Tuvalu

by Andrew O'Connor

  ‘You didn’t make friends at work?’

  ‘There was never time. People came in, taught and left—just like me. I tried to make friends with a few different Japanese people, but it wasn’t easy. I never got far beyond simple pleasantries. It felt like an invisible screen dropped down, like I was being watched or studied or something.’

  Tilly nodded. ‘And the dream?’

  I realised then what a change the hostel had made. It had dropped me back into society. There was no longer any way to escape people. I squeezed past them in narrow corridors, heard them laughing, shouting, crying—peeing even. I cooked with them, waited for them to finish with the phone, removed their sodden laundry from the unbalanced washing machine and hurried my meals down beside them. ‘The dream vanished the moment I came here.’

  We had walked a small loop and were now coming up on the hostel again. Stray, lazy, hungry cats of all shapes, sizes and colours milled about the entrance hoping to get inside. One—a proud, white thing with a brown face and tail—put its nose to a car bumper. When someone shut the car door it jolted, ran a few metres, then quickly recovered its composure. It looked around threateningly, as if to make sure none of the other cats had noticed its panic, before sauntering off.

  There was a sliver of momentary silence, then came a truck slowing for lights and an advertisement broadcast from a passing ramen noodle cart. It occurred to me that Tilly had said little about herself. It was the first hint I would have of her inherent secrecy, her tendency to hide behind a battery of questions.

  ‘So, what about you?’ I asked. ‘How did you come to be here?’

  Tilly smiled and pointed to a kitten, a tiny ginger thing. ‘That one’s my favourite,’ she said, ‘the skinny quiet one with the sad but shiny eyes.’

  Vertigo

  Noah, You must be loving having the room to yourself for a while. I’m enjoying home more than expected, though Dad is ill. I don’t know what it is exactly, but he’s quite frail so I’m going to stay here another month. The farm’s looking good. It’s summer here, of course, so it’s dry (which means we’ll probably have to harvest soon). When I first got back two weeks ago, Tokyo seemed close. Now the details come slowly. All I can picture with any real clarity is you in our ratty little room. I hope you know how much I enjoy sharing that room with you, even if we fight.

  Love,

  Tilly

  P.S. Don’t repeat the mistakes of last year—there’s insect spray on top of the wardrobe.

  I folded up the printout and turned to Phillip. He sat on the edge of my desk, tall, lean and bored.

  ‘So?’ he asked, rubbing at the long, heavily matted hair he had again let turn dirt-brown between photoshoots. He gently set down a large, balsa-wood glider. He had been painting this while I read the e-mail. Everything smelt of chemicals.

  ‘So …’ I started, sliding the printout into my pocket. ‘Don’t you see?’

  Phillip stood, stretched lazily, then flopped back down onto my bed. For a moment he appeared frozen. The ceiling light in my room had blown and we were both making do with the limited blue light of a small second-hand TV.

  ‘I can’t paint in this fucking light,’ he said, sitting up again and nodding at the glider.

  ‘Do you see?’

  ‘See what, Tuttle?’ he asked, irritated and unable to stay still. He dropped his paintbrush into a clear sandwich bag and sealed it with a sigh. Then from a pocket he plucked a can of beer.

  ‘For me?’ I asked.

  ‘You don’t drink.’

  ‘I do sometimes.’

  ‘And it gets you in trouble or makes you sick,’ he said. ‘What’s this all about, anyway? Talk.’

  ‘She’s serious,’ I said, feeling foolish.

  ‘That’s why you said no to ice-cream with Mami? Because of Tilly?’ Phillip shook his head and affected an expression of dismay. ‘Scared of heights and girls, huh? I still can’t believe you did that, Tuttle.’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Said goodbye to this Mami girl.’

  ‘Things are serious with Tilly, I guess.’

