Tuvalu

by Andrew O'Connor

  ‘I love this thing. Sometimes when I’m sad I get in alone. They never try to force anyone in with me. I get the whole cabin to myself and spend the loop thinking about reasons not to jump. You’re not the only one who thinks about falling, about dying.’

  ‘Not now, please.’

  ‘But there are always reasons not to jump, so I end up back on the ground, feeling better.’

  ‘Can you not talk, please?’ I ducked my head to enter the box. The attendant locked us in, walking alongside our cabin on a long boarding platform. He checked to make sure the door was secure.

  ‘Enjoy your ride,’ he said in polite, emotionless Japanese, before turning to the cabin behind.

  We were seated on opposite bench seats, knees up high. While I inspected the lock on the door, Mami played aimlessly with her rubber band. It was a miserable lock. Aside from the fact it could not be opened from within, thus preventing an easy suicide, it was wholly inadequate—the sort of catch commonly found on flyscreen doors. But there was no time to complain. In a matter of seconds it was just the two of us trapped in a cabin smaller than a golf cart. Below, the queue swung out and away. People’s features became indistinguishable and the cabin swayed in the night breeze. I tried to sit as still as possible. Mami, however, stretched out on her bench seat, unfazed by the interminable increase in altitude. She seemed to be staring out over the bay. I dared not follow her gaze.

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said, her voice loud in the enclosure. ‘I only ever look out like this if I’m happy.’

  ‘And if you’re not?’

  ‘Then I look out and down,’ she said. ‘But don’t worry, I’m happy.’

  My throat felt tight. There was no air in my chest. I wished Mami would shut up, but she kept on talking about previous trips up and around the wheel.

  ‘Once,’ she said (just as I felt we must be nearing the full 115 metres), ‘once, I rocked a cabin like this the whole way round.’

  ‘Oh-don’t-say-that-now.’

  ‘Like this.’ Mami grinned. First she made only small movements, shifting on her seat. Then she stood up and started to swing the booth backwards and forwards, throwing her weight into it.

  ‘Jesus-fucking-hell-sit. Sit!’

  ‘Relax, will you?’

  ‘Sit!’

  Laughing loudly, Mami increased the momentum of the cabin’s swing until I could anticipate each rise and fall—up, down, levelling out, up again and down, like a ship in heavy seas. She was unrelenting, throwing herself into it. I wanted to vomit.

  ‘The floor’s strong,’ she said. ‘Look!’ She began jumping as if on a trampoline, open palms striking the low roof. Every time she jumped, pulling up her knees, I felt sure she would simply vanish—fall noiselessly to her death.

  ‘And this little lock here—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘—on this door.’

  I was too horrified to stop her. All I could do was watch as she lined up the flimsy door and, still smiling, dropped a shoulder. Without the slightest hesitation she let herself fall, holding her shoulder firmly forward so that it slammed into the top of the door. The cabin shuddered and I screamed. Bile filled the back of my mouth.

  Somehow, miraculously, the thing held. Mami was knocked down onto the floor, laughing hysterically and slapping at her leg. I retched again, the taste of vomit strong.

  ‘Fuck you,’ I managed to say.

  After this excitement the cabin quickly resumed its regular sway, but I spent the journey down worrying it had sustained damage, that it would drop from the wheel. Whenever Mami tried to speak I ordered her to shut up. If she moved, I threatened to punch her.

  Later, finding our way home, I felt a surge of anger I could not articulate. It welled in my chest. Sitting in the Yurikamome train, Mami said nothing. It had finally occurred to her how upset I was. I vaguely regretted having threatened to punch her but she showed no sign of anger. Instead she seemed to have forgotten everything, giving the impression I was being a bore, even a disappointment. Eventually we reached Shinbashi Station, where Mami had to change trains. We walked to her platform. Her train was preparing to depart, doors open. Expressionless commuters stood packed inside like cattle awaiting slaughter, occasionally exchanging positions but mostly moving on the spot. More and more pushed their way in, making space where there was none and opening phones in preparation for the trip.

