Fire Flowers (12 page)

We raced inside, letting out loud whoops and war cries as we tumbled crazily across the floor and tripped into a hysterical heap.

We got to work cleaning the place up straight away. The children found cloths and buckets and a water pump in the kitchen and as they scrubbed and polished away, I checked the rat traps I had set the day before, then pulled away the last rotten boards from all the windows. As daylight flooded the room, it became clear exactly how run-down the building was—the wooden beams were splintered and the paper screens all torn. But as the children pushed rags up and down the corridors, splashing each other with suds and singing at the top of their voices, they seemed to be in paradise. Clouds of dust smothered Aiko and Tomoko as they beat the futons upstairs, spluttering with laugher, while Koji and Nobu hopped around shouting, sword-fighting with their broomsticks.

Shin, though, came over to me with a sly look on his face.

“What's so funny?”

He sniggered. “I suppose you know what this place used to be, don't you?”

My cheeks throbbed. I'd taken down all the pictures of the ladies the day before, and hidden them all at the bottom of one of the cupboards upstairs.

“An inn, I should have thought,” I said. “Some kind of classy place for the higher-ups.”

Shin gave a nasty laugh, then made a circle with his thumb and forefinger. He thrust the index finger of his other hand through it repeatedly.

“My father told me all about it,” he leered.

By the end of the afternoon, the rooms were airy and the blankets fresh and clean. Beyond the kitchen, Nobu had found a small bathhouse with a big cedar tub, a smaller, private bathroom set off to one side. Part of the roof was missing in this part of the building, and most of the tiles were cracked. Filled with excitement, though, I heaved on the handle of the pump. There was a great gasp of pipes from deep within the building, but nothing emerged from the faucet except for a long, spindly insect.

“Hiroshi-kun!”

Nobu's shout came from the other room. “Come and look!” In a compartment in the wall, he had discovered a large copper boiler and an oil burner covered with dials. After a few experiments and struck matches, we managed to get it to hold a flame. There was a rumble, and as I turned a wheel, we heard gushing and the clank of pistons, and wisps of steam rose from the boiler.

At the pump, we tried the handle again. With a tremble and a sputtering noise, water began to gush out, lukewarm at first, but growing gradually hotter.

“We did it!” Nobu yelled.

Triumphantly, we marched back to the main hall. The children were lying exhausted on the tatami.

“Well done, everyone!” I announced. “You've all worked very hard. And now, as a reward, we're all going to have a real bath, in our very own
sento
!”

Banzai!

The children screamed with laughter as we raced to the bathhouse. Tomoko and Aiko took the private room, us boys the bigger one. We started to sing Koji's dirty version of the Air Raid Song—
Cover your ears! Close up your bum!—
as we sat on our stools and scrubbed ourselves, the cedar tub gradually filling up.

The filth on our bodies was just incredible. It must have been over a year since any of us had washed, and the tiles were soon covered in grimy suds. But then it was just bliss, as we sank into the big pool of steaming water, groaning like old folk at a hot springs resort. The girls shrieked with delight in the other room—they must have got into their own bath at just the same moment.

As we lay there soaking, I looked up at the sky through the damaged roof. White clouds were passing overhead, and I pretended to myself that we really were at some lovely
onsen
up in the mountains; that after our bath we'd all dress in elegant clothes and be served dinner on floats suspended over the river . . . Tomoko's soft laugh drifted from over the wall, and I closed my eyes, picturing her bobbing in the water. Her hair wet and stuck to her forehead, her skin taut and white; dark, hard peaks on the bumps of her chest . . .

“Look out!” Shin hollered. “He's lifting the tent up!”

To my horror, I'd gone stiff and my tip was peeping out of the water. I crashed my fists into the bath.

“Damn you!” I shouted, desperately hoping that the girls hadn't heard. I leaped out of the tub and covered my privates, wiping myself off with a hand towel.

Shin was still guffawing and even Nobu had a smirk on his face.

“Thinking about someone we know?” Shin crowed, jerking his thumb at the wall. “Why don't you go round and show her how you feel?”

