Tuvalu

by Andrew O'Connor

  ‘No.’

  ‘See. I’d reached a point where I didn’t believe people like you existed.’ Mami again began to laugh. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t laugh, I know. I don’t even know why I’m like this. I’ve been doing it all morning and for no reason. Always at the stupidest things. But I loved that stammer of yours. I heard it and I thought, Mami, here’s someone who won’t ever lie to you.’

  ‘Because I can’t?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Then, as if Mami had seen something awful in the alleyway—a car crash or murder—her laugh cut out. When she faced me again her eyes narrowed. I had the sensation that all fun, all warmth had flooded from her.

  ‘So tell me again,’ she said, ‘why you don’t want this Catalina girl to see me?’

  ‘Because she’s a friend of my girlfriend, Matilda.’

  Mami nodded, threw her still-lit cigarette into the street and rolled her legs back into my room. The very edges of the feathers at her throat flashed white in the sunlight. I thought she was angry—leaving. But I glimpsed amusement in her face, and she flopped casually onto my bed.

  ‘Matilda’s the girl you share this room with?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And where’s she?’

  ‘In Australia, visiting her father.’

  Mami smiled—a full, beautiful smile revealing straight, white teeth, teeth with a confidence all of their own. I shifted uneasily.

  ‘To Odaiba,’ she said.

  Our train trip out to sleek Odaiba was unremarkable, except for the fact that Mami stole her ticket. While I was slotting change into the ticket machine she set her face in a pout and strode up to the stationmaster. I had no inkling of what it was she was doing or why she was upset. Nor could I understand a word she was saying. But her pleading tone was clear. There was something she wanted from this fat, balding man, something she was not meant to have. He peered through his window with the tired, resigned look of a harangued civil servant. Only when Mami shot him an awful look did he shrug, print a ticket and slide it under the screen. He looked unhappy with the whole affair but nevertheless bowed his head when thanked.

  Mami found me at a newsstand reading an English newspaper which featured, among other things, the weather and a photo of a schoolboy, hand in his mother’s, glossy red backpack strapped tightly on, returning to school for the winter term. I held up my ticket. Mami took an excessively firm hold of my wrist and flung me through a ticket gate.

  ‘Hurry up,’ she said. ‘You’re too slow.’ She dragged me through clumps of people, up stairs, around rubbish bins and into a train.

  ‘What was that all about?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Before, with the ticket guy.’

  ‘Oh, that. I lost my ticket.’

  ‘Lost it? You had a ticket?’

  Mami thought for a moment, chewing at the inside of her lip. A number of commuters glanced at her, at her dress and the red feathers. She had dropped her cashmere coat in the bin outside the hostel. ‘No. Not really. But I told him I did.’

  ‘So you stole this ride?’

  She recoiled playfully. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You stole your ticket.’

  ‘Stole? So I’m a common thief now? Is that what you’re saying?’ Still smiling, Mami jutted out her jaw. ‘Okay. For how long then? Exactly?’

  ‘How long what?’

  ‘How long will I be a thief?’

  I shrugged. ‘Until the end of this trip?’

  Mami swivelled to look out the window, thinking. ‘I can live with that,’ she said finally.

  We sat in silence after this. Mami pulled a rubber band from somewhere, stretched it, then curled it on her fingers. Around us, commuters typed messages into phones, did make-up with hand mirrors, slept, drank and exchanged furtive sexual glances. People’s lives spilling into trains uninterrupted. The train as bathroom, bedroom and bar.

  We somehow changed climates in the space of this fifteen-minute train trip, because when we stepped onto the platform in Odaiba it was snowing big, cumbersome flakes. I had never seen it snow in Tokyo. I watched as Mami held out her hands, trying to catch whatever flakes she could, but they swirled around her open palms and down onto wet concrete.

  ‘To hell with snow,’ she mumbled, wrapping her arms around her body, hunching her head and marching me on. Outside the station two young girls in bright pink parkas jumped excitedly, hands up as if snatching fruit from an unseen tree.

  ‘Which way?’ I asked.

