by Various
“Trick’ll be back poking around sooner or later, Evie honey,” says Lucy, pushing a greasy tempura prawn around her plate with her chopsticks. Lucy can eat just about anything and stay slim while the rest of us get fat and puffy on the booze, the starchy food and sleeping all day. It can be a problem: the customers prefer thin.
I shrug my shoulders. “So, who cares? As long as Mama’s happy with us, Trick stays off our backs, right?”
I wink at Lucy and pick up a couple of the traditional wooden coasters on the table and slip them under the cushions for later. I figure if I collect two a night I can put together some complete sets over the next few weeks and offload them at the Saturday Flea Market in Shinsaibashi. I do that a lot. Collect souvenirs from around the place.
Back home, Hopey and I’d go to swapmeets every month, and even though he’s not around anymore I still have the habit of trawling. I don’t really know why. It can be hard work selling stuff on a sweaty day or a winter’s morning but you can earn some money. You’d be surprised by what people buy if they think it’s a bargain.
Lucy doesn’t say anything about the coasters. Just throws back another shot and exhales. “I’ve got a bad feeling. I think things might get nasty,” she tells me and picks nervously at a scabby sore on her arm.
“Jeez, don’t do that, Satellite!” I snap. “It’ll get infected. What are you so worried about anyway? Trick’s just a gaijin making bucks like the rest of us. He’s an idiot but he’s not Charles Manson.”
Lucy flushes and lights a cigarette, pale pianist’s fingers shaking slightly, nails bitten down to the quick. I sigh under my breath and signal Taka-san for a couple of beers.
When I first started at Amber, Lucy seemed old-movie sophisticated, like Lauren Bacall, but she’s been wound up and jumpy lately with greyish half-moons under her eyes. I’d heard she used to be a speed demon but that she’d cleaned up a few months ago. Maybe she’s back riding the pony. Or maybe she owes Trick money. A lot of people owe money over here. You can earn a lot but you can spend it too.
When Taka-san brings us our beers, I mention we’re missing two coasters and it’ll look sloppy when the customers come in. He looks suspicious but I smile and tell him that he’s looking very tanned and he grins, makes a quick trip to the bar and then slaps two of the carved wooden squares down in the middle of the table.
“I betcha all the customers’ bottles that he goes to a tanning salon,” I whisper to Lucy. She nods and smiles but her eyes are on the door.
“You want something else to eat?” I ask, figuring that some more food might settle her nerves.
Lucy shakes her head then leans across the table and pushes a folded piece of paper into my hands.
“Check this out but don’t show anyone,” she hisses.
I open the paper in my lap and feel a familiar clench behind my right eye. There’s a manga cartoon of a half-naked girl, breasts spilling out of her tiny singlet, skirt riding up over her splayed thighs and an ugly slash across her throat, blood spattered across her neck. Two people, their faces in shadow, stand over her. Written in neat romaji at the bottom of the page, are the words: Lucy desu!
I grimace, fold the paper and push it back across the table.
“Is this a sick joke? Where did you get it?”
“It’s no joke, Evie. It’s the seventh one this week. Four in my letterbox, two pushed under my door and one taped to the seat of my bike. All the same kind of thing.”
I take a gulp of my beer. The throbbing behind my eye threatens to unfurl into a migraine so vicious the world will become glaring white noise. I pop five painkillers, drain my beer and then signal Taka-san for some whisky shots.
“Sickos. Don’t take any notice of it. It’s probably schoolboys who’re reading too much manga and their imaginations are running wild. Or maybe it’s a customer with a crush. Don’t let it rattle you.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s weird though and freaking me out a bit.”
“It could be a love letter from Hiroshi-san,” I tease, trying to lighten the mood. “Maybe you’re missing some cultural nuances here.”
Hiroshi-san is a blue-suited executive from Sumitomo bank. People say he does business with the Yakuza, but you can’t believe everything you hear. He’s one of Lucy’s regular customers and he’s besotted with her gappy beauty, everyone knows that. He comes to Amber most Friday nights and books her for dohan at least twice a month.
