I should know; I’m one myself. Wrong face, wrong clothes, wrong voice. I’m a completely different race from my neighbours, and it makes them suspicious that I should choose to live here among them, on the second floor of a big back-to-back terrace which has been converted into four bedsits.
People assume, with an instinctive contempt that hides fear, that I’m a student. In fact there are no students in these cheap lodgings; the people for whom they were intended prefer their own digs in Stanbury, where there is a theatre and a cinema and a noisy row of pubs. There is something a little cold about Mortimer Street; a reluctance to get involved.
At first its coldness suited me. Two years in a psychiatric hospital had given me a fierce need for privacy, for silence. I took joy in the solitude of my little room, the quietness of the nights, spent hours in my private bathroom, cooked slow deliberate meals in my tiny kitchen. Some evenings I did voluntary work for the Samaritans. It was rather dull work; I only persevered because my therapist recommended it. The rest of the time I earned money waitressing. Again, my therapist approved. It kept my mind from flights of fancy.
But at home – if Mortimer Street was home – I enjoyed my seclusion too much to share it willingly. The gossips had nothing on me. They watched me going to work in the evenings, my drab coat buttoned to the neck, and concluded that I was a student nurse. I never denied it. I gained the reputation of being ‘snobby’ – possibly because I refused to babysit the child of a neighbour I barely knew – and after a few half-hearted attempts to breach my defences, they left me in peace.
Then, to my dismay, someone moved into the flat opposite mine. A Mr Juzo Tamaoki, the name on the letterbox said; another foreigner, said the Mortimer Street grapevine, with barely concealed disapproval. I didn’t care about that. I only hoped he would be a quiet neighbour, and that he would leave me alone.
For a while he did. For days I did not see him. I heard almost no sound from his flat. There were no requests to borrow tea, no audible comings and goings, no visits from friends. My neighbour might have been like myself: an unperson; a vacuum; a ghost.
He had been living opposite me for a week before I finally caught sight of Mr Tamaoki. We met on the landing; a brief glance passed between us, a nod. I found myself studying him with reluctant curiosity, this man who might have been any age: small, neat, unassuming; the intruder who now shared my silent space.
He reminded me of a bird I had once seen in a provincial zoo. Small and drab-looking in its cage, it huddled in a corner, barely moving, as if in apology at receiving so much attention. Its eyes were all age and sadness. A sign beneath the cage read: BRED IN CAPTIVITY. I saw that expression in Mr Tamaoki’s face. By then I knew it well; I saw it every morning in my own bathroom mirror. Sometimes – though not so often now – I still do.
As with all newcomers on Mortimer Street, the arrival of Mr Tamaoki aroused a certain fleeting curiosity. Someone told me he was a vegetable chef in a restaurant in Stanbury, though no one seemed to know for sure. He never spoke to anyone. When I met him on the landing he would nod and smile, drawing back against the wall so that I could pass. These meetings were frequent – after the first week I discovered that his movements were as regular as my own. At night, when I collapsed into bed after an evening’s waitressing, I could occasionally hear him moving around his flat or talking to himself in low rapid Japanese. Most often, though, there was nothing. No friends called on Mr Tamaoki. No loud music played. From what I could tell he seemed to spend hours sitting in silence, not moving at all. Although I was always conscious of his presence (my hearing is very sensitive), it was not as obtrusive as I had feared. In fact, for someone of my temperament he should have been the perfect neighbour.
But there was a problem. Every morning at five-thirty there would be a delivery of vegetables for Juzo Tamaoki. A red van decorated with Japanese characters would rumble along Mortimer Street and stop outside the house, and two men would haul covered crates out onto the pavement. One man would ring the bell, while the other called up to the window. On cold days they left the engine running, and the exhaust billowed clouds of fumes which the neon of the street lamp opposite torched a lurid orange. The delivery men were stoically indifferent to my timid protests. Indeed, when I tried to complain, they gave no indication of having understood me at all. They merely hauled their crates to the doorstep and waited for Juzo Tamaoki to collect. Carrots, peppers, radishes, celeriac, parsnips and glossy yellow, purple and black squash gleamed exotically from crisp tissue-paper shells. Then came the thumping of boxes against the walls, raised voices in the stairwell, shouted instructions, laboured steps on the landing, a final double-thump as the crates hit the floorboards and then, blissfully, the sound of the van’s departure, its exhaust blatting rudely in the still morning air.
