The Devil of Nanking

  ‘Listen,’ I blurted one night. ‘This is important. You keep telling me about those women. And I know it’s true because every woman you meet wants to do it with you.’

  He was lying between my legs with his head on my thigh, his hands resting lightly on my calves. ‘I know.’

  ‘Mama Strawberry. All the other hostesses.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fuyuki’s Nurse. She wants to.’

  ‘She? Is it a she? I can’t help wondering.’ Distractedly he pushed his nails into the flesh of my leg. I noticed he was pressing fractionally too hard. ‘I’d like to find out. I’d like to know what she looks like naked. Yeah, I think that’s mostly it, I’d like to see her naked and—’

  ‘Jason.’

  He swivelled his head. ‘Mmmm?’

  I propped myself up on my elbows and stared at him. ‘Why are you sleeping with me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why are you sleeping with me? There are so many other people out there.’

  He seemed about to answer, but instead paused and I could feel his muscles tighten minutely. At length he sat up and groped for the bottom of my camisole. ‘Take this off—’

  ‘No. No, not now, I—’

  ‘Oh, for Chrissake.’ He pushed himself away, jumping to his feet. ‘This is—’ He got a cigarette from his jeans, which were lying on the floor, and lit it. ‘Look,’ he said, drawing in a lungful of smoke and turning to me. ‘Look—’ He shook his head and blew out the smoke. ‘This is turning into a long story.’

  I stared at him, my mouth slightly open. ‘A long story?’

  ‘Yes – a long, long pain-in-the-ass story.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve been patient but you’re . . . It’s going on for ever. It’s not funny any more.’

  A strange feeling came up through me, a horrible feeling, as if I was being swung round and round in a vacuum. Nothing looked right. The galaxies on the wall behind him seemed to be moving – drifting slowly across the sky over Tokyo like necklaces of light. Jason’s face looked dark and insubstantial. ‘But I . . .’ I pressed fingers to my throat, trying to stop my voice wobbling ‘. . . I wanted to – to – I wanted to show you. I really wanted to. It’s just I…’

  I got to my feet and fumbled on the dresser for my cigarettes, knocking things over. I found the packet and shakily pulled one out, lit it and stood facing the wall, smoking in tight, feverish bursts, pushing the tears out of my eyes. This is stupid. Just do it. It’s like jumping off a cliff, like jumping off a cliff . . . There’s only one way to find out if you’ll survive.

  I stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray on the dresser, and turned to him, breathing fast. There was a lump in my throat, as if my heart was trying to squeeze out of my mouth.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what is it?’

  I pulled the camisole up over my head, dropped it on to the floor, and stood, facing him, my hands covering my stomach, my eyes locked on a point above his head. I took deep, deep breaths, imagining my body through his eyes – pale and thin, laced with veins.

  ‘Please understand,’ I whispered, mantra-like, under my breath. ‘Please understand.’

  And then I dropped my hands.

  I don’t know if it was me who gasped, or Jason, but there was a distinct intake of breath in the room. I stood, my hands in fists clenched at my sides, my eyes on the ceiling, feeling as if my head was going to burst. Jason was silent, and when at last I dared to look down at him I found his face was very still, very controlled, nothing in his expression as he studied the scars on my stomach.

  ‘My God,’ he breathed, after a long time. ‘What happened to you?’ He got up and took a step towards me, his hands lifting up, reaching curiously to my stomach, as if the scars were emanating a glow. His eyes were calm and clear. He stopped a pace away from me, to the side, his right hand flat against the scars.

  I shuddered and closed my eyes.

  ‘What on earth happened here?’

  ‘A baby,’ I said unsteadily. ‘That’s where my baby was.’

