Tuvalu

by Andrew O'Connor

  ‘From the war?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh no, don’t be.’ She waved me off. ‘He didn’t bother to come back. After it ended, he plain forgot. He was alive, they saw him, but he stayed away.’ She nodded towards the Imperial Palace. ‘Maybe he didn’t believe the Emperor had surrendered. I was a translator then. English mostly—some German. I waited but he didn’t come back. That’s a straggler. You’ve never heard the term?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You do know there was a war though, which is something.’

  I smiled.

  ‘It’s so nice to speak English with someone who understands,’ Mrs Onoda repeated. A butterfly swooped in low, busily sewing an unseen quilt.

  ‘I’m on my walk,’ she said. ‘I am in a home. They think I’ve lost my marbles.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because I don’t speak Japanese to them, only English or German.’

  ‘Can you speak Japanese?’

  ‘Of course. It’s my language. My parents were Japanese. They were ambassadors before the war.’

  ‘Then why don’t you use Japanese?’

  ‘It’s bad luck. Worse than bad luck. If I use Japanese people in the home die.’ She paused. ‘You don’t believe that. I can see you don’t. But they do. I spoke to Mr Miyake last Monday. On Tuesday they found him dead in his bed, cold as a rock. It’s not the first time that’s happened.’

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘ “Pass me the pepper.” I was so tired of gesturing.’

  ‘I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘He choked on a carrot.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re quick to say that.’

  I again smiled and decided to ask a question that had been bothering me. ‘So why do you have the photograph?’

  ‘Fresh air is the only excuse I have. Now and then I like to get it out.’

  ‘So the air’s for the photograph?’

  ‘Don’t look so sceptical. You’re much too young to know everything.’

  ‘I wasn’t saying you—’

  ‘Also, he likes the palace. He was from here, from Tokyo. I met him on the other side.’

  ‘The other side?’

  ‘Of the palace. What else would I be talking about?’

  The butterfly finished its stitching and began a long, indecisive arc which took it up over the moat. Mrs Onoda, watching it, said, ‘A butterfly in this cold!’

  ‘Is it late for butterflies?’

  She shrugged. ‘Animals …’ she said. ‘You know, there are problems with the fish in these moats. I read about it in my newspaper, the English one they bring me. Have you ever heard of the bluegill?’ She proceeded to curl a blade of grass around her leathery index finger, then sharply uprooted it.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s an American fish. They breed well and eat anything. They’re taking over the moats and a host of Japanese experts are trying to fish them out. The Emperor studies gobies, you see. Do you by any chance know what a goby is?’ But Mrs Onoda did not wait for me to answer. ‘It’s a Japanese fish. It lives at the bottom of the moat in the mud. The thing is, the American bluegill eats the Japanese goby.’

  ‘Eats?’

  ‘Devours. It’s a problem. They have to empty the moats. Nets are no good. Japanese fish experts have to pull the black ships out. It’s a joi campaign.’

  Mrs Onoda grinned at my confusion. ‘But there’s a secret,’ she said. ‘It was in my newspaper.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The Emperor, he put them there.’

  ‘The Emperor put—?’

  ‘—the bluegill in the moats. That’s right. They were a present.’ She dropped her voice and glanced about. ‘Because he liked fish—he studied them, even wrote books about them.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘They came from some American politician. My, could they breed. And eat. Now they put them in dry plastic bags, let them flap themselves to death.’ With all this said, Mrs Onoda took a breath and puffed up her wan, wrinkled cheeks like a blowfish. I waited for her to release the air, but she did not. Three seconds became five, then ten.

  ‘No, no, please don’t,’ I said. ‘No, Mrs Onoda, please breathe.’ I was about to call for help when I felt someone tap my shoulder. Looking up and shielding my eyes from the sun, I saw a panic-stricken woman in her early sixties standing with two policemen, both of whom talked to me in Japanese while Mrs Onoda ignored us all and blithely went on holding her breath. The woman hurried around behind Mrs Onoda (who I guessed to be her mother) and expertly depressed both cheeks with two loving but firm palms. The old woman exhaled and began to chuckle. She spoke to the four of us in English and the three above stared down uncomprehendingly.

