by Susan Barker
‘Eight, nine, months.’
‘That is a long time for a girl so young. Do you miss your family in England?’
‘I don’t really have a family in England. Just an uncle.’
Mama-san raises her eyebrows at this. ‘Where do your parents live, then?’
‘My father died when I was a child. My mother lives in Spain with her boyfriend. They moved out there about five or six years ago, to run a bar at a holiday resort.’
‘Spain, eh? I saw a travel programme about Spain once. It looks beautiful. You must really enjoy going to visit them.’
I give an underwater shrug and blow clove-scented smoke up towards the spider on the ceiling. ‘I haven’t been out there.’
‘So your mother visits you in England, then?’
‘No . . . She likes to stay in Spain.’
I meant this to sound breezy, but it comes out hard and bitter. I don’t like talking about my mother. People act like I was abandoned or something when I tell them she went off to live in Spain while I was still at school. She did invite me to come along but I really didn’t want to go. My mum never took to motherhood anyway. When I was a kid she used to go on about the seven pints of blood she lost when she gave birth to me, as though those seven pints compensated for the lack of effort thereafter. Sometimes she’d up the number of pints to eight or nine if I hadn’t done the washing-up or whatever. We used to talk on the phone once in a while, but now I don’t even know her number any more. I just send her cards on birthdays and at Christmas, and hope she is still living at the same address.
‘Yuji grew up without a father too.’
‘He said.’
Our smoke twists up to the ceiling. I still have a good inch of cigarette to go but the novelty has worn off. I grind it out in the ashtray. The skin of my fingers is wrinkled, the top layer translucent white.
‘I’ve heard there are a lot of single mothers in England,’ Mama-san says.
‘Yeah. More people get divorced.’
‘Over here, people act as though single mothers have something wrong with them. And a single mother who works in a hostess bar, well, God help you, you may as well be a leper. It’s the other mothers who are the worst. I had to move Yuji to a school far away from the neighbourhood we lived in, just so he wouldn’t be bullied because of my job.’
‘Elena was telling me how bad it is. What have they got against hostesses?’
Mama-san’s lips curl into a wicked smile. ‘Where do you think their husbands disappear to night after night? They can’t stop me from making a living. But they can encourage their kids to pick on my son. They will always see me as a low-life, never mind that I provided for Yuji just as well, if not better, than two parents. I used the contacts I made hostessing to get him a place in a private elementary school, and a private junior high after that. The junior high school he went to was the best in Kansai, connected to all the best universities. His classmates were the sons of politicians and company chairmen.’
‘Really? The best in Kansai?’
Yuji went to private school. I almost laugh out loud. He always presents himself as if he were straight from the streets. His walk, his thick Osaka drawl, his tough, mistrustful way of sizing people up. And Mama-san has surprised me too. She always seemed to possess a self-made woman’s contempt for education.
‘One of the top five middle schools in the country. Don’t ask me how I got him in; his grades at elementary school were average, and he had already begun to make a reputation for himself as the class trouble-maker. I pulled many strings and flattered many toads. I thought a good school would set him on the right path. But that was where his troubles began.’
The avocado wall tiles sweat condensation. A droplet of water quivers on the shower head, ready to drip. I lean closer to Mama-san, one arm slung over the edge of the bath. Yuji never talks about his childhood or early teens. He acts as though he came into the world a hard-boiled twenty-one-year-old. Unfortunately for him, though, his mother doesn’t share this pretence.
‘It was the kind of school where background matters. I briefed Yuji before his first day. If anyone asked about his father, he was to say he died in a car crash. And if they asked about me, he was to say I am a businesswoman. I wanted to protect Yuji from the snobbery and cruelty you get in these elitist schools.’
The best protection against snobbery would have been to not send him to an elitist school in the first place. Mama-san practically taught him to hide and be ashamed of who he is.
‘Is that what went wrong?’ I ask. ‘They found out you were a hostess?’
Mama-san shakes her head. ‘They found out that I am a Burakumin.’
‘Burakumin?’
