by Meira Chand
Later, in Kazuo’s room they were served a dinner of fried shrimps, salad, white rice, pickles and bean paste soup. They ate together, sitting on the floor around a low table. Kazuo drank sake, and Hiroko poured it for him in her usual graceful fashion. Kazuo did not speak much through the dinner.
After the bath Natsuko no longer felt cold. The water had dried from her body almost before she could towel it off. Her flesh was hot and red and cooked. She felt like the octopus Hiroko had lifted from the pot. She ate a good meal. Cleaning the last grain of rice from her bowl, she looked up at Riichi across the table. His eyes were fixed upon Hiroko in a strange glazed way. She was busy eating and did not seem to notice. Quickly Natsuko checked Hiroko’s cotton yukata, but found it neatly tied, wrapped over demurely, high at the neck. No accidental chink of flesh escaped. Yet Riichi still stared at her and tension wound tightly in Natsuko again. The sound of their lacquer chopsticks knocking against the bowls of food echoed in her head, as she kept her eyes upon Hiroko. Only once, as she finished the last mouthful of rice, sucking the chopsticks in her mouth, did Hiroko glance up at Riichi over her bowl. But she looked away quickly, busying herself in the piling up of plates.
Getting up from the table they slid back the paper doors beyond the matted section of the room. It opened upon a narrow carpeted strip before the window. Two chairs and a small table looked out over the town. Now the hills were dark, crowding in upon them, the lights of the town heaped in a mass at their base. In the street below groups of people strolled past, identified by the yukata of their respective hotels.
‘Come,’ said Hiroko. ‘Leave your father to rest. Let’s go down.’
In the lobby Hiroko walked over immediately to a souvenir section, with glass cases of fans and beaded bags. They left her there and went out of the hotel, to the road outside.
The shops were all lit up and opened directly on to the street. Mostly they sold bric-à-brac souvenirs, plastic toys and edibles. They crossed from the hotel to the shop opposite and bought a tin of flat, round wafer biscuits, for which the town was famous. Munching these they studied the shelves of merchandise. The sweets and kewpie dolls, the gaudy comic books, bath towels with a vanishing naked geisha, who only showed when it was wet, miniature dolls of matchsticks and paper, brush ink scrolls and table mats, spilled brightly before them. Riichi became glued to a selection of rocks and minerals, examining carefully the cubic prisms of iron pyrites, feldspar and quartz. Natsuko left him, walking purposefully to the back of the shop.
She had seen the bird from the pavement, staring over glass cases of dolls and polished driftwood sculpture. Only its stillness betrayed it was stuffed. It balanced on a mounted wooden branch, head dipped forward, wings spread wide. Glaring out from beneath its pale brows, its amber glass eyes were unforgiving, and between them the little beak was sharp as a sickle. One black clawed foot crushed to the branch a dead squirrel, hanging limply, its belly fur pale and soft, its mouth open upon small teeth.
Slowly, holding her breath, Natsuko reached out, touching with the tip of her finger to the bird’s speckled breast. The feathers were soft as velvet, melting beneath her. Stretching further she ran a finger along the hard ridge of muscle on the open wing. It was then the bird moved, wobbling slightly, top heavy on its stand. A picture flashed in her mind of the bird, falling, perch broken, feathers blowing over the floor, the squirrel flung free. Frightened then, she reached out both hands to steady it. Her fingers pushed deeply into the feathers. The beak touched her arm, cold and horny. Under her fingers she felt the hard ungiving body and thought of the insides, drained away, replaced by something that kept it whole long after it was dead. The bird steadied, looking fiercely at her. Heart thumping, Natsuko stepped back. Turning she walked quickly away, searching for Riichi.
He was outside, slipping coins into a bright pink vending machine. Magazines were displayed in its window. With a thud and a rattle change fell out and a magazine dropped down. Riichi picked it up and pushed it hurriedly into the square hanging sleeve of his yukata.
‘What did you buy?’ She could tell he had not expected her.
‘Nothing. You’re a nuisance. Go away. I’m sick of you, always interfering.’ He walked abruptly across the road back into the hotel.
She glanced up at the machine, but its window was in shadow. It was too dark to see clearly, and the magazines did not seem familiar. She followed Riichi across the road.
