‘I understand,’ said Bill with a sigh. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to shoot you in the back if I don’t like what I hear.’
A small nervous laugh escaped from the man’s mouth. ‘The fact is, Mr Cody,’ he began. ‘If you do not accept this offer, and accept it within seven days at that, then I will be forced to re-route the –’ He paused and rephrased this last sentence. The Kansas–Pacific Railroad Company will be forced to re-route their intended line five miles east of here to a plot of land which they have an option on. They will then build their own town there under similar lease-holding arrangements to yours here and invite businessmen and families to join them there. And they will own all the town, Mr Cody, not just a four-fifths share in it.’ He paused and looked a little shamefaced. ‘I’ve seen this before,’ he said quietly. ‘I’d advise you to accept the offer.’
By the time he had finished this speech, Bill had seen the town of Rome, the town he and Yountam had conceived and built together, go up in smoke. He had not heard of this tack before and could hardly believe it was taking place, for the railroads were big business and in possession of the lands of fortune which he would never be able to lay claim to, despite the times that lay ahead. He knew immediately that if he did not accept the offer then Rome would burn.
‘I don’t need seven days, Mr Webb,’ he said quietly, looking away, sure that he could see Clara Yountam in the distance walking slowly across the centre street, one arm placed protectively beneath her stomach for her baby was due any day now and she had swelled to huge proportions. ‘I can give you my answer now.’
‘You won’t regret it, Mr Cody.’
‘My answer is no, Mr Webb. It’s no now, it’ll be no tomorrow and it’ll still be no seven days from now. So go on. Build your town. See where it gets you. I won’t die. It’s just another chapter, that’s all.’
Jack Webb opened his mouth to protest but couldn’t think of any words to say. He had been in this situation three times before. Once, the fellow had threatened to shoot him and he’d had to flee the town quickly. The second man had wept and begged him not to take his town from him. A third had recognised that he was a mere officer of the company but raged and stormed throughout the night, refusing to allow him to leave. None had ever won. But he had never seen such a cool and relaxed attitude to his announcement before. ‘I’ll leave you then,’ he said, standing up and shaking Bill’s hand. ‘And … I am sorry, Mr Cody,’ he added, a guilty strain in his voice. Bill said nothing, but continued to sit on his porch for the rest of the night, watching his town go about its business. He did not go to the saloon to play cards for he felt distinctly unlucky that dark night.
Within a month, the town of Ellray had been constructed five miles east, just as Jack Webb had implied. The tracks for the railway were being laid simultaneously with the foundations of the houses and stores and almost immediately the residents of Rome gathered their belongings together and relocated to the new town. The last to leave were the Yountams and Bill himself. They had lost all their money, were unemployed, but had two hundred houses to call their own. Before they left, they doused the main street with gunpowder and set a flame to it before walking away, unwilling to allow anyone else to come in and take their town again when their back was turned. As Rome burned, my great-grandfather moved on to his next adventure, where he would finally earn his name.
Over the coming months I saw more of Hitomi than of anyone else, and yet for a long time I never got to meet her family. We became lovers not long after that evening in the bar in Pontocho and from the first our compatibility was striking. At twenty years of age my experience of sex was limited to one long-term girlfriend – the difficult Agnes – and two one-night stands, all of which I had enjoyed with the usual teenage excitement, but it was only when Hitomi and I first got together that I began to understand a little about passion. She had been with only one less partner than I; her first boyfriend had been at school with her but they had broken up only a year before, on her twenty-second birthday, while her second had been a short-lived affair with a colleague which had ended when a streak of violence was revealed in him. We loved being together and we loved making love together; that was something we would never outgrow. It was difficult for Hitomi to spend the entire night with me as her parents always expected her home but from time to time she would claim that she was spending the weekend with a friend and we would retreat to a small hotel along Shijo-Don, willing to use some of our earnings in order to be together into the morning, away from the noise and bustle of student life in the hostel. She slept with her back to me, my arms wrapped around her, a leg slung over hers so that we could hardly have felt closer to each other. Those weekends awoke a sensibility in me which I had never known before. Sometimes, waiting for her in the bar or sitting at our dinner table while she visited the bathroom, I would watch out for her and when she would appear my eyes would be glued to her every step as she came towards me; it wasn’t her beauty that possessed me, but her very presence. Her voice on the phone filled me with excitement. To love and be loved in return, I knew nothing of those feelings before her. And I was foolishly jealous; I would see her joking with the barman while she collected our drinks or even conversing with a chambermaid while I searched the room for our lost key and I would feel envious that she was talking to them and not to me, even though I knew there was no reason for any insecurity on my part, for our connection was real and two-sided and nothing could have come between us then. We were as one.
