Tuvalu

by Andrew O'Connor

  ‘Someone’s driving. There won’t be a cab fare.’

  ‘I’m not going.’

  Phillip shook his head sadly, handsome chin on his chest. ‘Fine. Stay here, read, toss off and feel sorry for yourself. I’ve tried.’

  He left half an hour later—after splitting a pack of noodles with me—and he must have said something to Tilly because she visited well after dark, timid, like she expected to find the apartment full of rats. I was just out of the shower and wrapped in a towel. She nodded at my stomach, which was full of noodles and flabby from lack of movement.

  ‘You’ve put on some weight.’

  ‘Some. Surprised to see you here.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m feeling a bit better than the last time we talked. Phillip says you don’t get out much.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When did you last go outside?’

  ‘A while back.’

  She put her fists on her hips as though prepared to wait all night for the answer.

  ‘Friday.’

  ‘Four days ago! To do what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said defensively. ‘To see a friend, get some sun. Why does anyone go out? More to the point, why does anyone care when I go out?’

  ‘To see Mami?’ Tilly asked. She rolled her eyes. ‘I know all your other friends, Noah.’

  While I had gained weight Tilly had only lost it. At the farm I would have thought it impossible for her to get thinner, but now she was quite skeletal. I wondered momentarily if she had an eating disorder. Her face looked drained, her eyes tired. There were two pronounced bruises on her left forearm, both reminding me of the one I had seen on her ankle.

  ‘Just how is Mami these days?’ she asked coldly, sitting on the tatami. ‘Such a nice girl.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Not your type but—’

  ‘I’m not seeing her.’

  ‘You mean you’re not screwing her?’

  ‘No.’

  Tilly only smiled. ‘No? No, you don’t mean that? Or no?’

  ‘No, I’m not seeing or screwing her.’

  ‘Just friends then.’

  ‘Do you want me to write it for—?’

  ‘You can’t live here, you know,’ Tilly said, cutting me short and standing. ‘It’s not yours.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I said you could share the room with me until it’s torn down.’

  ‘Yeah, but you wanted me out as well.’

  Tilly flinched. The movement, little more than a blink, was hardly perceptible but I felt certain I had seen it. She ran her hand through her hair, which was still quite short

  ‘When will you move out?’ she asked.

  ‘Of here?’

  ‘Yes here. Where else?’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Then you can’t be helped.’

  At that instant I thought of Celeste. She had not mentioned that after love there was always something. And this was it, the something. It was both a comforting and horrible discovery, two people staring at one another across a room, both realising they might well live without one another, that they might make a chop of it, but that they would always be hopelessly tangled. Even if they never saw one another again.

  At a loss for conversation, Tilly talked about her job, admitting she wanted to give it away.

  ‘Then leave it,’ I said.

  ‘The airfare.’

  ‘I’ll pay it.’

  She laughed. ‘With what?’

  ‘I’m serious,’ I said sadly. ‘I can find the money. Let me pay for it.’

  Her face hardened. ‘Pay for it to get yourself off the hook, you mean?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What then? To keep me on it?’ Tilly stood up and crossed to the front door. ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said. ‘In the meantime, get out of this apartment. It’s got a bad feel to it. You’ll go mad in here.’

  The bang of the door behind her rattled the kitchen walls.

  Within half an hour I was asleep, but it was not the usual sound sleep. I dreamt that one of my teeth had broken in two, that the middle was filled with a sort of tasteless, toothy honeycomb. I kept running my tongue over it, over the sharp-edged, inverted crater, trying to smooth it until I eventually woke, highly agitated. It was well before sun-up. I showered and stood out on the balcony, staring across intoTilly’s room.

  I found the courage to call Mami. I began meeting her on Fridays in a small, out-of-the-way coffee shop in Odaiba. It was the demolition of the hostel that had convinced her to meet me. The moment I mentioned it, she declared she wanted to see it, that I could not under any circumstances let her miss it. I should have known she would be interested in all the dust and destruction, in the misery and tears. It was Kaketa to a tee.

