‘Nothing.’ I closed the door and stood for a while, leaning against it for support, catching my breath.
‘I did. I thought you were dead.’
I shook my head. She looked very pale, very fragile. Her stomach was big but her limbs were thin and breakable. How vulnerable instincts make us, I thought vaguely, looking down openly at the place our son lies. Soon she will be two and there will be twice the fear and twice the danger and twice the pain. Twice the amount to protect.
‘Chongming? What happened?’
I looked up at her, licking my lips.
‘What? For heaven’s sake, tell me, Chongming.’
‘There’s no food,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t find any food.’
‘You ran back here like the wind to give me the news that there’s no food?’
‘I am sorry. I am so sorry.’
‘No,’ she said, coming nearer, her eyes on my face. ‘No, it’s more than that. You’ve seen it. You’ve seen all my premonitions, haven’t you?’
I sat down in my chair with a long exhalation of breath. I am the tiredest man in the world. ‘Please eat the man yue eggs,’ I said wearily. ‘Please. Do it for me. Do it for our moon soul.’
And to my astonishment she listened. As if she sensed my despair. It wasn’t the eggs she ate, nevertheless she did something that came some way towards me. Instead of flying into a superstitious rage, she ate the beans from the pillow that she’d made especially for the baby. She brought it from upstairs, slit it open, emptied the beans into the wok, and cooked them. She offered some to me but I refused, and instead sat and watched her putting the food into her mouth, not a hint of expression on her face.
My stomach aches unbearably: it is like having a living sore, the size of a gourd, under my ribs. This is what it is like to starve, and yet it is only three days that I have been without food. But, and this is surely the worst thing, later, when we were preparing for bed, through the closed shutters the smell came back. That delicious, maddening smell of meat cooking. It drove me to insanity. It sent me on to my feet, ready to rush out into the street, careless of the dangers that lie out there. It was only when I remembered the Japanese officers – when I remembered tanks rumbling down the street, the sound of rifles reloading – that I sank back on to the bed, knowing that I had to find a better way.
Nanking, 20 December 1937
We slept fitfully, in our shoes just as before. A little before dawn we were woken by a series of tremendous screams. It seemed to be coming from only a few streets away and it was distinctly a woman’s voice. I looked across at Shujin. She lay absolutely rigid, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, her head resting on the wooden pillow. The screaming continued for about five minutes, getting more desperate and more horrible, until at last it faded to indistinct sobs, and finally silence. Then the noise of a motorcycle on the main street thundered down the alley, shaking the shutters and making the bowl of tea on the bed-stand rock.
Neither Shujin nor I moved as we watched red shadows flicker on the ceiling. There had been a report earlier that the Japanese were burning houses near the Xuanwu lakes – surely those weren’t the flames I could see moving on the ceiling. After a long time Shujin got up from the bed and went to where the kitchen range had died down to ashes. I followed her and watched as, without a word, she crouched, took up a handful of the soot and rubbed it into her face until I couldn’t recognize her. She rubbed it all over her arms and into her hair, even into her ears. Then she went into the other room and came back with a pair of scissors. She sat in the corner of the room, her face expressionless, took a lock of her hair and began to hack at it.
For a long time after the screaming stopped, even when the city was silent again, I couldn’t settle. Here I am at my desk, the window open a chink, not knowing what to do. We could try to escape now, but I am sure it is too late – the city is completely cut off. It is dawn and outside the sun filters through a yellow miasma that hovers above Nanking. Where has that fog come from? It is not smoke from the Xiaguan chimneys mingling with river mist because all the plants there have come to a halt. Shujin would say it is something else: a pall that contains all the deeds of this war. She would say that it is unburied souls and guilt, rising and mingling in the heat above this cursed place, the sky teeming with wandering spirits. She would say that the clouds must have become poisonous, that it is an unspeakable, fatal blow dealt to nature, having so many troubled souls crushed into one earthly location. And who would I be to contradict her? History has shown me that, in spite of what I have long suspected, I am neither brave nor wise.
