Tokyo (34 page)

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through. Then zoom … into a terrible close-up of my face. I’m standing in the middle of the room, looking into an empty handbag, my heart sinking because this is the handbag where I store all the money I’ve earned in the last few months. It has never, until now, occurred to me to put it somewhere safe, but now I can see that the Nurse and the chimpira have not only come to torture Jason, but also to milk everything they possibly can from this rambling house.

I stood for a while outside my room and looked down the long corridor. It was dawn. The light coming through the broken gallery windows cast jagged shapes on the dusty tatami mat and everything was still and ominously silent, except for the drip drip drip of the tap in the kitchen. Every store room had been looted: they all stood open and silent, the air freezing, piles of dusty and decaying furniture lying all over the place. It was as if the developers’ wrecking ball had come through early. Most of the doors were open. Except Jason’s. It drew the eye, that door, all the way from the end of the corridor. There was something shamed and sinister about it, the way it was closed so tightly.

Instead of knocking I went to Irina’s room. I’m that much of a coward. When I drew back the door two bodies recoiled in the dark: Svetlana and Irina, gibbering with fear, scuttling backwards as if they’d climb the walls like rats. ‘It’s me,’ I whispered, holding up my hands to hush them. The room was musky with the smell of fear. ‘It’s me.’

It took them a moment to subside, sinking to the floor, holding each other. I dropped down next to them. Irina looked terrible her cheeks were tear-streaked, her makeup everywhere. ‘I want to go home,’ she mouthed, her face twisting. ‘I wanna go home.’

‘What happened? What did she do?’

Svetlana stroked Irina’s back. ‘It,’ she hissed. ‘It, not she. It come in here - push us in here, and the other one take our money. Everythink.’

‘Did she hurt you?’

She snorted loudly. I could tell it was an act. Her usual bravado was gone. ‘No. But it don’t gotta touch us to make us - pssht.’

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She used her hand to mime the two of them flying into the corner in fear.

Irina wiped her eyes on her T-shirt, holding it up to her face and pressing it into her eyes. It came away with two black mascara smears on it. ‘It is a monster, that one, I tellink you. A real d’yavol.’

‘How they know we got money, hmm?’ Svetlana was trying to light a cigarette, but her hands were trembling so hard that she couldn’t control the flame. She gave up and looked at me. ‘Did you tell to anyone how much money we make?’

‘They didn’t come because of the money,’ I said.

‘Of course they did. Everythink always about money.’

I didn’t answer. I bit my fingers and looked back at the door, thinking: No. You don’t understand. Jason brought them here. Whatever he did or said to the Nurse at the party - we’re paying the price now. The silence coming from his room made my blood cold. What were we going to find when we opened his door? What if -1 remembered the photograph in Shi Chongming’s portfolio - what if we drew back the door and found …

I stood. ‘We’ve got to go into Jason’s room.’

Svetlana and Irina were silent. They looked back at me seriously.

‘What is it?’

‘You didn’t hear the noise he make?’

‘Some of it - I was asleep.’

‘Well, we …’ Svetlana had managed to light her cigarette. She held the smoke deep in her lungs, and blew it out through tight lips. ‘We hear everythink.’ She glanced at Irina as if to confirm this. ‘Mmmm. And it not us going in there now and look.’

Irina sniffed and shook her head. ‘No. Not us.’

I looked from face to face, my heart sinking. ‘No,’ I said woodenly. ‘Of course not.’ I went to the doorway and stared along the corridor to Jason’s room. ‘Of course it should be me.’

Svetlana came to stand behind me, her hand on my shoulder. She peered out into the hallway. In front of Jason’s room a suitcase lay up-ended against the wall, its contents spilling out on to

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the floor - his clothing scattered everywhere, his passport, an envelope stuffed with paperwork. ‘My God,’ she whispered into my ear. ‘Look at mess.’

‘I know.’

‘You sure they gone?’

I looked across at the silent stairway. ‘I’m sure.’

Irina joined us, still dabbing her face, and we stood in a huddle, looking timidly down the passageway. There was a smell - an unmissable smell that made me think, inexplicably, of offal in a butcher’s window. I swallowed. ‘Listen … we might have to …’ I paused. ‘What about a doctor? We might have to get a doctor.’

