My trance fractured. A sweat broke out across my back and I stood up, opening my mouth to speak. As if she had smelt me on the wind, the Nurse looked up. She paused. Then her huge shoulders rose, the polished wig swayed round her great angular head, which she held back a little, as if she was rising from an interrupted meal. I froze: it was as if the whole world was a telescope, containing me at one end, the Nurse at the other. Even now I wonder how I must have looked to her, how much she saw: a moving shadow, a pair of eyes glinting in an unlit window at the far, lonely end of the house.
At that moment the wind made a ferocious lap of the garden, screaming like a jet engine, filling the house with noise. The Nurse tilted her head and spoke in a low voice to the chimpira, who immediately became rigid. Slowly he straightened and turned to stare down the long corridor to where I stood. Then he pulled back his shoulders and flexed his hands. He began to amble casually towards me.
I lurched away from the window and bolted for my room, slamming the door and locking it, tripping and scuttling backwards like a crab, stumbling over the books and papers in the dark, banging into things blindly. I stood, pressed against the wall, staring at the door, my chest as tight as if I’d been thumped in the ribs. Jason, I thought, feverishly. Jason, they’ve come back to get you. What games have you been playing with her?
At first no one came. Minutes seemed to pass – time when they could have been doing anything to Jason, time when I thought I should open the door, get to the phone, call the police. Then, just as I thought the chimpira wasn’t coming, that he and the Nurse must have left the house in silence, I distinctly heard, through the wind, his footstep creak in the corridor outside.
I shot to the side window, scrabbling crazily at the edges of the mosquito screen, breaking my nails. One of the catches gave. I flung away the screen, threw open the window and looked down. About four feet below, an air-conditioning unit that might hold my weight stuck out from the neighbouring building. From there it was another long drop into the tiny space between the buildings. I turned and stared at the door. The footsteps had stopped and, in the awful silence, the chimpira muttered something under his breath. Then a kick splintered the flimsy door. I heard him grab the frame, getting a hold so he could punch his foot straight through.
I scrambled on to the windowsill. I had time to see his arm splinter through the hole, his disembodied hand in the lavender suit groping in the dark for the doorlock, then I pushed myself out, landing noisily, the air-conditioner shuddering under my weight, something ripping my foot. I dropped into a clumsy squat, scrambled on to my stomach, dangling my legs out into the darkness, the wind whipping my pyjamas around me. I pushed away and dropped straight to the ground with a soft thud, rocking forward a little so that my face slammed against the plastic weatherboarding on the neighbouring house with a painful thuck.
Another splintering sound came from above – the noise of something metallic – a screw or a hinge, maybe, ricocheting round the room. I hauled in a breath, sprang to my feet and flew out into the alley, diving into a gap between two buildings opposite where I crouched, the blood thundering in my veins. After a moment or two I dared to shuffle forward, my hands on the two buildings, and peer up at the house in mute horror.
The chimpira was in my room. Light coming from the corridor behind amplified every detail of him, as if through a magnifying-glass: individual hairs, the light shade swaying above his head. I pulled the collar of my pyjama jacket over my mouth, holding it there with both clenched fists, my teeth chattering, staring at him with eyes as hard and round as if I’d had adrenaline dropped into them. Would he guess how I’d escaped? Would he see me?
He hesitated, then his head appeared. I shrank back into the gap. He took long, patient minutes to study the drop from the window. When at last he pulled his head inside, his shadow wavered for a moment, then he disappeared from view, almost in slow motion, leaving the room blank save for the swinging light-bulb. I started to breathe again.
You can be as brave and confident as you like, you can convince yourself that you’re invulnerable, that you know what you’re dealing with. You think that it won’t ever really get too serious – that there’ll be some kind of a warning before it goes that far, danger music, maybe, playing offstage, the way you get in films. But it seems to me that disasters aren’t like that. Disasters are life’s great ambushers: they have a way of jumping on you when your eyes are fixed on something else.
The Nurse and the chimpira stayed in our house for over an hour. I watched them roaming through the corridors, slamming into rooms, throwing the shutters off their hinges. Glass smashed and doors were ripped away. They overturned furniture and ripped the telephone out of the wall. And all the time I sat squashed and frozen between the buildings, my pyjama top pulled up over my mouth, all I could think was: Shi Chongming. You shouldn’t have let me get into this. You shouldn’t have let me get into things so dangerous. Because this was more, much more, than I had ever bargained for.
46
The way I remember the rest of that night is like one of those time-lapse films you sometimes see of a flower opening, or the sun moving across a street – jerky, with people shooting suddenly from one place to another. Except my film is all lit in the electric cordite colour of disaster and the sound has a horrible slowed-down underwater quality, with the creaking noise that you imagine big ships make. Zoom, and there’s the terrible shadow of the Nurse and Jason, making me think of something in a book, beast with two backs/beast with two backs, then zoom!, there’s me crouched between the buildings, my eyes watering, the muscles in my flanks twitching with fatigue. I’m watching the Nurse and the chimpira leaving the house, stopping briefly at the door to cast a glance up the street, the chimpira swinging keys on his fingers, the Nurse tightening the belt on her raincoat, before melting away into the dark. I’m frozen and numb everywhere, and when I touch my face where I banged the wall, it doesn’t hurt as much as it should. There’s just a little blood coming out of my nose and a little more where I bit my tongue. Then zoom again, and the Nurse hasn’t come back – the alley has been quiet for so long, and the front door is wide open, it’s been popped out of its catch, so I’m creeping back up the staircase, shivering crazily, hesitating at each step. Then I’m in my room, staring in disbelief at the devastation – my clothes scattered on the floor, the door caved in and all the drawers open and rummaged 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.’ 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 – I 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 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?’
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,’ I said, staring blankly at the door. ‘No, I’m not deaf.’
‘He okay?’ hissed Svetlana.
I looked up at her. ‘What?’
‘He okay?’
‘Um,’ 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.
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.’
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 t
he 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.’
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.’