by Cory Taylor
A few months later I announced to my parents that I’d changed my mind about becoming a racing-car driver. I said I wanted to be a designer, although I wasn’t sure yet which kind. Maybe clothes, I said. Bill had been teaching me to see clothes not just as clothes, but as coded messages about who you were and how you spent your time and how much money and class you had. Never underestimate appearances, he told me.
‘Good for you,’ said my mother.
‘Over my dead body,’ said my father.
My father didn’t like Bill. He didn’t like the fact that I spent so much time next door and hardly any time at home. To keep me better occupied he invented chores for me like painting the front fence and chopping logs for kindling. I was old enough, he said, to start pulling my weight around the house. When I asked for pocket money in return for my labour he slapped me hard across the side of the head.
‘What was that for?’ I said.
‘I don’t like your tone,’ he said.
Another time I asked for some tennis shoes so I didn’t have to play in bare feet and he told me I could forget about learning tennis because it was a game for ponces. I didn’t argue back because he’d been drinking for most of the afternoon. He glared at me across the top of his whisky glass and asked me if I knew what a ponce was. I said I did.
‘Tell me then,’ he said. The whites of his eyes were full of tiny red veins in the shape of tree branches.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t tell him that at school Brian Callaghan got the girlie boys and pulled down their pants in front of everyone to prove how small their dicks were. He’d tried to do it to me once but I’d punched him so hard in the face his nose bled. He never came near me again.
‘If you have to think about it you must be lying,’ said my father.
‘Shirt-lifter, nancy boy, fairy,’ I said. ‘Same thing.’
My father licked his full, glistening lips and stared at me some more, and then he told me to get the fuck out of his sight.
My mother bought me the sandshoes with a secret stash she kept in her underwear drawer.
‘Leave them at Bill’s,’ she told me. ‘When you’re not using them.’
I played tennis in secret; I took photographs in secret; I modelled for Bill’s studio work without telling even Doris because Bill was worried she might get the wrong idea.
At thirteen years old I was tall for my age and starting to fill out. Bill said I looked like I might even outgrow him. On my thirteenth birthday he gave me a present of a book on anatomy for artists and he baked me an apple upside down cake. That was during the week his mother went into hospital to have surgery on her eyes, so we were alone together. After I’d eaten almost half the cake in a single sitting, he told me to stand up next to the wall where he’d kept a record of my spectacular growth over the two years I’d known him. When I was standing straight he parted my hair and made a mark on the wall with a pencil. Beside it he wrote my name and the date August 17th 1941, and then he said he wanted to show me something.
‘It’s a magazine about photography. I bought it in Berlin.’
‘Did you ever see Hitler?’ I said.
‘No. But his bullyboys were everywhere. Strutting about in their tight little uniforms.’
He goose-stepped a few paces on his way to the narrow back room he called his study. I followed him and watched him fetch the magazine from the top of a tall bookcase.
‘It’s quite a rare item,’ he said.
The magazine was in a plain brown box. There were other magazines in there too, but this was the best one, he said.
He talked about his studio, but it wasn’t an actual professional studio. It was just the garage down the end of the driveway, where he kept his car. There was room for two cars there but Bill had built a partition and made a space where he could set up his lights and make scenery and props, and that’s where I posed for him in various homemade costumes—sailor suits and riding kit, kilts and Roman togas. The pictures in the magazine showed men with nothing on at all, posed in front of painted mountain scenery. They were facing the front, so you could see everything. I laughed when I saw them.
‘You think they’re funny?’ said Bill.
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘They’re very well lit.’
Bill seemed pleased with my answer.
‘I was thinking of rigging up some heating in the studio,’ he said. ‘So we don’t freeze in there.’ He explained that the photographs in the magazine were for artists, so they could accurately draw the male body.
I glanced at him as he leafed through the pages. ‘So you want me to pose in the nuddy next time?’ I said.
‘Would you mind?’ he said, looking straight at me with an expression of disbelief.
‘It doesn’t make any difference to me,’ I said, although that wasn’t strictly true. In fact the idea excited me. It was where the studio photographs had been heading anyway and it didn’t seem such a leap to take for me to be naked in the pictures if that was what Bill wanted. I would have done anything to please him. I tried to imitate the expressions worn by the men in the photographs, which were all a mixture of conceit and amusement. It was Bill’s turn to laugh then.
‘Where did you come from?’ he said.
‘Next door,’ I said.
He put his arm around my shoulder and gave me a squeeze and I could have stayed there all day, in his firm grip, breathing in the stench of his sweat and pomade.
I once asked my mother why she hadn’t married someone more like Bill, someone who was interested in the same things she was, like movies and reading, and she suddenly looked like she was about to cry. I’m not a very good judge of men, she said. That was true. She should never have trusted Bill for a start. I don’t think she had any idea of the kind of man he was, no more than I did. She admired him, and she responded to his kindness, and I never told her anything to make her think there was a particular motive behind it, because I didn’t believe there was.