  ‘There are other foreign fish, too. Lucky those Japanese gobies like hiding in the mud.’

  The two policemen, following the orders of Mrs Onoda’s daughter, picked up the old woman as if she were a priceless artefact and led her towards a parked police car. Blue and red lights swirled silently, beams lost in the afternoon sun.

  ‘Goodbye, bluegill,’ she called out to me as they lowered her into the back seat and shut the door with a thud. ‘Beware of plastic bags.’

  Mrs Onoda’s daughter collected her father’s portrait and smiled somewhat feebly. ‘Goodbye,’ she said in heavily accented English. Then, swapping into Japanese, ‘Really, thank you. She’s my mother. She escaped again. She likes to walk.’

  After they left, my headache, which I had momentarily forgotten, only worsened. Perhaps a plan was already circling in my head but I had not yet identified even the need for one. I had not thought one step ahead of finding Mami, whose letter I had bravely come to look upon as proof she loved me. I did not allow myself to question this assumption, flimsy though it was. Without it, I was lost.

  Returning to Niigata, I began teaching English two hours a day. The rest of my time I spent reading. Though I did not care to admit it, like Phillip I was waiting for the cursed plants to grow. Outside the temperature continued to fall. Every night it was below zero and Phillip compensated with bar heaters and the aircon, which could be used to both heat and cool the room depending on fluctuations. I came and went without Phillip showing the slightest interest. He lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, bong to one side.

  As we moved into December, Phillip, satisfied with the height of the plants, hacked them down and strung them from the ceiling in tightly spaced rows. It became an eerie room to move through once he had cleared away the fertiliser bags, wooden frames and plastic pots—a sort of upside-down forest. Some four days later he set about removing the leaves. I watched him work but did not offer help. Then, once the leaves were off, he cut the buds free, trimmed them and laid them out on cardboard. They filled the floor, a carpet of buttons, and while they slowly dried he hauled woody waste high up into the hills to bury. Both jobs took about a week, after which he returned home with brown paper bags and blue plastic containers. He dropped roughly three inches of buds into each paper bag and once again left them to dry, the bags in neat rows like a miniature graveyard.

  Yet another week of waiting crawled by, in which I taught English in cafés or set out for the hills. I became familiar with the hiking trails behind our house, sometimes walking all day up over peaks from which it was possible to see not just our town but four or five more depending on the weather. The silence of these forested hills appealed to me. There was never much wildlife but I had the impression a host of animals were following me from afar, curious to see where I was headed but too shy to show themselves plainly. In the canopy above, birds raised their usual alarms, and below, my damp sneakers squished and snapped long-dead autumn foliage.

  On one such walk I came across an abandoned single-gear bike, the type popular throughout all Asia. It was not uncommon to find such junk dumped in these hills by people unable to afford to dispose of their belongings legitimately, and I thought nothing o
f hopping on it. Remarkably, the thin wheels still had air and I was able to get it moving. It wobbled at first but as I picked up speed it became steadier, and I avoided branches and one or two rocks embedded in the path without difficulty. The simple, rusted metal frame transferred every bump directly into my lower back.

  I was contemplating tossing the thing aside when I noticed two cats up ahead. One darted into the foliage but the other started running, keeping to the path and occasionally checking back to make sure I was not gaining. I pedalled furiously, enjoying watching it bounce along, and I must have chased it half a kilometre before it tired of me and vanished. By the time I tossed the bike into the trees I was bent double, gasping for air.

  ‘What if my Tuvalu isn’t a place?’ I asked the ground, voicing a thought which had been in my head all along. I conjured cannons, Admiral Perry’s black ships, my ‘diploma’ and Mami’s happy words to me. ‘It’s an illusion, all these rules. We can do whatever we want.’

  I stood straight and stared through the endless bare trunks, unconvinced.

