The Gun Room

by Georgina Harding

  He went back underground. This project he hoped might be the most successful. The people underground are composed. They walk at a constant pace. They know their position on the platform, which exit they will take from the platform where they get off to make a transfer or to go above ground. They queue in a line just where the doors will open. Nothing interrupts their composure. The station guards with their white gloves oversee their steps, and only occasionally do they intervene or change the pattern, only in the rush hour when they become important, conducting, directing, packing the people into the trains. And the trains move off, people pressed inside against one another and against the glass of the just-closed doors.

  Then there is a series of the little trees in the garden at Kamakura, where he had tried to capture the delicate contrived aesthetic that was alien to him and yet meant so much to the old man. He had crouched and then lain on the ground before the pots and angled the lens into their branches in an attempt to alter their scale and portray them as trees from nature, but that defeated their essence. Their identity was all in the artificiality and the metaphor, the microcosmic story they told of the wild within the civilised confines of the garden. So in the end he took the series like portraits in the low autumn light, each tree with the old man beside it, its scale clear, its height even in its pot no greater than that of the wheel of his chair, that low sharp light having the same value on its bark and on its needles or dying leaves as on the old man’s skin and his hands. Later he would look them all up in a book so that he could caption each portrait with the name of the species and the style, names which the old man had given them in the garden but which he had failed to catch at the time. Elm, juniper, cypress, pine. Chokkan, kengai, sekijoju, sabamiki.

  So, you’ve come to see the hydrangeas.

  He was lucky. It was one of the old man’s good days. He remembered the British boy and spoke to him in simple Japanese that a British boy could attempt to understand.

  You are too late. The hydrangeas are finished.

  He bowed, replied with as much respect as his command of the language permitted. It’s your garden, sir, I’d like to see. I have my camera. I would like, if you would allow me, to take some pictures of your trees.

  Then push me, if you would be so kind. I will show you round.

  They moved him into a wheelchair and put a woollen hat on his big bony head, and tucked a blanket round him, tight beneath his arms and over his knees. They pulled the doors wide and Jonathan wheeled the chair, awkwardly as he had not wheeled anyone in a chair before, down the ramp that had been placed to allow him to go into the garden, and made the tour with him, slowly past the groups of bonsai in their pots.

  That’s a tree in a wind, he said.

  He talked a surprising amount. His eyes were bright with his rare alertness and with the cold. He spoke all those names, spinning into incomprehensible detail as he elaborated the methods by which each branch and twig had been bent and trained and pruned in imitation of specific conditions of nature: the tree whose branches had been swept all in one direction as if by the wind, the one whose roots had been made to grow like tentacles about a rock; the sabamiki pine, whose trunk had been ruthlessly split down the centre as if struck by lightning.

  This pine is most beautiful in winter. You must come back in the winter and see how the snow rests upon it.

  Certainly I shall. But I like to take pictures of them now, in this autumn light. This maple, for example, the red of this maple is particularly beautiful right now.

  All of them are beautiful in the snow. The snow covers everything, you know.

  He waved his hands about and the blanket slipped off him, and Kumiko who walked behind picked it up and settled it around him again and straightened his hat, as Jonathan took out his camera and took pictures.

  They went on down the path to where the shrubs were and where the taller trees stood over their heads, and the path became thick with fallen leaves, the leaves heaped up in places so that it became hard to wheel the chair. Kumiko suggested that before they left they might sweep up the leaves so that it would be easier to pass, but her grandfather said, No, don’t move the leaves. He spoke suddenly with a kind of urgency or even fear – or perhaps it was no more than an old man’s irritation. No, don’t move the leaves. They cover the ground.

  And Jonathan suddenly thought, he’s afraid of the soil. He too has seen blood in the soil and knows that the soil smells of blood.

  He wheeled him on very gently and took care that he did not disturb the leaves, and other leaves fell as they went and there seemed to be a softening in the air and on the ground, and the woollen hat lolled as he dropped off to sleep in his chair, and it was hard to pull the chair back up the ramp without waking him.

  Again, the train, the roof-scape. Both of them silent at first, then Kumiko spoke.

  Do you know what he said to me? Did you understand all that he said?

  I understood pieces of it, only pieces. Words, the names of the trees, not the rest of it.

  He said to me, It doesn’t matter if I catch cold. Did you notice? He didn’t want me to put the blanket on him? I think he dropped the blanket on purpose. He said he did not want to live beyond the winter. He did not want the spring to come round again, or the rainy season or the summer.

  The view from the train was beginning to be broken now. They were coming to the tall buildings of central Tokyo. It was getting dark but it wasn’t dark enough. Sometime he meant to travel one of these lines into the city at night and take a long exposure of the lights, a horizontal blur of lights massing as the train moved on into the centre.

  A long panoramic shot. Rails, tarmac, concrete, roofs, the sky black above, the lights streaking below the sky. The city covering over all of the soil.

  What’s the Use?