Going on dohan with customers before bringing them to the club is part of the gig and bumps up your commission, but the dates are usually a drag. Lucy makes sure Hiroshi-san takes her to top-end restaurants for fugu, or shopping for clothes or jewellery, and says all those dohan are worth her while.
Hiroshi-san has got a wife and two young kids at home but that’s just how it is here. Maybe that’s how it is everywhere. I don’t know.
“Hiroshi-san might be a loser salaryman but he isn’t a chikan,” says Lucy, snatching the note from me and tucking it into her sleeve.
“I know, I’m only joking. But seriously, it could be a customer. Maybe you should tell Mama. Or, if you get any more you could take them to the police, I guess. It’s practically stalking. Have you kept all the others?”
Lucy grimaces. “You’re kidding right? Even if it is a customer, Mama isn’t going to do anything to interfere with her profits and do you really think the police are going to help a hostess, let alone a foreign one? I’m here on a tourist visa, I’m not even legal. Besides, they sell this kind of stuff everywhere and no-one bats an eye.”
“True, Satellite, true. It could be worse. Someone could be stalking your laundry bag and stealing your knickers to sell in vending machines.”
It’s not funny but we laugh because it’s true. Neither of us mentions Katherine Daniels.
“Promise not to tell anyone?” she asks. “I don’t want any problems right now.”
I don’t see how telling anyone is going to cause trouble but I don’t ask Lucy why and she doesn’t elaborate. That’s just how it is here. People only tell you what they want you to know. They roll their lives up tight.
“I promise,” I say and raise my whisky shot in a salute. “Hostesses’ honour.”
Lucy clinks her glass against mine then pulls two cigarettes from her delicate silver case and gives me one. We sit in silence as the club unfolds around us. I draw the smoke deep into the core of me then tilt my head back and exhale a long grey streak into the air. It floats above us for a few seconds then dissipates. By the early hours of the morning Amber will be so choked with smoke and sweat and exhaustion that it will seem as though we’re perching on the edge of a dream.
Lucy gnaws distractedly on a fingernail. “What’s happening with you, sweetie? Saved enough for your trip yet?”
I’ve told Lucy the same story I run by everyone else: there’s a camera I want to buy and a trip I’m dying to take. It’s easier than trying to explain Hopey.
Hopey called me most days and he’d always say, “Hey Evie, it’s the man on the moon,” and I’d always ask “Who?” and he’d sing REM’s Man on the Moon. Then we’d laugh non-stop for about three minutes. I don’t know why. We used to laugh a lot about stupid things.
Hopey was really into music and he played guitar in a covers band. They had a few gigs around town. He didn’t have any formal training but he could hear melodies in his head, so he’d just close his eyes and feel out the notes. He could really play. Sometimes he’d write his own songs. Just sit there and pick them out on the guitar, eyes drifting, cracked smile splitting his face. I told him the band should play his originals as well as the covers. He’d grin and say, “maybe one day.”
Hopey liked to sing too, but he had a terrible voice. I guess he wanted to be a rock star but had to settle for being the guitar player. I always told him Keith was cooler than Mick anyway. He liked it when I said that. Hopey really dug the Stones but the band he loved most was REM. Everybody Hurts was his favourite song.
Dragging myself back to the
present, I stub out my cigarette and pull a new one from my pack. I give Lucy a tired smile.
“I think I’ll only have to do a couple more months here and I’ll have enough money. I thought I’d go and hang out on a beach in Thailand for a while then maybe I’ll head to Alaska to photograph the Northern Lights. I’ve always wanted to see them. I was going to go with a friend once but we ran out of time.”
Lucy smiles at me but her eyes are opaque. “I’ll miss you when you go,” she says softly and I feel a sharp sting of surprise. Lucy and I look out for each other but it’s not the same as the friends you grow up with. It’s intense I guess, because it can get pretty lonely over here but it doesn’t last. Everyone’s always moving on.
“We’ll stay in touch. You can come and visit me if you like. That’d be pretty cool.”