  From the bags, Phillip transferred the buds into the plastic containers, packing the dope in tightly and stacking it into the freezer. Two days after doing this, however, he found a fine sweat inside the containers and had to unpack everything. The miniature graveyard reappeared and remained a fixture until he was finally satisfied the buds were perfectly dry. My resolve weakened. Wanting the job done with I helped stack everything into the containers once again. We waited six days for the sweat to reappear and, when it did not, we toasted our success with imported beer. It was by this time five days till my birthday and seven till Christmas. I could feel an unseen, airless plastic bag closing in on the two of us.

  This growing sense of doom was reinforced by an unexpected visitor. Phillip had gone to the nearby Lawson’s convenience store to buy food when the front door buzzer sounded. I assumed that it was him, that he had forgotten his keys. With the grass in the freezer again, I did not bother to identify him. I simply opened the door.

  I was confronted by an inordinately tall, thin man in overalls with a clipboard. He smiled and, holding his name badge at an angle for me to read, said something longwinded which I did not fully understand. I had him speak slowly and discovered that he worked for a power company—our power company—and that he had come to cut the power. It seemed we had not paid our bill.

  ‘I didn’t know we had a bill yet,’ I told him, quite sure nothing had arrived. Though it was nearly impossible to know which mail was junk and which required urgent payment, I had been careful to check everything, hoping to avoid exactly this situation.

  The man asked to come in. I stood back and he entered the kitchen, looking around, Thankfully, the doors to the other rooms were closed.

  ‘No, it wasn’t sent here,’ he said, running a finger over the clipboard.

  ‘Where was it sent?’

  The man handed me his copy of the bill and began to sniff—not big sniffs, but secret sniffs he did not want me to notice. I ignored him. Running my eyes over the bill I at once found the Japanese characters I was looking for. A surge of excitement ran through me.

  ‘Can I keep this?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. And you can use it to pay.’

  ‘What does this say? This bit?’

  He leant in, squinting slightly. ‘Where?’

  ‘Here.’ I pointed.

  ‘Kaketa.’

  ‘And this, beside it?’

  ‘Mami.’

  ‘And all this?’

  ‘An address in Hakodate.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I paid him with the money I had been saving from my work teaching English, then led him outside. He got in his car, and as he drove away an absurd plan took shape inside my head, one I scarcely credited possible until it occurred to me that there was no other.

  As a first move I asked if I could be the one to transport the grass to Tinkerbelle’s Treat. Phillip, taking a long drag on his cigarette and trapping the smoke deep in his lungs, eyed me suspiciously.

  We were walking down what was obviously once the town’s main street, past closed roller doors and the sort of fashion shops that pop up in small towns all over the world —cheap, shapeless garments and sun-worn posters in the front window featuring models who could well have aged ten years since the shoot. Through the smell of Phillip’s cigarette, I occasionally noticed the stench of human shit from the street’s main drain. Barbers with twirling white, blue and red poles out front and yet more faded posters in their windows sat inside waiting for customers. Everywhere beneath the dull afternoon sun there was lethargy and silence.

  ‘That’s a turnaround,’ Phillip said at last, after taking his time to figure out my possible motives.

  ‘I want to earn my cut.’

  At this he smiled. ‘And just what sort of cut would that be?’

  ‘I was thinking half.’

  ‘You were? Well, Tuttle, that’s a hell of lot more than I was ever planning to give you.’

  ‘I know. But you need someone to cart it, right? You don’t want to do it yourself, not if you’re staying in Japan.’

  ‘And you’re not?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where do you think you’ll go?’

  ‘Home—uni.’

  Phillip laughed. ‘Drug money spent on an education.’

  ‘I’m going straight.’

  Phillip’s caginess was all show. For days he had been watching, wondering how to get me to courier. Dropping his half-smoked cigarette into the open drain he pretended to be in two minds.

  ‘Shit, Tuttle, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’d have to ask Harry.’

  ‘Tell him I want to make myself useful.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just tell him that and he’ll understand.’

  ‘Is there something I don’t know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There is. I can smell it.’

  ‘Smell whatever you want.’

