Tales of Crow- The Complete series Box Set

by Chris Ward

  ‘It’s romantic,’ Kaede whispered in his ear. ‘If you steal me some flowers from somewhere I might be nice to you later.’

  He nodded, thankful that he didn’t have to reply as a man came out from behind the reception desk and called them to order, this time in a language Jun could understand.

  ‘Welcome to British Heights,’ he said in Japanese. ‘My name is Tomoya Mitsui. We hope you will enjoy your stay here and get the chance to practice your English with the foreign staff.’ A collective groan went up from the group, causing Kirahara-sensei to snap at them for silence.

  ‘English sucks!’ one of the boys near the back shouted, drawing an angry frown from the teacher.

  ‘You can leave your luggage here,’ Mitsui continued. ‘In the main hall down the corridor you will be formally welcomed and then watch a video presentation. After that you will be assigned to your rooms.’

  Jun glanced around as the students trailed Kirahara-sensei down the corridor towards an open door at the end. The owner had disappeared. At the other end of the corridor a tall, lithe Japanese woman stepped out of a doorway, glanced up as she crossed the hall, and disappeared into another. Jun frowned. She had seemed vaguely familiar.

  ‘…founded in 1995, British Heights has been the only place for students looking for a deeply cultural experience in the middle of the Japan Alps for almost two decades. Every dormitory building represents a different period in British history, from the early 14th through to the 17th century, while the Grand Mansion is an authentic representation of an 18th century British stately home, with all furnishings and contents shipped from Britain. Beyond our living British history, our classes take in numerous aspects of British culture, from cooking scones to Shakespearian language. Here at British Heights we hope you will find all of your dreams fulfilled…’

  The voice on the video droned on and on. Jun, sitting near the back, tried to concentrate on the pictures flicking past on the projector screen, but all he could think about was being somewhere else. With someone else.

  Akane was sitting in the second row, between a couple of her girlfriends. Ogiwara was with the meatheads over on the left. Kaede was playing with her phone under the desk, scowling as she failed to pick up any signal.

  ‘It’s like, where the hell doesn’t haven’t a phone mast these days?’ she muttered. ‘Like, where the hell are we? Africa?’

  ‘The Japan Alps,’ Jun whispered.

  ‘Yeah, I know that.’

  ‘Everything all right back there?’ came a voice from the front of the hall, and Jun looked up to see one of the foreign staff teachers staring in their direction.

  ‘Um, yes, fine thank you,’ Jun answered in his best English. Beside him, Kaede’s cheeks had reddened. A few rows in front of him, Akane briefly looked back then turned away again. Jun gave the teacher a regretful smile and allowed a dirty wave of embarrassment to wash over him.

  An hour later the students had been allocated their rooms and Jun found himself sitting on the edge of his bed, looking through an explanation booklet about British Heights while a shirtless Yohei Ogiwara flexed his muscular arms in front of the big desk mirror on one wall of their room.

  ‘I expect you want me to dish the dirt,’ Ogiwara said, not turning around.

  ‘What?’

  ‘About how Akane is in the sack?’

  Jun groaned. ‘No.’

  Ogiwara turned around. ‘Come on, Matsumoto,’ he said, a smug grin on his face. ‘You must want to know! You can’t have lived next door to her for your whole life and not wondered?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  Ogiwara throw back his head and gave an exaggerated snort of laughter. ‘You’re so transparent, Matsumoto. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Ogiwara turned and gave him a smirk. ‘I’ll let you figure it out.’

  Before Jun could reply, Ogiwara grabbed a shirt from his bag and pulled it over his head. ‘Hurry up, won’t you? We’re late for class.’

  The groups for the classes were mixed, so Jun was spared the company of either Kaede or Ogiwara. According to his map, his class was in the upstairs lounge room of the dormitory nearest to the main entrance, named Elizabeth I. The ground was icy and a light snow had begun to fall, so he pulled his jacket around him, ducked his head, and soldiered on. Jun hated the stuff, but luckily his town rarely had more than a light scattering once or twice each winter. Why did they have to come here? The rest of his grade had taken a trip down to Kochi on Shikoku Island. That city had palm trees. Even though it was December, they were probably still going to the beach.