Things came to a head one sunny morning in September. It was right at the end of the spring holidays, most of which I’d spent on the tennis court with Bill, trying to improve my backhand and my serve. My father must have known what I was up to but refrained from intervening because, despite his explosive temper, he was capable of restraint when it suited his purpose. After a typically silent breakfast I watched my father put on his policeman’s jacket and leave for work, and then I went over to Bill’s place for my lesson.
I found him in the kitchen, looking pale and shaky. My first thought was that his call-up papers had finally come, despite all his letters to the authorities regarding his pacifist convictions and his sick mother.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
He told me to sit while he fetched me a cup of tea. His hand was shaking as he put the cup down in front of me.
‘Two things have happened,’ he said. ‘The first is that Molly has gone missing.’
‘Since when?’ I said. ‘She was here last night. I took her for her walk.’
‘I know you did,’ he said. He gave me a sideways look then closed his eyes.
‘What’s the second thing?’ I said.
‘Your father left a note in my letterbox,’ he said.
‘What does it say?’
‘Terrible things,’ said Bill. His eyes were open again but he wouldn’t look at me. He kept staring at the surface of the kitchen table where his tea was going cold in front of him.
‘Can I read it?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I burned it.’
He looked up as his mother came in from the front garden. With her hair uncombed and her feet bare, she looked like she’d spent the whole night outdoors.
‘Anything?’ he said.
She shook her head and shuffled past Bill’s chair to the kitchen sink where she stood gripping the bench as if she might fall over at any minute.
Bill told me to go home but I refused. ‘I’m going to look for Molly,’ I said, because an idea was forming in my head about where she
might be.
My father had complained to my mother before now, urging her to speak to Bill about keeping his yappy mutt chained up so she wasn’t free to wander into our yard and do her business on our lawn.
‘She doesn’t do any harm,’ my mother said.
‘Well don’t be surprised if I decide to drown the fucking thing the next time I catch it,’ he said.
The creek was the only place he would have gone to drown a dog. I’d watched him drown kittens there once when I was smaller. He explained to me that we couldn’t keep them all, only the mother and one other so she could teach it how to catch rats. All my subsequent murderous thoughts about my father had probably stemmed from the way he smiled at me that day, while he tied a piece of cord around the neck of the sack. Inside were all of the mewling kittens except the grey one. My six-year-old blood had raged and sent me flying at him, throwing punches and kicking at his shins with my little boots. After he’d hurled the sack in the creek he’d picked me up by the scruff of the neck and flung me in the water to drown along with the kittens. It was only at the last moment he’d bothered to rescue me, just before I sank. He had to carry me home across his shoulder like something he’d hunted down and shot.
After Molly’s disappearance I waded along the creek bed for two hours, trying to find the sack with the small body in it, but it was no good. Whatever my father had done with her, he’d been thorough about covering his tracks. Bill found me some time later wandering like a beggar around town calling out Molly’s name, asking all the shopkeepers if they’d seen her anywhere. He drove me home in the Buick, parked it in the garage and, after he’d turned off the engine, he told me that he and I couldn’t be friends any more and I wasn’t to come over to his house ever again.
‘I’m very sorry,’ he said, leaning over to kiss the top of my head.
I did as I was told. I was too scared not to, because of the way Bill had looked at me in the car, and because of what a dangerous man my father was. He came home from the station that evening and sat down at the dinner table in the usual way except that he was carrying a brown-paper parcel under one arm. After he’d settled himself in his chair he placed the parcel in front of him almost tenderly. As my mother tried to move it to make room for his dinner plate he grabbed hold of her arm and wouldn’t let go.
‘If you or your son ever lie to me or go behind my back again,’ he said, ‘I won’t be answerable for the consequences. Do I make myself clear?’
He picked up the parcel and threw it at me so hard I had no time to get out of the way. It hit me in the head and split open. My tennis shoes and all the loose sand in them spilled out and fell in my food. Tied to one of the shoelaces with a little bow was five inches of Molly’s tail where it had been separated from the rest of her with a knife.
When my mother went to remove my plate and pick up the shoes, my father told her to leave everything where it was. ‘As for you,’ he said, pointing his beefy forefinger at me, ‘you will remain in your place until you’ve eaten every last morsel of food your mother has taken so much trouble to prepare for you.’
My mother pleaded with him. ‘Don’t John,’ she begged. ‘Let me get him a fresh serving at least.’
‘If you move,’ said my father. ‘I’ll kill you.’
It never occurred to me to tell Stanley the full facts about my friendship with Bill, not in the infirmary or later. It was a story I’d decided to take to my grave. My past was not a subject I was eager to discuss with anyone, unless it was to make it seem exceptional by embellishing the truth. When Stanley asked about my parents I told him the same lie I’d told a dozen other people, including May. I said I’d been fostered out after my mother and father had abandoned me.
‘Who looked after you?’ he said.
‘Various people.’
‘Such as?’
‘A fashion designer. And after that an architect.’
We were sitting in the reading room on the last evening before he was taken back into camp. He was sorting out his few possessions, the clothes and books he’d brought with him in his pitiful suitcase. It was covered in tattered stickers and labels from all the places he’d stayed on his travels.