“Maybe,” she says stubbing out her cigarette and signalling Taka-san for a clean ashtray. “You’ve done well, Evie. Most hostesses don’t save enough to do anything useful.”
“Yeah well, this isn’t a career move. I’ll be well and truly ready for something new in a month or two. I’m ready to go now but I need to earn a bit more cash.”
“Damn, I wish I could do that,” Lucy says and starts drumming her foot against the floor and picking at her scab again.
I press down hard on my right temple with my thumb. My eyes are gritty and I feel tired and dirty, like we’re at the end of the night, not the beginning.
“You should focus on selling more of the jewellery you make and work out a plan to ditch this gig, Satellite. I reckon you can only do this kind of job for so long before you start to lose it.”
“Yeah, maybe I will but I’ve got more important things to worry about at the moment,” says Lucy, and I guess she has.
I didn’t tell her but I’d be pretty spooked if someone was sending me those pictures. Especially now that Katherine Daniels has disappeared.
Maybe it’s an Amber regular or some stupid schoolboy. It could be a screwed-up gaijin’s idea of a joke or a warning; lots don’t approve of hostessing. Maybe Trick’s on another power trip and he thinks the pictures will put Lucy in her place, whatever that is. As far as I know, they had something once, but the gaijin community is always at love or war and you never know what’s really going on. Someone steals money or food, or takes off for Paris owing rent, or leaves all their gear in someone’s one-room apartment for five years instead of five days like they promised.
People come and go and even if you don’t know them you do, because your fellow English teacher, barman or hostess has lived, worked or slept with them and they’ll tell you all about it as if it’s World News Tonight. It’s like having Christmas Lunch with your extended dysfunctional family. Permanently.
When I arrived in Osaka I moved into Banana House, a crumbling two-storey accommodation for foreigners in the working class suburb of Taisho. Taisho was cement-filled and charmless but it had cheap rent.
Everything in Banana House was old and covered with the detritus of the travellers who’d gone before: torn books, bags of clothes, battered pots and piles of stained futons on the bedroom floors. The scabby kitchen bench always had dried rice and toast crumbs all over it, so the place was humming with flying roaches dive-bombing your ramen. It was off-putting at first but you got used to it after a while.
Officially five housemates paid rent but there were all these Saturday night lovers who stayed ‘til Wednesday and most nights the place shuddered with a cacophony of moans. Half the time you never saw who owned the moans. They arrived at 3.00am and disappeared like ghosts. They were faceless but they left their dirty coffee mugs in the sink.
The longest-serving resident was Sandra, an Environmental Science graduate from San Francisco. When we first met, Sandra told me there were no jobs in America so she taught Conversational McEnglish at one of the big chain schools, UIES.
“You’ll all regret in the future when the polar ice caps have melted and it’s too late,” she said, and pulled at her curls so they rose in a dark halo around her head. Sandra was pretty in-yourface but she walked the talk, which is more than most people do. She carried lacquered chopsticks everywhere, so she didn’t have to use disposable wooden ones, and when she bought something she deposited the wrapping – plastic, cardboard boxes, bags and string – back on the counter, and put the product in her hemp shopping bag.
This annoyed most shop assistants, who liked to wrap everything individually, and often three times, even basic purchases. They didn’t say anything though because there were two types of gaijin, pretty ones to photograph, touch or practise English with, and weird ones to avoid. Sandra was in the weird category and people kept their distance, mostly.
Sandra could be hard work sometimes but she had some useful connections and she hooked me up with Trick. “He’s a losergaijin, but he’s been here forever and he knows the business,” she said, leaning out of her bedroom window sneaking a joint. We weren’t supposed to smoke in the house because it was a fire hazard. It was on the list of House Rules, stuck on the message board by the door:
1. REMOVE your shoes before walking on the tatami!
2. NO loud music after 9.00pm!
3. NO drugs, NO drunks!
4. SMOKE OUTSIDE or suffer the consequences!
5. NO people staying over!
6. WRITE DOWN phone messages. No, you WON’T remember them!
7. DON’T steal bikes, umbrellas or FOOD! IT’S BAD KARMA!!
8. DO I LOOK LIKE YOUR MUMMY?? CLEAN THE BATHROOM AND THE TOILET!!!!
The rule sheet was typed up and laminated and it looked pretty official but no-one took any notice of it, except Matt from Minnesota who taught Business English and hiked every weekend.