  ‘Can we buy ice-cream?’ Mami asked. ‘Normally I buy ice-cream after Odaiba. We can both get out of the station again without losing our tickets. I’ll talk to the stationmaster.’

  ‘I need to go home.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ Mami backed into the carriage, the train doors sounding their usual piercing warning. Men found a way to accommodate her, happy to have her body pressed against theirs, and glanced at me as if looking for envy.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said.

  Mami, pulling the feathers from behind her neck and keeping her eyes fixed on mine, seemed sad for the first time. ‘But I’m taking your jacket,’ she said as the doors hissed shut.

  How to Kill

  a Cockroach

  I met my first girlfriend, Tilly, while killing (or trying to kill) a cockroach. Hardly romantic, but with us little was. We were best friends from the outset.

  This took place well over a year after I moved to Japan, towards the end of my second month in Nakamura’s. My room was overrun with cockroaches and I was holding fort with nothing more sophisticated than an old Time magazine. Tilly found me trying to upturn a wardrobe Nakamura-san had prudently nailed to the floor.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she asked, leaning in my open doorway, arms crossed. She was a tallish, pale, bony girl with freckles and vaguely curled red hair which she kept under control with a few strategically placed hairpins. Her green eyes kept me staring at her face long after I had intended to look away.

  ‘What am I doing with what?’ I asked.

  ‘With that wardrobe?’

  ‘There’s a cockroach under it.’

  ‘And you’re going to kill it?’

  ‘With this magazine,’ I said, ‘if I can get a clean swipe at it.’ I pointed beneath my wardrobe and shrugged.

  ‘You’re Australian?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah. You?’

  She nodded. ‘Tilly.’

  ‘Noah.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Noah.’

  I stood and dusted off, but she did not offer to shake hands.

  ‘You’re new?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I live near this room. Can I tell you something about cockroaches? I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it might help.’

  ‘Help would be good.’ I sat heavily on my bed.

  ‘Well,’ Tilly continued, ‘from what I’ve heard, when a cockroach gets scared—which I think we can pretty safely say this one is—it lays eggs. So even if you do find it and kill it, its children’ll soon be running all over the place.’

  ‘What would you have me do?’

  ‘You need chemicals …’ Tilly’s voice tapered off and her eyes wandered across the room, taking it in, the starkness of it. They lingered on the wardrobe.

  ‘What?’ I asked defensively.

  ‘Last night I thought I was going to die. I was lying there and I thought, I’m going to die. Your wardrobe just reminded me.’

  ‘The earthquake?’ I had forgotten this quake. It had been strong enough to rouse me and I had dozed through the aftershocks, dimly aware of my window rattling in its frame.

  Tilly nodded. ‘I have a wardrobe exactly like yours but no bed. So I was lying on the floor on my futon, too scared to move, looking at this wardrobe and trying to decide what it would hit first—me or the opposite wall. It was nailed down. I checked afterwards. But at the time I didn’t know that. So I was wondering all sorts of crazy stuff. Who’ll find me? What will they find? What facial expression will I have?’ She grinned lopsidedly. Her teeth were crooked but beautifully white. I loved this smile right away, just as much later I w
ould love other imperfections in her: the hundreds of brown, almost black moles that coated her thin, milk-white body, or the way she took up new hobbies like great handfuls of sweets, stuffing them into her schedule and spitting them back out half chewed.

  ‘I can’t afford chemicals,’ I said, returning to the original topic, which had never quite left my mind.

  ‘Well, you might as well give up now. I read somewhere that if all the governments of the world pooled their funds they could never hope to eradicate cockroaches. You, with only your magazine, don’t stand a chance.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about cockroaches.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Do you own spray?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Can I use it?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘I want to hit this wardrobe with it.’