After much persuasion on my part, she eventually agreed to introduce me to her family and we spent a torturous evening with Mr and Mrs Naoyuki in their Kyoto apartment. Hitomi’s brother Tajimo – known as ‘Tak’ – was there too, and highly suspicious of me from the start. Although we would eventually become long-distance friends, only slightly wary of each other, Tak and I got off to a rough start that evening for, although he was the younger brother, he was very protective of his sister and seemed to take it personally that she had found a relationship with a foreigner rather than a Japanese man. He was only five feet six in height, giving me the advantage by half a foot, and I think this intimidated him as well.
Mr and Mrs Naoyuki, of course, were gracious and attentive to me, but I could tell that they shared their son’s feelings, for they would ask me questions and give each other glances after I responded as if I was only confirming the dreadful things they already assumed about me.
‘Hitomi tells us you are partly American,’ said Mr Naoyuki as we ate and I raised an eyebrow in surprise.
‘Well not really,’ I said. ‘My great-grandfather was an American, but that’s about it. I’m pretty much English through and through.’
‘I was in England once, you know,’ he continued. ‘Brighton. Do you know Brighton?’
‘I know of Brighton,’ I admitted. ‘I’ve never been there though. When were you there?’
‘It was many years ago,’ he said gruffly as if I had offended him. ‘I don’t wish to discuss it.’
‘Your father,’ said Mrs Naoyuki, changing the subject entirely. “What does he do for a living?’
‘He’s retired now,’ I told them, ‘but he used to be a decorator.’ Tak gave a contemptuous snort but when I looked at him he pretended that some of his food had gone the wrong way. I decided not to fill them in on Isaac’s early life as a career criminal, nor the fact that he had spent a portion of his youth detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
‘I’m going to be an architect,’ he said, his voice suggesting that I should bow down before him and praise him for his creativity.
‘Congratulations,’ I said.
‘And your mother,’ asked Mrs Naoyuki. ‘She is well too?’
I thought about it, unsure what was the correct answer. I decided to simply tell the truth. ‘She’s fine, as far as I know,’ I said. ‘She lives in Canada. We don’t really see each other.’
‘How does she live in Canada?’ asked Hitomi’s father, looking at me as if I had suddenly cursed
.
‘They’re divorced, you see,’ I explained. ‘She remarried and moved to Canada. Her husband’s a doctor.’ I hoped that was a good thing.
‘It’s not that uncommon,’ Hitomi told her parents but they looked at me as if I was the bad seed regardless.
‘So your home is broken?’ asked Mr Naoyuki sadly.
‘Father!’ cried Hitomi.
‘That’s all right,’ I told her, placing my hand on hers protectively. ‘It’s not broken,’ I said, turning to look at her parents and sitting erect in my chair as I did so. ‘It was never really together in the first place. My father lives in London. My mother lives in Canada. In our own ways, we communicate with each other.’
‘And you’re in Kyoto,’ said Mr Naoyuki with a shrug before muttering something in Japanese which I could not catch. I was going to ignore it out of politeness but Tak saw to it that I didn’t miss out.