She looks very uncomfortable. I went to a museum exhibition on Burakumin once. They are a lower caste that evolved from people whose work was seen as being contaminated by death – stuff like slaughtering animals and digging graves. But that was generations ago. It’s illegal to discriminate against them now, and I never hear anyone talking about it.
‘I was born in a Burakumin ghetto outside Osaka. A slum run by gangsters and corrupt policemen. Lots of crime and poverty. It has improved since I was a child, but you would still have difficulty persuading a taxi driver to stop there. The chances of getting a decent education and a job there are slim.’
I nod. Listening to Mama-san talk like this makes me ill at ease. We were never friends before today. Her intimacy feels forced.
‘I didn’t know you had ghettos in Japan.’
‘You’re a foreigner – of course you wouldn’t. Even educated Japanese know little about these places. Who wants to acknowledge slums and misery in this clean and efficient land? I got out when I was fifteen.’
‘When you were only fifteen?’
‘I got a job in a restaurant kitchen. I grew up fast.’
‘Do you ever go back?’
‘Not for many years. I sent money to my parents once in a while. I had no illusions of improving their quality of life – the quality of liquor they drank, more like. My mother died a decade ago; my father four years after her. It was because of my father that Yuji had problems at school. My father’s liver and kidneys had been failing him for a long time, and before he died I paid to have him moved to a private hospital. While I was there one of the hospital specialists recognized me – he had a son in Yuji’s class at school. He was friendly until he saw my father bawling and pissing on the hospital sheets. He told me they had to move my father to another room, that they’d had complaints from the other patients.
‘Two things happened the next day: my father died, and Yuji was sent home from school for fighting. Yuji was a mess, with one eye so swollen he couldn’t see out of it. He went straight to his room without a word. Not a word. But I knew what had happened. I sent some friends round to the doctor’s house that night, to teach him some respect for a patient’s right to privacy. But by then it was too late. Yuji wasn’t going to school any more. How could he when even the teachers would treat him like dirt?’
‘He left for good?’
‘He was fifteen, the same age I was when I left.’ Mama-san laughs to herself. ‘Fate doesn’t care how much money you throw at it. It will always do what it wants to do in the end.’
The shower head expels another drip. The water is cooling now and my wet hair chills my scalp. I think I understand now why Yuji set his ambitions so low.
‘Why are you telling me all this?’ I ask. Just last night she was correcting my posture and ordering me around, so why now, hours later, is she telling me the secrets of her past?
‘Because it is important you know who Yuji is . . . who we are. Can I be honest with you, Mary? I never liked you much . . .’
I break eye contact. It’s always been as plain as the dye in her hair, but it hurts to hear it out loud.
‘You have a good heart, Mary – anyone can see that. But a good heart doesn’t stop prejudice against mixed-race couples.’
I knew it. I watch the rise and fall of the
bath water harmonize with my breathing. What prejudice? She is the only person to have shown hostility to me because I am white.
Seeing I have taken offence, she swoops in to limit the damage. ‘But here you are, months later, standing by him. I see now I was wrong to be concerned by something so trivial. You love my son, I can see that now.’
I do love him. But did everything have to go to shit before she accepted me? Mama-san smiles and I see that this is her botched attempt at an apology. I force myself to smile back.
Mama-san stands and pulls a towel from the rack on the wall. ‘The water must be getting cold,’ she says. ‘Dry yourself off while I make up a bed for you in the spare room.’
‘I don’t need to sleep. I’m not tired. I would rather go and see Yuji.’
‘You can’t see him until tonight. There are things I need to sort out first. I want you to rest until then. Trust me: you need sleep.’
I wake in darkness, from a dream of Yuji. In the dream we rutted like animals, lost to everything but the touch and taste of each other’s flesh. How long this delirium lasted I’m not sure, but it ended when I noticed, over his shoulder, his mother sitting in the corner of the room, watching us. That woke me up like a shot, killing dead any excited nerve endings into the bargain. My subconscious has a really sick sense of humour. But at least it is uncomplicated. It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to guess what is going on here.
I lie on the futon, listening to my stomach grizzle between the sheets. This room is so dark. There’s not even a sliver of light beneath the door. According to my mental clock it is just after seven. My mental clock is usually pretty good, so I am sure it’s not that far off.