“Shut up!” I hissed.

Shin started choking with laughter. “You'll need something to make up for that ugly face!”

“Shut up!”

My cheeks were burning as I heaved out the wooden plug of the bath. Koji wailed as the water began to slurp away down the drain. I glowered at Shin, praying that the girls hadn't heard his idiotic talk.

“That's enough,” I said. “It's not funny anymore.”

 

We decided to play a game later on. Koji thought it would be fun to pretend that we were all working at a real inn, and we all had to make up ways to entertain our guests. He rolled up a cone of newspaper on his head and sat cross-legged on the floor with a broom in his hands, then started to croon, plucking the strings of an imaginary shamisen. Nobu found an old pair of spectacles and sat on the stool in the office, greeting the “visitors” in a wheedling voice, while Shin tied a blue rag around his head and toasted the rice balls we'd brought with us on a little hibachi from the kitchen.

Giggling came from the landing upstairs. Stepping carefully down the staircase came Aiko, leading Tomoko by the hand. They both wore old embroidered kimonos, rolled up at the hem to stop them from tripping. From somewhere, they had found powder and makeup too and had painted their faces white and lips red.

Tomoko stood in front of me. Her hair was still damp and she smelled wonderful and fresh. My stomach knotted.

“Look,” Tomoko said. “We're geishas!”

Shin clapped his hands and started to sing a dirty song, but I shot him a ferocious look and he trailed off.

We sat down around the grill, and Aiko and Tomoko served us water from a teapot in little sake cups. I could hardly speak. Tomoko didn't look like a girl to me anymore. She seemed like a fresh, delicate bud about to burst into helpless bloom. When she leaned over to fill my cup, her kimono showed the curve between her breasts and my hand started to shake so much that I spilled water all over the floor.

Koji grabbed the teapot and swigged at it. A moment later, he started reeling, shouting in a slurred voice that he was drunk. As he tumbled over, the children cackled with laughter, and Tomoko put her arm around Aiko, smiling like a proud mother. For a moment, she caught my gaze and held my eye.

I remembered the feeling of her body next to me as we stood on the coupling of the train back to Tokyo, the warmth of her cheek as we lay down together on the station floor. An acute, guilty pleasure crept over me as she came over and sat down beside me, a faint smile on her face. She took my hand and gently pressed it between her own.

It was a soft, wonderful pressure, warm and enclosing. It only lasted a few seconds, but somehow, it seemed to capture the strange magic of those past months entirely.

I jerked my hand away, and leaped up with a short bark of laughter.

“Everybody up!” I shouted. “Time for bed!”

Tomoko's face fell as I hopped around, kicking at the children's legs. “Come on! We're not here on holiday, you know.”

The children grumbled as they stood up and trudged sulkily upstairs. We'd already laid out the blankets in the rooms: “Cherry Blossom” for the boys, “Ivy” for her and Aiko.

Tomoko and I stood outside in the corridor for a moment. My heart was still jittering.

“Well. Goodnight,” I said.

She bowed shyly.

“Goodnight, Hiroshi-kun.”

We went to curl up in our new blankets, and I blew out our lantern. The mattress was deliciously soft after all the months on the cold, hard stone floor of the station, but as I lay there in the darkness, I barely noticed its comfort. From the other side of the wall, Aiko was whispering something, but Tomoko gently hushed her, and soon their lamp was extinguished.

I closed my eyes. Tomoko's image floated vividly in my mind as I drifted off to sleep. Her clumsily painted lips. The soft swell of her kimono. The pale skin of her throat.

T
he sign I had tacked up for Hiroshi on the wall of Tokyo Station was tattered now, the ink smeared from the rain. I stood shivering in my thin coat, as a group of ex-soldiers huddled around a refuse fire nearby playing flower cards. An old woman squatted beneath a sign of her own, fumbling with her prayer beads. She gave me a sympathetic smile.

“Don't give up hope!” she mouthed.

