New Welsh Short Stories (25 page)

‘Your bath is ready.
You can use your brother's towel and scrubber for now, can't you?'

‘Can't you call him down?'

My mother didn't look up. I saw she'd changed into her nightdress, and was wearing a fur
-
lined cape wrapped around her shoulders. She kissed me on the cheek, pressed my head awkwardly against her ear and said, ‘Glad you arrived safely.'

I got into the bath alone. The water was scalding hot; the tap dripped miserably. My brother's wash bag with the pictures of his favourite alien action hero, Ultraman, hung on the side of the sink. The bag was so covered in dust I could hardly see Ultraman's laser eyes. We used to sit here together, Toru and I, our knees touching. I always sat nearest the sink so I could splash him with cold water. He wore glasses, too, but not in the bath. His fear of splashing was made worse by the fact he couldn't see it coming.

I collapsed onto my bed and did not open my eyes again until it was long past noon. It wasn't sleep, but a sudden loss of consciousness, as if I'd been kicked out of the world for a short period of time before being thrown back into it again by the pressing urge to urinate. Disoriented by the unfamiliar whiteness of my room, the photographs of strangers in Hawaiian costume, I managed to locate my pants and stumbled out into the light. As I ran to the bathroom half
-
naked, hoping not to bump into my mum, my foot caught on something and I went flying across the landing. I swore loudly, before looking over my shoulder to inspect the offending article. It was a breakfast tray. The object I'd kicked was a glass of orange juice, which was now soaking into the carpet. The tray lay directly outside Toru's locked bedroom door. There were also two empty bowls with traces of rice grains and miso paste. A balled
-
up tissue. Dirty chopsticks. A note, scrawled in black felt
-
tip pen: a list of demands:
Fried chicken. Tissues. Strawberry milk. Masking tape. Turn heat UP.
I held the note tightly in my hands, like a precious piece of evidence.

‘How long has he been in his room?'

My mother was standing by the front door, putting her boots on, her Lei dangling from one hand. The strong scent of perfume hung on her fur
-
lined coat. For a moment, with her head down and her glossy hair covering her face, I thought she could be any young Japanese woman. Thirty years old, or even twenty. She had the kind of compact, uncomplicated figure that didn't betray her age, and it struck me that, were I a passing stranger in the street, I would have turned round for a second look.

‘I'm going out now,' she said. ‘I'll be back before seven.'

I handed her the list. ‘Fried chicken again,' she sighed.

‘Mum? How long?'

‘Since you left,' she said. ‘I wanted to discuss it with you properly, but…'

‘For a year? He hasn't left his room for a year?'

‘Isn't that what I said?' she snatched the note from my hands and folded it away in her purse. ‘He didn't have much luck with the entrance exams. He stopped going out, said his friends had all moved into dorms, no one to see, I don't know. After a while he stopped eating with me and demanded I bring food up to him. Then one day the door was shut. There was a note for me outside saying I shouldn't come in.'

‘Did you try and reason with him?'

‘Of course. But I also thought that, come winter, he'd have to move out of his room and come down near the heater.'

‘It's winter now.'

My mother then did an amazing thing – something I will never forget. She wrapped the Lei over her wrist and
shrugged.
‘These things happen. He'll grow out of it,' she said. I stared at her. I was sure my mother had gone mad.

‘You let him ruin his life quietly upstairs for a year and you don't tell me?'

‘It's not as easy for him as it is for you.'

‘We're brothers, for God's sake.'

She sighed and avoided my gaze as she made to leave, like a teenager escaping a telling
-
off. This precipitated a wave of anger in me I hadn't felt in a long while. It seemed my family had all transformed into children while I was away – selfish, silly, mean little creatures living their separate lives like moles scurrying past each other in separate burrows in the dirt. I couldn't stand it.

‘Where are you going?' I asked, stopping the front door with my arm.

‘Let me go.'

‘Not before you tell me exactly where you're going.'

‘You sound like your father.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘Calm down.'

‘What are we going to do?' There was a tremble in my voice which made my mother stop and look up at me. ‘We have to pull him out of there!'

‘Tell me this,' she said, her expression suddenly hardening. ‘If we get him out of there, will you be the one looking after him?' I stared at her. ‘I didn't think so,' she said and left.

Jet lag had me in its grip. I lay awake in the dark, head spinning. I heard my mother come in at midnight; the bath water running; the squeaking of skin against the basin. I heard her put a tray outside his door and I smelled the faint, tantalising scent of fried chicken. Then the lights went off and all was silent again. Was my mother right, I thought? Had life been easy for me? I tried to recall a time when I'd been desperately sad. I tried to remember the last time I'd cried, for instance. Certain memories did come to me, but I admit they were all mild. Unhappiness was nothing more than discomfort, the frustration of something which didn't go exactly as I'd wanted. A girl not replying to a message. Missing out on a school trip because of flu. Toru, on the other hand, had been born unhappy. Any visible contentment in him was nothing more than an interval of distraction – cartoons, comics, computer games – transporting him out of lethargy for a limited time. Teachers would always tell Toru to
sit up straight
or
speak clearly.
He had trouble reading and writing. Trouble with classmates at elementary school who'd hide his things in other children's desks. Trouble with sports, hauling himself over the gymnastics equipment as if his body weighed three tons, as if he carried a burden on his shoulder I could not see.

