Tokyo (16 page)

It’s happening even as I write! The single lightbulb overhead has just died. Now we are … We are in semidarkness and I can hardly see my words on the paper. Outside the house the dying whine of failing machinery is terrible. The city is shutting down around our ears. Shujin is rummaging in the kitchen, trying to find our oil lamps, and from the end of the alley I can hear someone shouting hysterically.

I can’t sit here any longer. I can’t sit here and listen. I am going to investigate.

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19

When I went upstairs, the house seemed very dark and cool after the hot garden. I had a bath in the echoey old bathroom, with its green mould between the tiles and the pipes all showing. I washed carefully, staring at my reflection thoughtfully, at the way the running water magnified my white skin, the silvery hairs and pores. Shi Chongming wanted me to get Fuyuki to talk. What he was saying, I was sure, was that I had to flirt with him. He meant I had to be sexy.

In the hospital they had never got tired of lecturing me about my sexual behaviour, so I decided fairly early on that it wouldn’t be very bright to tell them how I’d really felt about the boys in the van. I could guess what they’d say: ‘Ah! See? An entirely inappropriate response!’ So I didn’t admit the truth: that after the boys had all taken their turns, and we’d got dressed and were heading back along the A303 the way we’d come, I was happier than I’d ever been. I didn’t tell them how bright everything looked, with the stars shining and the white line in the road slipping under the van. The four in the back kept yelling out not to go over the bumps too quickly, and I sat in the front humming and listening to a battered tape called XTC that kept wah’mg and cracking up through the van’s broken speakers. I felt light inside, as if something dark and secret had been washed out of me by the boys.

We got to the place on the country road where they’d picked

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me up and the driver pulled the van over to the verge. With the engine still running he leaned across me and opened the door. I stared at him, not understanding.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘see you around.’

‘What?’

‘See you around.’

‘Am I supposed to get out now?’

‘Yes.’

I was silent for a while, looking at the side of his face. There were some pimples on his neck just above his collar. ‘Aren’t I going to the pub with you? You said we were going to the pub. I’ve never been inside a pub.’

He pinched out his cigarette and threw it out of the window. There was a little line of turquoise still on the horizon over his left shoulder, and the clouds were rolling across it as if they were boiling. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said. ‘You’re too young for the pub. You’ll get us chucked out.’

I twisted round and looked into the back of the van. Four heads turned away from me, pretending to stare out of the windows. The sandy-haired boy was at the very back, meeting my eyes with a serious expression, as if he’d caught me stealing. I looked at the driver, but he was staring intently out of his window, tapping his fingers impatiently on the steering-wheel. I opened my mouth to say something, then changed my mind. I swung my legs out of the van and dropped out on to the road.

The driver reached over and slammed the door. I put my hands on the window and started to speak, but he’d already taken the handbrake off. The gears squealed, the indicator came on, the van rolled away. I was left on the roadside, watching its lights dwindle, then disappear. Overhead the clouds rolled and rolled until they’d entirely obscured the moon, and the little part of England that I stood in was completely dark.

And so I had to agree with the doctors - the immediate result of sex hadn’t been what I’d expected. And with the way my body was now, there probably wasn’t ever going to be a chance to find out if it could be different in the future. I didn’t dare tell the doctors this, I didn’t dare say how much I wished I could have a

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boyfriend, someone to go to bed with: I knew if I said anything they’d tell me my outrageous impulses were the root of a greater evil, that I was walking around with a wolf living inside me. I listened to the lessons about personal dignity and about self respect, all the complex stuff about consent and self-control, and it didn’t take long to decide that sex was dangerous and unpredictable, like Shi Chongming’s magic crane of the past, phosphorous on a cloudy day. I came to the conclusion that I’d be better off just pretending it didn’t exist.

In the end it was the girl in the bed next to me, the one who taught me how to smoke, who gave me a kind of solution. She used to masturbate every night. ‘Jigging’, she called it. Till stay in here for ever, me. Don’t care. Long as I’ve got me fags and a good jigging I’m sound.’ She’d do it under the covers when the lights went out. She wasn’t ashamed. I’d lie in the next bed with my sheets up to my chin, staring with wide eyes at the covers going up and down. She made it seem so gleeful, as if there was nothing wrong at all.