‘My father says that it’s a strange family which lives on three continents and isn’t broken,’ he said and Hitomi immediately punched his arm, soliciting an angry remark from her mother. I let the comment go. Under any circumstances I would not have wanted to insult Hitomi’s parents, but if they intended to be rude to me, I was even more convinced that I should hold my peace. Take the moral high ground.
The evening continued, however, much along these lines and while we were ostensibly friendly to each other, there was a reserve and hostility which I suspected was not just due to the fact that we were strangers. Leaving later, I begged Hitomi to return to the hostel with me for the night, but she grew angry with me then.
‘Why do you ask me to do that?’ she said in a hushed voice at the door. ‘You know I can never do that without lying to my parents.’
‘I just want us to be together tonight, that’s all,’ I said. ‘Is that so wrong?’
‘But why now? Why tonight?’ she continued.
‘I don’t know!’ I protested. ‘Why do you think? It’s not like we’ve never spent the night together before.’
‘You want to do it now because you want my parents to see that’s what we’re doing,’ she said in an accusatory voice. ‘And Tak too. You want to tell them look, you can be rude to me and insult me and call my family anything you like, but look at me now as I’m fucking your daughter.’
‘That’s not it,’ I hissed at her, taken aback by the vehemence of her language, the way that hearing the word ‘fuck’ uttered from her lips upset me. ‘That’s what you think I’m about, is it? If it is, then you don’t know me at all.’
‘You know that’s what you’re doing, William. You want to go in there to them and say they don’t own me any more? That you do? Just because you’re fucking me?’
‘Don’t say that, Hitomi,’ I said, taking her by the arm, and incredibly I thought I could feel a sting behind my own eyes now. ‘Don’t speak about yourself like that. Don’t speak about us like that. That’s not how things are with us at all. I love you, you know I do.’
‘Then don’t try to prove things to my parents about us,’ she said. ‘We are you and me. No one else. All right? You have that, William? You heard that? Don’t try to prove things to my parents, all right? Someday I’m going to leave Japan and I need them to understand why I’m doing it.’
I nodded and turned on my heel and stormed off into the night. We rarely argued but when we did, Hitomi always ended it by pointing out her intention of one day leaving Japan; neither of us ever mentioned whether I would be going with her or not. However, in time that argument, like all our arguments, subsided and we returned to our previously happy state. We did not visit the Naoyukis together again – ever again, in fact – although from time to time we would meet Tak and his date for drinks in the evening. Perhaps on one of our birthdays or if he had a job interview in the city. On these occasions we began to get on quite well and gave each other a grudging respect, although there was always a sense of awkward embarrassment whenever Hitomi would leave us for a few minutes, while we attempted to find common ground to converse on.
A year passed in Japan, and then eighteen months, and I became fluent in the language and worked full time for the teaching agency. The money was good and my savings grew and I found myself so consumed by the Japanese culture, while still feeling alienated by it, an unwelcome visitor, that I began to write about my feelings there and kept a journal of my life in Kyoto and the people I met. I approached it from the point of view of the ignorant foreigner and my pieces were humorous enough to be published by a local English-language newspaper, who eventually agreed to begin a weekly series which I would write and which helped to supplement my income. In the meantime I began to take a greater interest in writing, and read a lot more, immersing myself not just in Japanese literature but also in the western books which I had largely ignored for many years. I turned twenty-two in Japan and gave up my teaching job in favour of a full-time position with the newspaper where I wrote features and editorials, a job I soon began to love and take great pride in. Hitomi was proud of me too and liked introducing me to her friends as her ‘writer boyfriend’. She told them I was one day going to write a novel but I quickly told them that this was not true. I had found my calling, I thought, and it was journalism. I kept a portfolio of my work and knew that I was getting better. The fact that there were only two places I felt truly comfortable – alone in my apartment with Hitomi by my side, or sitting in front of my word processor, hunched forward, reading the words aloud as I typed them in, pausing, reading again, deleting, rewriting, scrapping parts of a sentence, paragraphs from a page, always working until I had said all I needed to say and could place my full stop. Physically, I could feel myself changing. A healthy sexual life discarded my childhood. I cut my hair and allowed a small growth of dark stubble to grow along my chin, which I sculpted meticulously every morning. I became a new man that year; I had found two things which made me happy: love and work. And then the letter came and a period of my life drew to a close.