  36

  They taught me about condoms in the hospital, when it was far, far too late anyway. In the few months before I was discharged, when everyone was talking about AIDs, we had HIV-awareness groups, and one of the nurses, a girl called Emma with a nose-ring and sturdy calves, would sit in front of us, blushing a bright red as she showed us how to roll a condom on to a banana. A sheath, she called it, because in those days that was what the newspapers called them – and when she talked about anal sex, she called it ‘rectal sex’. She said it with her face turned to the window as if she was addressing the trees. The others would be laughing and joking, but I’d be sitting at the back of the group, as red-faced as Emma, staring at the condom. A condom. I’d never heard of a condom. Honestly, how could anyone so ignorant have managed to live for so long?

  For example, the significance of nine months. Over the years I’d caught jokes and muttered asides: ‘Oh, yeah, cat’s got the cream now, but wait till you see his face in nine months’ time.’ That sort of thing. But I didn’t understand. The really stupid thing was that if they’d asked me the gestational period of an elephant I’d have probably known. But truths about humans I was lost with. My parents had done a good job of filtering the information that got through to me. Except for the orange book, of course, they weren’t that vigilant.

  The jigging girl in the next bed stared at me really hard when I admitted how ignorant I was.

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Well, bollocks,’ she said, a faint note of awe in her voice. ‘You really are serious.’

  In their exasperation the nurses found me a book about the facts of life. It was called Mummy, What’s That In Your Tummy? and it had a pale pink cover with a cartoon of a girl in bunches looking up at a big pregnant stomach in a flowery dress. One of the reviews on the back said: ‘Tender and informative: everything you need to know to answer your children’s little questions.’ I’d read it from cover to cover and I kept it in a brown bag pushed right to the back of my locker. I wished I’d had it earlier. Then I’d have understood what was happening to me.

  I didn’t tell a soul in hospital what those weeks after the van were like. How it took me weeks and months to piece it all together from whispers and odd allusions in the ravaged paperbacks on the shelves at home. How when I realized there was going to be a baby I knew, beyond any doubt, that my mother would kill either me or the baby or both. This, I suppose, is the true price of ignorance.

  In the alley outside a car door slammed. Someone jingled keys, and a woman giggled in a high thin voice, ‘I’m not going to drink a thing, I swear.’ Their laughter dwindled as they continued down the alley to Waseda Street. I didn’t move, or breathe – I was staring at Jason, waiting to hear what he would say.

  ‘You’re a good girl.’ Eventually he took a step back and gave me a slow, sly smile. ‘You’re a good girl, you know that? And now things are going to be fine.’

  ‘Fine?’

  ‘Yes.’ He put his tongue between his teeth and ran his finger carefully along the biggest of the scars, the central one that ran from two inches right of my navel diagonally to my hipbone. He clicked his nail over the knotty place in the centre of it, and navigated his way round the little holes where the surgeon had tried to stitch me up. There was a note of curious wonder in his voice when he spoke: ‘There are so many of them. What made them?’

  ‘A—’ I tried to speak but my jaw was locked. I had to shake my head to make it move. ‘A knife. A kitchen knife.’

  ‘Aah,’ he said, wryly. ‘A knife.’ He closed his eyes and slowly licked his lips, letting his fingers linger on the gristly whirl of scar tissue in the middle. The first place the knife had gone in. I flinched and he opened his eyes, looking at me intently. ‘Did it go deep here? Hmmm? Here?’ He pressed his finger into it. ‘That’s what it feels like. Feels like it went in deep.’

  ‘Deep?’ I echoed. There was something in his voice, something
rich and horrible, as if he was taking immense pleasure in this. The air in the room seemed staler than it had a few minutes ago. ‘I—’ Why did he want to know how deep it went? Why was he asking me this?

  ‘Did it? Did it go in deep?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said faintly, and he gave a delighted shiver, as if something was walking across his shoulders.

  ‘Look at this.’ He ran his palm down the skin on his arm. ‘Look, my hair’s standing up on end. I get such a stiff for this kind of thing. The girl I told you about? In South America?’ He circled his fingers around his bicep, half closing his eyes in pleasure at the memory. ‘She’d lost her arm. And the place where they took it off … it was like a . . .’ He held his fingers bunched up, as if he was balancing the most delicate, the softest fruit on his fingertips. ‘It was beautiful, like a plum. Whoah—’ He grinned at me. ‘But you’ve always known about me, haven’t you?’

