by Tobias Hill
The muezzin begins. He raises the hammer.
What he thinks is his own business.
* * *
At night I watch him breathe. His own bulk makes it uncomfortable for him to sleep. Movement spreads from the lungs through his whole flesh, the shoulders, his cheekbones, the curve of his waist. It keeps me awake, watching him. Only in the morning do I remember dreaming of Istanbul. A calligrapher’s shop window, six thousand miles away. Plastic flowers, and the great sweep of characters.
Twice a week I walk into town for supplies. There is little traffic on the coast road, only haulage trucks and the occasional van-load of surfers. I catch myself passing them with my head down, the way Hikari does. His seclusion becoming habitual in me. It is Christmas Eve before anyone stops.
I am walking back from Tosa with rice and rice wine, the weights balanced in each hand. The morning is cold and bright. An aeroplane passes overhead. I look up to follow its track, north-west towards Hiroshima, and as I do so something dark and sleek goes past on the road beside me. I have time to be surprised before there is a kick of brakes, ten yards back. The slow whine of reversed gears.
I don’t look round. The vehicle pulls up alongside me. A business car with tinted glass. It keeps pace, kerb-crawling backwards. I wait for a window to roll down, a door to open, but nothing happens. I don’t see anyone. It is fifty yards before it pulls away, hard, accelerating north. The sun glares off its rear window. A Tokyo number plate. I stand there long after it is out of sight.
No one is at the house. Hikari has taken the catch to Kôchi by boat, and the children are at school. The last few days before the New Year holidays. Under the stairs is a mass of fishing and navigation equipment, the smoked glass from a broken sextant, a wooden eel spear. It takes an hour to find a pair of binoculars. I go back down to the quay. The grilled-octopus man nods hello, grinning at the chance of custom. I buy a coffee. It is just past noon and I sit on the sea wall, drinking, facing inland. The binoculars focused to the coast road.
The tide goes out. The grilled-octopus man locks up and sits beside me. He talks about baseball and birdwatching. With his burn-marked hands he explains the secrets of catching octopus. I don’t see anyone arrive, but when I pick up the binoculars again a figure has appeared. A silhouette against the winter light.
I focus in. There is a man in a suit standing at the shoulder of the promontory. He turns in the shuddering arena of the lenses, putting out a cigarette. Sunglasses obscure any emotion in his face. His mouth is impassive. I can’t be sure if he is Japanese or not. He does nothing to show that he might have seen me. He only looks as if he is waiting for something.
It is two hours before Hikari comes back. I wait on the porch. Cold to the bone, rocking to keep warm. He sees me as he is coming down the dune path and he slows, knowing something is wrong, seeing it in my presence. He comes and sits beside me, not saying anything. His breath clouds the air, warmer than mine.
‘You never asked how I found you,’ I say.
Hikari blinks. His voice is gruff, covering its own surprise. ‘We never talked about it.’
‘Ask me.’
He shrugs. ‘How did you find me?’
‘I met a man in Tokyo. He knew how to access records by computer. He found your mother’s death certificate. It had your address listed with it.’ I stop. Not looking at his face. Not wanting to see it as I talk. ‘I asked this man if anyone could trace what he had done.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said that in computers, with enough money, one can see anything. He asked me if these people had money. I told him I didn’t know.’
I look up. He nods at me to go on. I blurt it out. ‘There was a man on the coast road today. Waiting by the headland. And this morning a car followed me back from Tosa. Not to the house, I didn’t show them where I was going–’
‘Enough.’ He stands up and, turning away, swears in Japanese. Face wrinkled up into the words.
‘I’m so sorry–’
‘Hah!’ He shouts me down. A sound without words. I flinch back from it. Hikari covers his face with his hands. When he looks down at me again he is frowning, as if he has come home and found a stranger in his house. My heart goes falling away inside me.
‘Please, Hikari–’
He mutters, only to himself. Repeating a phrase in Japanese, shaking his head. I catch it the third time. I have betrayed myself.
‘This isn’t your fault.’
‘No?’ He turns round. Sweat has broken out on his seamed face. ‘You are here because I wanted you. I let myself believe you were different from them.’
‘I am.’
He walks away without answering. Under the ginkgo tree he sits down. And I follow him, knowing he doesn’t want me to, unable to help myself. ‘Who are they?’
His voice is dull with exhaustion. ‘You think you’re the only one? That no one else is as clever as you?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t know who they are.’ He looks away, smiling, wretched. ‘There are many people like you. The companies who did business with my grandfather send you. All my life I have lived to avoid them. My grandfather did any work to find the jewel, anything, because of what happened to his father. He brought the Three Brethren back because it was ours, mine and my children’s children. My mother promised him she would keep it, and I promised her. But these companies don’t forget. You are my curse. You remember the people you have done business with. You are like flies.’
‘I’m not one of them. Hikari. Look at me.’
