I traced an arc across Takadanobaba so that I arrived back at the house via a small passageway between two apartment buildings. I stopped, half hidden behind a Calpis drinks machine, its blue light flickering spectrally, and cautiously put my head round the corner. The alley was deserted. The snow fell silently, lit by the lanterns outside the ramen restaurant. On my left rose the house, dark and cold, blotting out the sky. I’d never seen it from this angle – it seemed even bigger than I remembered, monolithic, its curved, pantiled roof almost monstrous. I saw I had left the curtains open in my bedroom and I thought of my futon all laid out in the silence, my painting of Tokyo on the wall, the silent image of Jason and me standing under the bead galaxies.
I dug in my pocket for the keys. I checked once over my shoulder, then slipped silently into the alley, staying close to the buildings. I stopped at the cleft between the two houses and peered over the air-conditioner. My holdall was still there, tucked in the dark, snow piling on it. I continued along the edge of the house, under my window. Ten yards away from the corner, something made me stop. I looked down at my feet.
I was standing in a gap in the snow, a long black groove of wet Tarmac. I blinked at it. Why had instinct halted me here? Then I saw, of course, it was a tyre track. I was standing in the greyed-out shadow left by a car, recently parked. Adrenaline bolted through my veins. The print stretched out all round me. The car must have sat there for a long time because the outline was clear, and there was a pile of soggy cigarette ends exactly where the driver’s window would have been, as if they’d been waiting for something. I backed hastily into the shadows of the house, my blood pressure spiking. The tyre tracks led straight ahead, all the way to Waseda Street, where I could make out one or two cars passing as usual, silent, muffled by the snow. The rest of the alley was deserted. I let out a nervy breath, and glanced up at the windows in the tumbledown old shacks, some lit yellow, shapes moving in them. Everything was as normal. This doesn’t mean anything … I told myself, licking my sore lips, and staring at the car print. It means nothing. People were always parking in alleys, privacy was so difficult to find in Tokyo.
I moved on cautiously, avoiding the car shadow, as if it might be a trick trap-door, and keeping close to the house, my shoulders brushing the snow from the security grilles on the ground floor. At the corner I leaned round and peered at the front door. It was closed, as if it hadn’t moved since I’d left, a snowdrift already piled up against it, perfect and downy. I glanced once more up the alley. Although it was deserted I was trembling as I stepped forward and hastily fumbled my key into the lock.
Jason’s TV was on. A flickering blue light was coming from under his door, but the bulb on the landing had been shattered by the Nurse and the house was unusually dark. I climbed the steps slowly, jumpily, all the time imagining something shadowy and rapid hurtling down the corridor towards me. At the top I stood in the dim light, breathing hard, the memories of last night like shadows racing away from me along the walls. The house was silent. Not a creak of floor or a breath. Even the usual sound of the trees rustling in the garden was muffled by the snow.
My teeth chattering now, I went to Jason’s room. I could hear him breathing inside the wardrobe, a congested, bloody sound that quickened when I pulled back the door. ‘Jason?’ I whispered. The room was freezing and there was an unpleasant organic smell in the air, like animal dung. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Yeah.’ I could hear him shifting painfully in the wardrobe. ‘Did you speak to someone?’
‘They’re on their way,’ I hissed, scrambling over the dressing-table and dropping silently to the floor. ‘But you can’t wait, Jason, you’ve got to get out now. The Nurse is coming back.’ I stood next to the wardrobe, put my hand on the door. ‘Come on, I’m going to help you downstairs and—’
‘What’re you doing? What the fu— Stay back! Stay away from the wardrobe.’
‘Jason! You’ve got to get out now—’
‘You think I didn’t hear you? I HEARD. Now get away from the fucking door.’
‘I won’t go anywhere if you shout. I’m trying to help.’