  Before he left for Asia he had taken a series of photographs of the farm. It was the end of the summer. He had been home for a few weeks to help his brother with the harvest, and when it was done they burned the stubble. He had taken pictures of the stubble burning. They had ploughed the headlands first. They had ploughed a few times around the edge of the field so that the fire when they lit it would be contained and not burn out the hedges. They had worked on a day when there was only a fine breath of wind, a crystalline September day. They had watched for the strength and the direction of the wind and then seeing that it was safe they set light to the field, at the end into the wind, and saw the stubble catch and crackle, gold to flame to smoke moving across the field, a narrow belt of fire, the smoke rising grey and turning white as it massed and spread, the ground bared and black where it had passed. In the distance they could see where other fields were burning, distant patches of red and smoke rising from fields other than their own, smoke spreading white into the sky, and all the air in the countryside was sharp with the smell of burning. He took pictures of the whitened sky above and the charred land below, and the flames in the stubble and the smoke welling up, images that if you closed in on them appeared to show the earth itself on fire.

  What’s the use of that? his brother said. Richard had his gun with him and shot a big rat that was running from the fire. The rat was fat from feasting on dropped grain. He picked up the spent cartridge but left the dead vermin where it lay. You might do something useful, instead of farting around with a camera.

  The pictures show time broken into pieces. He can arrange them to reconstruct all of his time in Japan. First, the ones he thinks of as the tourist shots: the sights, the Imperial Palace, Ginza, the Asakusa Temple, Meiji Shrine, and then the first of streets and the underground. Kumiko beneath the wisteria. More streets, and more of the underground. More of Kumiko, many of Kumiko, a whole boxful of Kumiko, her face, her lips, her smile, her eyes. The pieces of her body that he loved. Along with those, in the chronology he puts together, come the garden pictures and the rain pictures and the summer pictures. Many of these last are in colour. On the streets the signs and the colours can seem lurid beneath the haze of the pollu
ted sky. On trips outside Tokyo, the greens are intense, the skies strong, Kumiko in her summer clothes bright in the foreground. (When she is naked she looks most beautiful in black and white, but a soft, matt, slightly grainy black and white which brings back to him the lovely but imperfect texture of her skin.) As the summer goes on, Jim appears. He had taken many more photographs of Jim than he had realised. Jim made such a striking figure on the streets. Perhaps he was instinctively using him as a foil, his figure so effectively set off the Japanese-ness of the rest. And sometimes there is a visible tension between Jim and the rest that has the effect, he thinks, of projecting into the picture his own foreignness, the relationship he himself has with the city that he is trying to portray. But perhaps he was photographing Jim just because he was handsome, or because somehow he had come to love him. Some of these shots are good, if he were to show them, if he were ever to use pictures of Jim again. An American in Tokyo, he would call them, and they would tell their own story, the glamour, the looks of the girls, the stride, the aloneness. But he will not allow himself to use him. Not Jim, not again, it would not be fair to use him again. He works on through the other summer pictures, yet none seem so satisfying. He moves on to later, bleaker ones, when he isn’t seeing Jim any more and when Kumiko is so often gone to Kamakura and he is spending more time alone in the city as he had at the start, and though these pictures are in many ways similar to those he took at the beginning he thinks that perhaps they are getting closer to what he wants. He finds the ones he took that day in Omotesando, many of which at first glance almost repeat those he took in Omotesando in the beginning, yet the subjects of the pictures have shifted just so slightly, to the ordinary, the unselfconscious, the inadvertent, the flawed, alongside the self-consciously created images of the fashionable. Among these he finds his last picture of Jim, just the back of his head above the crowd. He remembers standing in the park watching Jim and his girl through the zoom, but it seems that he took no pictures at all through the zoom that day. It comes back to him, how instead of taking pictures he had only watched, and the sadness he had felt for Jim and for the unknown girl and for himself, and then how he had put the lens back into its case, slung the strap on his shoulder and turned away into the city through the sea of Japanese, and how he seemed to himself then to be passing through the alien city like a diver underwater, breathing his own oxygen that he carried with him, that was not the surrounding air.

  The Gun Room

  Gun room was a grand name for it, a name suggestive of bigger houses and other times. The place where his father kept his guns was little more than a cubbyhole opening out from his study, a crooked oily-smelling space beneath the stairs with room in it for a workbench and a stool, and leather gun cases and cartridge belts and other bits of shooting paraphernalia, besides the metal gun cupboard fixed to the wall, and a tiny narrow window that shed light across his father’s face where he sat with the gun on his knees. The metal cupboard was open, the thin light on that too, on the dark gleaming barrels of the three guns that stood upright in their rests, and on the empty space where the fourth had been removed. There was nothing strange about his father having taken a gun down yet the moment was strange. What was strange was the way his father looked.