Sandra finished her joint and pulled herself back inside the window, grabbing Carol King’s Tapestry CD from her stack of music against the wall.
“I hostessed for a few months when I first got here. It’s completely demeaning. Why don’t you just teach? I can get you a gig at UIES if you like.”
I gritted my teeth and forced my lips into smile. Ex-hostesses were like reformed smokers, always wanting you to learn from their mistakes. I just wanted to be left alone.
“Thanks for the offer but I need to earn some money quickly. I want to keep moving. Japan’s just a pit stop for me and teachers’ salaries are rubbish in comparison to the bucks I can earn hostessing, no offence. I’ll probably pick up some private classes on the side though. I’ve heard they pay pretty well.”
Sandra glared at me and tugged at her hair. “Why are you in such a hurry anyway? The world will wait won’t it?” She flicked on the CD and grinned. “My absolute favourite singer.”
I thought about telling Sandra about Hopey and me. How we’d been friends since we were ten and that REM and a freshly-dug grave were never part of the plan. How his melodies and cracked smile got lost in the needle, the spoon and the flame. That the world didn’t wait for everyone but you never knew who was staying or going until it was too late. How the grey made waves within me and the white-noise came down between me and everything else. That moving helped.
I took a sharp inward breath and grinned. “Carol King’s a classic. I’m not in that much of a hurry. I’m just trying to stick to a travel plan, keep things ticking along.”
“Plan, sham,” Sandra said dismissively. “Well it’s your funeral. At least I’ve done my duty by telling you it sucks. Try The Amber Club, the money’s good and Trick’ll get you the best rate. Not because he’s looking out for you, although he’ll tell you he is, but because he’ll get himself the best deal in the process. But watch your back. Trick’s real slippery. He’s got connections with the local Bosozoku Boys, who are mostly all talk but they can turn. Some people say he’s in with the Yakuza but I don’t know for sure. He’d probably like people to think that. Hell, he probably started the rumours. Whoever heard of a guy called Trick anyway?”
Trick was an odd name, it seemed undignified.
“Well, we’re al
l on show here in a way,” I offered. “You even have to perform in your McEnglish classes. You said so. Maybe it’s a stage name like Harry Houdini or David Copperfield.”
Sandra snorted and rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Here, have a spliff.” And she rolled me a new one.
“Thanks,” I said and shoved it in my pocket for later.
“I’m going to the store, do you want anything?”
I needed everything but I figured I’d just nick food for a while so I said I was OK and watched her try to jam her hair under a cap.
“You’ve got wicked hair,” I offered.
“I have to hide it whenever I can because people pull it here. I’m on the train and people just yank my hair then giggle behind their hands. Can you believe it?”
I could, because I wanted to pull her ringlets and watch them spring back but I just shook my head and watched as she strode out the door.
Sandra hooked me up with Trick who told me three gaijin had up and left for a spiritual retreat in India. I guess he was scouting for new blood and couldn’t afford to be too choosey.
We arranged to meet at 2.30 outside Mr Donut in central Shinsaibashi. I had a quick shower then headed into the humid bustle of the street towards Taisho station. I walked down the main drag, past the takeaway noodle bars that sold ramen for 700 yen, the video shop that only stocked porn and the local Lawsons where gaijin picked up dinner on their way home from teaching or hostessing or 1000 yen/hour bar work. The clammy air pushed down on me and my legs were wet with sweat.
I'd missed the push and throb of rush hour but the train was still crowded and I had to stand, gripping the plastic strap above my head. The other passengers avoided my eyes and pressed their bodies and faces away from me towards a safer space. Lots of gaijin got offended by how some locals treated you as if you were a cross between a maniac and a monkey but I didn’t mind the extra legroom it gave me and it was better than being mauled by a chikan.
