There’s no good music on the radio. Only drive-time DJs making jokes about each other, and ringing up people to ask them questions about their partners.
‘What’s his most disgusting habit?’
One woman said her boyfriend wore his jocks four or five days in a row. The two DJs, a man and a woman, shrieked and moaned and whistled as if this was the worst thing they had ever heard. Then they did the same thing with the next caller, about a man who pissed out the bedroom window at night instead of going to the toilet.
It’s hard to judge when people are giving you their genuine reactions. Not just on radio but in real life. Sometimes it’s easier to fake it just like the radio jocks. I know I have.
A week before he dumped me, Colin took me on a trip to the town where he grew up.
‘Wow, it’s fantastic. An original country town. Gee,’ I said enthusiastically as we drove down the main street. I kept smiling and turning my head like a clown waiting for a ping pong ball. At the pub they put us in a room with two single beds. We tried to cuddle together in one but Colin’s joints started to ache so we moved to a bed each.
The next morning we cruised around the streets so he could show me the landmarks.
‘We played cricket here,’ he said when we passed the supermarket.
The gate of the new housing estate was locked so I stood holding the bars of the gate while Colin pointed to the spot where his house had been.
At the old schoolhouse we watched a wrecking ball slam into the wall. ‘This is depressing,’ Colin said.
All I’d done to bring this on was say I’d like to meet his family. In the afternoon we visited an aged uncle who made us a cup of tea and gave us Milk Arrowroot biscuits and chattered away as if he hadn’t spoken to anyone for forty years. The uncle never mentioned my age, never looked sideways at us. As we were leaving he patted Colin on the back.
‘She’s a lovely girl. You must be proud.’ He waved goodbye and promised to make us scones next time we came.
Once I tried to cook for Colin. I let myself into his flat early one evening with an armful of groceries, and I made pasta with bottled sauce–although I hid the bottle to smuggle out later–and a salad of those bits of green leaf you buy by the kilo in the supermarket and some dressing from another bottle. I opened wine and wore a teddy under my blouse so that the lace peeked out near my breasts.
‘I don’t expect this of you. I don’t want you to cook for me. We don’t have that kind of relationship,’ he said.
He had my blouse undone before I could ask what kind we did have.
I’ve watched the steam curling out from under the bonnet of the car for a while but now it’s beginning to billow. The engine is still running though. I steer the car on to the median strip, knowing that someone will come racing along soon trying to bypass the traffic and they will be enraged to find my old Escort blocking them.
I get out of the car, clutching my bag. I know how I look, with the seat of my jeans bloodied, so I run crouching across the road between the idling cars and hug the fence on the footpath as I walk. The pain is bad. Now and then I have to double over for a second. A woman winds down her window and calls out, asking if I’m all right.
‘OK,’ I shout back and turn down the next sidestreet.
I try to call Colin on the mobile again. No answer. I think about calling my mother. I think about calling an ambulance, but I have no ambulance cover and no money. I even think about calling my brother but I know his girlfriend will gush, want to nurse me and pump me for details and lecture me later about contraception and older men.
I don’t look behind. I can feel the dripping and I know I am probably leaving a trail. As if I am turning to liquid.
It’s dark and I can see into the houses of people who live in the street. They’re preparing dinner and watching TV. They can’t see me. I find that if I walk fast enough the pain eases, so I’m half trotting, hunched over. Blood runs down the inside of my thighs. I wish I had a father. He would pick me up and take me to a hospital and then drive away and punch the bloke who did this to me in the face. He would hug me and give me a kiss on the forehead and ask me why I hadn’t come to him first.
Colin did say it to me once. ‘I could be your father.’ He had caught sight of himself in the mirror as he was getting dressed and I sat on the bed naked behind him. I shrugged.
‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘I’m withered. You’re still fresh and plump and full of juice and I’m withered like an old apple.’
My girlfriend’s older lover had said something similar. She told him to get over it. I lay back on the bed and stared at the lightshade.
‘Say something,’ he said.
‘I like old apples,’ I answered finally. ‘They’re sweeter.’
When he told me he was leaving, he wanted me to analyse why I was with him, to admit to some complex or neurosis. He wanted me to go crazy and call him Daddy or start doing babytalk to him. Then he would have had an excuse. But he left me without any excuse. He left me without admitting he had used me. He was fully convinced he was doing the right thing. Mr Do The Right Thing. Without asking me of course. That’s what I’ve realised at last. I don’t talk enough. I don’t ask enough questions, or tell people how I feel. All I do is listen and then think back later, again and again, over what people have said to me.
The receptionist in the twenty-four hour medical clinic rushes me past all the other waiting patients and helps me undress.
‘Your sign was so bright,’ I say. ‘That’s how I found you.’
She calls for the doctor and he comes in, a man in his fifties wearing a suit.
‘I think it’s nearly over. I’m feeling better now,’ I tell him.
He tells me to part my legs and he presses his gloved fingers into my belly.
‘You’ve lost a lot of blood,’ he says. He wants me to go to hospital for a transfusion. I tell him that my father died in a car accident, that he lost a lot of blood too, and the doctor says he’s going to give me an injection and call my mother. But I don’t want him to call her.
