Last Quadrant

by Meira Chand

  The man’s gaze made her uncomfortable, his eyes stayed on her too long, and turned her inside out. But there was some thing else too, something that rested between the man and the house, that she could never put a finger on. An elusive shadow in her mind. As she grew and sometimes faced Arthur Wilcox alone, the feeling was stronger, not less. She felt his eyes press into her body and search and search her face. As if he asked questions to which he expected no answer. She had deposited Eva’s commodities and retreated as fast as she could. But sometimes, turning quickly, the house closed in about her, or echoed strange shadows in her head. There was the feeling of knowing more about the place than what she saw before her. She felt she knew the graining of floorboards and the crack beneath a door with the familiarity of an ant. Strange elusive ghosts welled up and made her run.

  And now across the table, above his scrap of typhoon map, the man looked at her again. His eyes dug into her. A womanless man. Who knew how he interpreted the things he observed. Behind his moustache she glimpsed long thin teeth; his large pale hands were spread over his knees. She moved self-consciously in her chair to curb his stare. He looked at Kyo too, she had not missed that; hungry, furtive looks. She wished she could close the dressing gown that gaped to reveal Kyo’s beige satin slip.

  But now, as Akiko watched, Kyo stirred, moistened her lips and opened her eyes. She sat up and the bathrobe gaped wider. Lifting both hands to the back of her neck she shook out her damp hair, moving her head in a sinuous way. She took in the group at the table and looked surprised at where she was, then stretched, pushing her arms above her head. Her sleeves fell back on her thin arms as she stifled a yawn and turned her head with a pert little smile. Then, standing up, she walked across to where they all sat.

  Akiko stiffened as Kyo came towards her. All the pathos Kyo had arrived with was gone. Akiko saw again in the slim black eyes the customary guile.

  6

  In the kitchen Eva waited for the coffee to heat. It was silent and deserted, a ghost of its daytime self. The dinner plates were piled unwashed in two large sinks, waiting for the morning cooks and cleaners. The evening shift of staff had not come because of the typhoon. From the dishes came the stale smell of food mixed with the sourness of Arthur Wilcox’s drying socks and shoes, spread over a laundry rack before an oil stove.

  In the quiet empty room the sound of the storm surged frighteningly. There was a lamp on over the stove; the rest of the room was in darkness. Beyond the windows the moon appeared at times to illuminate great masses of cloud, moving wildly. Eva shivered and turned from the gaping black holes of the curtainless windows. But there was no way to shut out the noise.

  Bits of twigs and leaves smacked the windows; sometimes something heavier thudded against the glass and dropped. From beyond the ironing room veranda, where earlier Akiko had crouched, was the repeating noise of a loose corrugated roof in the backyard. Thunk, thunk, thunk, it repeated like a metronome of the storm. In that yard too were six tall metal bottles of propane gas, chained together to the wall. There was no piped gas or water up here, and they had their own well. She could hear a couple of the empty cylinders knocking together, rocked by the wind. The chain that held them together shifted and clunked.

  Suddenly, Eva was filled with fear. It seemed outside an inanimate world of solid, immoveable things had been given spirits of their own, and heaved and staggered, like dead creatures brought to life. She turned quickly to a thud at the window, and saw a child’s plastic sand bucket roll across and drop. The squashed wet bodies of moths and insects speckled the glass, their torn wings like bits of leaves. In one corner were the mashed green segments of a mantis, like bits of sappy twig, and near it a few yellow petals from a chrysanthemum head. These were the things that not long before had lived and breathed in a rightful world. Now orders were reversed: thick metal feet walked and clunked, roofs moved, stones took flight while birds were smashed to the ground. Something evil was about, something wild and screeching, like a harpie, plunging and swinging above the earth. She remembered again the black thrashing trees, she remembered her fear at the orphanage gate, of the night that would descend and seal them in the storm. A strange, living, shimmering fear.

  Her heart beat in her throat then, and she reached for the kettle at its first lusty song, poured it on the coffee grains, and breathed in their bitter, comforting smell. A smell that was reality. Calmer then, she picked up the jug to leave the kitchen.

