‘Going out.’
‘Coming in. Your whalestone is diving.’
My mind is on miraculous soccer exploits.
‘I really used to believe what you told me about the whalestone.’
Bicycle kicks and diving headers.
‘You spouted such rubbish.’
‘Uh?’
‘About it being magic.’
‘What being magic?’
‘The whalestone, deaf-aid!’
‘I never said it was magic.’
‘You did. You said it was a real whale that the thunder god had turned into stone, and that one day when we were older we would swim out to it, and once we set foot on it the spell would be broken, and it would be so grateful that it would take us anywhere we wanted to go, even to Mother and Father. I used to imagine it happening so hard that I could see it sometimes, like down a telescope. Mother putting on her pearls, and Father washing his car.’
‘I never said all of that.’
‘Did, too. One of these days I’ll swim out to it.’
‘No way could you
ever
swim that far. Girls can’t swim as well as boys.’
Anju aims a lazy kick at my head. ‘I could swim there,
easy
!’
‘In your dreams. Way too far.’
‘In
your
dreams.’ Waves break at the foot of the grey humpback.
‘Maybe it really is a whalestone,’ I suggest. ‘A fossil one.’
Anju snorts. ‘It’s just a stupid rock. It doesn’t even look like a whale. And next time we go to the secret beach I’m going to show you and swim out there, me, and stand on it and laugh at you.’
The Kagoshima ferry crawls across the horizon.
‘This time tomorrow—’ I begin.
‘Yeah, yeah, this time tomorrow you’ll be in Kagoshima. You’ll get up really early to catch the ferry, arrive at Kagoshima junior high school at ten o’clock. The third years, the second years, then your match. Then you go to the restaurant of a hotel with nine floors and eat while you listen to Mr Ikeda tell you why you lost. Then you come back on Sunday morning. You already told me a zillion times, Eiji.’
‘I can’t help it if you’re jealous.’
‘Jealous? Eleven smelly boys kicking a bag of air on a pitch of muck?’
‘You used to like soccer.’
‘You used to wet our futon.’
Ouch. ‘You’re jealous because I’m going to Kagoshima and you’re not.’
Anju stays aloof.
The tree creaks. I didn’t expect Anju to lose interest in our argument so soon. ‘Watch,’ she says. She stands up, feet apart, steadies herself, takes her hands away—
‘Stop it,’ I say.
And my sister jumps into empty air
My lungs wallop out a scream
Anju flashes by me
and lands laughing on a branch below, swinging down to a lower branch. I hear her laughter long after she has vanished in the leaves.
Fujifilm says two o’clock has come and gone. A single night is stuffed with minutes, but they leak out, one by one. My capsule is stuffed with Stuff. Look up ‘stuff’ in a dictionary, and you get a picture of my capsule above Shooting Star. A shabby colony in the empire of stuff. An old TV, a rice-cracker futon, a camping table, a tray of cast-off kitchen utensils courtesy of Buntaro’s wife, cups containing fungal experiments, a roaring fridge with chrome trimmings. The fan. A pile of
Screen
magazines, offloaded by Buntaro. All I brought from Yakushima was a backpack of clothes, my Discman, my Lennon CDs and my guitar. Buntaro looked at my guitar doubtfully the day I arrived. ‘You don’t intend to plug that thing in anywhere, do you?’ ‘No,’ I answer. ‘Stay acoustic,’ he warns. ‘Go electric on me, and you’re out. It’s in your contract.’ I am not going to contact her. No way. She will try to talk me out of looking for my father. I wonder how long it will take for Cockroach to die. The glue trap is called a ‘cockroach motel’, and has windows, doors and flowers printed on the side. Traitor cockroaches wave six arms – ‘Come in, come in!’ It has an onion-flavoured bait-sachet – curry, prawn salad and beef jerky are also available at all good Tokyo supermarkets. Cockroach greeted me when I moved in. It didn’t even bother pretending to be scared. Cockroach grinned. Who has the last laugh now? I have! No. It has. I can’t sleep. In Yakushima night means sleep. Not much else to do. Night does not mean sleep in Tokyo. Punks slalom down shopping malls. Hostesses stifle yawns and glance at their patrons’ Rolexes. Yakuza gangsters fight on deserted building sites. High-schoolers way younger than me engage in gymnastic love-hotel sex-bouts. In an apartment high above, a fellow insomniac flushes a toilet. A pipe behind my head chunders.
