Authors: Sujata Massey
“Just a day or two.” Long enough to see the potter, and have the questions answered that had been at the back of my mind.
“And during this time, may I have your word that you won’t try to speak with anyone in the Japanese government, whether it’s someone as lowly as a cop or as high up as a government minister?”
I nodded glumly and signed the receipt. I wanted to get out of there.
“This is the best number to call, if you want to discuss something personally with me.” A long, French-manicured fingernail tapped the first number on the card. “The other ones will allow you to leave a message with a human being.”
“Okay. Well, I’m actually hoping to be out of town within the next few hours—that is, if I can get a ticket—so I’d better go.”
“
Gambatte,
Rei.” She held out the envelope, which was still lying on the desk. “And don’t forget to take the money.”
It wasn’t until I was in the limousine ten minutes later that I opened it and saw how much there was. A million yen—the equivalent of $10,000. And an unsigned note inside:
Michael said for you to keep the change
.
I’d been planning to travel to Kyushu on the bullet train, taking the whole day, but I was now rich enough to take an hour-and-a-half flight direct from Haneda Airport to Fukuoka. First, thought, I’d need my passport, and that would involve retrieving it from Yokohama. I weighed the risks of taking the train to my aunt’s station and then walking to her house, but I decided that would be foolhardy.
I asked the driver to give me the name of a trusted colleague, and by the time we’d reached Angus’s hotel, I’d booked my own car and driver and reserved a seat on the one o’clock flight to Fukuoka. Feeling supremely organized, I used the house phone and called from the lobby to Angus Glendinning’s room.
“Hi, I’m calling up from downstairs. I just wanted to say I’m done with borrowing your driver. He’s in the hotel drive, awaiting your next command.”
“Command? What the hell time is it?” Angus croaked, sounding exactly like his brother first thing in the morning.
“Nine-thirty. Too early, huh?”
“Christ, I’m exhausted. Your cousin’s a madwoman. Kept me up all night.”
“Really?” I’d thought Chika was interested in Sridhar. Had she leapfrogged to Angus?
“Yeah.” Angus laughed richly. “She just, like, wanted to give us all Japanese lessons all night to make a good impression on TV today.”
“That’s right, your chauffeur said that you need to be at TBS at eleven for an interview,” I said, vastly relieved that all he was talking about were language lessons.
“There’s still time. Come up for a coffee or something. Chika made it already.”
My second offer of coffee this morning—and this one was worth taking up, I decided. I hadn’t had any time to catch up with Angus, and now he was fully available and sober. I thanked him for the invitation and rode the elevator up to the tenth floor. Outside Angus’s room, the
Japan Times,
the
Asahi Shimbun,
and a Japanese tabloid popular with male readers,
Tokyo Supootsu
, lay waiting. I picked them up to bring in before I knocked.
Angus answered, half-dressed in a hotel towel and with wet red hair standing on end.
“You must have just gotten out of the shower,” I said, feeling shy in the presence of all that Glendinning skin. “I’m sorry to have come this early. Shall I leave and give you time to dress?”
“Why so formal?” Angus said, imitating Hugh’s upper-crust Edinburgh drawl. “Come in, darling. You look like you could use wee kip on the sofa.”
I put the paper down on the coffee table in front of a cheerful striped sofa. The Roppongi Lily was a decent hotel, not as luxurious as the Grand Hyatt, but with Western amenities like the sofa, a desk with cables for a laptop, and a double bed. I looked for evidence that two pillows had been used by two people, but there was no way to tell. All the pillows were on the floor.
I looked around for Chika. “Where’s my cousin?”
Angus yawned. “Off to work, Sridhar said. But she was good enough to spirit herself around and make everyone’s coffee.”
As I poured cream in my own cup of coffee, I pondered the meaning of Angus’s statement, which seemed to suggest that Chika had slept in Sridhar’s room. Well, I liked the prospect of Chika with Sridhar more than the thought of her with Angus.
“I’ll take another cup, Rei. Make mine black as your beautiful hair,” Angus called. He’d slipped on his jeans while I’d been fixing my cup, and he was now lounging on the sofa, leafing through the newspaper.
I took him the black coffee, figuring it was the least I could do after borrowing his car. And I wanted to use his bathroom, too. “Do you mind if I spend a few minutes freshening up?”