It was good for us all, Kazuo thought the next evening, after they returned home. He settled himself on the couch in the study and picked up a magazine. The unexpected feelings shared with Riichi pleased him greatly. It was due entirely to Frances’ absence, he decided. He realized then, he had not thought much about Frances. He tried to feel guilty, and could not. There had been a cable of safe arrival and two postcards. He had written, briefly, details mostly of the children’s welfare, and domestic arrangements. He had yet to receive a reply, and wanted none. He dreaded seeing the neat fall of words upon a page, their tone of accusation and remorse, bringing her to him again. Now, if he tried it was difficult to conjure a clear physical exactness. She came go to him in fragments, a walk or a gesture, her hands, the line of her hair, a tone of voice. But her eyes, her expression, the shape of her face defied him completely. In his study, stretched out on the couch, he sank gratefully into this inability, and neither questioned it nor cared. Instead, he opened the magazine in his hands haphazardly, at an article upon the Asuka tombs in Nara. And suddenly from the page, the face of the woman Hiroko welled up, each detail clear, the pores of her skin, the loose curve of eyebrow, a few straggled hairs in its arc. He remembered occasions in the last few days when, meeting his gaze fully, she did not lower her eyes. He remembered each time the expression behind her smile. Pressing his knees together, he turned the page abruptly.
She drank her milk in the kitchen, sitting at the table, and looked at the skin formed on top of the liquid in the blue mug. Her mother always fished it off with a spoon before giving it to Natsuko to drink. She sipped again, and it stuck to her lip like wet tissue paper. With her tongue she transferred it to the far rim of the mug. Hiroko was ironing, clothes Kazuo Akazawa would need in the morning. She had set up the ironing board near Natsuko. As she drew the iron across the top it wobbled on its long crossed legs, like an ungainly bird. A yellow and white striped cover was tied over the ironing board. Frances had made it to hide scorch marks underneath, with material left from a Summer dress she made Natsuko. And Natsuko remembered now, how she had watched the yellow stripes gather quickly under the needle of the sewing machine, the peeling red ovals of her mother’s nails moving closer and closer to the frantic shuttle, escaping just in time. She wanted to ask, when will she come home? Why could I not have gone with her? Why did she have to go at all? Riichi just shrugged when asked and said she was ill without elaboration, waving her angrily from his room. And from her father there would be again the long confusing explanations she did not understand, driving the fear in her deeper.
On the ironing board she watched Hiroko’s small hand clasp the black handle of the iron, propelling the weight of chrome back and forth. Nothing would make her ask Hiroko. The clean linen was stacked in a pile on the table, underwear neatly folded, cuffs and fronts of shirts buttoned, concertinaed into rectangles, one on top of another. Her mother hung shirts open and loose upon a hanger, saying she had no time to fuss.
Everywhere Natsuko turned now it was like that, unfamiliar. The house was filled by a small echoing note of strangeness. The arrangement of flowers in an unexpected corner. One of Hiroko’s crocheted mats where no mat had been before. The lemony smell from a household deodorant Hiroko sprayed lavishly about, the unbalanced arrangement of bric-à-brac on shelves. Natsuko sensed a fine balance changed. Hiroko protruded everywhere, while her mother sank to the back of cupboards, and settled with the dust.
The milk was nearly finished. Looking down into the deep blue mug, at the froth drying in a fine lather round the sides, she w
ondered when things would feel all right again. When the thick, dead feeling inside her would lift. Abruptly the mug was pulled from her hand.
‘I haven’t finished.’ She looked up into Hiroko’s face. The hair was pulled tightly into a large clip at the back of her head. It drew her eyes up tautly at the corners, accentuating their narrow slant, making her mouth look fat and square.
‘It’s finished enough. You’re just wasting time. Go up to bed, now,’ Hiroko said.
She wished she could take stuffed animals to bed, like Riichi when he was much younger. But they never gave her comfort. Instead they grew in the dark and against a night window their ears changed to the shape of bats. Natsuko pulled the quilt into a lump beside her, pressing it under her cheek. She pushed a thumb into her mouth.