Not many people came to look for their lost relatives at the station anymore. In fact, we were the only two here today.

I smiled back, faintly. What would her expression be like, I wondered, if instead of my grey dress and mackintosh, I'd been wearing my nighttime clothes, my face plastered white and lips red? What would Hiroshi himself think, even if he did miraculously appear? To discover that his big sister was nothing now but a shameless American butterfly?

It had been weeks since my last trip here, and I felt dreadfully guilty for neglecting my duty to him. They were bringing up children's bodies from the tunnels every morning now, desperately thin and blistered with smallpox. That afternoon, I'd taken his photograph around the main railway stations, holding it up in the faces of the filthy men and women. Crowds of them stretched out on mats across the ticket halls. They squinted for a moment, sucking their rotten gums, and shook their heads. It all felt completely hopeless. I should simply accept the fact that he was gone.

I walked inside to take the Yamanote Line back to Shina­gawa. A swarm of filthy brats were clamouring around the passengers disembarking onto one of the long-distance platforms. They slipped their little hands into the travellers' pockets as they took down their suitcases, grubbing about on the floor like insects for the cigarette butts that they dropped.

My heart froze. There, right in the middle, I could see Hiroshi. My heels skidded on the marble floor as I ran toward him.

“Hiroshi!” I screamed. “Hiroshi-kun!”

Barging through the emerging passengers, I thrust my way onto the platform. As I reached him, he was scrabbling around someone's shoes. I seized his arm and pulled him up, rubbing the dirt from this face with my handkerchief.

“Hiroshi!”

The boy shook me off, swearing horribly in a strange dialect. My heart sank in confusion—I couldn't understand my mistake. It wasn't Hiroshi at all.

“I'm sorry—”

The boy squinted at me as I caught my breath.

“Miss?” he spat, turning. “You can wipe this if you want.”

He was holding his penis in his filthy hand, a gleeful expression on his face. I gasped and spun on my heel, hurrying away as fast as I could.

 

When I reached our tenement alley, I paused at the door of our tiny wooden building. There was a radio playing inside—a sentimental children's song that I hadn't heard for years. In fact, the last time I could remember hearing it had been at the old merry-go-round in Hanayashiki Park, with Hiroshi and my mother, one Sunday when I'd gone to visit on my monthly day off from the factory.

 

Come, come, come and see

Furry friends beneath the tree

In the autumn moonlight

At Shojo-ji Temple!

 

The song brought back all sorts of memories. I stood there in the alley for a moment, lost in thought. Finally, I slid the door open. Michiko was sitting by the low table with her ear close to the speaker of an ornate radio set. She had a look of intense concentration on her face.

“Michiko!” I hissed, but she waved an urgent hand to the floor beside her and gestured at me to be quiet. The song carried on. But though the tune was familiar, I realized that the words were quite different to those I remembered. In fact, they were in English:

 

Come, come, everybody

“How do you do?” and “How are you?”

Won't you have some candy?

One, and two, and three four five . . .

 

Michiko was trying to mouth along to the words.

 

Let's all sing a happy song

Tra-la, la la la!

 

She looked up at me in excitement.

“I'm learning English!” she whispered. A man's voice began to speak from the radio and she turned back with what she clearly thought was a studious expression, which mainly involved frowning and nodding at everything the man said.

Another one of Michiko's crazes!
I thought, as I sat down beside her. But, as I listened, the programme really did seem quite fun. The presenter's name was “Uncle,” and it was the same man who had translated the Emperor's speech into common language back in the summer. Now, it seemed, he was going to teach the Japanese people how to speak English.

Uncle was very kind. He explained that the lessons wouldn't be like school. In fact, they would be more like us playing a game together through the radio. This sounded very pleasant, and so we sat there, fascinated, and after a while, even I tried to repeat some of the English words back. I found myself smiling and nodding as the theme song came on at the end. It was funny, I thought—the new words were already standing in for the old ones in my memory.

“Satsuko!” Michiko exclaimed, after the programme had ended. “We can listen to this and become proper English speakers. Just imagine.”