As soon as I got out of hospital, and wasn’t being watched every five minutes, I began my own guilty experiments. I soon knew how to make myself come, and although I never actually squatted over a mirror (the jigging girl promised me there were people who did) I was sure no other girl on earth had got to know the dark tract between her legs the way I knew mine. Sometimes I’d wonder about the wolf. I was afraid that one day I’d reach down there and my fingers would brush over its wet nose.

Now in the bathroom in Takadanobaba, I rinsed out the flannel and looked thoughtfully at my reflection, a thin-limbed spectre squatting on the little rubber stool. The girl who might go to the grave with only five boys in the back of a Ford Transit to reckon as her life’s loves. I filled up the little plastic bowl, swirling the hot and the cold water together, and tipped it down my body, letting the water lift and furl in the hollows of my collarbone, filter down into the scars on my stomach. I put down the bowl and slowly, dreamily, spanned my hands across my abdomen, linking my thumbs and fanning my fingers into a frame, staring vacantly at the way the water gathered in the hatched gouges, silvery, reflecting the light like mercury.

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No one, only the doctors and a man who came from the police to take photographs of them, had ever seen my scars. In my daydreams I imagined there was someone who would understand someone who would look at them and not recoil, who would hear the story and instead of burying their face, averting their eyes, would say something sweet and sad and sympathetic. But of course I knew it would never happen, because I’d never ever get that far. Never. If I imagined taking off my clothes, if I pictured myself revealing the truth to someone, I’d get a sickening, rushing sensation in my inner ear that would weaken my knees and have me tugging frantically at whatever I happened to be wearing, wrapping it tightly round my stomach as if I could hide what was there.

I suppose there are some things you just have to be grownup about. Sometimes you have to take a deep breath and say: ‘This is not something I can expect in my life.’ And if you say it enough times, it’s surprising - after a while it doesn’t even feel that horrible any more.

While I was in the bathroom, thinking about Fuyuki, the Russians had got dressed and now they were going down to the garden. They must have seen me out there and decided that if I could venture out so could they. Svetlana was dressed in only a tiny lime green bikini and a straw sun-hat, which she held on to her head with her free hand. When I was dried and dressed I stood in the upstairs gallery and watched her make her way through the undergrowth, her tanned limbs flashing through the leaves. Irina came behind in a bikini top, pink shorts, sweetheart sunglasses and a bright pink baseball hat, worn backwards so her neck was shaded. She’d shoved a packet of cigarettes into the strap of her bikini top. They both picked their way out through the undergrowth, squealing and bickering, and lifting their feet in their high heels like odd wading birds, coming blinking out into the sunshine. ‘Sun, sun!’ they chorused, adjusting their glasses and staring up at the sky.

I put my nose silently to the window and watched them rubbing on sun lotion, undoing packets of cherry KissMint

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chewing-gum and drinking beer out of frozen cans they’d bought from the machines on the street. Svetlana had fire-engine-red polish on her toes. I stared down at my white feet, wondering whether I had the courage to paint my nails. All of a sudden I had a hot, overwhelming feeling that made me shiver and rub my arms - it was something about wasted time and how lucky they were to be so comfortable in their skin. To move and stretch and be at home in the sun, nobody accusing them of madness.

And right there and then I made up my mind. As long as I was dressed, as long as my stomach was covered, there was nothing, no physical mark, that gave it away. If you didn’t know, and no one here in Tokyo did, you’d look at me and say I was normal. I could be as ‘sexy’ as anyone else.

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20

I couldn’t stop thinking about Fuyuki. Every time the lift bell rang and the hostesses swivelled round to yell in unison across the club, ‘Irasshaimase! Welcome!’ I’d sit forward on the edge of my seat, my pulse leaping, thinking I might see his wheelchair gliding across the floor. But he didn’t come into the club that night, or the next.