No one else on the street seemed to care, or even to notice. But I have always suffered from insomnia; the slightest disturbance wakes me. Once awake, there is nothing to be done; to go back to sleep is impossible. My work meant that I was rarely in bed until the small hours of the morning. At best I could only average five hours’ sleep a night. Mr Tamaoki’s vegetable delivery reduced it to less than four.
At first I tried to reason with him, but the man politely deflected all attempts at conversation. Notes pinned to his door remained unanswered. My silent resentment grew. I tried to discover its counterpart in Mr Tamaoki’s mild dark eyes as we passed each other on the stairs, but he was impassive. His smile and my nod as we met on the landing remained the only communication between us.
At six o’clock every night he would leave the flat, a heavy bamboo hamper in each hand, as I set off for work. What these hampers contained I could not imagine. Vegetables, perhaps? Why then didn’t he have them delivered directly to the restaurant? Curiosity almost overcame my rancour. I began to make comments as we passed every day on the landing, growing bolder at his lack of reaction. Mr Tamaoki continued to smile and nod with unfaltering politeness, even when I did not.
As the uneventful weeks passed, it occurred to me that perhaps my neighbour spoke no English, and I became reckless at the thought, muttering insults at the meek little man as he staggered down the stairs with his hampers. My suspicion was confirmed when I heard him practising English phrases with the aid of a tape recorder, laborious words and phrases repeated endlessly and haltingly in the night. Please . . . Esscuse me . . . Thank you . . . You too kind. Once I heard a scratchy, old-sounding record: ‘Oh, for the Wings of a Dove’.
That summer was unusually hot; the heat seemed to bake out of the floor and shimmer dustily from the pavements. The flat was stuffy, and I sometimes lay awake for hours, caged by the heat, in terrible anticipation of the morning’s vegetable delivery. It became a torment. I flinched at every sound from Mr Tamaoki’s flat, every footstep outside my door. His presence, even silent, enraged me. I watched his window at night, trying to catch sight of him behind the bamboo blind. Several times I found myself standing outside his door, my hand raised as if to knock. It would have been better if he had had a riotous family, I told myself in growing bitterness; if he had played some noisy musical instrument. Anything would have been better than this secret man and his vegetables.
One day, as I returned from a shopping trip, I found Mr Tamaoki waiting for me on the landing. His hampers were nowhere to be seen, and he had left his door ajar. I could not prevent myself from sneaking a glance inside; through the doorway I could make out a bright, bare interior glowing with the full light of the afternoon sun.
Juzo Tamaoki nodded and, for the first time in our acquaintance, spoke.
‘Cha,’ he said.
I stared at him uncomprehendingly.
He nodded again. ‘Please. Please.’ With a gesture he beckoned me in. The door swung wide. Bewildered, reluctant, I followed him inside.
The room was almost bare. A red lantern swung from the ceiling. A bamboo calendar on the far wall. A futon in the far corner. The tiny kitchen space was almost filled by an enormo
us old-fashioned pink refrigerator. Beside it, a large, heavy chopping-board on which were aligned a number of knives. A low table in the centre of the room on which stood a lacquer tea service. A red tatami mat on either side. Mr Tamaoki beckoned me to sit down and, with the ease of long practice, poured the tea.
It was an unfamiliar brew, greenish and fragrant with a quick, sharp scent. Mr Tamaoki poured carefully into the small bowls and used a bamboo whisk to froth the liquid. It tasted the way cut grass smells: warm and smoky-green. From time to time, Mr Tamaoki nodded to me and smiled. There was no conversation; I supposed his English was not good enough to sustain small talk. Motes filled the bright air between us. For the first time in my life I felt wholly comfortable with another person; in silence.
Finally Mr Tamaoki stood up. Smiling, he made his way into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. He beckoned me to look in. I followed.