34
Suddenly, almost overnight, I wasn’t afraid of Tokyo. There were even things I liked about it. I liked the view from my window, for example, because I could tell hours in advance when there was a typhoon in the east, just from the bruised colour of the sky. The gargoyles on the roof of the club seemed to crouch a little lower and the gas streams, red against the blackening sky, sputtered in the gathering wind, spitting and guttering until someone in the building thought to switch them off.
That year venture capitalists were throwing themselves off the top of the skyscrapers they’d built, but I was oblivious to the depression that was creeping through the country. I was happy there. I liked the way no one on the trains stared at me. I liked the girls sashaying down the street in oversized sunglasses and embroidered bell-bottom jeans, wearing the glittery red eyelashes they got in the shops in Omotesando. I liked the way everyone here was a little bit odd. The nail that sticks up will be hammered down. That was how I’d expected the Japanese to be. One nation, one philosophy. It’s funny how sometimes things turn out so differently from the way you picture them.
I worked on my room. I cleared everything out, all the furniture, the dust and the sheets tacked on the walls. I bought new tatami mats, washed every inch and replaced the dangling lightbulb with a flush, almost invisible fitting. I mixed up pigments and painted a picture of Jason and me on the silk in the far corner of the room. In the picture he was sitting in the garden next to the stone lantern. He was smoking a cigarette and watching someone just out of the frame. Someone moving, maybe, or dancing in the sun. I was standing behind him, gazing up into the trees. I drew myself very tall, with my hair full of reflections and a smile on my face. I was wearing a black satin Suzie Wong dress and I had one knee slightly forward and bent a little.
I bought a sewing kit and pounds and pounds of silver and gold beads from a shop called La Droguerie. One Saturday I tied a scarf over my hair, put on black linen Chinese worker’s pants, and stood for hours sewing constellations into the ruined silk sky, above the dark painted buildings of Tokyo. When I had finished, the tears in the sky were healed and it lay flat against the walls, criss-crossed with glittering rivers of gold and silver. The effect was mesmerizing – it was like living inside an exploding star.
The funny thing was that I was happy in spite of the way things had become between me and Shi Chongming. Something had shifted – it was as if the dry, frantic neediness I’d brought with me to Tokyo had somehow edged out of me and infected him instead.
On the Monday following Fuyuki’s party, I’d tried to get Strawberry to tell me more about the stories she’d heard. I’d sat down in front of her and said, ‘I ate some meat when I was at the party. Something about it tasted odd.’ When she didn’t answer I leaned towards her and spoke in a low voice, ‘And then I remembered – you’d told me not to eat anything.’
She fixed me with an intense look. For a short time it seemed as if she was going to say something, but instead she jumped up and nodded at her reflection in the plate-glass window. ‘Look,’ she said conversationally, as if I’d said nothing. ‘Look. This dress nice dress from movie Bus Stop.’ It was a mothy green coat-dress she was wearing, with attached black net and a fur collar, worn unbuttoned to show her daringly engineered bosom. She smoothed it over her hips. ‘Dress suit Strawberry figure, ne? Suit Strawberry more good than suit Marilyn.’
‘I
said, I think I’ve eaten something bad.’
She turned to me, her face serious, her head unsteady from the champagne. I could see her jaw working in tiny movements under the skin. She put her hands on the desk and leaned forward so that her face was close to mine. ‘You must forget this,’ she whispered. ‘Japanese Mafia very complicated. You cannot easily understand it.’
‘It didn’t taste like anything I recognized. And I’m not the only one who noticed. Mr Bai. He thought there was something strange, too.’
‘Mr Bai?’ She made a contemptuous clicking sound in her throat. ‘You listen to Mr Bai? Mr Bai like Fuyuki’s pet. Like dog with collar. He famous singer once, but maybe now not so famous. All fine now, until . . .’ She held up her hand warningly. ‘Until he make mistake!’ She drew her hand across her throat. ‘Nobody too important to make a mistake. Understand?’
I swallowed and said, very slowly, ‘Why did you tell me not to eat anything?’
‘All rumours. All gossip.’ She grabbed the champagne bottle, filled her glass and drained it in one, using the glass to point at me. ‘And, Greysan, you never repeat what I have told you. Understand?’ She shook the glass, and I could see how serious she was. ‘You want happy life? You want happy life working in high class club? In Some Like It Hot?’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It mean your mouth. Keep shut your mouth. Okay?’
