The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (80 page)

Mizuki couldn’t accept the point. How different was this, say, from New York, Paris, Tokyo, where people took you more seriously depending on your street, district, zone.

The American student held up her hand. And what about the Spanish student in Elementario Due who was chased through the Centro Storico
by a man with a machete
?

The tutor dipped forward in defeat. She knew this student, she said, and Erica, point of fact, wouldn’t run even if her head were on fire.

‘I heard this from an Italian,’ the American continued regardless. ‘There’s an earthquake in the middle of the day, OK, and a house shared by two families – one family from Milan, the other from Venice – and it’s totally destroyed. Which family die?’

The women fell silent.

‘A family from Naples who broke in while the others were at work.’

Mizuki could not look up and didn’t want to face the tutor. The class fell silent: when the tutor finally spoke she suggested they take an early break.

Mizuki waited in the stairwell for Lara to finish her class: she checked the messages on her phone then switched it off. She thought to leave, to return to the station although she guessed the brothers would be gone by now. A young man flapped a dishcloth out of a window; the sound dislocated and came softly across the courtyard to her, undiminished. People knew their neighbours because the courtyards amplified every detail: the TVs, radios, the clatter of plates and cutlery, the arguments and supple conversations, the flushing toilets, the water running through pipes, and with surprising frequency, people singing or coughing. To live here was to sense your neighbours at all hours, to taste the food they ate, to bear their good tempers and bad. It made no sense that she would like this city, being so opposite to home, so permeable and messy.

When Lara finally arrived the friends kissed in greeting. Lara said she looked tired and asked if she still wasn’t sleeping.

Mizuki shrugged, who knew why these things happened?

‘You should rest this weekend.’

They sat on the cool marble steps of the open stairwell, quietly sharing confidences, while other students (the military wives, the vacationing teachers) on their way to the café mixed with priests and clerks from the seminary offices. Mizuki, closest to the courtyard, kept an eye on the wasps, small specks chaotically charging the air two floors below. No one else appeared bothered.

She repeated the joke, knowing it would annoy Lara.

‘They talk about this place like it’s a zoo,’ Lara slapped her hand to the step. ‘Come on. I need a cigarette.’

Mizuki followed Lara through the courtyard and kept close to her side; her hands tucked away, her collar drawn up. Wasps zagged over the biscuits in untold numbers, their tiny shadows flitting across the wax paper, antennae dipping for syrup. A horror show. Mizuki covered her mouth, held back her hair, half-ran to the door with her eyes closed, suppressing a squeal – bad enough to be stung, far worse to swallow one.

Once outside Lara lit up, indignant now, unaware of her friend’s small panic. Mizuki held her hand to her heart.

‘And where does she get these ideas? She lives in Bagnoli.’ Lara huffed out smoke. ‘These houses are behind gates, no one can visit. Americans keep themselves locked away. They aren’t houses, they’re safes.’

The buildings overshadowed the street and drew out a cavernous darkness. A clean blue sky pinched above tight black alleyways of old stucco facades, of dim intestinal yellows and pinks. Above them hung a sign for the bakery, a simple tin star in a circle. How familiar this was now, this depth: straight lines buckled to time and gravity. Streets designed for walking, for carts, made perfect runs for scooters and dogs and channelled their noise.

‘If they don’t offer me something soon I’ll have to go back.’ Due to finish her course, Lara taught sessions at the language school as part of her placement. ‘It’s good to have work, but it’s always temporary, and it’s not enough. Everywhere is the same.’

They watched students return from the cafe one by one, each buzzing first, then ducking through the small portal door. Mizuki looked over two dusty violas displayed in the window of an antiques store. She held her hand to the glass to see into the shop.

‘They never sell anything. I’ve never seen it open,’ Lara paused. ‘You’re wearing a wedding ring?’

Equally surprised, Mizuki looked at her own hand then held it up for Lara to see.

‘I’ve never seen you wear a ring.’

‘It was my mother’s.’ Mizuki automatically began to screw the ring about her finger. ‘I wear it at home. Sometimes. I forgot to take it off.’