He stares up. ‘I should never have let you stay.’
‘Please.’
He shakes his head. Reaches out for my face. Cups it with both hands. Later we will make love for hours. Hardly moving, the dark of his room fading to daylight. The rhythm of him inside me so slow it is almost nothing. Only a closeness. I never feel it end.
He is gone when I wake. I lie still listening. I remember his warmth and the weight of his body. My body remembers it. It is late already. The house is quiet.
A seabird mewls outside. It occurs to me that Hikari was still with me as the sun came up. My thoughts follow on, one after another. Slow as breakers at the edge of sleep.
I turn my head. The house altar is gone. There is no shock, nothing so quick. There may even be a part of me which expected its absence. It is the way one turns round in a dream. Knowing something monstrous already waits.
I look round at the rest of his room. Nothing else is gone. There is not much else that could be taken. I imagine Hikari lifting the lacquered box, silently carrying it away. I get up and follow his image out.
He is less than a dream, more than an idea. On the landing a rice cake has fallen. On the third step, an aubergine. He didn’t stop to pick them up. Nor do I. Distantly, it comes to me that it is Christmas Day.
The doors of the children’s rooms are shut. I try Tom’s, calling his name softly. No one answers. The room is full of wallpaper animals and nothing else. Light falls across their processions. They watch me go downstairs.
The house feels abandoned. My presence has no impact, it changes nothing. The rooms have become ownerless. Light falls across the empty floors. The bookshelf is stripped. The stove and mini-fridge are gone.
There is no letter for me that I can find. I begin to look harder. Scattering the insides of cupboards and drawers. The noise is out of place. It is hard to make myself stop, to hold the panic in. Iren’s breakfast cup waits on the counter, blue plastic with green dolphins. I try to imagine her face, making itself keep quiet. Her eyes leaving me.
The rice wine is where I left it. I fill the cup and take it outside onto the porch. There are no chairs. I sit against the peeling wall. My hand shakes a little as I drink. There is no sound of the boat or the generator. Only the giant footfall of the Pacific Ocean going nowhere.
I say to myself, He left no message so they wouldn’t find it. He left no letter because he didn’t know how to say goodbye. I say, He left not
hing because I am a stranger in his own house. He will never let himself love me again.
I think of his voice. His arms, the curves of them, their balance and strength. Like calligraphy. I close my eyes to think of them and when I open them again I am crying and there is nothing to be done about it. I swallow back the last of the rice wine. My throat clicks over it. The sun shimmers over the marram grass.
There is something in the grass. It is some time before I notice it. Only when I am done with myself do I look up and see it. A low square bulk against the light. I walk past the allotment and the ginkgo tree. The sand is against me. At the point where the dunes begin there is a hummock, a nest of grass. I know them. I curl myself down into their shape.
There is a box half-hidden by the scrub. An old wooden case, left in a place no one would know but me. I pull it towards me. It is dark with age, acrid with the smell of turpentine. There is a piece of paper underneath, and as I move the weight off it the wind tries to take it and I catch it first. It has already fluttered open.
Dear Katharine,
I am sorry this is all I have to give you. It belonged to my mother’s father and his father before him. My mistake has been to try and keep it. It was never worth what any of us gave it.
Make a good life.
Hikari.
I open the box. It is almost empty. There is only one object inside. My head aches with the wine. I feel my life twisting down to this point.
It is a warped frame of gold. A triangle of metal, angular as a snake-head. There are vacancies where stones have been. I take it out. The weight of it catches my hand by surprise. It is a thing without beauty or purpose. It could be the skeleton of a great jewel. No one would know it but me. I sit in the shelter of the dunes and weep over Hikari and the Three Brethren.
It is noon by the time I pack. It takes me longer than it should. In the abandoned house I linger, insubstantial as a ghost. As if anyone I want would be coming back. When I’m finished I walk over to the quay. The grilled-octopus man is waiting for business. Hikari’s boat still hangs at the rope bollards.
‘Good morning!’ The vendor shouts in enthusiastic Japanese. ‘How about breakfast?’
My bag in one hand, the jewel in the other, I go over to him. ‘What is there?’
‘Octopus.’ He smiles, bright white. ‘Fresh. Good for the heart.’
I buy what he has. We stand together, tendrils splotching on the skillet between us. The man smiles and nods. As if we are talking, although we are hardly talking. Waves thud against the hull of the fishing boat.
‘Has anyone been out here this morning?’
He shrugs, turning curlicues with a spatula. ‘Only your boyfriend and his kids. Business will pick up after New Year.’
‘You saw them?’
‘Sure.’
‘When?’ I try and keep the emotion out of my voice. As if it matters, now; or ever did.
‘Early. Your man walked into town. Came back with a car. The kids waited here. He bought them octopus before they left.’ He shuffles food into a polystyrene box. Peers through the smoke. ‘North. They went north. That’s eight hundred yen. Half price to you.’