  So we went to Tilly’s room, collected her spray, returned and draped a misty chemical plume over my wardrobe. Tilly waved her hand in the air, pleading for me to stop, but I kept my finger down. I did great sweeps of the room like a crop-duster. Swooping, banking, then coming in again.

  ‘C’mon,’ she said. ‘Let’s find something to do until the smell clears.’

  ‘Like what?’

  She dragged me out of the room and into the corridor, which also smelt strongly of bug spray.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Let’s get lunch. Find a nice—’

  ‘I can’t afford nice.’

  ‘Well, from a convenience store then. Surely you can afford that?’

  ‘I guess.’

  We walked to the nearest 7-Eleven, outside of which a young, pretty girl in uniform was emptying the recycling bins. She tried with both hands to hoist a plastic bag full of empty bottles from the biggest bin, her elbows out, then dropped it and let out a soft, displeased grunt. We entered without helping her.

  The store was devoid of customers. The elderly man behind the counter was busy stacking cigarettes. He looked oddly satisfied with his job, as if it suited him perfectly, and greeted us with genuine warmth. We ambled to the section selling box lunches and, while debating what to eat, heard an ambulance arrive. The sirens caught our attention. We stood in front of the porn magazine section staring out the window, watching an ambulance pull up in front of a generic brown building across the road. Two abnormally stocky Japanese men climbed out, each with ‘Fire Brigade’ written on their uniform.

  ‘What are they doing in an ambulance?’ Tilly asked, confused.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  For a moment she was quiet. ‘I don’t like ambulances,’ she said finally.

  I waited but there was no story. We continued to watch, absorbed by the unfolding scene. The two firemen approached a rotund elderly lady. She wrenched up the sleeve of her tracksuit and pointed into the brown building. Words were exchanged. The two men nodded gravely, then unfolded a stretcher and wheeled it inside. The elderly woman remained by the ambulance.

  ‘So,’ Tilly asked, while we waited for something more to happen, ‘why are you so poor?’

  ‘That’s a long story.’

  ‘We have time,’ she said.

  ‘True.’

  ‘Unless it’s private.’

  ‘Not really. My last company hired me in Australia to work here. They helped me get a visa and apartment and all that, but decided not to renew my contract after a year. That was about three months ago. In other words, I was fired.’

  Finally settling on onigiri rice triangles, we moved towards the counter to pay.

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Teaching English.’ We handed over the correct change and I followed Tilly outside. The elderly woman was still waiting by the ambulance for the firemen to return.

  ‘So why didn’t they renew your contract?’

  I leant against a warm brick wall. Winter had seemingly let up overnight; a day earlier it had been possible to determine the point at which my breath began to curl upwards, but now it was invisible. Around us people were wearing T-shirts.

  ‘Who can say? Performance, maybe. I thought the school was a scam.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. Most of the students I only taught once. It was always one on one. A student would arrive, take a seat in my little green booth, perform a rote-learnt self-introduction, then show me what page they were up to in the company text. I never saw them again after that. The company discouraged it. They liked to be able to drop students in on whichever teachers were free. It was like a sweatshop that way, only they made a selling point of it. “Learn from the entire English world.” They charged extra for variety but there was no continuity.’

  ‘How many lessons a day?’

  ‘Me? Twelve, with five minutes off between each.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  We both stared into a clear, blue sky. Despite my initial reluctance I kept talking. ‘Leaving my subsidised apartment wasn’t much fun. I’d become pretty attached to that whole area, even though it was way out in Chiba. I knew where everything was: the supermarket, the convenience store, the chemist, the dry cleaners. I’d memorised them—not the Japanese characters, but cartoons painted on a window or a certain type of door handle. You know how that works. Now I’m lost again.’

  ‘Do you have a new job?’

  ‘Not yet. I’ve launched a sort of employment campaign.’