  He had gone into the study only to borrow something from the desk, a pencil or a ruler or something like that. He was only going to the desk to borrow whatever it was from amongst the usual mess of papers, his father wouldn’t have minded him doing that, and he glanced to the side and saw his father there in the gun room, and he stood a moment and looked, and ran out of the study without it, whatever it was. His father was just sitting looking ahead of him, looking into the study, looking directly at him but not seeing him. At least, he thought that he did not see him, and certainly there was no sus-picion or mention of it later. His father was sitting on the stool beside the bench where he kept his things for cleaning the guns, but he had swivelled the stool round to face into the study and sat with the gun held flat across his lap, his two hands on the stock and the barrels, cupping its length in his hands like a power. Daddy/I’m sorry/I just/I want/Have you got … There were words that it would have been easy to say, but he said nothing. Words would have broken the moment. He stood for that split second and then ran out, closing the door very softly behind him. And he never forgot.

  The pose wasn’t the same as Jim’s. Jim had crouched on the ground with his knees up before him and the gun held vertical between them. Jim’s face was dirty with war, his father’s clean in the winter light. But the look in their eyes was the same: frozen, blind with what in Jim he thought was shock, but in his father it must have been memory, or intention. Past, or future.

  * * *

  Do Japanese farmers have guns?

  There was Jim holding a gun, his father holding a gun.

  I don’t know, she said. I don’t know any country people.

  In England all farmers have guns.

  He took that picture of Jim because he had already that picture of his father, the two pictures merged now by some chance double exposure, the one above or beneath the other.

  Some Japanese people go hunting, she said. I think maybe people go hunting but I don’t know anything about it.

  We don’t call it hunting, we call it shooting when we go with guns. Hunting’s what you do with horses.

  In a red coat?

  That’s right.

  I’ve seen pictures, men in red coats chasing foxes.

  Their conversation became light. Everything became lighter once he was with Kumiko. Her smile didn’t show only in her mouth but there could be a small one, just a sense of a smile, in her eyes first.

  English farmers have guns for shooting rabbits and pigeons and pests.

  Japanese people think rabbits are cute.

  So do English people. Farmers don’t think they’re cute because they eat the crops.

  And what about foxes?

  Foxes eat the chickens.

  Her smile was broadening now. He was sitting on the edge of her desk in the office, looking down at her. There was no one there but themselves. They were about to leave. He had been teaching English all day and here he was having an inane conversation like one in an English lesson, full of unnecessary sentences, question and answer and repeated structures and related vocabulary.

  Do you have a gun? she asked him.

  My brother has guns. He told her about his brother. My brother has my father’s guns.

  Guns, plural, that means he has more than one. See how I work in a language school. How many does he have?

  Three. There’s a .410, which is a lightweight gun that boys can use, then the 12 bore, then the 16 bore. There was an old and valuable one that used to be my great-uncle’s, before, but my brother sold that one. When he says ‘before’ his hand points behind him. It is an English teacher’s habit, to point back when you mention a thing in the past, to point forward when you mention a thing in the future. It helps the student to identify tenses, and to keep track of all those little words in a sentence that can indicate time.

  They went out from the office, down in the lift.

  I saw Jim yesterday.

  Where?

  In the street. I didn’t speak to him, I just saw him.

  You should have spoken to him. Those things are meant, when you see people like that.

  They went to a yakitori bar. They were going to eat quickly and then go to the cinema.

  The trouble is, you’re a Pisces, she said. You’re bad at taking the initiative. You see and you don’t act.

  She asked what Jim’s star sign was and he said he had no idea.

  Only the Dog

  What was there that he could have done? Only spoken. He could have run back and spoken then – or screamed, rather, screamed as he ran across the plough, stumbling on the hard-frozen clods, running home, and nobody would have heard him out there in the fog but Billy, and Billy had heard the shot already and was already by then on his way to the spinney. He coul
d have called the others out, when he got to the house, shouted from downstairs, or run up and hammered on their doors, and brought them out, his mother and Richard in their night clothes running through the fog, the fog beginning to thin by the time he had got them outside, concentrating itself into a milky streak along the ground, the sky above beginning to clear with a thin white sun showing through.

  Then they would all three of them have seen, standing over him on the leaves, his mother’s hair wild that normally she kept so neat and her nightdress sticking out from under her coat, and Richard with his pyjamas spilling over the tops of his gumboots. And maybe, seeing them, the dog would have stopped its whining and come over to them, to the rest of the family standing shivering there, come over, sleek and dark from the damp, and rubbed against their legs and their cold knotted hands. But they didn’t get to see, only the dog saw, and the dog came to them later when they sat all three of them together on the sofa, and was warm then and nuzzled them, and he looked at its brown pools of eyes and slobbery mouth and pink tongue, and he might have spoken then but he didn’t. He bent towards the dog. He rubbed its ears and put his head to its smelly golden coat that smelled of dog but also of the earth and the blood and the leaves, and he knew that Richard was looking at him. There was a great black chasm between them from that moment, between himself and Richard, and between himself and his mother too. Because of what he and not they had seen.

  It was a lie, what she told them, between them on the sofa. He knew that it was a lie.

  It was foggy that morning. No one goes out shooting in the fog.