Which meant, of course, that when Shi Chongming telephoned, unusually early the following day, I had nothing more to tell him. He didn’t take it well: ‘I find this attitude most odd, yes, most odd. I understood you were “desperate” to see my film.’
‘I am.’
‘Then explain to me, an old man with a poor grasp of the vicissitudes of youth, please do me the honour of explaining this sudden unwillingness to talk.’
‘I’m not unwilling. I just don’t know what you want me to say. I can’t make things up. I’ve got nothing new to tell you.’
‘Yes.’ His voice was tremulous with anger. ‘It is as I suspected. You’ve changed your mind. Am I wrong?’
‘Yes, you’re—’
‘I find this quite unacceptable. You have happily allowed me to make a monumental effort,’ I could tell he was trying not to shout, ‘and now such casualness! Such casualness when you tell me that you are no longer involved.’
‘I haven’t said that—’
‘I think you have.’ He coughed and made an odd sound, as if exhaling through his nostrils in little staccato bursts. ‘Yes, yes, I believe that, where you are concerned, I will trust my instincts. I will say goodbye.’ And he put the phone down.
I sat in the chilly living room staring at the dead receiver in my hand, my face blazing with colour. No, I thought. No. Shi Chongming, you’re wrong. I pictured the Nurse’s shadow, climbing up the corridor wall, I remembered standing inside the bathroom door, my heart leaping out of my chest, memories of the crime-scene photo playing in my head. I put my fingers over my closed eyes, pushing gently at them. I’d done so much, gone so far, and it wasn’t that I’d changed my mind – it was just that the picture had got hazy, like seeing something familiar through a steamed window. Wasn’t it? I dropped my hands and looked up at the door, at the long corridor, stretching away, a few rays of sunshine illuminating the dusty floor. Jason was asleep in my room. We’d been up together until five o’clock that morning, drinking beer he’d got from the machine in the street. Something odd was dawning on me. Something I could never have predicted. What if, I thought, shivering in the cold morning air, what if there was more than one route to peace of mind? Now, wouldn’t that be something?
35
In the end it didn’t matter what Shi Chongming said because Fuyuki didn’t come to the club for days. And then it was weeks. And then, suddenly, I realized that I’d stopped jumping every time the lift bell rang. Something was sliding away from me, and for a long time I did nothing, only watched apathetically, lighting a cigarette and shrugging and thinking instead about Jason, about the muscles in his arms, for example, and how they trembled slightly with the effort of supporting his body above mine.
I couldn’t concentrate on my work at the club. Quite often I’d hear my name and come out of a trance to find a customer staring at me oddly, or Mama Strawberry frowning at me, and I’d know a whole conversation had passed and all anyone had got from me was a blank because I was off somewhere else with Jason. Sometimes he would watch me when I was working. If I caught him looking he’d run his tongue across his teeth. It amused him to see the way goosebumps jumped out on my arms. The Russians kept reminding me about his strange pictures, putting their fingers warningly to their lips and whispering the titles of the autopsy videos. ‘A woman cut in half by a truck – imagine that!’ But I’d stopped listening to them. At night, if I happened to wake and hear the sound of another human being breathing near me, the sound of Jason rubbing his face in his sleep, or muttering and turning over, I’d get a lovely tight feeling in my chest, and I’d wonder if this was how it was supposed to feel. I’d wonder if maybe I was in love, and the thought made me feel panicky and short of breath. Was that possible? Could people like me fall in love? I wasn’t sure. Sometimes I’d lie awake for hours worrying about it, taking deep breaths, trying to keep calm.
The way it was going you’d think I would never, ever get round to showing him the scars. I kept finding excuses. I had ten camisoles now, all lined up in the wardrobe, and I wore them all the time, even when I was asleep, my back to him, crunched over my stomach like a foetus. I didn’t know where to start. What would the right words be? Jason, some people, a long time ago, thought I was crazy. I made a mistake … What if he was horrified? He kept saying that he wouldn’t be, but how do you explain that understanding, or even the illusion of it, would be the most wonderful feeling imaginable, almost as wonderful as knowing for sure that you hadn’t imagined the orange book, and that if you were to take the chance and tell someone, and if it were to go wrong . . . well, it would be like – like dying. Like falling into a dark hole, over and over again.