It was dark when the door opened quietly, waking her, and after a moment shut again. Her father’s footsteps walked away, his bedroom door opened and shut. Now when she woke she did not go to Riichi, fearing his scorn. And in her parents’ room there was just an empty side of the bed, and bottles on the dressing-table gathering dust.
A faint light pushed through a gap in the curtains, illuminating a huge papier-mâché dragon-fly she had made at school. Her mother proudly insisted they hang it there. Its ungainly, wired blue tissue wings spread several feet across the wall. In a breeze they moved, rustling slightly. Tomorrow the weekend was finished, it was school again. Its rigidities and pressures loomed suddenly at her over the edge of the night. They went to an International school, not far from the house. The children there came mostly with parents on company postings. Within two or three years they moved on. She had three times lost the beginnings of friendship in this way. Now she no longer tried. At breaktimes she sat on the periphery of groups, observing the easy interplay between children, the give and take. There had been conferences about her at school with her parents, her withdrawn attitude had been examined. She wondered if it would ever end. If she would ever do as well as Riichi, whose grades were good and who friends greeted from across the street.
More steps sounded in the corridor outside her room. The door opened, a bar of yellow light pushed in. Through half closed eyes she saw the outline of Hiroko, in her arms a pile of linen. For a moment she stood there silent, light touched the seams and buttons of folded shirts. Then, quietly she pulled the door shut. Her feet padded away to the next room. Natsuko listened to the short knock, to her father’s voice, and the opening of his door.
‘Put it down there,’ he said.
Bending, her back to him, she placed the pile of linen on the stool. She rearranged the order of folded underwear and socks to balance the pyramid securely. Behind her he watched. It pleased him, this exactness, this attention to his needs, the crisp folded shirts, the rolled balls of socks, even his underpants ironed. No one had given him such meticulous care since he lived in his parents’ house.
She was still attending to the pile, her head bent forward, the hollow of her neck soft and white. It was unnecessary, he knew, to take so long, to rearrange with such care a pile of linen. She was waiting. He was sure of it then, that moment by moment this was what they both had consciously planned. Slowly, he turned to the open door, shutting it quietly, making no noise.
There was only a muffled click, no more. But she was used to listening in the night for unseen things that might reach out for her. She knew exactly from what part of the corridor a floorboard creaked. Her father’s door shut, and there was the slight grate of the key. She waited for the flip-flapping sound of Hiroko’s slippers as she walked away down the passage. None came. Natsuko waited, thinking each moment they would begin. Silence. Moments passed, but no footsteps came.
Then, from the middle of her stomach the tightening began, spreading out until her body was rigid. Hiroko was still in the room. The door was shut and locked, and Hiroko was still in the room. Everything in her knew this was so. She sat up then, and waited. Why Hiroko should be in the room, what purpose made it necessary to shut and lock the door, she did not know. She was sure only of these facts, and that they held something more terrible than could be imagined.
She began to shiver then, her teeth shattered and she clutched the covers tight in her hand, knees pulled up under her chin. Straining her ears she waited, knowing sooner or later there must be a clue, the silence was alive with sensations. Once she thought she heard a whisper, several times a creak of the bed. But nothing more. Nothing. Then suddenly she heard the careful opening of Richii’s door further down the corridor.
Quickly then she got out of bed and peered out into the passage. The dark was eased by a lamp on the landing of the stairs, left burning at night. Crouched before the door of their parent’s bedroom was Riichi, his face pressed to the keyhole. In his body nothing moved.
It seemed she stood there a long time, she with her nose pressed to the open crack of her door, feet cold and numb, and Riichi, unaware, crouched before their father’s bedroom door. There was no sound or movement. The silence was filled by her heart, thumping and bumping about in her chest.
Then, in a quick movement, Riichi started up. She could see his legs were stiff by the awkward way he rose to his feet. At the door she moved and he turned his head. She saw then that his face was flushed, his eyes bright and disconnected in a way she remembered once when he was ill. He turned and disappeared quickly into his room.
Carefully, she stepped into the passage, walking to her father’s door. Bending she pressed her eye to the keyhole. First she saw nothing but a blurr of light. Then on the stool the pile of linen, the exact buttoned buttons, the tight balls of socks. A small part of the bed was visible, the sheets drawn back. It was empty and white. She could see nothing of her father. Then a green patch filled the hole. Hiroko was walking towards the door. Natsuko ran quickly back to her room. Leaning against the inside of the door, she heard at last the sound of Hiroko’s feet, flip-flapping away down the stairs.