I still have some of that sensation–that I am melting, that I have always been in danger of dissolving, and that I need a container, something that will hold me while I find my true form. But at least I’m feeling snug now, and sleepy, and the pain is almost gone.
‘Will you look after me?’ I whisper. I can hardly keep my eyes open as the doctor reaches down and brushes the hair from my sweaty forehead.
‘Where’s your boyfriend? He should be here,’ he says, his voice sharp as though he is angry with me.
When my mother met Colin, just a few weeks ago, she reeled back as if she had been slapped. We ran into her in a department store. Perhaps she thought this man I was introducing was my old teacher or the local doctor or my friend’s father.
‘Your boyfriend?’ she repeated after me, with the emphasis on boy.
Colin flushed. He stuck out his arm, shook my mother’s hand vigorously, then excused himself and left.
‘Oh, Lucy,’ she said to me after he had gone. We were standing at the perfume counter. I was heady with the scents. ‘Sweetie, come home for a while. I’ll make up your bed for you.’
I wish she had called me Lucaballoo.
‘Is the baby gone?’ I ask the doctor, but he’s not there anymore. The nurse tells me to try and stay awake.
My eyes want to close. My arms are heavy. I imagine a baby lying beside me. I would have to hold it, nurse it, keep its floppy body intact. Was that how Colin came to feel about me? It’s strange but I can’t remember a single time Colin called me by my name.
‘People looked at us,’ I say to the nurse.
‘Did they?’ she says as she lets the air out of the blood pressure cuff and watches the gauge drop. She makes a note on my chart.
‘I know what they th
ought,’ I whisper.
‘What did they think?’ She checks the pad between my legs and tucks the sheet under my feet. There’s noise outside, voices and clanking.
‘They don’t understand. I don’t have a complex.’
‘You’re going to be fine, Lucy. Keep talking. You need to stay awake to see your mum. She’s gone to the hospital to meet you.’
‘My mum misses him too.’
‘Does she? Who does she miss?’
The stretcher arrives and two ambulance men lift me across from the bed. Lights in the corridor flash above my head. Outside is dark but the ambulance doors are open and light shines out. I tilt my head back so I can see the man pushing the trolley. He smiles.
‘It’s Lucy, isn’t it?’ he asks.
My head falls back on the pillow.
‘Lucifer,’ I mumble.
Distance Runner
Transienceξ
It is three o’clock on a black, icy spring morning in Tokyo. A small group clusters around a cherry blossom tree in full flower deep inside a vast, empty park. Rain drizzles down and the spectators hunch their shoulders and bow their heads. I am one of the crowd. We are watching a man dancing among the boughs of the tree. He is being filmed. He has shaved his entire body and covered his skin in white greasepaint. Only his black eyes and the scarlet cavern of his mouth show against the white. The camera films his grimaces and contortions as he wraps his thick, sturdy limbs around the branches of the tree. Each time he moves, the tree lets fall a sprinkle of pink petals and they adorn the hair and shoulders of the audience like confetti. Tom hands me a paper cup with a dribble of hot sake in the bottom and a cherry blossom petal pasted to the outside. As I raise the cup to my lips and taste the steaming drink I understand why cherry blossoms are so important. They show how transient life is. They are exquisite for a moment and then they are gone. Every petal will be dead and fallen within a week. And then I shiver because I am cold and hungry and tired, and most of all I am lonely.
Enclosure
We step into a room where a crowd is milling around an auditorium. Without warning, all light is extinguished and hands begin to touch us, herding us roughly into what seems to be a line. I can hear the breathing and coughs of bodies around me, but the room is without light and even after a few minutes I am still blind. Someone further ahead giggles nervously and is shushed. A hand grips my elbow and pushes me forward until I reach a ladder. I climb the ladder. At the top I crawl on all fours across a platform, sometimes bumping my head into the buttocks or the shoulders of another anxious body. ‘Sorry,’ we whisper to each other. I find a wall and sit against it. The probing hands of other people brush my body and hurriedly pull away as they search for their own safe space. When everything is quiet except for the breathing of the crowd, a voice tells us to stand up. Once we are all on our feet the box containing us begins to move. There is nothing to hold on to except the walls or other people. We stumble as the box glides around. I hit my head against the wall and tears start in my eyes. As the tension rises to the point where we are ready to rebel, lights flood into the box, a trapdoor in the wall slides open, and a grotesque puppet head lunges through the hole and screams with laughter. ‘Scared?’ it shouts.Ω
Supplicationψ
We take a trip to Enoshima, home of the goddess of the arts. In midsummer the humidity wraps around us like the clinging arms of hot children and before we have crossed the bridge to the island I am flagging. We stop in the dusty town square to buy a drink. Outside the fish shop is a fibreglass statue of Benten, the goddess of the arts. Her black hair is pulled back from her face and held with a comb at the back. She wears a kimono draped over one shoulder so that her right breast shows. On her lap sits a lute. ‘Take a photo,’ I tell Tom. He wants me to stand next to the statue and put my arm around her naked shoulder but I prefer the picture of her alone, staring out across the bridge toward the mainland with a baleful expression as if she is wondering why she has been banished to this faded tourist island.