  ‘Always known? No – I—’

  ‘Yes.’ He dropped to his knees in front of me, his hands on my hips, breathing hotly on to my stomach. ‘You did. You knew what gets me.’ His tongue, dry and corrugated, stretched out to meet my skin. ‘You knew I just love to fuck freaks.’

  My paralysis broke. I pushed him away and stumbled backwards. He rocked back on his heels, looking mildly surprised, as I grabbed up my camisole, fumbling it on. I wanted to run out of the room before I started to cry, but he was between me and the doorway, so I turned and crouched in the corner, facing the wall. Everything was coming back to me – the photographs in his room, the videos the Russians swore he watched, the way he’d talked about the Nurse. I was one of them – a freak. Something mangled to turn him on, just like in the videos he watched.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Um . . .’ I said, in a tiny voice, using my palms to wipe my eyes. ‘Um . . . I think, I think maybe I’d—’ The tears were running into my mouth. I cupped my hands to catch them so he wouldn’t see them dropping on to the floor. ‘Nothing.’

  He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘See? I told you it would be okay. I told you I’d understand.’

  I didn’t answer. I was trying not to sob.

  ‘This is what we’ve been moving towards all along, isn’t it? It’s what pulled us together. I knew the moment I saw all this – your paintings, all the freaky photos in your books – I knew you and me were . . . I knew we were the same.’ I heard him fumble out another cigarette and I imagined his face, smirking, confident, finding sex in this, sex in the scars I’d been hiding for so long. I imagined what I looked like to him, crouched in the corner, my thin, cold arms wrapped round me. ‘It just took you a little longer,’ he said. ‘A little longer to recognize that we’re a pair. A pair of perverts. We’re made for each other.’

  I leaped up and grabbed my clothes from the chair, dressing quickly, not looking at him, my legs shaking helplessly. I pulled on my coat and fumbled for my keys in my handbag, all the time taking short, desperate gulps of air, trying to hold back the tears. He didn’t say anything or attempt to stop me. He watched me in silence, smoking thoughtfully, a half-smile on his face.

  ‘I’m going out,’ I said, throwing open the door.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I heard him say behind me. ‘It’s okay. You’ll be okay soon.’

  Even as recently as 1980, it was possible in England for a stillborn baby not to be buried. For her not to be buried in a grave, but instead to be taken in a yellow waste-bag and incinerated with other clinical waste. It was even possible for her mother, a teenage girl with no experience, to let the baby go and never dare ask where she went. It was all possible, because of a simple accident of the calendar: my baby had failed to live inside me for a crucial twenty-eight weeks. Just one day short, and the state said that my baby should not be buried, that she was a day too small to be a human being, a day too small to get a funeral or a proper girl’s name, and so would for ever carry the name foetus. A name that is full of sickness and nothing like my little girl when she was born.

  It was a late December night when the trees were heavy with snow and the moon was full. The nurses in the emergency room thought I shouldn’t be crying like I was. ‘Try to relax.’ The doctor couldn’t meet my eyes when I came to, stretched out on the operating table, and found him dressing the wounds in my stomach. He worked in chilly silence, and when eventually he told me the outcome, he did it standing in profile, speaking to the wall and not to me.

  I tried to sit up, not understanding what he’d said. ‘What?’

  ‘We’re very sorry.’

  ‘No. She’s not dead. She’s—’

  ‘Well, of course she is. Of course she’s dead.’

  ‘But she’s not supposed to be dead. She’s supposed to be—’

  ‘Please.’ He put his hand on my shoulder, edging me back down on to the table. ‘You didn’t really expect anything else, did you? Now, lie down. Relax.’

  They tried to hold me down, they tried to stop me looking. But I cheated. I looked. And I discovered something I’ll never forget: I discovered that it is also possible, along with all the other incredible possibilities in life, to see, in one brief moment, everything a child might have been – to see through that almost transparent, inadequate skin, and see her soul, her voice, her real and complex self, to see the long story of her life stretching away ahead of her. All of these things are possible.

