled incense. I held her gaze. ‘The night before he killed himself.’

  She put a hand to her mouth. As if she was going to be sick. She looked horrified. I watched her hurry out of the kitchen but said nothing. I poured myself another and turned to the window, waiting for pink blossom to tumble again on the wind and this time I would know I had truly seen it.

  She hadn’t come to bed by the time I’d fallen asleep. When I woke up the next morning I assumed she’d slept in her room, but when I peered round the door she wasn’t there and the bed didn’t seem slept in. It was only when I went outside and saw the rowing boat tied up across at the little island did I realise where she must be. Yet when I shouted she didn’t appear.

  In the end, I had to wade over, watched by an anxious Erin, my feet making wet prints on the neat cobbles, birds and insects fussing as I hurried up the path to the shrine, calling out for Anna.

  I found her lying on the wooden platform. Peaceful, as if she were asleep: that would be the cliché. She didn’t look that way at all.

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bsp; Inside, on the altar, the candles were burning and Duke was smiling.

  * * *

  I used to wake with a sense of foreboding. Remnants of troubling dreams I couldn’t actually remember.

  In the absence of recollection, I crafted my own images. Wild seas and empty, scoured landscapes, looking out from our old cottage, watching a rowing boat pitch and sink on the Sound of Skerray, standing in a storm atop the Esha Cliffs, certain I’d just missed someone stepping off.

  Yet all those struggling in the waves and plummeting into darkness had no faces. Just blank spaces. I knew who they were and had no need to see their eyes looking at me as I lay in bed, staring up at the checkerboard pattern of the wooden ceiling beams, creating my unremembered dreams and slowly coming back to myself, disorientated, the only clue to how much time had passed in the cold cup of coffee on my bedside table which I had not seen Akira bring.

  It was Akira who offered to move into Shuzenji. He would look after the place. Look after me. He picked up Erin from Tokyo every weekend, bringing her back to a home now become a mausoleum.

  She was thirteen. I told her that her mother had died of a sudden heart attack, an undiagnosed condition. She forgave me for not turning up at the airport to fly back to Scotland with the body. I had a teacher chaperone her instead, and asked a furious Leo to collect her at Glasgow and accompany her to the funeral in Inveran.

  Erin tried so hard to get close yet gave up in the end, driven away by a coldness I hated myself for. She followed a friend to boarding school in Lausanne, returning every holiday, to begin with, then occasionally, and eventually not at all.

  Others came, to begin with. Leo, once, to berate me. Fatty to insist I extend my sabbatical, take all the time I needed. Breda Inc. was a big beast now, a Godzilla of Corporations they inevitably called us. Don’t worry, Johnny, it’s in safe hands: Fatty Ashcroft’s safe, pudgy hands.