  ‘You guess? Things are what you decide they are.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning just that.’ Phillip opened his beer. The can hissed white, froth rolling down the back of one hand. He licked it up carelessly. A year earlier, when I first met him, this clumsy clean-up might have surprised me. Phillip’s looks and sinewy, sculpted body advertised a certain dexterity, intellect and panache which did not tally at all with reality. He was a complete klutz, a man with only rudimentary control of his body. And he was a nerd, too. The glider on the floor was testament to this. Given wood, glue and a desk he could go days without eating, manically cutting and pasting. The problem was Phillip hated all this about himself. He preferred to live up to people’s first impressions wherever possible and masked what he lacked in coordination and intellect behind a confident, often callous air.

  ‘You look like shit,’ he said.

  ‘I’m tired. The boys in my primary school are trying to stick their grubby pointer fingers up my arse again. They do it whenever I turn around.’

  ‘Why the …?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  Phillip took a long slurp of beer. For a moment, nothing more was said until anxiety forced my hand.

  ‘So what should I do?’

  He shrugged. ‘All I know is,’ he said, ‘it should’ve been me this Mami girl came to, not you. She’s obviously just looking for a ride. But you’re no good for that. You’re too damn serious. That’s your problem. You didn’t even bed her.’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘There was the other, though.’ I gestured as if shaking dice in my half-open hand.

  Phillip forced a superior laugh. ‘A little hand job? Tuttle, Tuttle, Tuttle. Anyone’d think you have two families the way you’re going on—one in Tokyo and one up in the hills. Sure, that’s a nice enough e-mail from Tilly, but you’ve got to make up your own mind.’

  I felt anger surge in my upper chest. I was a year his senior but nineteen-year-old Phillip had fallen into his comfortable routine: condescension carried in brusque, brutal advice.

  ‘First of all, I don’t know when it became serious with Tilly. I always thought the two of you were lonely and screwed each other to keep out the cold. But forget her for a minute. What’s up with this Mami bird? You must like her. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be so twitchy.’

  ‘I’ve told you the whole story, more or less. She hit on me in a bar.’

  Phillip raised a single, dubious eyebrow. ‘So you’re sticking to that?’

  ‘I was drunk and—’

  ‘—she took you to her place.’

  ‘Yeah. We talked about furniture and fashion and … I don’t know … stuff. It was good—relaxed.’

  ‘You’ve told me all that.’

  ‘Then she started undressing. Not seductively, but like we’d been living together for years. She didn’t hide a thing. I didn’t want to look. Well, I did. But I didn’t feel I could. I thought that would be … I don’t know, perverted. I just kept on talking about furniture.’

  ‘I thought you said she lived in a hotel. What was so exciting about her furniture?’

  ‘She does, but it’s nothing like a hotel room. It’s more like a private apartment near the top of a hotel.’

  ‘Which part of Tokyo?’

  ‘Near Tokyo Station.’

  Phillip whistled. ‘Money.’

  ‘Money. The hotel’s five star. Anyway, she must have been frustrated with me talking because she looked across and said, “I want to help you get off ”.’

  ‘And you said?’

  ‘I said no. It felt wrong.’

  Phillip stood and paced my room. He seemed weary, as though he had been explaining quantum physics to a child. When he flopped back down on the bed, all the air in his chest rushed from his mouth in a single, uncontrolled exodus. ‘Keep going,’ he said, withou
t forcing any real strength into his voice.

  ‘When I didn’t do anything, she asked if I was gay.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just say yes? The perfect out.’

  ‘It didn’t occur to me.’

  ‘You didn’t think to tell her about Tilly? That would have done it.’

  ‘That seemed wrong too. Here I was saying all this drunken stuff: “Yeah, I’ll come up. You’re beautiful.” I couldn’t suddenly say, “Actually no, now you’ve got me in your hand, I just remembered, there’s someone else”. And anyway, I don’t think she cares about Tilly.’

  ‘Tuttle, you really are a curious fuck, you know. I can’t get a fix on you. I’ve never seen you do a thing since moving in here. You’re the most bone lazy, antisocial, aimless guy I know. You never go out, you never plan anything. Then just once you do go out, and suddenly you’re with this girl who’s amazing and you want to ditch her? The poor girl. You know what I think—you were fine until you thought about Tilly. You can’t ever fucking think for yourself.’ Saying this, Phillip’s voice lost its amused tone. He became almost aggressive.