He made an irritated sound, and I heard him sink back in the wardrobe, breathing fast. After a moment, when he had calmed a little, he put his mouth to the wardrobe door. ‘Listen to me. Listen carefully—’
‘We haven’t got time to—’
‘I said listen! I want you to go into the kitchen. There are rags under the sink. Bring me as many as you can find – and get towels from the bathroom too, anything you can get hold of.’ He was struggling to get up. From inside the wardrobe a pool of something viscid, matted with hair, had crept a short way across the floor and congealed. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. ‘Then get my holdall from the peg, and my suitcase – is it still outside the door?’
‘Yes.’
‘Bring me everything from the suitcase and then I want you to switch off the lights and leave the house. I’ll take care of the rest.’
‘Switch off the lights?’
‘This isn’t a fucking freak show. I don’t need you staring at me.’
My God, I thought, clambering back over the desk into the corridor, what has she done to you? Is it what she did to Bison? He died. Bison died from what she did. The shutters were all open and in the garden the snow was still falling, huge fat grey flakes the size of hands, circling and batting into one another, their shadows skittering across the floor. The carrier-bag in the tree sent a long, lantern-like shape on to the wall. I couldn’t remember the house ever being so cold – it was as if the air had frozen in blocks. In the kitchen I grabbed an armful of rags, then some towels from the bathroom. I climbed shakily back over the desk.
‘Put them near the wardrobe. I said don’t look at me!’
‘And I said don’t shout.’ I clambered back into the hallway, pulled his suitcase to the door, lifted it over the desk and pushed it down on to the floor. Then I went to the row of pegs at the top of the stairs to get his holdall from where it hung under the coats. As I pulled aside the coats and jackets I kept my ears trained on the alley, all the time imagining the Nurse silently sidewinding down the streets towards us, standing outside the house looking up at the windows and trying to decide how she would—
I came to a halt.
Jason’s holdall.
I stood absolutely still, staring at it, only my ribs rising and falling under the coat. An odd idea was whorling through me. The house was silent, only the click click click of the floorboards contracting in the cold and the muffled sound of Jason shuffling around in the wardrobe. He had been carrying that holdall the night of Fuyuki’s party. Slowly, dazedly, I looked along the silent corridor stretching into darkness, then I turned stiffly and stared at his door. Jason? I thought, the blood in my veins like ice. Jason?
I placed my hands on the holdall, looking at it thoughtfully. Listen, he’d said, when he’d come to my room after the party. He’d been holding this bag. I remembered it all clearly. We’ve both got exactly what the other needs. I’m going to tell you something you’re really going to love. Suddenly I wasn’t imagining the Nurse lingering outside in the alley – instead I was imagining her hurrying past a black pool with the sky reflected in it, a red emergency light flashing on and off above her head. Last night I hadn’t seen Jason reappear with the Nurse when Fuyuki was choking. There had been a few minutes, just a few, when in the confusion anything could have happened . . .
Gingerly, moving slowly, painful inch by painful inch, I unzipped the bag and put my fingers inside. I could feel tissues and cigarette cartons and a pair of socks. I pushed my hands in deeper. A set of keys and a cigarette lighter. And in the corner of the bag something furred. I stopped. It was something furred and cold, and the size of a rat. I became very still, the skin on the back of my neck twitching. Jason? What’s this? I brushed my fingers over it, felt the fibrous tug of old dead animal skin, and a memory came to me. I took a breath and pulled the object out and stared at it in dumb surprise. I
t was a model of a bear – about five inches tall. There was a long red and gold braided string tied to a ring in its nose, and the moment I saw it I knew it was Irina’s lost fighting bear. He a strange one, that one, I remembered her muttering one day so long ago. He watch the bad video and he thief too. You know that? Stole my bear, my glove, even stole picture of my grandmama, my grandpapa…
‘Hey!’ Jason called suddenly. ‘What the fuck’s going on out there?’
I didn’t answer. Moving woodenly, I took the holdall off the peg and went back to his room. I stopped outside the door, and stared at the suitcase lying on the floor. I was thinking of him weeks ago, throwing his hand into my face, mimicking Shi Chongming’s exploding dragon. He’d known I was looking for something. But – I had no idea how perfect you were, not until tonight…
Of course, Jason, I thought, my knees weak. Of course. If you found Fuyuki’s medicine it would be exactly the sort of thing you’d like… You’re a thief, aren’t you? Someone who’d steal for nothing but the thrill.