7
Riichi said nothing. He doubled over the slice of toast, marmalade oozed between the crusts. A dollop dropped on to the table. He scooped it up with a finger, licking it off. Eating, he bit large chunks, chewed distractedly, bit again too soon, stuffing it all into his mouth, hardly tasting.
Natsuko could not eat. Exhaustion filled her. Something had happened last night, she did not know what. The churning feelings tired her out, she was an old woman, weathered and bent. From Riichi she sensed a strange new energy, jerking about, filling him hotly. He could not sit still. His eyes followed Hiroko about the kitchen, as she moved from sink to stove. Natsuko knew the old balances were gone, irretrievably. This room, beyond it the house, the people in it, were separated from her by something she did not understand. Everything was soured and treacherous. This much she understood. It had begun with Hiroko.
Abruptly, Riichi stood up, swinging his school bag over his arm. He was going before Natsuko this morning, he had a project at school to revise. Half an hour was left before Natsuko need leave. Upstairs her father was getting dressed, she heard the slam of the bathroom door. She sipped hot milk, nose deep in the mug. Steam rose in a circle to the centre of her face. Before her the cereal was untouched. The thought of eating made her sick. Finishing the milk she took the empty mug to the sink. With a soapy sponge Hiroko was washing Riichi’s plate.
‘Have you finished?’
‘I don’t want any breakfast.’
‘No. You must eat. You can’t waste all that food.’ Hiroko sounded annoyed.
‘But, I don’t want it.’ Natsuko heard her own voice shouting the words. At once Hiroko whipped around, eyes narrowed. In the sink she let go of the plate and sponge, and took hold of Natsuko’s arm.
Her hand was warm and wet on Natsuko. A skin of soapy bubbles slid from Hiroko’s fingers on to Natsuko’s arm, and dribbled down to her elbow.
‘You’ll eat if it makes you sick. You’ll learn to do as you’re told.’ Hiroko began pulling Natsuko back to the table.
Tugging the other way, afraid of bei
ng struck, Natsuko looked down and saw Hiroko’s feet in open-backed slippers. The front of her foot was lost beneath green felt, the heel and ankle were thick and strong, the soft wrinkles of her stocking encircled them. Suddenly it seemed everything Natsuko hated was in those feet. She remembered Hiroko’s legs flung out on her mother’s bed, one foot over a pile of Frances’s clothes, and the flip-flapping of Hiroko’s slippers that followed her everywhere. Hiroko gave an extra hard push, and the edge of the table came up hard against Natsuko’s hip. She saw Hiroko raise her hand. Bending backwards then, Natsuko kicked out as hard as she could.
It surprised her most to feel substance, the wall of bone and flesh, stopping her foot. Hiroko cried out and immediately let go of Natsuko. She thought, ‘I have done it. I kicked her.’ The pleasure of it was warm. She turned and ran, leaving Hiroko rubbing her shin.
In the hallway she picked up her school bag and fled out of the door. Once, at the gate, she stopped, expecting Hiroko somewhere behind. But she was not to be seen. Beyond the gate a breeze rustled through tall, dry grass. A swift darted up and flew away. She turned and began the walk to school.
It was a relief to be out of the house. Walking the narrow curving road descending the hill, she pushed her toes down hard, leaning back with her body to balance the steeper parts. From the side she pulled off a blade of grass, rubbing it in her fingers, smelling the sharp juicy smell on her hands. It was warm and sunny. Taking off her cardigan she tied it by the sleeves about her waist, stretching her arms, feeling the sun on her skin. She pulled again at a shrub and a butterfly rose up. They were beginning now, every day she saw one or two little white cabbage butterflies. Spring would soon be early Summer. Already cherry blossom petals clogged the gutters, mixing with orange juice cans and paper bags. Along the side of the road pollen from catkins of an overhanging tree was trampled like a green velvet patch into the surface of the road. Everything was better in Summer, they lived less in the house, more in the garden. And even then, doors and windows were flung open. Warmth, if not sun, pushed into the dark rooms.