  ‘Why should I trust you?’ Phillip asked, surprising me.

  ‘Because we’re in this together.’

  ‘The fuck we are. I grew it, Tuttle. People think it’s easy but it’s not.’

  ‘True. But from a legal rather than a horticultural perspective,’ I said patiently, ‘it’ll appear I helped. We were living together the whole time. I can hardly claim I didn’t notice it.’

  ‘Good point. Okay. Consider it a goodbye present.’

  ‘Thank you. When will I move it?’

  ‘This coming Monday, in the arvo. Don’t fuck up.’

  I took leave of him, pretending I wanted to shop, and rang STA Travel from a payphone, feeling a rush of excitement when the operator listed the various flights to my destination.

  Next I drafted a letter and carefully copied the Japanese characters from the power bill onto the front of the envelope, praying it would somehow reach Mami in Hakodate. I wrote that her apology had been appreciated, that I had come into some money and was planning to depart for an undisclosed location, where I intended to relax for a few months before looking for work—something part time. I concluded all this with a heartfelt apology for being vague and assured her that I was perfectly serious, encouraging her in one last crazy act to disregard her bail and flee the country. This was a calculated proposal. Unless my offer was absolutely irrational I had little faith Mami would give it more than a moment’s thought.

  As a P.S. I added the most important detail of all—a meeting point. For this I chose a Japanese-style hotel near the airport, one I had found on the internet that did not look too cheap or too expensive. I booked a single room for Monday and Tuesday, paying with an old credit card which still had a few hundred Australian dollars attached to it. The payment went through without difficulty.

  Monday, as it happened, was the day before my birthday. Around midmorning Phillip removed the plastic containers from the freezer and packed them into a specially purchased backpack.

  ‘Time to go,’ he said.

  ‘Time to go.�
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  I picked up the backpack and let myself out. It was heavier than I had anticipated and I thought about turning back, reneging on my plan—I no longer had the nerve for it. But the thought of Mami kept me moving. On the bus down to Tokyo I stowed the pack in the underneath compartment and enjoyed knowing I could walk away from it if discovered, deny any knowledge. Once we arrived at Tokyo Station, however, I had to claim it and heft it up again.

  The commuter train to Shinjuku was half empty. I sat opposite a mother in a cheap suit and a girl of four or five in a pink dress. Aside from the dress everything the girl wore was a bright white: the hair bands wrapped around her near vertical pigtails, her collar, cuffs, stockings and shoes. She stared up at me unselfconsciously with two large brown eyes. Her chubby face and downcast but not unhappy mouth made me want to smile, but I instead clutched at my backpack and averted my gaze.

  It suddenly began to rain. The millions of drops seemed to move almost horizontally. We were above a road and I peered through the water-streaked window down into a crowded street, where I caught the eye of a man smoking before he was gone again, before it was all gone again, replaced by city windows. Down the carriage an attractive, svelte woman with long, reddish hair typed a short message into her mobile phone and smiled at the reply, and a young businessman of perhaps twenty dropped his head and tried to nap. The backpack, even resting between my legs, sat heavily. No one paid me much notice. Certainly not the girl asleep beside me—one cheek scrunched against the rail at the end of the bench seat, yellow cashmere scarf threatening to suffocate her. She twice changed position and dozed on my shoulder as if she had known me all her life. I stared up at the colourful ads for magazines hanging from the carriage ceiling. Unable to read even a word my eyes jumped from one portrait photograph to the next while I thought about jail.

  Intent to Sell

  Shinjuku Station is the perfect place for an amateur drug deal. Millions of people travel through it and exchange packages every day, and I was not surprised Harry chose it. I was surprised, however, to be giving the drugs to a perfect stranger. Harry had described the man to Phillip who, in turn, had described him to me. The man would wear dark pants, a light-blue shirt and a leather jacket. He would have short, spiky hair and be carrying an English newspaper. He would be shopping for a tie at one of the tables set up outside the men’s toilets, and would enter to urinate upon seeing me. I was to follow him in and stand at the urinal immediately to his right.