  Jun, having not had a chance to go since they arrived, ducked into the toilet just inside the main door as the other students filed up the stairs. He sat down for a few moments, then checked his hair in the mirror. He looked like he hadn’t slept for a week. He picked at a spot on his forehead and rubbed his eyes.

  Outside in the corridor, a bell chimed. ‘Shit,’ he muttered, and hurried for the door.

  The door opened into a flurry of flying papers and a curse of frustration. Jun stared as the fluttering sheets came to rest in a circle around him, then looked up into Akane’s angry face.

  ‘Be careful, Jun!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered, leaning down to scoop them up, shuffling them into some kind of order. ‘I didn’t see you there.’

  ‘You weren’t looking.’

  Akane sighed. Jun held out her sheets of paper and she put them into her bag. ‘I’m sharing a room with Ogiwara,’ he said, not able to meet her eyes.

  ‘How nice for you. I bet you have lots to talk about, sharing notes and all that.’

  ‘He hasn’t said anything about you.’

  Akane rolled her eyes. Jun wanted to reach out and touch her, to pull her into his arms.

  ‘Don’t lie to me. I know what he’s like. He’s an asshole.’

  Jun couldn’t hold himself back. ‘Then why are you with him?’

  Akane shrugged. ‘Why are you with Kaede? Oh, I forgot. Everyone knows why you’re with her. The same reason anyone gets with Kaede.’

  ‘It’s not like that. She’s … deeper than anyone realises.’

  Akane rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t care about you and your pervert fantasies.’

  Jun blushed. ‘I didn’t mean that! I meant–’

  ‘Save it.’

  Jun sighed. Why am I defending her? I’m defending a girl I don’t like to a girl I do. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just say it?

  ‘If you must know, Ogiwara and me have broken up. I got a little tired of his childishness and the idiots he hangs around with.’

  Jun frowned. ‘It didn’t sound like you’d broken up.’

  ‘Oh, so you were talking about me?’

  ‘No! I mean, he was. I was just trying to get ready for whatever stupid class it is I’m late for.’

  Akane sighed again. She lifted a hand as if she was about to say something important, then she let it drop to her side. ‘Look, Jun. I’m sorry, but you’re right. We’re both late for class.’

  Before Jun could reply, she turned and hurried off down the corridor, slipping through the door and skipping down the road towards the next building. He watched her until she was out of sight, then put both hands up on the nearest wall and went to headbutt it, stopping just a couple of centimetres short.

  He’d grown up on the other side of a three-foot wall from her. He’d seen her grow from a dorky, gap-toothed kid obsessed with the piano into a talented young woman who could break hearts with a single glance. That she seemed to seek out the biggest goons in school to date was irrelevant; at times her choice in men was akin to charity, but nothing could hide the truth: Akane Yamaguchi was a woman to be desired and swooned over.

  Jun, who had spent his childhood pushing her off slides, putting bugs down the back of her shirt, and slamming mud pies into her hair, had come into that knowledge in the final year of junior high school. He had spent the three years since tr
ying to convince himself otherwise, that the messy-haired, muddy little kid with whom he had played with train sets and hunted for butterflies was in actual fact the only person he could ever imagine himself being with.

  Why can’t I just tell her? This time he did thump his head against the wall. He winced, rubbed his forehead, and headed off to find his class.

  2

  The band takes a wrong turn

  ‘Okay, where is he now?’

  Ken Okamoto slammed a fist down on the hood of the van. He held it there a moment, his eyes squeezed shut, letting the violent surge pass. One day it would take him over like a puppeteer shoving a gloved hand up into his cloth ass, but for now he felt it subside. He opened his eyes and looked up at Bee, standing nearby, his long pale face and huge, almond-shaped eyes watching him with a wide-eyed innocence, like a little kid watching his brother beat a puppy to death.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Bee said slowly, his strange, echoing voice muted by being outside. ‘I don’t know at all.’