The cabinet was filled with birds. Orange, yellow, green, scarlet. An aviary of birds of every imaginable shape, some fan-tailed, others sleek, crested, streamlined, long-beaked, bright-eyed, resting among flowers and leaves in tropical abundance. All were silent and eerily still.
These were the vegetables which were delivered every morning at five-thirty outside my window, now carved and worked into these intricate designs. Here a radish opened miraculous feathers, a squash became a plump water-fowl, a carrot sprouted a feathery bird-of-paradise tail. The eyes were small black pins; the feathers were pared away with a tiny knife. I could see the texture of a bird’s back brought to life, the half-open beak just showing a sliver of tongue, the delicate arch of the neck, the wing. There must have been over a hundred vegetable carvings in there, every one resting lovingly on the shelf, waiting to be packed into Juzo Tamaoki’s hamper and delivered as garnish for a dish of jasmine rice or ginger prawn, perhaps to be wondered at briefly, or more likely ignored altogether . . .
So this was Mr Tamaoki’s secret. This aviary of magical birds. Company, perhaps, for one bred in captivity. I looked at them in amazement and delight. Dream birds, flightless, voiceless, but riotous with colour.
‘They’re beautiful,’ I said.
‘You too kind,’ answered Mr Tamaoki, his eyes gleaming.
He left soon after that. I did not see him go. The first I knew of it was when the delivery van failed to arrive; I awoke at seven-forty with yellow sunlight streaming thickly through the slats in the blinds; later I noticed the name written above the doorbell was gone.
I felt curiously bereft at his absence. Although I was no longer awoken at five-thirty by the vegetable van, I slept badly. I was restless. I found myself missing Mr Tamaoki’s comings and goings, his vegetable hampers, the sound of his small movements in the flat opposite mine. I no longer relished the silence around me as much as once I had; the coldness of Mortimer Street was no longer a comfort. I began to watch my neighbours – the Hadleighs with their shy son; Miss Hedges from the antiques shop down the street; the McGuires with their cheery, messy horde of children – with a more lenient eye. Perhaps they had been right, I told myself; perhaps I hadn’t given them a chance.
For some weeks after his departure, Mr Tamaoki’s rooms remained empty. There was talk of a new tenant arriving soon, a woman alone, but no one seemed to know much about her, though Miss Hedges had seen her once.
‘A funny kind of woman,’ she told me, her mouth pursed with disapproval. ‘Never said a word to me. Not your friendly type at all.’
The thought did not attract me as once it might have done.
The day before the new tenant arrived, I found the door to Mr Tamaoki’s flat open. The room smelt of dust. The table, the lantern, the tatami were gone. The kitchen was empty. Everything had been left neat and bare, the steel surface of the sink carefully wiped of moisture, the cloth left to dry on the tap. There was a small rice-paper package next to the sink. My name was written on it in shaky capitals.
The thin paper was dried petals between my fingers. As I opened the package, the scent was suddenly, startlingly pungent in my nostrils, a smell like Bonfire Night, autumn firewood and gunpowder. Something crumbled between my fingers, and I recognized the contents of the packet as tea, Japanese green tea, its shredded leaves packed with scent.
That night I prepared it, trying to recall exactly how Juzo had done it, fanning the steam with my hand to release the flavour. It was good; soporific somehow. I felt as if I would sleep well after drinking it; perhaps better than I had ever done before. In the morning I would invite my new neighbour, the unfriendly woman who never said a word, to share the rest of the packet with me. She might be glad of a friendly face to welcome her to the street. As I finished the cup, I noticed that in the semi-darkness of my room, with the fire casting stilted red shadows on the wall, the rising steam looked like a bird’s wings fluttering, ready to fly away.
Breakfast at Tesco’s
We all get the Mean Reds once in a while. For some of us, however, Tiffany’s will always remain slightly out of reach . . .
‘GOOD MORNING, MISS Golightly. your usual, is it?’
That’s what I like about this place. That human touch. The way Cheryl always brings me my usual and calls me by name. I only know her as Cheryl, of course; that’s only right, as she’s such a young thing. One day, maybe I’ll ask her to call me Molly.