  ‘No idea,’ said Mami. ‘Actually, no, that’s another lie. This way.’ She started off without the slightest regard for a man about to photograph his smiling wife. I watched him frown, pull his phone back to let her pass, then hold it out again as Mami started to talk about what she called ‘matters of much significance’.

  ‘You see, Noah, I don’t accept rules like most people. That’s what you’ve got to understand about me. I think it’s so strange the way people just accept rules. We’re supposedly free to do whatever we want, but then there are all these rules—things we can’t do.’

  ‘Like stealing a ticket?’

  ‘Exactly. Only I can hear from your voice you think I learnt something from that, something that’ll make me less inclined to steal in future.’

  ‘Do you often steal?’

  ‘That’s not the point. Keep up. The point is, I don’t think it’s entirely wrong.’

  ‘And what if everyone did it?’

  ‘That’s not the point either. I’m taking a completely different angle here, a far more personal one.’

  Mami paused to think. We were nearing a slight bottleneck, unusual in Odaiba. There was a pair of schoolgirls vying to peer at the one mobile phone, a yakuza-looking type with a toothpick, children, mopey husbands and more than a few plump, middle-aged women with fixed fuck-the-world glares. I felt I was trying to follow a string of pebbles while ahead Mami weaved a dexterous, devil-may-care line through it all. As we stepped clear, a red feather, riding the bay breeze, whipped back past me and was lost.

  ‘Let me try and be clear,’ she said, twisting her upper body to face me but maintaining the same almost belligerent pace. ‘The government says we are free to do whatever—’

  ‘I’ve heard that but—’

  ‘Let me finish.’ Mami halted. Two people collided into and bounced off her.

  ‘I’m saying,’ she said, elongating the words, ‘a truly free society would be a society without rules—not so much as one rule. Nothing written down.’ She made a gesture (possibly tossing out the Japanese constitution).

  ‘That would be chaos.’

  ‘You would think.’ She frowned and started walking again. ‘But things have a funny way of working themselves out. Criminals live outside the law and therefore have a code. This code is just as effective as any government law. If you don’t follow the code, you have to be prepared for the consequences. Why can’t everything be like that? Why can’t all society be left to sort itself out? Imagine what a different place it’d be.’

  ‘I imagine,’ I said, looking around, ‘it’d be very similar to this.’

  Mami clucked her tongue. She started to walk faster. When she resumed speaking, the haughty edge to her voice was gone. ‘Yes, but I mean, with nothing written down.’

  ‘What difference does that make?’

  ‘What difference?’ she parroted. But she did not answer.

  I was left with a vague unease following this conversation. I had never really broken the law. I had hardly broken a rule. This was not due to a concerted effort on my part, but more a result of my fearful nature. I disliked risk. The night we first met, it was mostly drink that gave me the courage to follow Mami home. But if, as Mami was suggesting, she had rarely observed a rule, how was I to proceed?

  We passed a theatre, or what might have been a theatre. The Japanese characters above the door looked a little like eigakan, but were not—not exactly. I looked for the two basic alphabets I knew, for hiraga
na or katakana, but there was mostly only kanji—thousands of complex little stick houses stolen from the Chinese. I could extract no sounds from which to puzzle out meanings. Far more telling was a queue trailing out front. People flapped tickets in gloved hands, their breath white. I noticed the snow was starting to abate, that the flakes were smaller and no one was looking up anymore. A mother tried to pull scarves over children’s faces, but every time she got one up it was pulled back down while she fished for the next. I counted seven children in all, swirling around.

  Mami dragged me into a smaller street, talking quickly and loudly. ‘My argument didn’t make sense before, I know. I’ve never tried to explain what I do, not even to myself. It’s difficult.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t steal to thumb my nose at the government or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not a communist. I just steal sometimes. Like that ticket. I saw that fat, lazy stationmaster sitting there and knew somehow I could travel for free. Like there was a little sign in front of him that said: “Mami can travel for free. Everyone else, please refer to the set prices”.’ Mami ran her hand down the columns of this imaginary sign, the rubber band from the train still wrapped around her fingers. While presumably she saw vertical Japanese characters, she spoke in her fluent but oddly accented English, the sort of accent you could never place.