  It was a great tearing ripping sound, a terrible thrashing and groaning, like some giant winged creature struggling free. And then the splintering and a crash that shook the floor in the kitchen.

  Daniel, Akiko, Arthur and Sister Elaine came running from the dining room. Eva stood still, coffee pot in hand.

  ‘What is it?’ they asked breathlessly.

  ‘It’s from the ironing room.’ Eva put down the jug as Daniel slid open the ironing room door. A blast of cold wind and rain rushed in at them. Daniel switched on a light in the room.

  ‘It’s the backyard roof, ripped clean off and blown into the window.’ Wind roared in like a great open-mouthed tunnel, rain sprayed and swirled about them. Over Daniel’s shoulder Eva glimpsed the jumbled mound of ironing stands: bodies askew, legs collapsed or stuck up in the air. The white corrugations of the plastic roof poked through the shattered window.

  ‘The room will be ruined. What can we do?’ Eva thought of the rain on the matted tatami floor.

  ‘Have you anything to board it up with, cardboard, wood?’ Arthur inquired.

  ‘No bits and pieces will stand against that wind. Have you no more sliding doors like this?’ Daniel pointed to the sliding detachable fusuma doors in the ironing room.

  ‘Upstairs, between the two smaller dormitories,’ Eva replied.

  Daniel and Arthur came back, lugging the two segments of the door. They humped them over the fallen ironing boards and wedged them at an angle against the broken windows. The noise of the storm was forced outside again and they crunched back across the glass carpeting the matting, shutting the door behind them.

  As they wiped the wet rain from themselves with towels Eva gave them, the sound of feet beat down the corridor. There was the voice of Eiko and behind her Yoshiko. They burst into the kitchen, excited.

  ‘It’s coming here to Kobe. Here. Oh, what shall we do?’ They laughed and clung together.

  ‘The typhoon, here to Kobe?’ Eva echoed.

  ‘They say it has slowed a little and changed course. It will hit Kobe in an hour,’ they cried again together.

  On the television this information was continued.

  ‘ ... Typhoon 21 leaving a trail of devastation in the wake of its torrential rains and record-breaking winds, dropped speed during the last hour and has changed to a more northerly direction. It is now expected to hit Kobe at ten o’clock tonight. Still retaining a central barometric reading of 968 millibars, Typhoon 21 is speeding forward at the pace of ninety kilometres an hour. Havoc wrought by the storm is expected to extend to thirty eight prefectures in Japan. So far already thirty people have been killed with forty missing and another one hundred and fifty-eight injured. Flooded houses so far number more than eight thousand, roads have been damaged at more than two hundred and fifty places and landslides reported at two hundred and ninety five points. Residents of Kobe are asked to take shelter in substantial buildings. The sudden change of course makes the precautionary measurements of evacuation impossible ...’

  They stood in silence until it was finished.

  ‘What shall we do? Oh what shall we do?’ Eiko and Yoshiko cried in unified terror.

  ‘Not much choice in the matter, I fear,’ Arthur replied. He moved anxiously up and down on the balls of his feet, stretching his neck this way and that. ‘No doubt we shall now experience the right front quadrant of the storm, young man. Have to heave to on the starboard tack,’ Arthur said to Daniel with a sudden salute of his hand.

  But Eva stood still, a coldness suddenly in her body. And she re
membered again the fear she had felt in the kitchen and at the orphanage gate.

  7

  The children slept. In the stillness were small sounds of breathing and an occasional cough. Outside, the wind hammered and raged, rain slapped windows in hard straight sheets. The grey curtains were drawn in the dining room. There was nothing to see, only the noise and an odd shudder through the house.