  ‘Can we drop it?’ I asked.

  ‘Have some fun. Go visit this Mami girl.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does she know where you live?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He beamed. ‘Perfect.’

  ‘That’s why I went out with her the second time. She came here. And now she has my denim jacket.’

  ‘She’ll come again.’ Phillip tapped the brow of his painfully handsome head. ‘I know women. They’re different to us—or to me anyway.’

  I was suddenly tired of his arrogance. ‘You know how to bed women,’ I said. ‘Beyond that you know fuck all.’

  Phillip stiffened and stretched out on my bed.

  I rubbed my face and eyes.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘that came out wrong.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’ He stared straight up at the ceiling, jaw tensing. It was a wonderfully strong, stubbly jaw, the sort of jaw that propped up whole lines of cologne; I wanted to take back my apology.

  I sat listening to a strange banging through the wall and began to wonder just how many women Phillip had brought back to the hostel. Countless. So many I doubted even he knew. Most of them he did not share a language with. And, while I might have envied him the sex, I liked to think I pitied Phillip, this boy who lived in a dive so he could knob it with the crème de la crème of Tokyo. He spent whole pay packets on single evenings and no one could argue his life was dull. At least not until he came crashing back down to earth, to trashy Nakamura’s, to spend weeks making model planes. The model who made model planes.

  Also, I had seen Phillip fall madly in love twice before, and it was these two frenzied, unexpected eruptions—first of passion, then of fragility—that cemented my pity and enabled me to see past his fierce, all eclipsing arrogance.

  The first girl had been a Russian hostess, the second a flight attendant. Although the first worked in a bar, letting men hit on her for a fee, and the second served food and drinks on domestic JAL flights, they were in essence the same girl. They were sharp-witted, domineering types, and neither was in the least awed by Phillip’s arresting beauty. He had gobbled up both greedily like a long-starved trout going for a lure, only to be cast back into the murky depths of bachelorhood. After each unhooking he moped at my doorway, doleful and lonely.

  Now, he appeared to be brooding, his brilliant blue eyes unblinking. Even his breathing was subdued as I pressed on in vain, trying to salvage our conversation.

  ‘I don’t know how she found me here, but somehow she did. I must have mentioned the place in the bar that first night, before I knew she was interested.’

  Phillip sat up and winced. Six abdominal muscles flexed beneath his T-shirt and I realised he had been doing one of his controlled holds—engaging in what he liked to call ‘incidental exercise’.

  ‘That one hurt,’ he said.

  ‘You want to know why I went out with her the second time? Because she turned up—there it is.’

  ‘There it is. Nothing to do with being in love.’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Well, I find that very convenient, Tuttle.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you won’t mind if I go after her.’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m not introducing you.’

  He drained the last of his beer and crushed the can on the carpet, giving out a cocksure laugh. ‘You should. I’ll solve all your problems.’

  Two days after our conversation he brought the glider to my room for a final inspection. It was a beautiful enough plane. The wings were at least two metres wide and curved at the ends. The paint had been applied with care, being both uniform and striking. And there was a cockpit with two pilots inside.

  ‘Let’s take it out,’ he said.

  ‘It’ll be dark in an hour.’

  ‘I know. I’ve been working to get it ready.’

  We walked for fifteen minutes, the glider in hand, occasionally throwing it out ahead of us. Soon it was dusk. The sky above remained relatively bright but the roads were increasingly dim. We talked only in short bursts and never about anything more controversial than the glider’s tendency to drift left or right. Eventually we came to a towering freeway. It must have had eight lanes, though we could only see the rain-stained, shuddering concrete underbelly. We made our way to the nearest pair of pylons, standing in the void they created.

  ‘Here’s okay,’ Phillip said, pulling out his lighter.

  ‘How much did you put in it?’

  ‘Enough to do the job.’ He sparked flame and held it to the wick in the plane’s tail. I wondered why Phillip had given it wheels. We were launching it by hand and it would never land, but I said nothing and stood quietly, admiring the glider and listening to the cars and trucks overhead.