  ‘This might be off the topic,’ I said, ‘but are you truly bilingual? I mean, are both languages the same for you— equally easy?’

  ‘No. English is what I use for thinking. Isn’t that strange? I’m Japanese and I think in English. It’s not that I don’t like Japan or speaking Japanese. I like both. But all through my schooling I liked English more. It was the language spoken in the classroom and I think it was just easier after a while.’

  ‘So you went to an international school?’

  ‘My father insisted on it. He hated memorising English from books and tapes.’

  ‘Have you ever been overseas?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Are you planning to go?’

  Mami shrugged. ‘I could live in Korea but I don’t want to. I know Tokyo. I see those little signs. Private messages just for me: “Mami Kaketa Can Have This”. And Mami Kaketa takes, believe me. That wouldn’t happen overseas. Overseas I’d have to be normal.’ This last word fell from her mouth like spoilt sea urchin.

  ‘How awful,’ I said sarcastically.

  ‘I’m glad I’ve told you about my little signs though. Once I told this Japanese boy and he went crazy. Pure madness. He said, “You can’t do that! That’s no way to live. Where’s the honour in that sort of selfish approach?” Too many samurai movies. Honour? Please! What a joke.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  We walked on in silence until I asked, ‘Why Korea?’

  ‘Why Korea what?’

  ‘How can you live there?’

  ‘Because my mother’s Korean.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No. She was born in Korea but doesn’t speak much Korean, so she’s not really Korean at all. She’s only Korean because her parents were. Maybe I couldn’t live there. I don’t know.’

  I did not understand this but had the distinct feeling Mami wanted me to drop the topic. We entered a larger street and soon passed the futuristic Fuji TV building. Mami explained that people could walk through its centrepiece— a 1200-tonne sphere—for a fee.

  ‘This whole area’s known for dating,’ she said. ‘All my female Japanese friends have been dragged to Odaiba by at least one unoriginal boyfriend. Some of them, the ones that have been unlucky in love, have been here fifteen or twenty times. Personally, I could never do that.’

  ‘Come here fifteen times?’

  ‘No, I’ve been here thirty times or more. I mean I could never be brought here—not even once. It’s okay when a girl chooses to come to Odaiba, but to be dragged here—ugh. There’ll be nervous, lifeless couples everywhere tonight, the boys all hoping to get laid just because they brought a girl to Odaiba.’

  ‘So why do you come?’

  ‘The ferris wheel.’

  Mami must have noticed how little this excited me, but she perhaps mistook my apprehension for a manly lack of enthusiasm.

  ‘It’s over 115 metres high,’ she said, ‘with excellent city views, but we have to save it for tonight. It’s no good during the day.’

  ‘What will we do until then?’

  ‘Walk. I like walking here. They reclaimed land from the bay, made a little extra space. You can walk without your hands getting caught up in other people’s. You’re not always brushing past everyone or slamming into them, having to say sorry when you’re not.’

  We wandered around Odaiba aimlessly, waiting for the sun to set. Mami was correct. There was no shortage of space. The footpaths were wide and attractive. Occasionally a train zoomed overhead past tall, glimmering buildings. Tourists said hello solely on the basis of my appearance. And the young Japanese couples Mami had warned me about, many clearly working hard at first dates, kept popping up everywhere, hand in hand.

  At one point I wondered why Mami had not asked me more questions. How was it she was so at ease knowing so little?

  ‘I should tell you more about myself.’

  ‘Should you?’

  ‘Shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Okay, tell me who you are,’ Mami said.

  ‘Like how? What would interest you?’

  We paused near a toilet block in a park. Mami thought for a moment. ‘Give me all the details you’d normally try and hide,’ she said.

  Thinking myself in possession of an attentive audience, I bent down to take a sip of water from a small silver drinking fountain, but when I stood, wiping at my mouth and flapping the cold out of my fingers, Mami had walked on. I had to jog to catch up.