Last Wednesday, my second day as a drone at Ueno station. I am taking a good solid dump during my lunch break, smoking a Salem in the cubicle. I hear the door open, a zipper scratch, and the chime of urine against porcelain urinal. Then the voice begins – it is Suga, the computer nerd whose part-time job I am taking over from the end of the week when he goes back to college. Obviously he thinks he is alone in here. ‘Excuse me, are you Suga? Are you responsible for this?’ His voice isn’t his real voice – it is a cartoon voice, and it must scrape the lining off his vocal chords to produce it. ‘I don’t
wanna
remember, I don’t
wanna
remember, I don’t
wanna
remember. Don’t make me. Can’t make me. Won’t make me.
Forget
it!
Forget
it!
Forget
it!’ His voice reverts to its bland, nasal calm. ‘It wasn’t my fault. Could have happened to anyone. To anyone. Don’t listen to them.’
I am in a fix. If I leave now we’ll both be embarrassed as all hell. I feel as though I have heard him mutter a secret in his sleep. But if I stay here, what might he reveal next? How he chopped up the corpse in his bath and put it out with the garbage bit by bit? If he finds me listening, it will look like I was eavesdropping. I cough, flush the toilet, and take a long time to pull my trousers up. When I emerge from my cubicle Suga has disappeared. I wash my hands and walk the roundabout way back to the office, via the magazine stands. Mrs Sasaki is dealing with a customer. Suga is in the back eating his lunch, and I offer him a Salem. He says no, he doesn’t smoke. I forgot, he told me that yesterday. I go to the mirror and pretend to have something in my eye. If I show him too much kindness he may twig it was me who heard him being memory-whipped.
Later, back at the claims counter, Suga perches on his stool reading a magazine called
MasterHacker
. Suga has a weird physique – he is overweight around his belly, but he has no bottom. Long dangly ET arms. He suffers from eczema. His face has been medicated into submission, but the backs of his hands flake, and even in this heat he wears long-sleeved shirts to hide his forearms. A trolley of lost items from the afternoon trains is in the back office waiting for me. Suga smirks. ‘So you already had the Assistant Station-Master Aoyama experience?’ I nod. Suga puts down his magazine. ‘Don’t let him intimidate you. He isn’t as big time as he makes out. The man is losing it, imho. A big shake-up is being announced, Mrs Sasaki was saying last week. Not that I care. Next week I’m doing my IBM internship. Week after, back to uni. I’m getting my own postgrad research room. You can come and see me when I’m not supervising. Imperial Uni, ninth floor. Near Ochanomizu. I’ll draw you a map. You can get the front desk to ring up for me. My masters is in computer systems, but between you, me and the lost property, all that academic crap is a cover for this—’ He waves
MasterHacker
. ‘I’m one of the five best hackers currently working in Japan. We all know each other. We swap info. We break into systems and leave our tags. Like graffiti artists. There is
nowhere
, right, in Japan I can’t hack into. There’s a secret website in the Pentagon – you know what the Pentagon is, right, the American defence nerve centre – called Holy Grail. This site is protected by their top computer brains, right. If you hack into Holy Grail it proves that you are better than they are, and men in black appear to offer you a job. That is what I’m going to do. Imperial Uni has the fastest modems this side of the twenty-fifth century. Once I get access to those babies, I am in. Then, whoosh, I am out of this shithole commonly known as Tokyo. Deep joy. You suckers won’t see me for dust.’
I watch Suga read
MasterHacker
while I work. His eyebrows twitch up every time he reaches the bottom of a column of text. I wonder what Suga wouldn’t call a shithole. What would make Suga happy? Weird, but when I remember that I’ll only be here until I find my father, I almost like Tokyo. I feel I’m on holiday on another planet, passing myself off as a native alien. I might even stay on. I like flashing my JR travel pass to the train man at the barrier. I like the way nobody pokes their nose into your business. I like the way the adverts change every week – on Yakushima they change every ten years. I like riding the train every day from Kita Senju to Ueno: I like the incline where it dives below the ground and becomes a submarine. I like the way submarines pass by at different speeds, so you can fool yourself you are going backwards. I like the glimpses of commuters in parallel windows – two stories being remembered at the same time. Kita Senju to Ueno is crammed beyond belief in the morning. Us drones all swing and lurch in droozy unison as the train changes speed. Normally only lovers and twins get this close to other people. I like the way nothing needs to be decided on submarines. I like the muffled clunking. Tokyo is one massive machine made of smaller components. The drones only know what their own minute component is for. I wonder what Tokyo is for. I wonder what it does. I already know the names of the stations between here and Ueno. I know where to stand so I can get off nearest the exit. Do not ride in the first compartment, says Uncle Tarmac – if the train collides, this is the crumple zone – and be extra alert on the platform as the train pulls in, in case a hand in the small of your back shoves you over the edge. I like the brew of sweat, perfume, crushed food, grime, cosmetics. I like how you can study reflected faces, so deeply you can almost leaf through their memories. Submarines carry drones, skulls carry memories, and one man’s shithole may be another man’s paradise.