  The demolition started far earlier than anyone anticipated and was a slapdash affair from the first clang of a hammer. The labourers all wore matching tracksuits and talked to one another in mumbles. Not without trepidation I watched them from behind the curtains of Nakamura-san’s apartment. They never seemed to work unless a man with dark glasses and a missing finger visited, and were always smoking and gawking at passing women.

  Something about these labourers was not right. They looked nothing like the government road workers up a nearby street who operated in clearly defined teams with set, whistle-toting leaders. Cheap new signs were put up around the hostel notifying tenants of ‘The First Stage’. These signs did not specify (at least not in English) what the first stage was, only that it would soon be followed by a second and maybe even third stage. Tenants were left to work out for themselves that the so-called first stage was nothing more sophisticated than a stripping of the building for anything of value—planks of wood, slabs of carpet, posts, tiles and even bricks where they could be pulled free.

  The last warm rain of the summer drew me out of hiding. I wandered from street to street without a care and watched it. It came late in the afternoon and steamed on hot, tiled roofs. It muddied dusty gutters—filling them with leaves and other litter—flooded cracks in the older, narrower roads and caused pets to seek shelter. Then it was finished, just like that. What had been a hard, driving, cleansing rain became a dribble and then nothing at all. The summer, one of the worst of my life, was over.

  When I returned to the hostel I saw the rain shower had shooed off most of the workers, whom I thought of as the Deconstructionists since they were tearing the building down in reverse, working from the finishing touches back towards the foundations. The last of them—two men and a sour girl—departed in a souped-up van with black windows, fenders, flashing lights and a stereo thudding deep inside. Watching them flick on a blinker and pull out into the street, I decided to have a look inside the hostel. Though I did not especially want to bump into Phillip or Tilly, or anyone for that matter, curiosity overcame me. What had these Deconstructionists done? I strolled to the front door and stopped dead. The hostel’s innards had been callously excised. It seemed the Deconstructionists, though lethargic-looking, were far more serious about their work than I had guessed.

  I started in cautiously. Almost all of the internal plaster was gone and numerous wires were exposed. Power points were cavities in walls. There were no taps in the two bathrooms. And here and there light-blue plastic tarps had been put down in the corridors to catch a powdery grit.

  The place was dying, no question about it, and unsurprisingly many of its old tenants were gone. They had simply vacated their rooms and left the doors ajar. Without anyone living in these rooms they looked larger and cleaner. I passed Harry’s and saw it was empty except for an old clock.

  Tilly called out from next door and I heard her move.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, appearing at the door. ‘It’s you.’

  ‘Who did you think it was?’

  ‘A worker.’

  ‘A Deconstructionist?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been calling the workers.’

  ‘I see you�
��re still not doing anything, then.’

  Since this was not a question, I did not answer. Tilly, who looked ill again, with big, dark bags beneath her eyes, retreated into the gloomy room. She climbed back into bed. Everything smelt of sleep and there were a number of pill bottles on the table which I guessed to be vitamins. Beside one of these lay a wad of cotton wool. When Tilly saw me eyeing it she again climbed out of bed, put all the bottles in a drawer and shut it sharply.

  ‘Vitamins?’

  ‘Mostly. Cold and flu tablets, too.’

  ‘Can they just slowly force you out like this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Isn’t there anything you can do?’

  ‘Well, I could break into a nearby apartment and set myself up there, I suppose.’

  I ignored the snipe and adopted a stern look. ‘But this work they’re doing is dangerous. Wires, asbestos and stuff.’

  ‘Asbestos and stuff? The only people at risk are these … what did you call them?’

  ‘Deconstructionists.’

  ‘Right. If they were legit, they would have evicted me. But they’re amateurs. I saw one guy hammer his finger out of shape yesterday. He ran off howling. And now, at the first sight of rain, they’ve all packed it in. Not that I’m complaining. It’s the first quiet I’ve had in days.’