In all the time I had been in Japan, I had been a poor communicator with Isaac. I sent him the odd postcard, a letter on his birthday and at Christmas, and on rare occasions would phone him up for a little stilted conversation, but whenever we spoke it was difficult. I knew that he believed I had betrayed him in some way. It was true that we had not laid eyes on each other in almost two years and while I was fully aware that he had no other living relative to speak to in London, it was a thought that I tried to bury at the back of my mind. I had found a form of liberation for myself in Japan; I hated to think of Clapham and Battersea and Lavender Hill and the train station and the crowds of people heading for those platforms every morning, pushing past each other, carrying Styrofoam cups of coffee as they charged into work or charged home again, their skin pale and blotchy, their eyes barely open. There was nothing there for me; I felt my days with Isaac and Buffalo Bill Cody were part of a different life and wanted no more of either of them. And I knew that I was wrong to do so but I didn’t care. I tried not to think about them at all. And then he wrote to me.
It was a short letter, only half a page long, but it gave the essential details in the starkest terms. Isaac was going to die and he didn’t want that to happen without seeing me one last time, without trying to make amends for whatever it was (he said) that I thought he had done to me. Could I come to visit, he asked. If not, he understood and someone would contact me when it was over.
I read the letter in shock. I had taken it from my mailbox on a Saturday morning and climbed back into bed to read it; I was still there when Hitomi let herself in at lunchtime and found me sitting there, my head in my hands, the pillows strewn around me, my eyes puffy from tears. She read the letter and asked me what I was going to do.
‘What choice do I have?’ I said. ‘I have to go home. I want to go home,’ I added to make myself sound like a better son, like a better man, even if it were not the case.
‘Of course you do,’ she said, but her face was pale and scared. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll arrange it for you.?
??
‘Come with me,’ I said quickly, reaching up and taking both her hands in mine. ‘Come with me, Hitomi.’ I looked at her and pressed one of her hands to my bare chest, in the spot where my heart was, hoping that she would feel it beating beneath the skin and understand why it did so, and she did but she stayed silent. ‘Don’t make me go there on my own,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be without you.’
She stayed silent for a long time but eventually, she shook her head. Before speaking, she began to cry. She sat on a chair and buried her face in her hands. ‘I don’t want to,’ she said simply, raising her hands in resignation, as if this was something that was completely beyond her control. ‘I just don’t want to,’ she repeated.
‘You don’t want to?’ I shouted at her, appalled. ‘What does that mean? How can you just not want to?’
‘I don’t want to go to England,’ she said. ‘If I go to England, I’ll die there.’
‘You’ll what?’
‘I just don’t want to go there!’ she repeated. ‘You have to go. I know you do. So you go. But I don’t want to. I want to go to America.’
‘Oh fuck America,’ I shouted at her. ‘Enough with the I-want-to-go-to-Americas. You never go, Hitomi! You keep saying you’re going to go but you never do! You’ll die in England? Well I don’t know what the fuck that means but I’ll tell you this, if you stay in Kyoto you’ll die here, that’s what. You’ll end up rotting in your parents’ apartment for the rest of your life and one day Tak will be the only person at your funeral. Do you understand me? Do you hear what I’m saying?’ I was screaming at her and had jumped out of the bed to march up and down the room. I came down close to her face and took her head in my hands, pushing it forward so that it was buried in my chest, before pushing it down further and further. She kicked her feet out and her shoe slapped into my shin, causing me to fall to the ground, clutching it in pain. ‘What the fuck did you do that for?’ I asked, crying now myself. ‘Please come,’ I added immediately, not caring about the physical pain at all. ‘I need you.’