Last Stop Tokyo

by James Buckler

  ‘You sound like you don’t enjoy this job very much.’

  Megumi stood up from the balcony railing and looked at him squarely. ‘Enjoyment isn’t the point. Once you’ve started something, it’s important to be successful. Otherwise, how could you live with yourself?’

  Alex sipped his champagne. ‘Is that why you and Naoko are so competitive with each other?’

  Megumi looked momentarily flustered. ‘Is it that noticeable?’ she asked.

  ‘I imagine she’s a hard act to follow. She’s very dedicated.’

  ‘Do you have any idea what it’s like working with her?’ Megumi said, becoming animated. ‘Can you imagine having to walk in her shadow and act dumb while she gets all the attention? Sometimes I feel like the girl in that film.’

  ‘You’re still young. You have lots of time yet.’

  ‘Maybe I don’t need that much time. There are things I’ve found out about her that I’m sure Naoko doesn’t want anyone to know. But it’s going to come out. I’ll make sure of that. Then everyone will finally see that she doesn’t belong here. In the meantime, I always have you to help me.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you’re saying?’

  ‘I’ve thought about this a lot,’ Megumi said. ‘And the only way for me to progress in my career is for something bad to happen to Naoko.’

  Alex was confused. ‘Something bad? Like what?’

  ‘Like this.’

  Megumi stepped forward and pressed her hand to Alex’s chest. She slipped her fingers inside the buttons of his shirt and dug her nails into his skin. He instinctively grabbed her wrist and pulled her arm away, twisting it as he took a step backwards to remove himself. Megumi cried out and sank down as her knees buckled. She dropped her champagne glass and it shattered on the wooden floor below.

  The room fell silent. Every face in the gallery turned towards them.

  Alex was still standing above her, gripping her wrist. He released it and she held it against her body, clutching it as if she had been badly hurt. Two security guards began to make their way up the spiral staircase but Megumi waved them away.

  She didn’t look up but very deliberately said, ‘I think you had better go.’

  Alex was sure he could see the trace of a smile on her lips. He looked down at the shocked expressions in the crowd below.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’m leaving.’

  10

  HIS INSTINCTS TOLD him to get as far away as possible, so Alex started walking over the junctions and crossings of Ebisu, the streets dark and humid and empty. There was no logic to the sequence of events, no matter how many times he tried to replay them in his head. He stopped under a streetlight and tried to call Naoko but there was no answer. He tried once more and again it went straight to voicemail. He wondered what Megumi was telling her now, what version of events she was fabricating that worked to her favour. He couldn’t believe he’d been so dumb.

  There was no way he could leave this unresolved so he looked for a taxi and told the driver to go to Mejiro. He would wait for Naoko there, he thought, and then explain everything once she came home.

  When he arrived at her building, the lights were off in most of the windows and the lobby was deserted. He took the lift up to the twelfth floor and checked the landing was clear before he approached her front door. He felt along the top of the door frame until he found the spare key Naoko kept there and let himself in.

  He called her name from the entranceway but there was no answer. He took off his shoes and walked into the living room. Everything looked different without her there. Her clothes were spread across the furniture in the bedroom where she had tried on different outfits for the party and her make-up was scattered over the coffee table. He wondered if she was still at the gallery, if she was looking for him. There were footsteps out in the corridor and Alex froze and waited, standing stock-still in the dark. The sound receded and a door opened and closed at the end of the landing and then the silence returned. His heart was racing and he tried to force himself to relax. It was nearly 3 a.m. so Naoko had to be home soon.

  He walked into the bedroom and took off his jacket and shirt and lay down on the bed in his jeans. He looked up at the ceiling. He could feel his eyes grow heavy as the adrenaline ebbed away and left him hollow and empty. He tried to force himself to stay awake. He could hear the crows outside on the waste ground shrieking and fighting for food. It was still dark when he woke.