In the bathroom mirror, I evaluated myself. Not pretty at all, even after I’d washed my face. I was still wearing the same bedraggled clothes as the day before—and my hair was so awful. I was an ugly, easy mark for the cop who’d stalked me. And where was the policeman from hell today—still looking for me?
I scrutinized Angus’s many grooming aids tossed across the vanity table. There was a surprising amount of makeup to play with, and a bottle of temporary hair coloring. The shade was flame red.
I stuck my head out of the door and called, “Angus, do you mind if I try out your hair color?”
Angus was on the phone, talking with someone. “Yeah, yeah, tonight’s great,” he said, not noticing me.
I waved and held up the bottle questioningly. Angus smiled. I decided to take this as a yes. Besides, it was an economy-size bottle; there’d be plenty left over for him.
I read the instructions quickly. The redness achieved would vary, depending on one’s original hair color and the amount of time the dye was left on. Black hair, I figured, would fall at the longer end of the waiting time. I washed my hair in the sink with Angus’s Aveda shampoo, and then applied the color, using the provided plastic comb to distribute it evenly. Then, I donned a little shower cap—it amused me to imagine the macho Angus wearing this item—and waved a blow-dryer around my head. This wasn’t part of the instructions, but I remembered my mother sitting under a giant bubble dryer when she had her blonding treatments. Heat could only help speed the process or intensify the color.
I thought about asking Angus—after all, he was the expert at this—so I turned off the dryer, adjusted the towel I was wearing around my shoulders to protect my sweater, and went back into the bedroom.
Sridhar, dressed in drawstring pants and a striped turtleneck, had joined Angus and had his own copy of
Tokyo Supootsu
in hand. When he saw me peep out, his eyes widened.
“Excuse the shower cap, I’m just working on restyling my look.” I winked at him.
“Is it—because of the picture?”
“What picture?” Angus asked from his lazy perch on the couch.
“Chika saw it while she was riding the train. She called to warn us,” Sridhar told Angus in a low, angry voice.
“So someone snapped a picture of us behaving badly last night?” Angus laughed lazily. “Well done. The timing’s great, with the TV bit about to happen—”
“That’s right,” I chimed in. “People say that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. How much trouble did you boys get into, after we parted last night?”
“We weren’t the problem,” Sridhar said, staring at me in a way that seemed almost reproachful. “You were.”
“Oh,” I said, starting to feel worried. If my face was in the paper, it would probably fan the flame of the man who was chasing me, and any of his colleagues as well. But who would have photographed me? “Did somebody take a picture of us standing around that poor girl who was passed out on the street?”
“I can’t believe you haven’t guessed.” Sridhar’s tone had turned from cool to frigid.
“I don’t want to guess. Let me see!” Suddenly, I was frantic.
“Yeah, where’s the infamous snap?” Angus was rummaging through his own copy, a perplexed look on his face. Apparently he hadn’t known that in Japan, the back page of the paper is the front.
“Page three,” I said, feeling dead. “That’s usually where the scandal stories and photos are placed.”
“Bingo,” Angus said as I leaned in to inspect the close-up black-and-white photo of a man and woman.
It was bad. The couple in the picture were Takeo Kayama and myself, at the very moment at which Takeo had tripped toward the duck pond and I’d attempted to stop him and wound up in the water, too. The photographer had captured the two of us in each other’s arms, laughing, and improbably surrounded by fluttering ducks. I didn’t have enough time to decipher all the writing underneath, but I did make out my name and Takeo’s, both spelled correctly.
“Who’s the arsehole?” Angus finally said.
“His name is Takeo Kayama. He’s an old friend.”
“A boyfriend, according to the papers,” Sridhar chimed in. “Son of the eighth richest man in Japan, who only the day before was mourning the death of his fiancée.”
“I didn’t know you could read Japanese,” I said.
“I can’t!” Sridhar retorted. “Chika translated the story for me over the phone.”
“I had no idea someone was watching us with a camera,” I said. “If only they’d come up and asked for an interview, I could have easily explained. We weren’t hugging. It was actually an accident—he, we, fell into the pond. The ducks took off because of a light—damn it, that probably was the first camera flash! I remember more light going off when we were in the water, but I just didn’t make the connection.”
“Why were you having a walkie-walk by a duck pond with a guy who just lost his fiancée?” Angus demanded. “You’re making a bloody fool of my brother, not to mention yourself.”
“Takeo needed help, Angus. I’d just gone there to help him. And this picture—well, it will be even worse for him than me, if you can believe it.” I put my face in my hands, wishing everything would go away.