Toru wasn't always a well
-
behaved boy, either. He lied. He stole money from my mother. He threatened a boy in his class with a knife. The incident with the knife sounds worse than it is – or does everything always sound worse afterwards? Especially if you saw it with your own eyes. I was standing in the lunch queue at school when it happened: Toru's threat was as calm as the hundreds of other conversations going on all around. He held the fruit knife close to the boy's neck, and he followed it up, not with a violent stabbing, but with a bite of pickled plum. The recipient o
f
Toru's threat seemed to receive it equally casually at the time. He looked at the knife and walked away. (Later we realised he'd gone straight to the headmaster.) Could he really have believed Toru was serious? My little brother, with his rounded earnest spectacles, his puffy cheeks and podgy stomach? All softness. A body utterly incapable of wielding a sharp weapon. As for the money, well, I admit that was foolish. But foolishness ought to be forgiven. He'd mistakenly believed – like every teenage boy – that he was the centre of the world and that his needs should always be met.

I closed my eyes, moving from one darkness to another. And then I heard him. Toru. I sat up. It was coming from the other side of my bedroom wall. Sounds like a pet gerbil scrabbling in its cage, in thrall to nocturnal rhythms. The hushing of a futon being dragged across the floor and the rustle of bedsheets. A sniff, or something which resembled a sniff. A drawing of breath, perhaps, or a machine springing to life. I pressed my ear against the wall. More undetermined scuffles. Then the tip
-
tip
-
tip of a computer keyboard. Rising in intensity. Stopping suddenly. Starting up again. A click. Then another click. Was it a computer mouse? Or the furniture squeaking, the doorframes? I couldn't tell. I saw him: a muffled form, hidden in a nest of bedding, with no light in his room but the laptop screen cradled between his knees. No matter how carefully I listened, however, my vision lacked clarity. I couldn't be sure what was going on, the noises being impenetrable, random. There were no words, for instance. No phrase of music. Not a single sound which I recognised as human.

My mother was rarely around during the day.
The kitchen counter became a bulletin board for her messages. Dance classes. Names of friends I'd never heard of. Emergency contacts and ETAs.
Sorry, love,
she wrote again and again, until, eventually, she stopped altogether. She occasionally brought dinner back, dreaming of some comfortable family evening in front of the television, but by that time I'd already eaten, with an entire day of TV watching already behind me.

‘Bring it upstairs,' I said, nodding at the takeaway pizza. For Toru, I meant. We no longer said his name.

My suitcases were unpacked. The correspondences from the friends I'd made in England had thinned – I was too far away now to be involved in their lives – and my old school friends in Tokyo were all employed, working long into the evenings with no time for anyone but themselves or those closest to them. As for my own job
-
hunting, well, it was hardly worth mentioning. Unlike what my mother might suppose, I worked hard on my applications, polishing with a fine toothcomb even the politest phrases. But the silences and tepid rejections made my efforts seem pointless.

I spent the first few months back in Tokyo moving between the rooms of the apartment like a rheumatic old man, struggling to get up from the sofa. I did not pick up my English books as I'd intended to, and I began to lose the language I'd sworn never to forget. I had strange dreams which put me in a thoughtful, melancholic mood. In the dreams, I'd be at home in London, standing on the tiny communal balcony, aware that there was someone behind me who I couldn't see. I knew that if I turned round to ascertain who it was, I'd fall over the flimsy balustrade to my death. In some of them I asked, in a friendly way,
Who are you?
And in others, I grabbed hold of the railings and prayed he wouldn't push me over them.

‘You don't look very well.' Mum had taken to eating her breakfast standing up at the kitchen counter, a bowl of rice held close to her mouth and one foot nestling against her thigh, making her look like an unsteady flamingo.

‘I haven't been sleeping.'

‘When's the last time you went for a walk?' she asked. A walk? Just the sound of the word made me feel weak, as if someone had cut the strings that held me up. I shook my head. Mum changed legs, putting her left foot up against her thigh. ‘Why don't you go out and do the shopping for me today?'

‘What about the home delivery?' I said.

‘You can cook dinner then,' she went on, gesturing at the electric hobs we never used. I shook my head again. ‘I'm busy,' I said.

She laughed, briefly. ‘You really look awful.'

‘I keep…' I started, but something stopped me from telling her about the dream. It was nothing more than a bad feeling, I thought, an ordinary fear of death. The idea of telling someone was, frankly, a little embarrassing. So instead I said, ‘He keeps me awake. I can hear noises from his room. In the night.'

Her leg dropped with a thud. She turned her back to me, covering her reaction by scrubbing her rice bowl in the sink. I waited for her to reply, and when she didn't I decided to press on.

‘I read that people who lock themselves in their room are three times more likely to kill themselves.'

‘I read it might snow soon,' she said.

‘He might already be dead for all we know.'

‘Either today or tomorrow.'

‘He might be rotting in there.'

‘I thought you said you were busy.'

‘The noise might not be him at all. It might be rats…'

The bowl clattered in the sink. She didn't even take the time to put her coat on as she left for work. I didn't see my mother again until the following morning, and echoing through the apartment all day were the words I'd scared her with.

One day, three months after my arrival in Tokyo, I came downstairs to find my mother in front of the TV.

‘Why aren't you at work?' I asked.

‘I'm sick,' she said. And then I saw the white pallor in her face and realised she was telling the truth. ‘It's my head. Migraine.'

‘Shouldn't you be in bed?'

She was sitting quite still and upright, her hair tied back. It was the first time I'd seen her without make
-
up or jewellery of any kind. She didn't look bad, only unfamiliar. Then I realised I hadn't heard her come back the night before as I usually did; this led me to look at her sallow expression with suspicion.