At the top of the hill there is a shrine where we buy lucky charms because Benten is one of the lucky gods. Tom buys a keyring with a glass vial attached. Inside the vial is a miniature statue of Benten. A man next to us at the stall warns us about Benten. ‘She is a very jealous goddess,’ he says. ‘You must not have other gods near her or she will be jealous of your love for them. She wants you all to herself. If she catches you with someone else she will destroy your artistic powers, take away all your money, ruin your life.’
By the time we are trudging down the hill back to the tram stop, I am exhausted. Tom strides ahead then waits for me to catch up. The afternoon sun bores through my black straw hat, but when I take it off the sun’s rays burn the skin of my face. I am wearing a short dress with thin straps and my shoulders are turning bright pink. Men turn to stare when I sit down on the kerb to rest and try to tug my tight dress further down my thighs. Tom strolls back to where I sit. He stands in front of me, blocking the sun.
‘Stay there a minute will you?’ I say. ‘It’s very cooling.’
He lifts his arm to shade his eyes. The Benten keyring is looped around his middle finger. The charm dangles from his hand, and Benten’s tiny body rattles around in her glass cage as Tom wipes the sweat from his forehead.
‘That’s no way to treat a goddess,’ I say. ‘Do you mind if we rest in a coffee shop for a while?’
He laughs and takes the keyring off his finger, then places it with mock respect in his pocket. But the image of her dangling from his finger, trapped in her glass prison, has lodged in my mind. We sit in a coffee shop and drink iced tea and wait until I feel ready to set off again.
Patienceω
This day I am waiting in a dim corridor. People occasionally walk by. One or two nod. I sit there for an hour listening to bodies moving about in the room opposite my bench. When I am allowed in, three people dressed in lead costumes are waiting like an audience. I am the performer. The three leaden people move behind a screen. Two arms, encased in lead-shielded gloves, reach out from behind the screen and take the lid off a container, then use tongs to pull out a large pill which they place in my hand. I swallow the pill and wash it down with a glass of water. The leaden people are all standing far away, but one of the people takes off her mask. It is the woman doctor I know well. She smiles at me and tells me I have been good. I remember her with fondness. She is the woman who has said to me over the past few months in her broken English, ‘Do not be exciting. You can die. Remember, no exciting.’
‘It’s all right,’ I always assured her. ‘I am not exciting.’
That night I say to Tom, ‘I can’t sleep with you. I have to be alone.’
He pauses. He looks around the room and frowns. ‘Oh, okay,’ he says.
‘I mean, they told me I’m radioactive. I’m dangerous. For two nights.’
‘Only two nights? I could tell them you’ve been dangerous longer than that,’ he says.
ξ Let’s say I told you this story and you asked me, ‘Is that a dream you had?’ I would answer, ‘No, that is my life on the night of my thirty-third birthday.’
Ω If I told you this you might laugh and say, ‘Well, you shouldn’t keep going to see experimental theatre.’ And I would probably answer, ‘These shows sometimes hint at how your own life is going.’ What would you say to that? I imagine you would say, ‘Oh, you drama queen.’
ψ Just like everywhere else, the gods in Japan are capricious. The link between what you have done wrong and why you are being punished is rarely clear. Do you remember when you saw my collection of brightly coloured charms and prayers to the different gods? When I told you I was covering all my bets you said, ‘That only works if you know the whole field.’ I laughed at you then. ‘Does this mean you’re afraid?’ I asked.
ω When you are sick for a long time, you learn to wait in a new way. You le
arn the art of waiting. Each spasm of pain or thundering heart or cramped muscle has its own span, its own rhythm, and you learn to wait until it is done. A part of you counts the beats of your body, and another part of you keeps walking, keeps talking, lifts the shoulders and shortens the stride and makes you move forward. You move through the pain, knowing that it will end. Knowing, at the same time, that this illness is your companion and will greet you again soon.
Stirringσ
Tom has been away for work and his friend has decided to look out for me. Hermann takes me to a theatre one night. We watch the performers careen across the stage like kamikaze. The words make no sense but in the final scene the back of the stage falls away and the skyline of Shinjuku, its mad burning neon face, is revealed to us like an epiphany. Afterwards we run to the nearest café and eat and drink and joke. At the end of the night, as we are walking to the last train, always the last train, he pulls me to him and kisses me on the lips.
‘Come with me,’ Hermann says. ‘Come now, quickly. I’ll make love to you, any way you like. I’ll do anything you like.’ He kisses me again and his tongue creeps between my lips and his left hand cups my breast while his right hand pulls me closer. I push him away and look at his face.
‘But Tom is back tomorrow,’ I say. ‘What are you doing? And you have a wife.’
‘I know,’ he says. ‘That’s why we have to go tonight. To a hotel. A park. Anywhere. Come on.’
I feel the wine running through my veins and his cock against my belly as he presses into me again and his mouth writes messages on the skin of my throat and, for a moment, I consider going with him. Even though he is nothing special, just Hermann, Tom’s friend. Then I pull away.ϕ
The End of the World Page 14