The suitcase wasn’t closed properly – his belongings were hanging out of it, a pair of trainers, jeans, a belt. ‘Yes,’ I said, under my breath, as things began to fit into place. ‘Yes – I see.’ All the questions and answers were knitting dreamily together. Something else had been nagging at me since that morning, something about all the other objects that had been strewn around the corridor: a camera, paperwork, some photos. His passport. His passport?
‘Jason,’ I murmured, ‘why were all those – those things . . .’ I lifted my hand, pointing vaguely at the suitcase. ‘Those—You were packing last night, weren’t you? Packing. Why would you have been packing if you hadn’t known –’
‘What the fuck’re you talking about?’
‘– if you hadn’t known … that she might come?’
‘Just put everything on the floor and go.’
‘That’s it, isn’t it? You realized what you’d done. You suddenly realized how serious it was, that she might come because you’d stolen—’
‘I said put everything—’
‘Because you’d stolen,’ I raised my voice. ‘You’d stolen from Fuyuki. You had. Hadn’t you?’
I could almost hear his indecision, his lips moving silently, muttering his fury. For a moment I thought he was going to leap out at me, full of aggression. But he didn’t. Instead he said irritably, ‘So? Don’t start lecturing me. I’m choking with it, believe me. Choking with you and all your weird fucking issues and obsessions.’
I dropped the holdall and put my hands to my head. ‘You . . .’ I had to breathe in and out very quickly. I was shaking all over. ‘You – you . . . Why? Why did you …’
‘Because!’ he said, exasperated. ‘Just because. Because it was there. Suddenly this fucking thing you’d been . . .’ He caught his breath. ‘It was there. Right in front of my eyes and, believe me, I had no idea of the fucking hell-fire that was going to rain down on my head if I took it, and now is not the time to be giving me judgement, so just put the stuff on the fucking floor and—’
‘Oh, Jason,’ I said dazedly, ‘what is it?’
‘You really don’t want to know. Now put the—’
‘Please, please, tell me what it is, where you’ve hidden it.’ I turned and looked up the empty corridor, stretching into the darkness. ‘Please, it’s so important to me. Where is it?’
‘Put the holdall on the floor—’
‘Where is it?’
‘And move the towels nearer the wardrobe.’
‘Jason, where is it?’
‘I said move the towels to the wardrobe and—’
‘Tell me now or I’ll—’
‘Shut up!’ He hammered on the doors, making them bounce in the runners. ‘Fuck you, fuck you, and fuck your shitsucking little treasure hunt. If you’re not going to help me then either fight me – because I will fight you, I’m not afraid to hit you – or go and screw yourself.’
I stood for a moment, looking at the wardrobe door, my heart racing. Then I turned and stared back down the corridor. Most of the doors were closed. It was still littered with broken glass and fabric from the walls. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘It’s okay.’ I put out my hands blindly in front of me, moving the fingers, as if the air texture would hold the answer. ‘I’m going to find it. I don’t need you. You brought it back last night and it’s still here somewhere.’
‘Just shut up and switch the fucking lights off!’
My trance cleared. A sweat broke across the back of my neck. I pulled the roll of money from my right pocket and threw it into Jason’s room. It broke and notes floated down in the semi-darkness. ‘There,’ I said. ‘Strawberry sent you some money. And, Jason—’
‘What?’
‘Good luck.’
54
One morning, a few days before the Nurse had come to the house, I’d woken, pulled back the window and there, standing in the alley below, dressed in a hard hat and a suit, clipboard in hand, had been a surveyor, or an engineer, looking up at the house. It had made me so sad to think of the house, after war and earthquake and famine, after everything, giving in to the property developers. Its paper-slim walls and wooden structure were designed to fall in a quake, to fall like matchsticks so that the occupants had a chance to escape. When the men came to pull it down, when they wrapped a thin blue cover round it and took their demolition ball to it, it would go without a whisper, taking with it all its memories and trapped secrets.