  Naoko was sitting above him, across his chest, her knees digging hard into his ribs. He saw the mascara on her cheeks, like black war paint. She was still wearing the dress with the chrysanthemum pattern, hitched up, and her hair was scraped back from her face. He was still half asleep and he found his hands were resting on her thighs and he felt the flesh beneath his palms. He smiled at her but she didn’t smile back. She looked down at him with dark, wet eyes and pressed something sharp into the softness of his neck below his jaw. He saw the muscles in her shoulders tighten and he looked down and saw the wooden handle of the knife held firmly in her grip.

  ‘It’s just me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t steal anything.’

  He tried to sit up but she forced him back with the angle of the blade. He coughed to clear his throat and felt the metal jagging against the stubble on his neck.

  ‘Everyone saw what you did,’ Naoko said.

  ‘It wasn’t how it looked.’

  ‘Megumi showed me the bruises on her wrist. You did it deliberately, didn’t you? To get back at me.’

  Alex tried to raise his hands but she pressed the knife harder.

  ‘She’s lying,’ he said. ‘I didn’t touch her. I swear.’

  ‘The whole gallery saw you.’

  ‘Nothing happened. I’m stupid, but not that stupid.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re worth a thousand of her, Naoko.’

  He looked at her, the black make-up streaked down her face, and saw the flicker in her eye as her perspective changed. He could feel his heart beating and felt hers in time through his fingertips. The muscles and tendons were wire-tight beneath her skin. She gripped the knife with her arms extended and pushed harder into his neck.

  ‘If you’re good to me, I will give you one hundred per cent good in return. But if you’re bad, I will give you one thousand per cent bad. Believe me.’

  ‘I would never do anything to hurt you, Naoko.’

  ‘You must think I’m a fool.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  Naoko leaned further on to the knife, edging it a fraction deeper. The tip of the blade seemed desperate to puncture the skin.

  ‘Just tell me you weren’t high when you came to the gallery tonight.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I can’t believe I even have to ask you that.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘You humiliated me,’ she said. ‘In the one place I told you was important to me.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that, Naoko.’

  ‘You can fuck up all you want to in your world. I just don’t want you to fuck up mine. You have no idea of the sacrifices I had to make to get here.’

  He felt the knife dig into the softness of his throat. For a moment he thought she was going to do it but she breathed out and released the pressure from the blade. Her shoulders slumped wearily as she pulled the knife away from his neck and let it hang beside her.

  ‘I know whatever you had to do, it hasn’t made you happy,’ he said.

  ‘Who in life ever gets to be happy?’

  ‘Everyone who really wants to.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  ‘Good things only happen if you try.’

  ‘And bad things happen if you try too hard.’

  ‘You know I didn’t touch Megumi, don’t you? You know I would never do something like that to you.’

  ‘But why would she lie? What does Megumi have to gain by making a crazy scene?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Alex said. ‘We were chatting and sh
e was acting normally. Then I started talking about you and she just lost it. She said she had found out something that you didn’t want anyone to know. She was talking like a madwoman.’

  Naoko looked down at him with a suspicious scowl. The aspect of her face accentuated the Asiatic cast of her eyes.

  ‘What had she found out?’

  Alex held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. ‘She didn’t tell me, Naoko. And I didn’t have time to ask.’

  ‘But what did she say? What were her exact words?’

  ‘I don’t remember. I couldn’t really follow what she was saying.’

  ‘Try to remember!’ she shouted frantically.

  Alex tried to sit up but a look of panic overtook Naoko and she pressed him back down on to the bed. She swung the knife towards him and Alex saw the metal blade flash close before his eyes as she held it to one side of his face. The sensation of the sharp edge on his skin revolted him and he pushed her away, bolting upright as she fell backwards, her skull cracking against something dense, a chair or table, as she fell. The knife skittered off across the floor.

  Then he felt the burn across the crest of his cheekbone where the skin was tightest, the coldness of the exposed nerve endings and the blood as it pulsed down his face and neck. He held his hand to the wound and it slicked along his fingers, his palm tight against his face. He couldn’t stop it coming. He stepped over her and walked into the bathroom and stood before the mirror.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ he said. ‘I thought you were bluffing.’