Svetlana chewed her lip uneasily, exchanging a look with Irina. ‘We take him to doctor, Grey, and they gonna wanna know what happened and then the politsia gonna be here, looking snoopy snoopy, and then—’

‘Immigration,’ Irina clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. ‘Immigration.’

‘And who gonna to pay for it, hmm?’ Svetlana turned her cigarette and looked at the tip, as if it had spoken to her. ‘No money left.’ She nodded. ‘No money left in whole house.’

‘Davai.’ Irina put her hand on the small of my back, and propelled me gently forward. ‘You go see. Go see, then we talk.’

I went slowly, stepping over the suitcase, stopping in front of his door with my hands very stiff at my sides, staring at the doorhandle, the terrible silence ringing in my ears. What if I didn’t find his body? What if I was right about Fuyuki and his medicine? The word ‘hunt’ came to my mind. Had the Nurse come here hunting? I glanced back down the corridor to where the Russians were huddled in the doorway, Irina with her hands over her ears as if she was about to hear an explosion.

‘Right,’ I murmured to myself. I turned, put a jittery hand on the door, and took a deep breath. ‘Right.’

I tugged but the door wouldn’t slide open.

‘What is it?’ hissed Svetlana.

‘I don’t know.’ I shook it. ‘It’s locked.’ I put my mouth to the door. ‘Jason?”

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I waited, listening to the silence.

‘Jason - can you hear me?’ I tapped on the door with my knuckle. ‘Jason, can you hear me? Are you—’

‘Fuck off.” His voice was muffled. It sounded as if he was speaking from under a duvet. ‘Get away from my door and fuck

off:

I took a step back, putting a hand on the wall to steady myself, my knees trembling. ‘Jason - you’re …’ I took a few deep breaths. ‘Do you need a doctor? I’ll take you to Roppongi if you like ‘

‘I said fuck off.’

‘- we’ll tell them we’ll pay next week when—’

‘Are you fucking deaf?

‘No,’ 1 said, staring blankly at the door. ‘No, I’m not deaf.’

‘He okay?’ hissed Svetlana.

I looked up at her. ‘What?’

‘He okay?’

‘Urn,’ I said, wiping my face and looking dubiously at the door. ‘Well, I think, yes, I think he is.’

It took us a long time to believe that the Nurse wasn’t coming back. It took even longer to get up the courage to inspect the house. The damage was terrible. We tidied up a little and took it in turns to have baths. I washed in a daze, moving the flannel woodenly over my swollen face. There were scratches on my feet where I must have ripped them jumping out of the window. Coincidentally they were exactly where the dream baby had bitten me. They could have been the baby’s toothmarks. I stared at them for a long, long time, shivering so hard that I couldn’t stop my teeth chattering.

Irina had discovered some money in a coat pocket that the chimpira had overlooked and agreed to lend me a thousand yen. When I finished bathing I tidied my room, carefully sweeping up the broken glass and shattered door shards, stacking all the books into the wardrobe, arranging the notes and the paintings neatly, then put Irina’s money in my pocket and took the Maranouchi line to Hongo.

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The rain-soaked campus looked very different from the last time I’d been there. The thick leaf cover had gone and you could see all the way to the lake, the complex and ornately tiled roof of the gymnasium rising up behind the trees. It was early but Shi Chongming already had a student with him, a tall, spotty boy in an orange sweatshirt that said Bathing Ape on the front. Both of them stopped talking when I walked in, my coat buttoned up tightly. My face was bruised, blood still crusted my nostrils, my hands were in rigid fists at my sides, and I was shaking uncontrollably. I stood dead in the middle of the room and pointed at Shi Chongming. ‘You made me go a long way,’ I said. ‘You made me go a long way, but I can’t go any further. It’s time for you to give me the film.’

Shi Chongming got slowly to his feet. He steadied himself on his cane, then held up his hand to indicate the door to the student. ‘Quick, quick,’ he hissed, when the boy sat frozen in his seat staring at me. ‘Come along now, quickly.’ The student got cautiously to his feet. His face was serious and his eyes were locked on mine as he sidestepped with great care to the door, slipping through and closing it behind him with a barely audible click.

Shi Chongming didn’t turn immediately. He stood for a while with his hand on the door, his back to me. When we’d been alone for almost a minute, and there was no chance of interruption, he turned to me. ‘Now, then, are you calm?’