The surveyor and I had regarded each other for a long time – he in the cold, me standing warm and wrapped in my duvet – until eventually my hands grew cold, my cheeks red, and I closed the window. At the time I had thought vaguely that his presence meant the end of our lives in the house was near. It hadn’t occurred to me that the end might come in a different, totally unexpected way.
I grabbed a torch from the kitchen and went silently down the corridor, switching off all the lights as I went. One or two doors were open and there were no shutters or curtains at most of the windows – from the street the Mickey Rourke light illuminated everything that happened in those soft, silent rooms. Someone watching from outside would see everything, so I moved swiftly, bent into a crouch. In my room I crept to the side window and leaned out as far as I dared, until I could crane my neck round and see through the gap into the alleyway. It was deserted, the snow falling silently, no sounds of cars or voices. The tyre tracks and my footprints had already disappeared under the new snow. I grabbed the money from my coat pocket and threw it on top of the bag. It landed with a silent flutter and a puff of snow. I turned and changed hurriedly, fumbling in the dark, throwing off my club dress and pulling on trousers, flat shoes, a sweater, a jacket zipped up to the neck.
Where did you put it, Jason? Where? Where am I supposed to start?
I crouched in the doorway, clutching the torch, my teeth chattering. From his room I could hear a series of muffled thumps – I didn’t want to imagine the secret, painful manoeuvre he was going through. But no. It’s not in your room – Jason, that would be too easy. The torchbeam played over the other silent doors. I let it rest on the store room next to mine. Even when you haven’t got a map, when you haven’t got a clue, you have to start somewhere. Stooped awkwardly, I crept to the door, sliding it back in fractions, careful not to make a noise. I peered inside. The room was in chaos. The Nurse and the chimpira had gone into everything, into all the decomposing futons, the fragmenting piles of ageing, insect-chewed silks, a case of framed photos, posed black-and-white portraits of an elderly woman in a formal kimono under splintered glass. I squatted in the middle of the room and began to tear at things, a rice-cooker, a box of yellowing paperbacks, here was a silk obi, once silver and blue, now stained brown in places and riddled with moth holes. When I touched it, it crumbled in my hand and iridescent flakes of silk, like butterfly scales, moved in a cloud, upwards through the cold air.
I went through everything, my panic building, sweat dampening my clothes. I had almost worked acro
ss the entire room when something made me stop and raise my eyes. Headlights were sweeping across the ceiling.
Fear lit up across my skin. I clicked off the torch and put it into my pocket, resting my fingers on the floor in a runner’s crouch, every muscle twitching. My ears crawled out of the room, out into the alley, trying to guess what was happening out there. The beams ran down the wall, then moved quickly in a straight line, sideways like lights from a spaceship. From the alleyway came a long silence. Then, just as I thought I would stop breathing, I heard the car change gear and move off. Brake lights appeared, reflected in the window, an orange indicator flashed. The car had stopped in the snow, waiting to turn left on to Waseda. I closed my eyes and sank to my haunches against the wall. ‘My God, Jason,’ I murmured, my fingers to my forehead. ‘This is going to kill me.’
It was pointless searching blindly like this. The Nurse had been through these rooms and hadn’t found anything. Why would I be able to do any better? But I was clever and I was determined. I was going to think my way through the walls, the ceilings and the fabric of the house. I was going to look where she hadn’t. Try, I thought, putting my fingers to my eyelids, try to picture this house through different eyes. Picture it through Jason’s eyes last night. Picture its skeleton. What had he been thinking? What had been the first thing he looked at when he came home last night?
The image of the house rotated in my mind. I saw through its skin, I saw beams and joinery, a timber frame laced with wires. I saw the windows. The windows. The windows in the gallery were saying something important. They were saying – think carefully now – they were saying: Remember Jason last night. Remember him outside your room. We are having an argument. Then what? He walks away. He’s furious and he’s still drunk, and he’s banging on all the shutters. He stops for a while looking out at the garden – one of the windows had been open when I came out of my room – he stands there, smoking a cigarette. Then he turns and he’s going to his room and starting to pack . . .