  ‘The fireworks were easy to pull apart,’ Phillip said.

  The wick caught. I stepped back. ‘Just throw it, will you, in case you’re not quite the munitions expert you think.’

  Phillip hoisted the plane above his head and pointed it between the sets of pylons. He flung the glider, aiming it to the left. At first it looked like it would shoot out from under the freeway towards a parallel sunken road.

  ‘Shit,’ I said.

  ‘Wait.’

  Then, sure enough, the glider altered its path mid-flight, curving back towards the right.

  ‘One of my best,’ Phillip said, a second before the craft disintegrated. A sharp retort reached us, more a ping than a bang, the sound bouncing off pavement. Balsa and other debris rained lightly from a cloud of smoke, spiralling down onto drab, weed-littered concrete.

  ‘Now,’ said Phillip, dusting off his hands, ‘are you going to introduce me to this girl or not?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that.’

  Phillip sat beside me at a bar deep in the foreigner-infested Roppongi. He smelt faintly of glue and was oblivious to the lusty looks coming from just about everyone, bar staff included. Despite fitting the stereotype of a boozing gaijin, I felt exposed and out of place. I wanted nothing more than to leave.

  ‘Exactly what time did she say she’d be here?’ he asked.

  ‘Eight.’

  ‘Eight? She’s late.’

  Phillip called to a barmaid. Already staring at him she fumbled and almost dropped a wineglass.

  ‘Two more beers,’ he said.

  I thought again about leaving. Matchmaking had been a stupid idea from the outset. I would probably get my denim jacket back, but I was beginning to think I deserved to lose it. My only motivation to stay was preventing Mami from appearing at my door whenever the urge so struck her.

  Six people were working the bar, an impressive set-up. There had to be at least a hundred different bottles of spirits on three long glass shelves. Each was a different colour. Some were blood-red, some fluorescent-green, one a swirling, smoky-grey like the outer edges of Mami’s irises. The music was jazz a
nd, jiggling my knee, I swivelled. There were fifteen tables in the place, all well spaced. I counted them, then counted them again to pass time. A small area had been kept clear, possibly for dancing, though no-one was making use of it. Instead, the mood was intimate. People’s conversations were hushed, the dim lighting suggestive of sex and sophistication.

  ‘She really is late,’ said Phillip, a little amazed.

  Two beautiful women arrived at the bar for drinks. They both glanced at Phillip.

  ‘Got a light?’ the taller of the two asked him.

  ‘No.’ He focused on me. ‘Where is she, Tuttle?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Waiting for someone?’ asked the shorter of the two women, who was still all of six foot. She had a slight Slavic accent and, like her friend, a model’s sharp, sensual features.

  ‘Yeah,’ answered Phillip distractedly. He tapped a finger on the bar. The girls waited for him to say more but he had no interest in either. I tried to match his indifference but could not. I kept glancing furtively at both. They must have been in their early twenties, though one was slightly older than the other. Each possessed a unique, abstract beauty which provoked in me, if I let it, a surge of fear—fear that flowed into despair. I wanted to initiate conversation but the words felt heavy and ominous, like a plane before that first skyward lift.

  ‘I’ve never known girls to be late,’ Phillip said, taking a cigarette from the shorter girl’s packet without asking. He gave only the slightest hint of a nod, as if certain she would not object. ‘Normally they’re so punctual.’

  ‘Need a light?’ asked the taller girl without sarcasm.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Punctual … That’s not quite my experience,’ I said. ‘But then, I expect we date different women.’

  ‘Hope not.’ Phillip again checked the main door. I realised then that something about Mami Kaketa, something in my portrayal of her, had excited him. I had inadvertently set off another of his peculiar infatuations, sent him thrashing after another lure.

  In uncustomary retreat, the models slunk away. Trying to stay calm I bummed a cigarette from the youngest of the Japanese bar staff, a handsome boy with dyed hair. He reluctantly handed over a bent-looking thing which I puffed until a nauseating giddiness set in. I stubbed the cigarette in a perfectly clean ashtray, vaguely sorry to fill it with such filth, then shut my eyes. Phillip nudged me.