  There was an agency nurse who didn’t know or care how I’d ended up like this. She was the only one who saw what it meant to me. She was the one who pressed a tissue into the corners of my eyes and stroked my hand. ‘You poor little thing, poor little thing.’ She looked across the room to the humped shape in the kidney bowl, to the small curve of shoulder, the dab of dark hair. ‘You’ll have to stop worrying about her now, lovey. You’ll have to stop worrying. Wherever her soul is, God will find it.’

  The moon was still out when I left the house, hurrying down the alley clasping my coat at the neck, but by the time I reached Shiba-Koen dawn was coming – you could see it between the buildings. The sky was a pretty washed-out pink, and an artificially warm wind blew through the streets, as if a nuclear wind was coming from the west. It made the bare branches in the Zojoji temple spin and whip. At the purifying bowl in front of the rows of child statues, silent and sightless in their red bonnets, I stopped and ladled freezing water first into my left hand, the way you were supposed to, then into the right. I dropped a few yen into the offertory box, tugged off my shoes and went into the freezing grass, wandering up and down the rows of stone children.

  The shadows of the white prayer slips tied in the branches over my head moved and shifted. I found a place in the corner of the gardens, a place between two rows of statues where I couldn’t be seen from the road, and sat down on the ground, my coat pulled tightly round me. You were supposed to clap your hands when you prayed. There was a sequence, but I couldn’t remember it, so in the end I did what I was used to seeing people do in my own, Christian country. I put my hands together, dropped my forehead on to the tips of my fingers and closed my eyes.

  Maybe the nurse had been right. Maybe ‘God’, or the gods, or something greater than any of us, knew where my baby’s soul was. But I didn’t. I didn’t know where she was buried, so I had nowhere to start. Without a grave to visit I had learned to imagine her as nowhere and everywhere, flying somewhere above me. Sometimes when I squeezed my eyes closed I would picture her in the black, pitted night sky, so high up that her head was brushing the roof of the world. In my dreams she’d be able to fly anywhere she wanted. Maybe even from England to Tokyo. She would have to set her course straight for the east, then off she’d go, fast, looking down from time to time and seeing the travelling lights beneath her: Europe, with all its bridges lit up and decorated like wedding cakes. She’d know when she was over the sea from the dark stretches, or the ridged reflection of the moon, or the little pearl drops of tankers. After Europe she’d fly fast into the rising sun. Over the Russian steppes and bottomless Baikal lake with its strange sea
ls and landlocked fish. And further, past rice fields and industrial chimneys and oleander-fringed roads, over the stretching, hardening crust of the whole of Shi Chongming’s homeland. Then Tokyo, and on and on until she was over Takadanobaba, and she would see the curled eaves of the old house. Then she would be above my window and at last . . .

  But, of course, she hadn’t come. Even at O-Bon, when the dead were supposed to visit the living, when I’d sat in my window watching lighted candles floating down the Kanda river as the Japanese guided their dead back, all the time I thought stupidly that maybe she’d find me. But she didn’t. I told myself that I shouldn’t have expected it, that she’d probably tried hard. It was such a long way from England for only a small spirit, maybe she’d got lost, or just very, very tired.

  I lifted my head from my pseudo-prayer. Around me the children’s windmills were spinning in the warm wind, the wooden memorial slats clicking and clattering. Every hand-made bonnet, every bib, every toy ornamenting the statues had been placed there by a mother who had prayed, like I had just prayed. It was getting light and the first commuters were walking fast along the street next to the temple.

  Jason, I thought, getting to my feet and brushing down my coat, Jason, believe me, you are stranger, stranger and more insane than I have ever been. What I did was ignorant and wrong, but I was never as wrong as you are. I took a few deep breaths of clean air and looked up into the sky. He had brought me back to something. I had almost forgotten, but he’d reminded me. There was only one way I could go. There had only ever been one way.