Two rounds of white toast, strawberry jam, a currant teacake and a pot of Earl Grey. That’s my usual. Cheryl knows always to bring it to my seat by the window, to serve the milk in a proper jug – can’t stand those little plastic tubs – with two wrapped lumps of sugar in the saucer. There’s something so very safe about coming here every Saturday morning and having the same breakfast, seeing the same faces, sitting in my favourite place and watching the people go by. It’s my reward for having scrimped and worried all week; my little treat.
Cheryl is twenty-nine. She has bleached hair and a pierced nose, and wears those built-up trainers, like the orthopaedic shoe Doris Craft wears down at the Meadowbank Retirement Home. I suppose you could say she looks cheap. But she brought the milk jug from her own house because Tesco’s don’t provide them – a tiny, tiny ceramic jug which she later admitted came from a doll’s tea set – and she always calls me Miss Golightly.
Not everyone is so polite. At the Meadowbank Home, where I go twice a week to visit my sister, the nurses call me dearie, with that awful, vulpine coyness, as if they know that it’s simply a matter of time before I end up there too, alongside poor Polly, who has long since ceased to care about names at all, and rarely even remembers mine.
Perhaps that’s why I always try to make an effort with my appearance. They must think I’m rather ridiculous at the Meadowbank Home; always so correct in my black dress – a little shabby now, but still good – my gloves and my red spring coat. Who do I do it for, they wonder. Surely I’m far too old for vanity. I don’t wear my pearls to visits, though; not since Polly forgot how she’d given them to me, all those years ago, and made a scene. I shouldn’t feel guilty, I know – her mind was quite sound when she gave them to me, and they are only cultured – yet somehow I always do.
There’s a carnation here on the table, in a narrow glass vase. Cheryl again. No one else would bring me flowers. But she will deny it if I mention it to her, laughing and saying that it must be a gift from one of my gentlemen admirers. I sense that I fascinate Cheryl; to her I am a fragment from another world, like a piece of moon rock. She finds excuses to come and talk to me; to ask me questions.
At first she was incredibly ignorant. Two years ago she had never seen a black-and-white film. She thought Hepburn was the name of a pop group. She had never heard of Luis Buñuel or Jean Cocteau or even Blake Edwards. Her favourite movie was Pretty Woman.
Two years on, she is still strangely shy of me. It comes out in a brashness which she means to be cheery but which to me sounds defensive and not entirely happy. She has the dirtiest laugh, though. When she laughs she could be pretty; perhaps even beautiful. There is a man, but no wedd
ing ring amongst the dozens of cheap glittery things she wears. She seldom speaks of him. He has been through a bad patch, she explains reluctantly. I take this to mean that he is unemployed. I’ve seen him once or twice in town – usually outside the pub or the betting shop – a big, once-handsome man now going to seed, like an ageing Marlon Brando. He comes into the café occasionally; I always know he’s there because Cheryl gives him away with her eyes. Her movements are less free when she knows he is watching; she stabs at the keys of the till like a chicken pecking corn. On those days she does not come over to talk to me, but sometimes gives me a little apologetic smile.
She knows when to expect me – half past eleven on the dot – and she tries to take her break when I am there. We talk about films. Since we first met, Cheryl has learned more about them; last month she watched Brief Encounter and Casablanca. She knows most of my favourites by now: Funny Face, In the Heat of the Night, Roman Holiday, Wuthering Heights (the 1939 version, with Olivier), Rebecca, Orphée, and of course Tiffany’s. She knows the difference between John Huston’s Unforgiven and Clint Eastwood’s. She watches them in the mornings before Jimmy gets up – he likes action and war movies, and she prefers him to be out of the way – and we discuss them later. Although she is still wary of expressing opinions, I find her comments intelligent and interesting, in spite of her predilection for happy endings. I sometimes wonder what a girl like Cheryl is doing, working in the café at Tesco’s.
She doesn’t talk about herself very often. Her parents are dead, she says, and she was raised by her grandparents, but I gather they haven’t been in touch for many years. She is older than the other waitresses – perhaps that’s why she dresses as she does – and when she talks to them her accent broadens and her voice becomes rougher. I can sense that she makes more of an effort when she is with me.
Jigs & Reels: Stories Page 13