  Arthur Wilcox frequently consulted his watch, and stared into space before him, waiting, a newspaper lay open on his knees. Alternately he picked it up and put it down and looked at his watch. Eiko and Yoshiko giggled over a ludo board and turned for advice to Sister Elaine, who embroidered a sampler beside them. Eva read, Akiko and Daniel spoke quietly together, their chairs drawn apart from the group. Only Kyo yawned and shifted, sipping coffee, drawing on a cigarette in sharp drags. The dressing gown opened on her slim crossed legs and satin slip. She jiggled a foot impatiently and blew smoke, staring at Eva and Akiko.

  She did not recognise Arthur. He could see that clearly. Her eyes ran over him blankly, and turned away; for it was twenty years. He was still shocked, still felt the woman a hallucination that would suddenly disappear. But she did not, so that slowly he stared at her for longer intervals from the raised safety of the newspaper. She had changed and aged, and yet she had not. When he looked at her the same excitement twisted in his body, dissolving the years. He tried to define the changes. The red, curling hair had been sttraight and black before. Fine and soft in his hand, like a curtain over his face. He still remembered light from a window, iridescent and prismed through her hair, and the curve of her naked shoulder. Kyo. His heart flickered in his throat. But where were the changes of these twenty years, the furtherance of age? He saw only the same slim body and limbs, the features as before. Age was something buried, a hardening beneath the eyes, a calculation of sallow skin. She looked ill. Not just the ochre tint, but a deadness of her very flesh, sucked bloodless and limp. She coughed in a rusty way as if her throat was scoured with wire mesh. She was a bony, featherless little bird, she was a piece of limp thrashed rag. She was everything that was at an end, well used and cast aside. Kyo. Had she ever been more than this? Yet he still could not look at her without a tightness in his limbs.

  She had only used him, he had meant nothing to her. Yet he was grateful, for she did not know what she gave. She did not know the shadows and confines of his life. Unaware, she tossed them aside and the light had dazzled him. Dazzled. Lit him up from within, so that he had existed only for the moments when she came. Kyo.

  He remembered the first time. She had brought the eternal newspapers from Eva Kraig on two occasions before. He had not been long in the house then, barely knew of Eva Kraig, and appreciated her thoughtful gesture. Twice the girl had come instead of Eva. She worked in the orphanage, she said. Her eyes had travelled the room, travelled over him, lazy, calculating eyes. That third time she did not turn to go, but instead wandered round, looking, touching.

  ‘What’s this?’ she said, before the photo of him as a child with elder brothers and parents. He stepped forward to explain, standing close to her. He did not finish speaking before she turned, unbuttoning slowly the tight white blouse, button by button by button, watching him all the time. He backed away, his whole body contracting, for how could he tell her of his fear. Of the disease that became the madness that killed his philandering father. Of his mother’s embittered recriminations that tied him in guilt-ridden, inexplicable knots, that impeded his very life. He backed away, trembling, until there was only the wall behind him. Then she had taken his hand and placed it beneath the blouse.

  She came regularly then, whenever she could, for an hour, sometimes two, barely longer. She said it was enough, although to him a day would have been no more than an hour. Kyo. Her body gave him life. Gradually he relaxed, for nothing seemed to happen to him that was not whole and good. Beneath him she throbbed. ‘I can’t live without it,’ she whispered once. ‘I can’t live like she does at that orphanage. She wants nothing for me but good, I know. But she could never understand the kind of woman I am.’

  The kind of woman I am. He remembered the words, and he knew then the distance he always sensed. He could have been anyone for her, as long as he was a man. But it made no difference to the burning within him.

  Then she went away, placed by Eva Kraig with an American family on a military base. He thought he would never see her again. It was two years before he did. Then she came with the child, and stood on his doorstep. It had been a night like this, of wind and rain. Her clothes and hair were wet.

  ‘There was nowhere else to go,’ she said.

  It had taken him some time to comprehend the child, to realise it was hers and nothing to do with the orphanage. Akiko, she said. Her name was Akiko. She jiggled the small creature in her arms and told him about that bastard, Joe; her English had improved.