  Ken glared at him a moment, then let his gaze drop. After all, it wasn’t Bee’s fault that O-Remo was a raging junkie. Nothing was Bee’s fault; it never had been and never would; he was just the bass player after all, and bass players were designed by their very nature to be the ghosts of rock bands, forever in the shadows, neither claiming nor rejecting the adulation and the fame as it came, bloomed, and faded. They were merely a background, a cardboard cutout of a stable scene behind a nativity play. While Ken and Dai fought and battled alongside O-Remo as he faced up—and usually lost—to his personal demons, Bee was just a silken sheet draped over everything, soaking up the blood as it was spilt.

  Dai came running around the side of the gas station, shaking his head. Big, muscular and square-jawed, it was impossible for Dai to ever look concerned, but the eternal look of concentration on his face had cracked a little. One curl of gelled hair was sticking up, and his eyes scanned the forest across the road.

  ‘He’s in the can,’ he said.

  ‘I thought we checked there?’

  ‘The ladies.’

  Ken sighed. ‘I guess we should have thought of that. What’s he doing?’

  ‘What do you think? I don’t know where he got it, but he has some stuff.’

  ‘Did you flush it?’

  Dai shook his head. ‘He tried to scratch out my eyes.’

  Ken slammed his fist back down on the van’s hood, and this time his rage bloomed. He punched the scratched bodywork over and over until the side of his fist ached. It was lucky tomorrow was a day off, as his hand would probably now be too bruised to play.

  ‘Fuck him. Fuck him!’

  ‘All right, calm down. Not like it’s anything new, is it?’

  ‘He promised.’

  Dai grinned. ‘And like you don’t break promises, Ken? Like there aren’t a hundred girls out there who you’ve lied to?’

  Ken scowled. ‘Lying to girls won’t break up our band. Taking a junkie lead singer on the road might.’

  ‘Hey! Where’s the party, comrades?’

  They all looked up as O-Remo Takahashi, charismatic lead singer of doom metal titans Plastic Black Butterfly, came prancing around the side of the gas station, his arms spread wide, a huge grin on his anorexic, pockmarked face. Despite the cold he was wearing just a t-shirt and skintight trousers under a thin cloak that looked stolen from the set of a vampire movie. His face had once been angularly beautiful, but the drugs had turned graceful curves into sharp, irregular contours that made him look like a robot trying to burst out of a net of human skin. At the age of thirty-six, the looks that had once soaked the panties of stadiums full of screaming girls were just a memory.

  As, Ken reflected sourly, were a lot of things.

  O-Remo laughed, aimed a couple of mock punches at Dai’s stomach, fired a finger-pistol at Bee’s face, and clapped Ken on the shoulder. ‘You fill her up ready? Let’s hit the road, boys.’

  ‘Where did you find it?’ Ken muttered, feeling deflated, as he often did beneath O-Remo’s natural star power. ‘You said you were clean.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, my old friend. I was just powdering my nose. And a fine nose it is, wouldn’t you agree? Not a single minute of surgery.’

  Ken sighed. ‘Get in the van and let’s get out of here.’

  Dai was the designated driver, Ken the navigator. O-Remo usually took up a casual observer’s position from the sofa-bed wedged into the space behind the front seats. They had cut a hole in the awning separating the front from the back compartment for him to see out, although within a few minutes of the van setting off he was usually asleep. Further back, behind the sofa which doubled as a buffer for their gear in the event of a crash, Bee sat on a beanbag in the middle of a miniature New York skyline of amplifiers, mike stands, drums, and guitar cases. That he preferred to sit in the dark and peer into the screen of whatever electronic device was this month’s toy of fancy was one reason for the extreme pallor of his skin. The other, of course, was the make-up. They were a doom metal band after all.

  ‘The sat-nav says left,’ Ken said.

  ‘Are you sure? The last sign said Toyama straight on.’