‘Have you spent much time in Japan?’ I said, trying to draw him out since I imagined I might never get another chance.
‘No.’
‘What about your parents?’
‘What about them?’ he said.
‘Have they spent a lot of time in Japan?’
‘I guess,’ he said. ‘They’re Japs.’
I asked him if he’d like me to go back to my room.
‘No,’ he said. ‘When I want you to go back to your room I’ll tell you.’
And then he smiled at me and said he was sorry for being so rude, but that his family was too dull to talk about. At the same time he cupped his hand to his ear as if he was straining to catch a faint sound in the distance.
‘Can you hear that wailing sound coming from Hut C12?’ he said. ‘That’s my mother talking to my father. Droning on and on about how brainless I am.’
‘I thought your father wasn’t here,’ I said.
‘Tell that to my mother,’ he said, pointing to his temple and drawing circles there to indicate that his mother was crazy. I was prepared to believe it, having seen her for myself.
While he tried on a pair of his trousers to see if they still fitted I picked up one of his circus posters. He was in the picture, aged about ten, standing at the front of a row of men in their circus outfits, the tallest of whom bore an unmistakable resemblance to Stanley.
‘Is that your father?’ I asked him.
‘Yep,’ he said, clearly unwilling to say any more.
He took off the trousers and folded them neatly while I stared at his legs. They were practically hairless and the same ivory white as the rest of him. Aware of me watching him, he struck a couple of poses as if he was a batter warming up at the plate. When he’d finished teasing me, he reached out and plucked the poster out of my hands. He stared briefly at it before rolling it up with the others and packing it in his suitcase.
I picked up one of his books from the pile on the sofa beside me and opened it in the normal way. Stanley grabbed it from me and demonstrated, as if to a child, how it opened from the back.
‘It’s different from English,’ he said.
‘I can see that,’ I said, staring at a random page of densely packed symbols cascading like rain from top to bottom.
I asked him to read aloud to me.
‘What for?’ he said almost viciously.
‘Don’t bother if it’s too much trouble,’ I said.
He snatched the book out of my hands again and opened it somewhere in the middle, holding it at a distance from his body, as if it were a holy book. He cleared his throat and started to intone sentences in Japanese, adding occasional gestures with his free hand that were meant to signify blessings. Even though it was intended to be funny it still moved me in the way that even nonsense words can if they’re said in a certain rhythm and at a certain pitch. When he was finished with one page he made a sign and turned to the next and then he sped up the process so that he was flicking through the pages at impossible speed, still reading, but so fast that the words were jumbled and mashed together. Finally, when he’d reached the last page, he sent the book sailing out of his hand, so that it landed with a thud halfway across the room.
His performance over Stanley fell backwards onto the sofa exhausted. ‘Give me a fag before I die of grief,’ he said, pretending to wipe the sweat from his brow.
I handed him the matchbox in which he kept his butts and watched him light one. ‘Great story,’ I said.
‘Glad you enjoyed it,’ said Stanley. ‘Akutagawa again. He’s a genius of course.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I can tell.’
Stanley offered me a drag on his smoke. I took it and sucked hard. He watched the tip of it burn hot then drop a length of ash on the floor.
‘Don’t smoke it
all,’ he said.
‘I can get you as many cigarettes as you want once I’m out of here,’ I said.
I crawled across the floor, picked up the book and handed it back to him.
‘I can’t wait to read more,’ I said.
Stanley smiled at me coolly and told me I could go back to my room now. He said it in such a way that I had no option but to obey.
I got up off the floor and padded back to my own bed where I lay for a long time staring at a narrow beam of light that stretched all the way from Stanley’s room to my doorway. The fine dust swirled backwards and forwards through it like flurries of snow. I was worried that I might have offended Stanley without meaning to, but I had no idea how to apologise, or even if it was worthwhile to try.
This idea, that our acquaintance was over before it had really begun, made me anxious and miserable. I thought of getting up again to say goodbye to him in a formal way but I wasn’t sure if he would appreciate a further interruption to his preparations. In the end I stayed where I was and drifted in and out of a shallow sleep, imagining at times that I was back in Bill’s house searching high and low for him. When my parents came to get me I sat them down at the kitchen table and told them I was leaving them for good to be with Bill. I love him, I remember telling them in my dreams, and being surprised that neither of them was angry or shocked.
The next morning Stanley came into my room dressed and ready to leave. He had the book in his hand, the one he’d read from the previous night. Without saying a word he came to my bedside and handed it to me, then he bowed very low before turning around to leave. It was all so swift I didn’t have time to say good morning or to thank him and anyway I suspected I would have choked on the words. After he was gone I opened the book and saw what Stanley had written inside the cover. Dear Arthur, I will try to write Akutagawa in English for you if you will get me the fags you promised, your good friend Stanley Ueno. Below that he’d written something in Japanese that naturally I couldn’t read. In brackets beside it he’d written Untranslatable.