I stand and walk with my arms outstretched until they hit a wall. Then I sweep my hands back and forth in search of the light switch. When the room is illuminated I see the clothes I had discarded in the bathroom neatly folded at the end of my futon. I pick up my shirt, hold it to my nose and breathe deeply. Fabric-conditioned to alpine freshness. The same goes for the rest of my stuff; even my knickers look as though they have been ironed. I shed the bathrobe and quickly dress, impatient to get out of here and see Yuji. My hair is a mass of knots, so I try and finger-comb it back to respectability.
By the wall is a low table with a large wicker cage on it, the kind used to keep flies off food. I lift the cage and see a plate of rice balls and a can of barley tea underneath. Ravenous, I take a rice ball and bite into it, my teeth sinking through the crisp seaweed. In the middle of the rice ball is tuna mayonnaise. Seaweed, rice and tuna mayonnaise: never has the combination tasted so good. I am washing down my third rice ball with tea when the door opens. Mama-san enters, wearing full make-up, a Hermès scarf, and a short black dress that shows off her dimpled knees. Mr Bojangles is cradled in her arms. His ruff has been groomed so it stands out like a fluted collar.
‘How did you sleep?’ she asks.
‘OK. Thanks for washing my clothes.’
‘I have a car waiting for you on Nagahori street. Do you know how to get there?’
I nod. ‘Will it take me to Yuji?’
‘Yes. You will have to leave the building by the fire exit. None of the girls must see you.’
I had forgotten that the hostess bar is just downstairs. Most of the girls will be on the first gin and tonic of the evening by now. I think of the sad, smoky world I am leaving behind, the friendships and rivalries, the boredom and shift-swap negotiations. Katya is the only one I will miss. It seems like days since I last thought about her.
‘Is Katya here yet?’
‘Yes. Late as usual.’
‘Is there any chance I could speak to her?’
‘That’s not a good idea, Mary. We are in a rush and it is better that no one knows you are here, not even Katya.’
‘It will only take two minutes . . .’
‘No.’
Why not? I want to shout. Then I remember she is taking me to see Yuji. ‘Well, could you pass on a message to her . . .? Could you tell her that I will miss her?’
Mama-san nods, her face softening. ‘I will,’ she says. ‘Come on then, Mary. It’s time to go.’
17
WATANABE
I wake to an instantaneous guilt flash as the carriage rocks between Noda and Fukushima. I boarded the train at 05.16, just as daylight began to douse the fiery furnaces of the stars. Now it is 10.16 and the train has made 17.3 circuits of the JR loop line. The plan had been to join Mary at Umeda station, to be on hand as her loyal, invisible human shield. But two days without sleep proved too much for the hyper-sensorium of my mind. It shut down against my will. I may be transcendent, but my brain is sadly organic and requires neurone regenesis. Torn by guilt and separation anxiety, I swoop over the rooftops of non-Euclidean space. I find my tattered, tear-stained angel and shudder when I see what I could have prevented had I not fallen asleep.
I straighten my baseball cap and prepare to alight at the next stop. It is time to reunite with Mary, to compensate for my neglect.
Outside the hostess bar I have the joyful premonition that I am darkening its doors for the last time. Night after night I have watched this place suck the human spirit dry. Mementoes of these slain souls are everywhere.
Dark chimeras float in the lounge, writhing in discontent. Broken egos weave among the chair legs and hide in the drawers of the cigarette machine. These poor salarymen and their poor, squinting souls. When will they learn that the overpriced whisky, a curve of breast here, a bulge of thigh there, will never cure them of their desperate malaise? Escape is to throw off the chains of third-dimensional incarceration, not to intoxicate yourself to the point of forgetting they are there.