  He lit a fire because she shivered, peeled off her wet clothes himself and wrapped her in a blanket, and his body warmed again. He carried her to the bedroom, shutting the door upon the child. But through the wind and rain and Kyo’s body he heard its cries and the sound of small fists, desperate on the door. He had got up, angry, shouted and shut the door again. Kyo laughed and drew him down. Almost at once there were the cries again and the pounding on the door. Afterwards he had turned away in distaste at the child’s wet and swollen face, at the slime that ran from her nose to her mouth, and the choking sobs even Kyo could not stop. He turned away, he knew nothing of children.

  She stayed three days, and he did not even ask her why. She cooked and lay warm beside him. He did not go to work. Yet only at night, when the child slept, were they free of its frettings, of its small hands upon the door. Kyo found a worn sock of Arthur’s, stuffed it with remnants of a withered cushion and embellished it with button eyes and lips of rough chain stitch. But still the child would not be quiet, its fists hammered through his dreams, until she left it at the orphanage.

  ‘That’s why I came,’ she said, incredulously. ‘I’m going to Bangkok, to a cabaret opening there. I can do nothing with a child.’ She shrugged, and found a box that had held some onions, and lined it with a cloth. Later that night she placed the sleeping child in it with some clothes and the button-eyed sock. She carried it down herself, she would not let him help.

  ‘Eva took her in. I waited behind a bush. I saw,’ she reported upon return. Holding out a hand she drew him near, a strange, wild look in her eyes. She might have deposited a box of fruit on the orphanage doorstep.

  That night was long and quiet, and in the morning she was gone. On his desk she left the small blue vase with a tag about it, ‘To Arthur’. He never saw her again, until she came here tonight. Twenty years.

  There must be a way to make her see it was him, some way to attract her attention. Nobody had introduced them. He looked at her hard and spoke up loudly.

  ‘I wonder what our bearing is of the centre in this storm.’ Kyo looked at him without interest.

  ‘How could you determine that, Mr Wilcox?’ Daniel asked.

  Arthur kept his eyes on Kyo, but she gave no sign at the sound of his name. She looked back at Akiko, and puffed out a quantity of luxuriant smoke. He spoke loudly again, to catch her eye. ‘Buys Ballot’s law.’ Arthur dug in his pockets for a compass. ‘Dashed useful little things, always carry one with me. Now, according to Buys Ballot’s law, we face the wind. If it veers to the right we are in the right semicircle, and the other way we are in the left. A non-shifting wind indicates we are in the storm track, either ahead or behind the centre.’ Arthur spoke earnestly, sitting forward in his chair. Kyo met his eyes and held them for a moment.

  It was no use, she did not recognise him. It hurt, for to him each moment all those years ago, although no longer totally recallable, still released a warmth into him. Kyo. He would not remind her, he had his pride. Instead he observed her sadly and lowered his eyes. And then, from outside, without a warning, the typhoon came down upon them at last.

/>   8

  It was like the smashing of a vial of wrath. Swift and hard, unmistakable. It exploded around the house. The beams, the glass, the floor shook under the avalanche from above, like an earthquake in the storm.

  Eva started from her chair. Oh God, she thought. Oh God. The children woke and began to scream, until they were all astir, clustering round the adults, the little ones hugging worn stuffed toys.

  ‘We must keep calm,’ said Eva. ‘Put your dressing gowns on and sit together at this end of the room.’

  They must all be prepared, although she knew not for what. In all the years in Japan, through typhoons that came and went, she had never experienced a direct hit. She did not know what to expect.

  ‘It is only wind and rain. We must keep that in mind, nothing more. And we are safer here together, inside,’ she reassured. But her last words were lost in a clap of appalling noise, thunder, wind or a falling building, she did not know what. It was as if the wind tunnelled under the orphanage now, and shook until it shuddered and creaked. Some little ones screamed and clung to her.

  ‘It’s only the wind,’ she calmed, and turned to Arthur Wilcox. ‘How long could this go on?’

  ‘It’s barely started. Great variations. Impossible to say. Some storms can be one thousand miles, with a belt like this, five to sixty-five miles, spiralling into the centre. Impossible to say,’ he said.

  ‘How about the television?’ Daniel asked. ‘Or the radio?’