  ‘They’re not trying to be quiet?’

  ‘Of course not. They’re gutting the place and they want us out, so they’re doing it as loudly as they can—and as messily.’

  ‘Well, I’ve made my offer, Tilly.’

  ‘You’re serious then?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, miserable at the thought of her leaving. ‘Have you decided?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I’m happy to pay for everything,’ I reiterated.

  ‘I know. But I don’t think I can accept it.’

  ‘They’re tearing everything apart backwards!’

  Tilly glanced up. ‘Like you.’

  Midway through the following morning the apartment doorbell rang. Having asked Phillip, Tilly and Mami to knock seven times when visiting, I froze. Sweat coated my forehead. The sun glared in through the fuzzy kitchen window, beneath which I had been making a sandwich. I put this meal aside and tiptoed to the alcove just inside the door, peered through the peephole and realised, with a new sense of finality, just how well I had trapped myself. Two Japanese men stood in pristine, creaseless uniforms. No matter the angle I could see nothing much more than their heads and upper torsos. They appeared rounded and distant, and there was nothing familiar about their smudged faces. They talked to one another for a moment, apparently in two minds. One kept glancing at his feet, as if maybe he had something there.

  ‘Go away,’ I whispered softly. ‘Go on, fuck off.’

  But they would not. They continued to linger, talking. I watched them intently. What was it that was below my field of vision? Was there a third, unseen party? Nakamurasan maybe? She was short enough—but dead. I had accepted this as fact. When one of the men tried the door handle I panicked, certain I had forgotten to lock it. Stepping backwards onto a shoe, I fell sideways and crashed into the wooden shoe locker. The sound of this clumsy collision came and went as sharply and incongruously as a gunshot.

  Then someone knocked seven times.

  I put my eye to the peephole again, frowning.

  ‘Tuttle, you hermit nut fuck, open the door. I’m in trouble here.’ Phillip’s voice.

  I opened the door, careful to leave the chain on just in case there was a last, remote chance of escape. One of the uniformed men peered in through the gap and I saw a stretcher with a body laid out on it. I could only see the outline of a hand beneath a blanket, but guessed it belonged to Phillip.

  At this, I shut the door, flung off the chain and wrenched it open again. My haste was dictated more by curiosity than concern. Phillip looked glum. Heavy white bandaging covered most of his skull and face. The rest of his body was pinned beneath the blanket which, though he wriggled and winced, he could not loosen.

  ‘What the—’ I said.

  ‘Accident.’ He tried to shrug.

  I helped wheel him in, apologising for the delay and talking in a garbled fashion about a very important phone call, but the ambulance men appeared not to understand English.

  ‘What accident?’ I asked Phillip.

  ‘We almost hit a kid on a bike.’

  ‘Almost? So he’s okay?’

  ‘She.’

  ‘She then. She okay?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘We? Who’s we?’

  ‘Later, Tuttle. Not now.’

  The two ambulance men wheeled Phillip into the living room and peered around—looking, no doubt, for furniture, somewhere to set him down. I gestured to the two blankets I had been using as a bed and they nodded. Their bemused faces turned suspicious.

  ‘You didn’t hit the girl, did you?’ I asked.

  Phillip winced as he was set down on the tatami, a surface hardly softened by blankets. ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘What did you hit?’

  ‘A shop.’

  ‘A shop? Shit.’

  ‘Went straight through a window into something— a steel foundation, I think.’

  ‘So the police’ll be coming?’

  Phillip shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about it, Tuttle.’

  One of the ambulance men glanced at me when I said the word ‘police’, but did not ask questions. Together with his partner they moved towards the door.

  ‘Where’s the pillow?’ Phillip asked.

  ‘There isn’t one. You just had it made it into a bed.’

  One of the men carried a CB radio, which squawked. He ignored it and tried to speak to me in rapid Japanese.