‘Calm? Yes, I’m calm. Very calm.’

‘Sit down. Sit down and tell me what’s happened.’

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47

Nanking, 20 December 1937

There is nothing so painful, so agonized, as a proud man admitting he has been mistaken. On our way back from the factory, leaving the dead child on the street, we reached the point where we would separate and Liu put his hand on my arm. ‘Go home and wait for me,’ he whispered. ‘I will be with you as soon as I’ve seen young Liu back to the house. Things are going to change.’

Sure enough, less than twenty minutes after I’d arrived home, there was a coded series of knocks on the door and I opened it to find him standing on the threshold with a coarse bamboo-hemp folder under his arm.

‘We need to talk,’ he murmured, checking to make sure that Shujin wasn’t listening. ‘I’ve got a plan.’

He took off his shoes as a mark of respect and came into the small room on the ground floor that we use for formal occasions. Shujin keeps the room properly prepared at all times, set out with chairs and a red lacquered table, which is beautifully inlaid with peonies and dragons in mother-of-pearl. We seated ourselves at it, arranging our robes round us. Shujin didn’t question old Liu’s presence. She slipped upstairs to tidy her hair, and after a few minutes I heard her go out to the kitchen to boil some water.

‘There’s only tea and a few of your wife’s buckwheat dumplings to offer you, Liu Runde,’ I said. ‘Nothing more. I am sorry.’

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He bowed his head. ‘There is no need to explain.’

In his folder he had a map of Nanking that he had prepared in great detail. He must have been working on it over the last few days. When the pot of tea was on the table, and our cups were full, he spread it out in front of me.

‘This,’ he said, circling a point outside Chalukou, ‘is the house of an old friend. A salt trader, very wealthy - and the house is large, with a fresh well, pomegranate trees and well-stocked pantries. Not so very far from Purple Mountain. And this,’ he put a cross a few li further into the city, ‘this is Taiping gate. There are reports that the wall has been badly shelled in this area, and there is a chance, with the rush to the west, that the Japanese won’t have assigned enough men to guard it here. Assuming we get through, we’ll walk from there along back-streets, following the main Chalukou road, reaching the river a long way north of the city. Chalukou can be of no strategic importance to the Japanese, so if we’re lucky we’ll find a boat, and from the far shore we will disappear inland to Anhui province.’ We were both silent for a while, thinking about taking our families through all those dangerous places. After a while, as if I’d expressed a doubt, Liu nodded. ‘Yes, I know. It relies on the Japanese being concentrated upstream at Xiaguan and Meitan.’

‘The radio says that any day now there’ll be an announcement about the self-governing committee.’

He looked at me very seriously. It was the most unguarded expression I’d ever seen him wear. ‘Dearest, dearest Master Shi. You know as well as I do that if we stay here we’re like rats in a drain, waiting for the Japanese to find us.’

I put my fingers to my head. ‘Yes, indeed,’ I muttered. Tears were suddenly in my eyes, tears I didn’t want old Liu to see. But he is too old and wise. He knew immediately what was wrong.

‘Master Shi, do not take this blame too heavily - do you understand? I myself have done no better than you. I, too, have been guilty of pride.’

A tear ran down my face and fell on to the table, landing on the eye of a dragon. I stared at it numbly. ‘What have I done?’ I whispered. ‘What have I done to my wife? My child?’

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Old Liu sat forward in his chair and covered my hand with his. ‘We have made a mistake. All we have done is to make a mistake. We have been ignorant little men, but that is all. Only a little ignorant, you and I.’

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48

Sometimes people forget to be sympathetic and instead they blame you for everything, even for the things you did when you had no idea they were wrong. When I explained what had happened at the house, the first thing Shi Chongming wanted to know was had I jeopardized his research? Had I talked about what he was looking for? Even when I gave him an edited version, a vague explanation about what Jason had done, how he’d brought the Nurse to the house, Shi Chongming still wasn’t as sympathetic as I’d hoped. He wanted to know more.

‘What an odd thing for your friend to do. What was going on in his mind?’

I didn’t answer. If I told him about Jason, about what had been going on between us, it would be like the hospital all over again, people tut-tutting over my behaviour, looking at me and thinking of mud-streaked savages mating in a forest.