  She looked up at him from the floor, her hair raked out and blood smeared down the lace of her dress.

  ‘What’s bluffing?’ she said.

  The blood ran down his forearm and dripped from his elbow on to the floor. There was a slice across his face from cheek to ear, the wound open like a mouth about to speak. Alex felt as though he could stand there fascinated for ever. He forced himself to turn away.

  ‘I can’t believe you did it.’

  ‘It was an accident, Alex. You moved too quickly.’

  ‘I’m leaving,’ he said, and started to look for his shirt.

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I don’t know. Anywhere. Somewhere less dangerous than here.’

  Naoko stood and moved towards him and he could see the seriousness of the situation register on her face.

  ‘You can’t go,’ she said. ‘There’s been too much noise already. Stay and I’ll take care of you.’

  He sneered at her. ‘I think you’ve done enough for one night.’

  Naoko picked up the shirt and jacket he was looking for and opened the window and tossed them outside. Alex watched them flutter down to the waste ground twelve storeys below. She ran to the entranceway and grabbed his shoes and threw them out as well.

  ‘There,’ she said calmly. ‘Now you have to stay.’

  Alex turned and swept an arm over her dresser and cast off the mirror and her make-up and then picked up an ashtray from the coffee table and threw it against the framed print on the wall. The glass shattered in a spray of jagged fragments that showered down on to the wooden floor.

  He stood with his fists clenched white-knuckle tight, his body shaking with rage. Naoko came towards him and tried to reach up and take his face in her hands. He gripped her by the wrist and held her scarred palm open.

  ‘Maybe this is the big secret Megumi has discovered about you?’ Alex shouted and pushed her aside. He walked to the bookcase on the opposite side of the room, his footsteps reverberating through the structure of the building. He picked up the landscape photograph in its heavy frame and tore the wooden back away. The document was inside, folded carefully, exactly as it had been before. He took it from its hiding place and unfolded it. It was meaningless to him.

  ‘Or maybe this is it? I don’t know. It seems that you have just as many secrets as everyone else.’

  ‘Please give it to me,’ Naoko said, her eyes washed with tears.

  ‘Tell me what it is.’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  She hesitated. ‘It’s a birth certificate,’ she said. ‘You can destroy anything else here but not that. It’s all I have.’

  Alex held it up before her in both hands. He tried to find the resolve to tear it in two, anything to hurt her in return, but he couldn’t do it. He threw it to the floor and watched as she fell to her knees to retrieve it.

  The blood was coursing down the side of his face and neck and he went into the kitchen and pressed a towel to the wound. He looked out of the spyhole in the entranceway. Lights were coming on in the neighbouring apartments and doors were already cracked open as people looked out to find the source of the commotion. He unhooked the security chain and was about to turn the lock. Naoko ran in short, quick steps and held him back. The tears had given her eyes a burning clarity.

  ‘Stay, Alex. Please. You can’t go out like that. Let me clean you up. I know what you need.’

  She touched her fingers to his face where the blood was still streaming down from his cheek and on to his neck and chest. She tried to clean it away but only smeared it on her hands and on to the scars on his shoulders and arms. He looked down at the fresh blood flowing over old wounds.

  ‘You don’t know anything about me,’ he said.

  He hesitated for a moment, then turned and unlocked the door. Faces peered from the doorways as he walked along the landing. He opened the fire-escape door and took the steps down twelve flights to the lobby. Then he was out of the building, barefoot and shirtless in the Tokyo dawn.

  Rain was cascading down the gutters and into the storm drains. Alex walked past rows of shuttered shopfronts and stopped by the entrance to the park. He was dazed and nauseous and needed to think. The gates were locked so he hoisted himself up on to the surrounding wall and climbed over.