  ‘Yes,’ I kept saying without having understood a word. ‘Yes, yes.’

  The radio squawked again and he cut off sharply, either listening to the CB or realising I could not understand him. He was an intelligent-looking man in his mid-twenties with wire-rimmed reading glasses. I had the impression the ambulance work was service to his community. I did not trust this do-gooder with my secret and wanted to finish Phillip off myself, stab him with my butter knife.

  ‘Insurance,’ the man said in broken, hesitant English, nodding towards Phillip.

  I groaned.

  ‘I don’t have it,’ Phillip said. ‘That’s why I checked myself out.’

  ‘You did what?’ I asked.

  ‘I can’t afford further treatment.’

  ‘Have you had any treatment?’

  ‘No, Tuttle. The fucking bandages are for looks.’

  After the effort of saying all this Phillip lay still in his makeshift bed, staring at the roof. One whole eye was covered in gauze and I worried about the extent of his injuries. The other ambulance man, far thicker-looking with a friendly face and the soft, pleasing aroma of cheap cologne, now handed me a bottle of tablets. The bottle rattled and hearing the sound Phillip held out a hand. I looked down at it, opening and closing, and then to the bottle, but the man who had given me the tablets shook his head.

  ‘Not to two,’ he said, having as much difficulty with English as his co-worker.

  ‘Not to two?’

  ‘Not to do, no. Two.’

  ‘Do what too?’

  ‘One two, every two.’

  They gave me further hopeless instructions and let themselves out.

  ‘Pills!’ Phillip yelled.

  I walked back to the living room and rattled the container loudly.

  ‘Were you driving?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Who was? Who were you with?’

  ‘Forget it, Tuttle.’

  So I returned to the kitchen and sat stacking up loose change that had amassed, sorting it into useless little piles. I could not decide whether to move out. I needed more information. After a few minutes Phillip proved himself predictable.

  ‘Pills!’

  I took three pills through to him and held t
hem just out of reach.

  ‘Fucking give them to me.’

  ‘Tell me everything and I will. You can OD on them for all I care.’

  He waved me off, but his eyes betrayed desperation.

  ‘What happened to your room?’ I asked.

  ‘I moved out a few days ago.’

  ‘You didn’t say goodbye?’

  ‘You hardly ever said hello. Anyway, I was going to. Today maybe.’

  ‘But instead you drove into a building?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘With who? Who else was in the car?’

  Phillip sighed loudly. ‘The couple I went to Guam with. I guess I’ve been seeing a lot of them. They’d taken me in before all this.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She’s hurt. He’s not. The girl on the bike … I don’t know.’

  ‘Were you drunk?’

  ‘And the rest, yeah.’

  ‘The other two?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Who drove? Which one?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘And the police, will they be interested in this?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘They’ll have this address.’

  ‘So don’t answer the door,’ Phillip said irritably.

  For a moment I said nothing, pacing the room. ‘Why the fuck did you come here, Phillip?’

  He tried to roll over, away from me, but it caused too much pain. ‘We’ll hide. It only has to work once,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll run.’

  ‘You’ll run? Like this?’

  ‘I’ll do my best if it means not getting arrested. Now give me the pills and fuck off.’

  I ignored his pathetic attempt to intimidate me. ‘Would they arrest us do you think—for being here?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Phillip said, without giving it much thought.

  ‘Then we should move.’

  ‘To where?’

  I handed him the pills and he chewed and tried to swallow.

  ‘Where?’ he asked again.

  ‘Wherever. Away from here.’ But saying this I thought of Tilly and did not press the point.

  Phillip fell asleep. I crossed over to the hostel to see what assistance I could offer Tilly. Even before I entered I could tell the Deconstructionists had returned. It was the noise and dust. It spilled out into the street from doors and burst from holes in walls. There was the usual clatter associated with destruction. Drills screeched and jammed, hammers thudded and an angle grinder squealed before it was let to chew into metal.