“Go on, hide your face!” said Sridhar. “I would too if I committed such a devious deception!”
“The way Hugh talked about you to us…” Angus drifted off, sounding heartbroken. “He loved you more than life itself, and I know he thought you were going to Japan to work, not to become a total slapper!”
I looked at both of them, knowing the worst part was that I couldn’t protest. There had been a one-night stand, and that was essentially the same thing as an affair. I stood up and attempted a wry half smile. “I never thought I’d get a moral lecture from two guys in a rock band.
Sumimasen.
I’ll just get this crap out of my hair and I’ll leave.”
“So, where are you going?” Angus asked. “To this Takeo dude?”
I wiped away a bit of the foamy substance that had dripped underneath the shower cap onto my forehead. “No, I’m actually leaving town for a while. This kind of—misunderstanding—and the snap judgments of people I considered my friends make me realize I’d rather not stay around. I’ll—I’ll just go into the bathroom and rinse this stuff out—I’m supposed to rinse it out, right?”
“Yeah,” Angus answered, not even looking at me.
“So that’s why you’re changing your hair color.” Sridhar snapped his fingers. “New bloke, new look, eh?”
“It’s not because of him.”
“Like I said before, I liked your hair the way it was,” Angus said.
When I came out of the bathroom again, they were gone: to Sridhar’s room, maybe; or to one of the other guys, I wasn’t masochistic enough to hunt them down to say good-bye.
Aunt Norie silently answered the door when I rang. I’d said
“Tadaima,”
the phrase that meant, “I’ve returned home,” but she had not answered with the corresponding
“Okaeri nasai.”
I was not welcome. My suitcase had been packed and was standing next to the front door.
“You changed your hair color,” my aunt said dully. It figured that even if she didn’t want to talk to me, she couldn’t resist criticizing my appearance.
“I did it because of the man who followed me last night. It’s supposed to wash out after a week or two.” I hadn’t left the color in long enough, or combed it through right, because the end result was a horrible hodgepodge of black and red chunks.
“Oh? You mean you didn’t do it because of what’s in the papers and on television?”
“Obasan, please understand that Takeo and I are not in a relationship,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “We had met at the park to chat and didn’t know we were being followed by a paparazzo. I was trying to help Takeo when he tripped into a pond, and that’s all the picture shows.”
“On the TV news this morning, they called you the ducky lovers,” Norie said, her distaste clear. “A reporter even interviewed the taxi driver who took us to Emi’s memorial service. He said you and Takeo had a passionate discussion right outside the family house!”
“I didn’t want to keep that driver waiting around. I knew he was a gossip—”
“Oh, don’t blame him. It would come out anyway that you were the girl who was banned from Japan, the girl whose return resulted in the death of a young bride-to-be—”
“I didn’t kill Emi,” I said, my heart pounding. “Is that what they’re saying?”
“No, but it’s just a matter of time before someone asks. That policeman yesterday evening was probably genuinely looking for you to question.”
“Maybe so, but I doubt it. And the truth is, through this all I was only trying to help—”
“To think that I let you convince me to arrange a meeting with Takeo-san at his office, which started all the trouble!” Aunt Norie’s voice rose into hysteria. “I’ve already spoken with your uncle and cousin about this. I fear we’ll never be received socially again, and it could affect their jobs—”
The sad thing was that she was right. “Well, there’s one way Japanese people have always survived socially, when a family member misbehaves.”
“I’m not going to kill myself over your—your ridiculous actions.”
“Of course you won’t,” I said. “But you can cut me off. Disown me. Not have me as a niece anymore.”
Norie blinked, and I could see tears in her eyes. “I would never do that.”
“I think you should if things are as bad for you as you’ve just said.”
“Rei-chan.” My aunt took a shuddering breath and seemed to calm down slightly. “I didn’t intend to speak so sharply. You are one who makes mistakes. But you weren’t brought up here. There’s so much we should have taught you, that we haven’t done.”
“It’s not your fault. And I’m sorry I dragged you into the matter with Takeo.” I picked up my suitcase. “Do you know if my passport’s in here?”
“I double-checked that it’s in the front pocket. But where are you going? Not back into Tokyo, I hope, because that’s where the press is crawling, looking for another chance to catch you doing something silly.”
“I’ll be miles away, where nobody expects to see me,” I assured her. “And when I come back, I promise that I’ll figure out a way to make things right.”