  There was a wooden bench beside the baseball diamond and he sat there and tried to work out how it had started. It was too much to compute. The vagrants who lived near the bandstand came out of their blue plastic shelters to see who the stranger was at that hour. They stood around him and stared at the cut on his cheek and the blood splattered down his face and made guesses among themselves without asking for an explanation. They offered him a drink from the gallon bottle of sake they shared and Alex accepted. The sake was tepid and stale but it seemed impossible to refuse something from a group of homeless men.

  One of them stepped forward and pointed to the cut on his face and the scars on his back in a gesture to connect the two.

  ‘Onagi mono, desu ka?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Alex said. ‘Not the same thing at all.’

  ‘You want medicine?’

  Alex shook his head. He thought about the chain of events that had brought him there. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The last thing I want is more medicine.’

  The man didn’t understand. He reached into his backpack and handed Alex an old, stained T-shirt. Alex thanked him and slipped it on.

  The sound of a siren blared out from the road beyond the park and the blue flash of emergency lights strobed through the dark branches. The homeless men froze momentarily, waiting to see if it was coming nearer. The electronic squeal built to a piercing crescendo and then started to recede as it drove past the park gates and down towards the highway. The vagrants were relieved and began to drift back up towards the cover of their shacks, but Alex realized what it meant. He thought of Naoko, still in her room with the knife, and began to feel his panic mount. He knew he would never forgive himself if he left her alone and she did something really stupid. He began to sprint back to the entrance and climbed the wall and ran back along the rain-drenched road towards her building. When he turned the corner, he could see the police car parked at the foot of the steps outside the main doors, the lights still flashing, with no one inside. He ran through the lobby and took the stairs to her floor three at a time.

  Naoko bent down and reached under the dresser. The blade of the knife was still smeared in bl
ood and the imprint of her fingers were marked out in relief on the wooden handle. She pulled it out and walked over to the bed, stepping carefully over the broken glass and upended furniture. Books and clothes lay in piles, as if a strong wind had blown them into drifts at the edges of the room.

  She lay on the bed, her chest still heaving, and tried to calm herself. She closed her eyes and pushed her face into the pillow but she could smell the warm scent where he had been sleeping. She sat up and pulled the pillow from the case and threw it across the room.

  A sound of voices out in the corridor and footsteps approaching. A frenzy of yelping and scratching from her neighbour’s dog as it tried to ward off strangers. Her buzzer sounded and Naoko got up and went to the entranceway. She opened the door without looking out through the spyhole.

  Two uniformed policemen were standing with solemn expressions, their coats dripping water on to the landing carpet. They were both wearing clear plastic rain protectors over their caps, their collars turned up to their ears. Naoko looked at the prying stares of her neighbours, some in night clothes, standing in half-opened doorways, watching her with curious pity. She was still holding the knife in her hand, her dress torn and ragged and streaks of blood on her face and arms.

  ‘We’ve had a report of a disturbance,’ the first officer said, his eyes peering past her to the chaos inside her room. ‘Can we come in?’

  She stood aside and they entered without removing their boots. She followed them into the living room.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ the second officer asked.

  ‘No. I’m fine,’ Naoko said.

  He reached out a hand and waited for her to pass him the knife. She held it out at arm’s length and he took it carefully, holding the handle between his forefinger and thumb, and placed it on the sideboard.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked.

  Naoko paused for a moment as she saw the scene through the officers’ eyes. She tried to think. There was a chair lying beside her on the floor and she set it upright and slowly took a seat. How could she explain her dishevelled appearance? How could she explain the noise of the disturbance and the chaos of broken furniture in her flat? Most importantly, Naoko knew, was how to explain the blood-stained knife. To tell the truth to the police would be to condemn herself. That would mean losing her job and her home and everything she had worked for. Alex was gone and she was all alone now. She had to do what was best for her. A different explanation of the night began to piece itself together in her mind. The patrolmen stood above her, waiting. Then the words started to come in an unbroken flow and she found herself unable to stop. The officers listened intently as she spoke, their expressions becoming ever more serious with each sentence. When they began to look at one another with the worried glances of concerned parents, Naoko knew she had gone too far.