The first bell rang and they returned to the courtyard. Lara hesitated at the door, half-in, half-out, unconvinced by Mizuki’s answer.

Mizuki let Lara walk ahead, worried now that Lara would ask bolder, more direct questions. She hurried by the bakery, did not look at the trays of biscuits, but noticed, up on the third landing, the American, Helen, arms up, flailing, and couldn’t make sense of her gestures, how her hands slapped uselessly at the air. Up the stairs Mizuki kept behind Lara to avoid her questions, and the reason for the waving came to her. A wasp.

Mizuki fell immediately on the first sting, sudden and heavy, and upturned her bag even as the wasp, caught in her hair, stung her throat a second and third time. She frantically ruffled her hair, felt the insect between her fingers as something rough, like a seed head, caught then swiped free, she saw the pen, a red tube, tumble out of her bag with her lipstick, face cream, sun cream, tissues, hand mirror, mascara; her course books scudded down the steps, her phone. She snatched up the pen, snapped off the top, stuck it to her shoulder and injected herself.

By the time Lara reached her, Mizuki was done. The wasp, flicked out of her hair, spun circles on the marble.

And now the part she hated, a light woozy bafflement, how she might even seem a little drunk. How inevitable this was because of the biscuits, the syrup, the wasp’s natural aggression, and how day after day for six weeks the odds were getting thin. Inevitable now that Lara would ask questions about the ring and Mizuki would have to explain herself.

Lara brought her to the office then returned to the stairwell to collect her bag and books. Mizuki sat by the computers expecting to feel sick, an awful anticipation. She took the water offered to her, insisted that she was all right, and explained to Lara once she returned that she took antihistamine each night as a precaution. Who could say if this helped, if this time there would or would not be a reaction?

‘When I was a girl,’ she explained, ‘I was stung.’ Once, on her foot – and her legs, her arms, her face swelled like she was some kind of windbag, or some instrument. And while her throat had not sealed, a mighty itch had troubled her afterward as if her neck was fur-lined, and the threat that one day she might choke stuck with her. Ant bites, spider bites, a scratch once from coral, and she swelled up, ballooned.

As if to prove her contrariness the insulin depressed her. She could feel the immediate effect. Not sick now but tired. A nurse from Elementario Due came out to check her pulse, her throat, and declared if something was going to happen, it would have happened. Mizuki wasn’t sure that this was true. She hid in the toilet and hoped that Lara would leave her, but Lara stuck outside and waited in the corridor.

An undiscouraged Lara accompanied her to the station. Because of her tiredness, Mizuki felt a general disconnection from what she was doing; more than this, she felt empty, and this emptiness seemed evident in every spoken word and gesture, to the flow of passengers rising on escalators or paused on the stairs, the deepening sunlight, the presence of the scaffolding, of paint pots and rollers laid across the platform. She insisted that she would be all right; two hours now and there were no serious fears, no reaction. She just wanted to be home. Home? In the hot and still air it seemed possible that she could haul herself above the hubbub and swim free. In her dreams flying and swimming were the same action, but even when dreaming she never really lost what was troubling her, she never really became free.

Mizuki took off her sunglasses and shook her head. She pointed at the stubby towers of Porta Nolana, close by there was a café, she said, she had something she wanted to say.

Lara paid for the coffees, brought them to the window where they stood and faced the Circumvesuviana station. The sun sparked off windscreens and chrome of passing traffic. She couldn’t help but scan through the waiting groups outside the station for the brothers.

Lara dusted sugar off her hands.

Unsure about how she should start, Mizuki took out her passport and passed it across the counter, the text inside was printed in Japanese and English. ‘My name is not Mizuki Katsura,’ she began. ‘I didn’t intend to lie to you. I haven’t told you everything. I’m married. It’s true that this ring belonged to my mother.’ Mizuki rubbed her finger as Lara paged through the passport, conscious that her friend would not look at her. Mizuki looked to the station forecourt. ‘When I first met my husband he told me he had two ambitions. He wanted to marry before he was fifty, and he wanted to see every building designed by Kenzo Tange. He likes this architect. Back home, in Tokyo, he has an office in a building designed by Tange. He sometimes arranges his business so that he can go to a new city and see Tange’s buildings, and he has seen almost all of them, but he hasn’t come to Naples. He hasn’t seen the Centro Direzionale. After we married he became busy with his work. He’s away most of the time, and I was looking after his mother, who is very sick and very difficult. When I decided to leave, I couldn’t decide where I should go, or what I should do. And one day he was talking about Tange and Naples. I don’t know why, but I made up my mind to come here.’