Four hearts pump at the bar. Semi-lunar valves open and close, channelling litres of blood through cardiac cycles. One heart belongs to Mama-san (61 bpm), another to Aya (68 bpm), an ex-hostess Yuji knocked up three years ago. The demon progeny is also present, visiting grandma. Like an oestrogen-rich pigeon, Mama-san coos over Katsu (84 bpm), asleep in his pushchair throne. Mr Bojangles (131 bpm) watches jealously. To him the baby is an impostor, and an inferior one at that, with his subservient pack scent and non-existent coat of fur. Mama-san rises and heaves herself onto the stool next to Aya, lifting the folds of her red silk robe.
I choose this moment to push through the doors. Mama-san is pouring tea. She looks up from the stream of water molecules and tannin compounds arching from the spout of her teapot.
‘Watanabe,’ she says. ‘To what do I owe this dubious pleasure?’
Aya smiles. She is in a good mood because her imaginary husband has accompanied her to the bar. He stands behind her, 180 cm tall, taut and rippling of muscle, his nebulous face reforming, harmonizing with the face of the model from the razor ad she saw on TV that morning.
‘Erm . . . I’ve come to work,’ I say.
Mama-san draws out a long silence, allowing me to feel the intensity of her disdain. Finally she says: ‘Watanabe, your shift doesn’t start for another eight hours. If you think that I am going to pay you before seven o’clock I would like to shatter that fantasy right now.’
‘OK,’ I say.
‘Good,’ Mama-san replies. ‘Did you have any particular task in mind?’
‘Er . . .’
‘Well, you can dismantle and clean the pizza oven.’
‘OK.’ I shuffle past the bar and into the kitchen.
Mama-san shakes her head, thinking, The boy may be a simpleton, but at least the pizza oven gets a clean. Aya smiles, bemused. Where was this one when they were handing out the brains? she remarks to her imaginary husband.
It is impossible to take offence. Let them think me a simpleton. How are they to know that I am situated like a god; immanent in the world yet transcendent of it? That I can calculate pi to a million decimal places? That I can read the mind of a lichen clinging to the side of an underwater cave a thousand kilometres away? Exiled by my higher dimensional expeditions I am an iconoclast, a heretic . . . But I digress.
&nb
sp; In the kitchen I clatter the pizza-cutter against the oven to make it sound like I have begun work.
At the bar Aya leans towards Mama-san, eager to resume the conversation I interrupted. ‘Is she pretty?’ she asks.
Mama-san scrunches her lips. ‘She is abnormally tall. Her mouth and hips are too wide, and her nose has a bump in it. Her one saving grace is her hair, because it is blond.’
I seethe like a pan of boiling milk. What does Mama-san know? The woman suffers from ultra-subjectivism. When everyone sees an apple, she sees a banana. When everyone sees a banana, she sees a runner bean. But that is neither here nor there. Mama-san can only perceive the external Mary. She is blind to the beautiful infinitude beneath.
‘Will she be here soon?’ Aya asks.
‘In the next hour or so. Mizutani called me. He drove past her trying to hitch a lift back in Amagasaki, near Yuji’s place. He says she had no shoes on!’
‘And he just drove past her? He didn’t offer her a ride?’ Aya laughs. ‘That Mizutani is a real gentleman! Do you think Mary had a run-in with whoever Yamagawa-san had watching the apartment?’
‘Mizutani said he heard Hiro scared her away with his gun.’
The myofibrils of my hand contract, causing the pizza tray I am holding to clatter to the floor. Strange how one’s body can recoil in shock when one’s mind is already acquainted with the facts.
‘Watanabe, be careful in there!’ Mama-san rolls her bloodhound eyes. ‘Why do I let that cretin loose in my kitchen?’ she asks Aya.
Aya smiles. ‘What will you do with Mary when she gets here?’
‘Send her on to Yuji. He needs a woman at a time like this . . .’
My mind goes blank with rage. How dare she treat Mary as a comfort woman, a pleasure receptacle to be sent to Yuji in his rotting lair!
‘. . . But I have to wait for Yamagawa-san to call before I can do anything. He knows, and I know that he will let Yuji go free, but he needs the illusion of power and control. Just like a man. How many times have I supplied him with women? How many times have I loaned out my best hostesses to spy for him? I lost one of my best girls because of his carelessness. And after everything I have done for him he still wants to keep me in suspense.’