Over the days that followed, I would take out his card and look at it several times a day. Sometimes I went into a kind of trance holding it, turning it over and over in my fingers. His name meant Winter Tree and something in the combination of the calligraphy and the nature of the characters was so powerful that I only had to glance at the black on white to visualize, in astonishing clarity, a forest deep in snow. I would retrace the kanfi with my calligraphy brushes, picturing a mountainside, a pine forest, snowdrifts and icicles in the trees.

Now that I knew what would make Shi Chongming relent and give me the film, now that I was going to make the leap, I had become a serious student of the erotic. I started to watch the Japanese girls on the streets in their Victorian petticoats and lacy pumps, their ‘loose socks’ and short kilts. In traditional Japan, eroticism was something slender and pale like a flower stalk - the erotic was the tiny patch of bare skin on the back of a geisha’s neck. It’s something different the world over. I stared for hours at the Russians in their big high heels and orange suntans.

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I had a lot of wage packets backed up, just sitting in a bag in the wardrobe doing nothing except making me jittery. Eventually I got up my courage and started shopping. I went to astonishing places in Ginza and Omotesando, caves crammed with sequined slippers, pink negliges, hats trimmed in purple marabou and rose pink velvet. There were cherry pink platform boots, and turquoise bags covered in hundreds of stick-on Elvis Presleys. The salesgirls with their bunches and ballerina skirts had no idea how to deal with me. They chewed their nails and watched me with their heads on one side as I trailed up and down the aisles in amazement, getting to know how people made themselves look sexy.

I began to buy things -1 bought taffeta and velvet dresses, little shrug-on skirts in silk. And shoes, so many shoes: kitten heels, stilettos, court shoes, black-ribboned sandals. In a place called the Sweet Girls Emporium and Relax Centre, I bought a box of Stoppy hold-up stockings. I’d never worn stockings in my life. I dragged home piles of bags, weighed down like an ant.

But, of course, I didn’t have the courage to wear any of it. Everything stayed packed away in the wardrobe, day after day, all the dresses with red tissue paper taped round them. I thought about them, though, I thought about them a lot. Some nights I had a little ceremony that I kept absolutely secret. When the others were in bed, I would open the wardrobe and take out all the things I’d bought. I’d pour a glass of chilled plum liquor and drag the little dressing-table to a place under the light so that the mirror was properly illuminated. Then I’d go to the wardrobe and take a dress from its hanger.

It was horrible and exciting. Every time I saw myself in the mirror and reached automatically for the zip, ready to rip off the dress, I would think about Fuyuki sitting in his wheelchair, saying, ‘Are they all so pretty in England?’ Then I would stop, take a deep breath, slowly rezip the dress, and force myself to turn back and look, to study the white tops of my breasts, my legs in silk, dark, like inky water. I put on very high heels and painted my lips in a deep red, pure like heart-blood. I crayoned in eyebrows, and for a long time I practised lighting and smoking a cigarette. I tried to imagine myself, sitting formally in Fuyuki’s home, leaning

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towards him, cigarette smoke trailing across my painted lips. In my mind’s eye one of my hands was resting on a locked chest, the other was extended elegantly, palm up, to receive a large key that Fuyuki was passing to me.

After a long time I would open my eyes, go to the wardrobe and take everything out of its tissue paper, then arrange it in a ring round me. There were velvet strappy sandals, negliges in tangerine and cream, a crimson Ravage bra in the shape of a butterfly, still in its Cellophane. Things and things and more things, stretching out across the shadows. I’d lie down then, stretching out my bare arms, and roll over, mingling with my belongings, smelling the newness, letting them brush my skin. Sometimes I’d group them according to different rules: according to material, for example, black pique crushing peach silk noil, or according to colour, saffron with copper, silver with teal, lilac and electric pink and grey. I held them up to my face and breathed in their expensive smells. And, because I must be a bit funny like that, the ritual always seemed to lead to one thing: my hands in my knickers.

The Takadanobaba house was big, but sound spread like water along the timbers and through the flimsy rice-paper screens. I had to be quiet. I thought I’d been careful until very late one night, when it was over, I slid back the door to go to the bathroom and found Jason a few feet away in the moonlit corridor, leaning out of the window, a cigarette between his fingers.