‘Eiji!’ Anju, of course. Moonlight bright as a UFO abduction, air heady with the mosquito incense which my grandmother uses to fumigate the lived-in rooms. Anju whispers so as not to wake her. ‘Eiji!’ She perches on the high windowsill, hugging her knees. Bamboo shadows sway and shoo on the tatami and faded fusuma. ‘Eiji! Are you awake?’
‘No.’
‘I was watching you. You are a boy-me. But you snore.’
She wants to wake me up by getting me angry. ‘I do not.’
‘You snore like a piggy puking. Guess where I’ve been.’
Let me sleep. ‘Down the toilet.’
‘Out on the roof! You can climb up the balcony pole. I found the way. So warm out there. If you stare at the moon long enough you can see it move. I couldn’t sleep. A pesky mosquito woke me up.’
‘A pesky sister woke me up. My soccer match is tomorrow. I need sleep.’
‘So you need a midnight snack to build you up. Look.’
On the side is a tray. Omochi, soy, daikon pickles, peanut cookies, tea. I see trouble ahead. ‘When Wheatie finds out she’ll—’
Anju scrunches up her face and voice for a Wheatie impression. ‘Your mother may have made your bones, young missy, but inside that head of yours is going to be all
my
handiwork!’
As always, I laugh. ‘You went down to the kitchen on your own?’
‘I told the ghosts I was one of them and they believed me.’ Anju jumps and lands at my feet without a sound. I know resistance is pointless so I sit up and bite into a squeaky pickle. Anju slides under my futon and dunks an omochi into a saucer of soy. ‘I had my flying dream again. Only I had to keep flapping
really
hard to stay above the ground. I could see lots of people moving about, and there was this big stripy circus tent where Mum lived. I was about to swoop down on it when the mosquito woke me up.’
‘Be careful about falling.’
Anju chews. ‘What?’
‘If you dream about falling and hit the ground you really die in your bed.’
Anju chews some more. ‘Who says so?’
‘Scientists say so.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘Scientists proved it!’
‘If you dreamed of falling, hit the ground, and died, how could anyone know that you were dreaming of falling in the first place?’ I think this through. Anju enjoys her victory in silence. Frogs start up and die down, a million marimbas. In the distance the sea is asleep. We chomp one omochi after another. Suddenly Anju speaks in a voice I don’t remember her using. ‘I never see her face any more, Eiji.’
‘Whose face?’
‘Mum’s. Can you?’
‘She’s ill. She’s in a special hospital.’
Anju’s voice wavers. ‘What if that isn’t true?’
Huh? ‘Sure it’s true!’ I feel as if I’ve swallowed a knife. ‘She looks like how she looks in the photographs.’
‘The photographs are old.’ Why now? Anju wipes her eyes on her nightshirt and looks away. I hear her jaw and throat sort of clench. ‘Wheatie sent me to buy a box of washing powder at Mrs Tanaka’s while you were at soccer practice this afternoon. Mrs Oki and her sister from Kagoshima were there. They were at the back of the shop and they didn’t notice me at first, so I heard everything.’
The knife reaches my gut. ‘Heard what?’
‘Mrs Oki said, “Of course the Miyake girl hasn’t shown her face here.” Mrs Tanaka said, “Of course, she has no right to.” Mrs Oki said, “She wouldn’t dare. Dumping her two kiddies on their grandmother and uncles while she lives it up in Tokyo with her fancy men and fancy apartments and fancy cars.” Then she saw me.’ The knife turns itself. Anju gasps between tight chains of snivels.
‘What happened?’
‘She dropped her eggs, and hurried out.’
A moth drowns in the moonlight.
I wipe Anju’s tears. They are so warm. Then she brushes me away and hunches up in a stubborn crouch. ‘Look,’ I say, wondering what to say. ‘Mrs Oki and her sister from Kagoshima and Mrs Tanaka are all witches who drink their own piss.’