  The two firemen exited the brown building. They were at either end of the stretcher, which now had an old man lying on it. The section of stretcher beneath his head had been tilted upwards and he stared into the ambulance. He was wearing a transparent ventilation mask and looked sleepy. The elderly woman took his hand, then released it, standing back to let the firemen load him in. She looked calm, like maybe this happened a lot.

  ‘Heart attack?’ I asked.

  Tilly shrugged. ‘They’ll have to say goodbye soon, though. He should just get on and die.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because long goodbyes are awful.’

  We walked back towards the hostel but decided to keep on going; something about the place felt uninviting. Tilly walked fast with her long, white, freckled arms swinging ahead of her.

  ‘You walk with one foot sticking out, you know,’ she said, turning back to watch me.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It looks funny but I like it.’

  I tried to straighten the offending foot but it felt odd. Tilly copied my walk and acquired such a stupidly exaggerated gait I had to laugh. She would not stop mimicking me.

  ‘So,’ she said, shunting herself along, ‘the old hostel must be a change from your apartment?’

  ‘Quit it.’

  ‘Quit what?’ she asked, affecting a look of ignorance.

  ‘You know what.’

  ‘Fine. I can’t do it right anyway.’

  She pulled her foot in, grinning.

  ‘And since you’re interested,’ I said, ‘it’s not that bad.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The hostel.’

  ‘Oh.’ She pointed at my foot. ‘I thought you meant having feet that go different ways.’

  ‘Except for the stray cats—the way they hang round.’

  Tilly frowned. ‘I happen to like the cats.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just like cats, I guess. Any sort. I tried breeding them for a while.’

  ‘Here in Japan?’

  ‘No, back on the farm.’

  ‘You come from a farm?’

  Tilly nodded in a lazy, circular sort of a fashion. I was intending to ask more about this farm, but another question bullied its way in.

  ‘What about the hairless ones?’

  ‘Do I like them? I like them especially. They’re the toughest of all.’

  ‘You’re definitely the first tenant I’ve heard say that.’

  ‘I’ve been here a while,’ Tilly said. ‘Three years teaching English. A lot of people have come and gone, but the cats, hairless or not, have stayed put. Japan can be lonely—the way p
eople just up and vanish. But I’m sure you know that. Were you alone in your last place?’

  ‘Living alone? Yeah.’

  ‘How was that?’

  ‘Good—at first.’

  ‘At first?’

  ‘Yeah, at first there was nobody to tell me what to do. No one to clean up for. Nothing to remember. The place was mine. I could let it rot or clean it every fifteen minutes. Whatever I wanted.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then … I don’t know. I just sort of lost my confidence, I guess.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Too much alone time. It was always just me in this one small room. I found it impossible to meet people. All my neighbours were Japanese and they came and went from jobs. Most said hello but that was as far as it went. If I said anything else they looked at me like I was crazy or going to mug them. They were all shy, afraid. And after a while the outside world began to feel …’ I caught myself, finishing dismissively with, ‘I guess I became the same.’

  ‘The outside world began to feel …?’

  I tilted my head as if in protest, then gave the answer. ‘Menacing.’

  ‘Menacing?’

  ‘You really want to hear this?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Late in the year I started to have nightmares—well, one recurring nightmare. I dreamt that my skin came out in red boils and there’d be yellow pustules in my armpits. I kept waking up, picking at them, scared. I’d think I was ill. I’d wonder where to go for help, what to say, but then they’d vanish. I changed sleeping pills but it didn’t make any difference.’

  ‘What do you take sleeping pills for?’

  ‘Sleeping.’

  ‘You don’t sleep?’

  ‘About four hours a night, but never in a single block. Always an hour here, an hour there.’

  ‘What happened to this dream?’ Tilly asked.

  ‘Shortly before I moved here I decided it was because I was spending all my free time locked inside my apartment. Aside from the odd supermarket run, I never went out. Not for anything. In my defence, there was nothing much to go out for.’