‘What kind of car?’
‘Blue Toyota, a real heap. Aren’t you going with them?’
‘With them?’ His question catches me off guard. As if he has not asked anything, but told me something about myself.
He nods down. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’
I look. The Three Brethren is still in my hand. Heavy as a gun. ‘Gold.’
‘Eh?’ His eyebrows shoot up. The smile vanishes and he ducks inside the trailer. I wait for him to re-emerge.
‘I need you to do something for me.’
‘Ah.’ He comes back monosyllabic with worry. I unzip my bag, take out the notebooks. They make a respectable pile on the trailer counter.
‘I need you to look after these. Some friends of mine will come for them.’ I put the Three Brethren on top of the books, weighing them down against the shore wind. ‘Give them all this. All of it.’
The grilled-octopus man grimaces. ‘When are they coming?’
I don’t answer him. Light catches on the jewel. For a moment it is just the two of us here. Something human and something inhuman. I think of Hikari. I wonder what I am doing now. How much I will have cause to regret.
I touch it. The Three Brethren. The sun has warmed its element. I close it in my hand. An object the size of my palm. Not letting it go.
‘Well? Are you leaving it or not?’
When I look up the vendor is squinting out at me uneasily. A cardboard Coca-Cola sign flaps against the trailer. I open my fist. ‘I’m sorry’
‘Don’t be sorry to me. Gold.’ He clucks it distrustfully. ‘How will I know them, these friends?’
‘Ask them what they’re looking for.’
‘Oh. Sure then. Good luck finding your man. North, eh?’
I pick up my bag. He waves after me as I turn down the seafront. The strand is bright in the afternoon light. Somewhere a seagull begins to cry. It sounds like laughter. When I think of myself again I find I am laughing with it.
I start to walk inland. A truck clanks on the coast road. A deepwater road, this one, nothing but trucks and trailers out this far. And me. My life swings on its turning point. I say to myself, I am looking for something. Looking for someone. A love out of stones.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to: Walid Atiyeh, the Kufa Gallery; Felix Graf, the National Museum of Switzerland; Tessa Chester, Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood; Kay Staneland, the Museum of London; Anna Kay, Hampton Court; Jennifer Marin, the London Jewish Museum; Liz Wilson, Sothebys; Jeanette Cannon, the Jewish Historical Society of England; Lesley Coldham, de Beers; Haled al Fayad; Pip, Hannah, Caroline, Xandra, Victoria and Julian; the Arts Council of England, and Edward Lear.
By the Same Author
fiction
SKIN
UNDERGROUND
THE HIDDEN
THE CRYPTOGRAPHER
poetry
YEAR OF THE DOG
MIDNIGHT IN THE CITY OF THE CLOCKS
ZOO
Praise
Acclaim for The Love of Stones:
‘The Love of Stones is an admirable achievement… Hill is a superb time traveller, slipping dextrously between the two centuries of his novel, and writing as well about early Victorian London as its late-twentieth century counterpart … Densely detailed and imagined throughout, his novel is an object lesson in how fascination can harden into love, or be mistaken for it.’ Times Literary Supplement
‘Throughout it all runs Hill’s authority of tone and compelling gift of readability. Like the object of its quest, this book will find many devotees, and provide the true smack of diamond-carat satisfaction.’ The Scotsman
‘Carefully chosen details evoke exotic foreign cities and Hill portrays London at the dawn of the Victorian age through brightly impressionistic dabs and strokes. [He] made his reputation as a poet, and the book is written with great precision and care for the language. It glitters with the hard brilliance of its elusive stones, while at the same time providing an intelligent and inventive story that hooks the reader from the first page.’ Sunday Times
‘You don’t have to love jewels to enjoy Tobias Hill’s sumptious fictional quest for the Three Brethren, a jewel worn by Elizabeth I, and here lovingly evoked … I didn’t want the quest to end.’ New Statesman, Novel of the Week
‘Like Underground, The Love of Stones works because Hill merges all the dynamics of a thriller – a riveting, page-turning plot – with crisply poetic observation. His is a cold, chiselled prose style that results in an eerie parable of greed that is even more precious than its glittering subject matter.’ The Times
Tobias Hill has published three award-winning collections of poetry, has worked as a rock music critic for the Sunday Telegraph, was the inaugural resident poet at London Zoo in 1998 and is Visiting Fellow at Sussex University. Skin, a col
lection of stories, won the 1998 PEN/Macmillan Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 1998 Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Underground, his first novel, was published to great acclaim in 1999: ‘Hill is among the most noticeable talents of his generation’ according to the Independent on Sunday, whilst the Observer found that, ‘Hill writes the kind of fiction that can change the way you look at the world’.
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney
First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Faber and Faber
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
www.bloomsbury.com
Copyright © Tobias Hill, 2001
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
The right of Tobias Hill to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
eISBN 978-1-4088-4411-3
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