  ‘It’s probably a quicker route.’

  Dai peered out of the van’s windscreen towards a rising highland area to their right. He frowned. ‘Maybe, I guess. I haven’t changed the tires to the winter ones yet, though.’

  Ken shrugged. ‘It’s not that cold. I imagine we’ll be out of the mountains before the roads ice over again. It’s only a couple of hours.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  Dai turned them off the main road, following the little mountain road as it wound up towards the distant peaks of the Japanese Alps, first through dry rice fields dusted with a light covering of snow, then into stands of pine that gradually drew in around them. The road began to head up, and twenty minutes later the verges were twenty centimetres deep in snow as the pines leaned over the van, cutting off the sunlight.

  ‘I’m not so sure about this,’ Dai said, adding ‘Shit!’ as the van bumped into a pothole.

  ‘Watch out, fool!’ O-Remo shouted. ‘I’m trying to get a little shut-eye before tonight’s show.’

  Ken turned to glare at him, but the singer had already lain back down on the sofa, skinny hands behind his thin, scrawny neck.

  We should have broken up years ago, he thought, giving a small shake of his head, and it would be hard for any of them to argue with his logic. They should have put themselves down like a two-legged, diseased dog, ended the misery. The days of arenas and playing the Budokan, the finest venue in the country, weren’t coming back, and while they could make a steady living driving around the country in their van, playing to three hundred people every night in forgotten little towns, the shadow of their former success hung heavy over their shoulders, like a thundercloud forever waiting to douse their fading fire. They weren’t getting any younger, and, much as it pained Ken to admit it, they weren’t getting any better. Perhaps it was preferable to let it go, get a job in a convenience store or some part-time work teaching guitar to kids, and quietly reminisce on cool autumn evenings about the days when they had ruled the land.

  ‘Road is getting worse,’ Dai said. ‘Perhaps we should turn back.’

  Ken ran a couple of fingers over the sat-nav’s touch-screen, widening out the map. He peered at a thin line winding up, flattening out a bit, and then winding back down.

  ‘I’d say it’s as far to go on as it is to go back. We’ve made our choice.’

  ‘Who set the sat-nav? I always take the major roads.’

  ‘Thought you boys might like the scenic route,’ O-Remo laughed, his voice slightly slurred as the drugs began to wear off.

  ‘You dumb bastard. It might not look far, but these kinds of roads are often more trouble than they’re worth.’

  ‘Shit! Look at that!’

  Dai was pointing out into the road ahead. A huge crack had opened up down the length of the asph
alt, at least six inches wide, splitting the road in two like a cracked crust of bread.

  ‘Um, I think we’d better go around.’

  Dai groaned and pointed at the dashboard. ‘The fuel’s going down. I thought you filled it up?’

  Ken grimaced. ‘Just enough to get us to Toyama,’ he said.

  O-Remo laughed again. ‘Scrimping on fuel again, were you?’ he said, his voice nasally, his words bookended by two bloody sniffs. ‘Just like the good old days, huh?’

  Ken closed his eyes, feeling that familiar rush of blood. He thought about saying something back, but it was better to stay quiet. O-Remo was unpredictable at the best of times; high, he was as random as the free prize draws at the 7-Eleven.

  ‘There’s a third option,’ came Bee’s voice. The bassist was standing over O-Remo’s sofa, so pale against the darkness of the back of the van that he looked almost translucent. Ken shivered. Bee’s eyes were huge and alien, flicking from his, to Dai, to O-Remo and back again.

  ‘What option?’

  He held up his tablet. That satellite navigation system of yours is so old this van was built around it. When you all started to catfight I had a look at the map on my tablet. There is no road ahead. It’s been closed for five years. The only way is back the way we came and then north up around to the coast. However, there’s a storm coming in. We passed some kind of study village a kilometre back, so I suggest we overnight there, see if we can get some fuel or even get our van fixed if they have a mechanic.’

  ‘But we’ll have to cancel the gig,’ Dai protested. ‘What about the fans?’