Lara closed the passport and left it face down on the counter.

‘Why did you leave him? Why change your name?’

‘I don’t know. I could say that he is nineteen years older than me. That he knows his mind. He never makes mistakes. He is always certain. I could say that I always make mistakes. I make too many mistakes.’ Mizuki bowed her head. ‘But I don’t know that these are the right reasons.’

‘He doesn’t know where you are?’

Mizuki shook her head. ‘Nobody knows. Not even my family. If they knew they would tell him.’

‘What about your friends?’

‘I had friends before I was married, but he didn’t like them. He told me they were bad people, or they were stupid, or strange, and that they were not a good influence. Then, slowly, they stopped calling or inviting me out. It’s complicated. When I’m with him I don’t know my own mind.’

‘But if he can’t find you here. If he doesn’t know where you are, he can’t bother you.’

‘My husband is very wealthy. I thought that if I told somebody they would find out how wealthy he is and they would tell him where he could find me. I don’t think they would want to – not at first. But I’m certain that this would happen.’

Lara propped her elbows against the counter. Both women looked hard at the coaches and taxis under the station awning. ‘This is my second attempt to finish my studies? I never finished – the first time – because I met someone. It was a terrible mistake. I gave up everything. When it was over, when I came back, I had to start from the beginning again. I had nothing. Nowhere to live, no money, no work. I had to start everything from the beginning.’

Mizuki fell quiet for a moment. It was sad, she said, when one person gives too much and the other takes for no proper reason.

‘It’s never that simple. But why don’t you tell him where you are?’

Mizuki paused then closed her eyes. The story was not true, not quite. She hadn’t left her husband exactly, but run away for an adventure, something happenstance, the kind of encounter suggested by the brothers at the station: one thing couldn’t end without another starting.

Lara saw her onto the train and then left.

Immediately out of the station the line ran between empty warehouses and loading bays stacked with rusted shipping containers, the shore visible between the gaps. Mizuki sat beside the window, her shirt stuck to the small of her back, and she regretted explaining herself to Lara. Why had she done this? After spending six weeks as Mizuki Katsura, she had spoiled this illusion in five, less, three minutes of careless chatter. She couldn’t understand why she would do this, and couldn’t see what she could do to correct it. In an attempt to dismiss the day’s events she began to take notice of the passengers, and sensed among the men an air of opportunity. They looked at the women dressed in thin skirts and tight summer tops with long glances and lowered heads. A dog-like expression, she thought, common, hopeful, indolent, and nestling threat.

Mizuki looked at the sea through breaks between the apartment buildings. Her mobile rang as the train came into San Georgio, and she was bothered to see that the call came from Lara. More questions. More explanations.

One man dressed in a business shirt, his tie loose about his neck, stood too close. Mizuki shut off the phone and closed her eyes. How disappointing these men were, and how unlike the brothers. If she saw them now what would she do? Would she speak with them, follow after them? The idea of two brothers took on a new shape and possibility. It wasn’t the older brother who interested her, no, it was both of them, together, and how would it be to spend time with two men? One intense, the other removed.

The train slowed as it approached Torre del Greco; men drew out cigarettes, lighters ready in their hands. The businessman paused on the platform as he lit his cigarette. He caught Mizuki’s eye as the door shut between them, then gestured, hands raised, unresolved.

Anxious that her sleep would again be interrupted, Mizuki prepared carefully for bed. She ate early and moderately, and then focused on completing her assignments. Once she was done she sat at the dressing table and declined verbs, then answered simple questions with direct answers and watched Italian bubble out of her mouth. Mizuki practised the tricky rolling consonants, the unchanging vowels, and wondered at how her expression, fierce with concentration, appeared to show anger, when she was seldom, if ever, harsh or bad-tempered.