  ‘You don’t want to hear?’ I asked. ‘It’s not important. I just thought—’

  ‘Get on with it.’

  ‘Okay. Well, my father was a priest, then a teacher— now retired. My mother’s a housewife, though she’s worked on and off as a secretary. I’m an only child and—’

  ‘Secrets,’ Mami said.

  ‘I’m coming to one. My family’s quite poor.’

  ‘How poor?’

  ‘We rent.’

  ‘That’s your best secret?’

  ‘It’s one secret—one I normally work to keep when home. The area we live in doesn’t really know what to do with poor people. It’s easier to let them think we’re rich. Or well-off, anyway.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘I don’t have a degree. I had a uni offer after school, a pretty good one, but came here instead. A guy told me where to buy a fake diploma, how to get a Japanese visa with it.’

  ‘You look scared they’ll still catch you.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You’ve never done anything like that before?’

  ‘No.’

  She smiled. ‘See how easy it is. It’s an illusion, all these rules. We can do whatever we want. We just have to dare.’

  ‘I had no choice. I had to get over here, get away.’

  Mami appeared not to hear this, or not to want to. She said nothing until we reached the water’s edge and, since I did not want to babble, I too remained silent. It was a relief to see her open her mouth.

  ‘Once, they were setting up cannons here to shoot at your type, at Admiral Perry and his “black ships”. Now there’s a rule against taking pot shots at whites in the bay, and they’ve taken the cannons away. Whenever our views change, our rules change too, but we forget that bit; we forget we changed the rules and go on believing they’re intrinsic, that they’re unquestionable.’

  ‘You want to shoot cannons into the bay?’ I asked jokingly.

  ‘Of course not. That’s not my point. Listen, if you need a piece of paper, find it, steal it, have it made, but live your life and forget rules, because in fifty years there’ll be a new rule—Subsection L or something—saying it’s all right to come to Japan withou
t that piece of paper, but you’ll be too old.’

  ‘So I did the right thing,’ I said, not asking but surmising.

  ‘You’re here. That’s what you wanted.’

  The sun set slowly. A vivid pink appeared out on the horizon and lights clicked on, first aboard the boats in the bay, then on both shores. As it grew dark whole ships were reduced to pinpricks of light bobbing amidst a vast, empty blackness. Only the Rainbow Bridge gave any sense of distance, long and bright in the watery void lying between our pier and inner city Tokyo. We stood staring. I had earlier given Mami my denim jacket and was now beginning to feel the cold. I wanted to move on. I wrapped my arms around my chest and thought about the girl beside me—her delicate, feathery neck and perfect chin. But the cold still bit through.

  ‘You get cold so easily,’ Mami said, noticing me shiver and adding, almost proudly, ‘not like me.’

  ‘Then can I have my denim jacket back?’

  ‘No.’

  Queuing for the ferris wheel, I resorted to jumping on the spot—partly to keep warm, partly to hide my nerves.

  ‘Why do people do this?’ I asked. ‘Queue to go up like this?’

  Mami shot me a look. ‘Because it’s fun.’

  The line moved another two steps forward. I wanted to turn and let couples pass so that we could keep our distance from the thing. But Mami had me by the wrist.

  ‘How’s it fun?’ I asked.

  ‘It just is.’

  When I looked at the wheel, I had to look straight through it and on towards the sky. Focusing on the enclosed cabins swaying softly in the night only made me want to bend double. There was a relentlessness in the way they climbed, neither fast nor slow. The apex terrified me.

  ‘Can we not go on it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s fun.’

  ‘Can we not, please?’

  ‘You’re just scared.’

  From this point the queue took fifty-four minutes. I timed it to take my mind off the so-called ride. We followed the patrons in front of us—a young anxious boy and a bored, beautiful girl—through makeshift lanes, up stairs and into the mechanical bowels of the machine. Attendants waved us forward, all perfectly relaxed. We waited for our cabin to be vacated by a trendy couple still absorbed in conversation. Then I let Mami climb in, and the instant she was seated she started talking.