I started dreaming about my skin a lot. In the dreams it would be loosening and lifting up from me, unsticking from my body, unpoppering along seams down my spine and under my arms. Then it would drift upwards in one piece, like a ghost on an air current, ready to sail off. But there’d always be a jolt. Something would shudder and I’d look down and see that the beautiful shimmery parachute was tethered and bloodied, tacked in a puckered criss-cross to my stomach. Then I’d start to cry and rub frantically at the skin to loosen it. I’d tug and scratch at myself until I was bloodied and shaking and—
‘Grey?’
One night I woke with a start, sweat streaming from me, the images from my nightmare scuttling away like shadows. It was dark, except for the light from Mickey Rourke, and I was lying on my side, clinging to Jason, my heart pounding. My legs were clamped as tightly as possible round his thighs, and he was looking down at me in surprise.
‘What?’ I said. ‘What was I doing?’
‘Rubbing against me.’
I groped under the covers. My camisole was crumpled and damp with sweat. I yanked it all the way down over my hips and put my face into my hands, trying to steady my breathing.
‘Hey.’ He pushed away the hair that was sticking to my forehead. ‘Sssh. Sssh. Don’t worry.’ He put his hands under my armpits and gently encouraged me higher up the futon, so I was level with him. ‘Here.’ He kissed my face, stroked my hair, smoothed my skin calmingly. We lay there for a while, until my heart had stopped thumping. ‘You okay?’ he whispered, putting his mouth to my ear.
I nodded, pressing my knuckles into my eyes. It was so dark and cold. I felt as if I was floating. Jason kissed me again. ‘Listen, weirdo,’ he said softly, resting his hand on my neck, ‘I’ve had an idea.’
‘An idea?’
‘A good idea. I know what you need. I’m going to tell you something that you’re going to like.’
‘Are you?’
r /> He pushed me on to my back and gently nudged my left shoulder up so that I rolled away, my back to him. I could feel his breath on my neck. ‘Listen,’ he whispered, ‘do you want me to make you happy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Now concentrate hard.’ I lay there, staring blankly at the chink of light coming from under the door, at all the hairs and balls of dust collecting there on the tatami mat, and concentrated on Jason’s voice. ‘Listen carefully.’ He shuffled himself up behind me, his arms round me, his lips on my neck. ‘This is how the story goes. Years and years ago, long before I came here, I used to fuck a girl in South America. She was a little crazy, I can’t remember her name, but what I can remember was how she liked to be fucked.’
He reached down between my thighs and parted them, running the flat of his palm along the inside of my left thigh, carefully raising my knee, cupping it in his hand and bending it up to my chest. I felt the hard, cold node of my knee brush my nipple as he moved behind me.
‘What she really liked was for me to put her on her side like this,’ he whispered into my neck, ‘like I’m doing now. And lift up her knee like this, so that I could get my cock in her. Like this.’
I took a sharp breath and Jason smiled against my neck.
‘Do you see? Do you see why she liked it so much?’
Winter was creeping into spaces in the house. The few trees were bare, only the occasional papery leaf clinging to a branch, and the cold seeped up through the pavement. In public places they planted ornamental cabbage in Christmas colours of red and green. The heating in the house wasn’t working and Jason was too preoccupied with me to fix it. The air vents in the rooms rattled and whined and stirred the dust, but they gave off no heat.
I was never sure if it was normal, the way all Jason’s exgirlfriends came into bed with us. I didn’t like it, but for ages I didn’t say anything. Listen, he’d murmur in the dark, listen. I’m going to tell you something that you’re going to like. Years ago I used to fuck this Dutch girl. I can’t remember her name but I do remember what she really liked … And he’d manoeuvre my limbs, choreographing a private dance between him and my body. He liked the way I was always ready for him. ‘You’re so dirty,’ he told me once, and there was admiration in his voice. ‘You are the dirtiest woman I’ve ever met.’