End of the World Blues

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  End of the World Blues

  Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Kit Nouveau didn't escape himself when he flew to Japan. He runs a bar in the Roppongi district of Tokyo and is having an affair with the wife of a High Yakusa ganglord. All things considered being held up at gunpoint isn't a complete shock. The pale girl in the black cloak appearing from nowhere and punching an ivory spike into the man's head on the other hand ...

  Nijie has stolen fifteen million dollars, she's on the run, she's just killed a man and she has a cat who knows more than it should. It's a lot to deal with when you haven't even left school. But Nijie is really Lady Neku. And it is time for her to stop mewling in the darkness. And suddenly, the girl who became Lady Neku understands she's never really been anyone else. And in a sentient castle at the end of world Lady Neku otherwise known as Baroness Nawa-no-ukiyo, Countess High Strange and chatelaine of Schloss Omga realizes that a man called Kit has stolen some of her memories.

  END OF THE WORLD BLUES

  Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  End of the world or not, peonies, azaleas and camellias will still produce beautiful flowers…

  —Hagakure Kikigaki (Way of the Samurai)

  Prologue

  Friday, 22 December

  “That looks heavy.”

  Glancing round, the girl saw a porter in the grey-green uniform of the Tokyo Metro, complete with smart white gloves. He was smiling.

  “No,” she said. “It’s fine.”

  “If you’re sure?”

  “I’m certain,” said Nijie, more firmly than was polite…Kids today, she could see him think. No manners.

  Having wrestled her case into a left-luggage locker at Shinjuku Sanchome, Nijie Kitagawa slammed its steel door and fed 2,000 yen into a slot. She followed this with two 500 yen coins and checked the door was tight.

  The longest she could leave her case was three days. After that, she’d need to change lockers. As Nijie was fifteen and official statistics suggested she should live to the age of eighty-three, this meant she’d need to swap lockers 8,273 times before she died.

  Mind you, official statistics could be wrong.

  Alternatively she could spend its contents. On that basis, the girl could afford to take $100 a day for the rest of her life, minus the $500 she’d already used. Fifteen million dollars was a lot of money to steal, particularly for someone her age.

  It was Friday, the twenty-second of December, the last day of school term. Nijie’s friends would be wondering where she was; she could imagine their conversation.

  She’d left a cup of sake, her videophone, and her high-school identity card at a road-side shrine for luck, before entering the station. As an afterthought, Nijie had swapped her card for five $100 bills, anchoring them with her door keys. So now her card lay in a gutter where it belonged. A girl with brown eyes, her hair in bunches, still smiling as people trod on her.

  The first train was for Ginza, from where it would run the loop to Ikeburuko, giving her twenty-four stations before she needed to change. Getting a corner seat was lucky; the metro was crowded with Christmas shoppers carrying white-painted twigs and plastic snowmen. Nijie sat quietly, working out what to do next. After a while she remembered to keep her knees together.

  Opposite her, a woman with that day’s Asahi Shimbun was tutting to her husband about the Kitagawa killings, while a photograph of a man with swept-back hair stared from its front page. Tony Kitagawa looked better in black and white, certainly a lot better than when Nijie last saw him.

  “I am a cat,” she announced.

  Across the aisle a boy in the blue tunic of a local high school glanced up, only to smile as he recognised her words. “As yet I have no name,” he said, finishing the quote for her.

  Nijie burst into tears.

  When she next looked he was gone. Maybe he was late for school, maybe the start times had changed, or perhaps she’d been on the train longer than she realised. Looking around, Nijie decided it was a different train.

  Station names changed and smartly dressed men got on or off, and when every seat but the one next to her was taken, even that one filled up. Having finished her crying, Nijie sniffed, being far too carefully brought up to blow her nose in public.

  Her old life had gone. She needed a new name and somewhere to hide. Most of all she needed to stop crying and pull herself together. Reciting lines from I Am a Cat was perhaps not the best way to achieve this, but the story came from her grandmother, who’d read it aloud one winter night many years before.

  At the end of the line, the girl climbed out of her seat, crossed the platform, and waited for the train to take her back. The station was suburban neat, its trees pruned into elegant shapes and a clock above the tracks counted off the seconds until her train would arrive.

  When the clock hit zero, Nijie felt it happen, like paper ripping inside her. Several things previously muddled became clear. Neko meant cat, while niku meant meat; she was both of those…

  Neku?

  Yes, she thought, that was it. She was Lady Neku. And suddenly, the girl who became Lady Neku understood she’d never really been anyone else.

  When the salaryman opposite began staring, Neku moved her magazine to obstruct his view of her knees. It was early afternoon, the metro was full of Christmas shoppers and Neku was several hours into her new life.

  At this, the man shifted to get a better look and Neku decided subtlety wasn’t going to work. “Pervert,” she announced loudly. When no one paid any attention, Neku stood up and repeated herself, only this time she pointed.

  The man got off at the next stop.

  Although what actually happened was that he got off, the woman sitting next to Neku changed seats, and two grandmothers opposite spent the next three stops muttering to each other.

  Well, said their glances, what did she expect? Looking like that.

  Shrugging, Neku raised a pencil and began to give herself eyebrows. Her cheeks stung from skin bleach but she ignored it. The tube said apply over the course of two weeks, use not more than an inch and start with a sensitivity test. To be helpful, the makers even printed a line with the daily measurement.

  Neku had applied half the tube before deciding this was a bad idea and washing most of it off. Far from lightening her complexion, the cream had made her skin blotchy, so now Neku wore foundation to hide a rash, which rather defeated the object…

  Pulling out a black lipstick, she slashed a line across her face and a goth girl began to appear in the window opposite. White face, strong eyebrows, and a pastiche geisha pout. Neku sat too far from her own reflection to see the silver bolt recently fixed through her tongue, but she could still taste its metal and blood.

  She wore a fat amber ring on her right hand, a black plastic watch, and a bracelet made from glass beads threaded onto silver mesh. Five gold hoops ran the rim of one aching ear and beneath her ripped blouse she could feel flesh try to shrivel beneath the bolts now skewering it. The first boy to touch her, and he’d barely glanced at Nijie’s breasts as he swabbed on surgical spirit, reached for a metal clamp, and thrust a spike through each nipple.

  Pain meant nothing.

  Remember that, Neku told herself.

  She was not like the other kids arriving at Harajuku Bridge with their fantasy identities hidden in Liz Lisa bags. Little suburban showoffs who unpacked their alter-egos each weekend, flashing white knickers as they made up their faces or struggled into thigh boots, lace tops, or ripped silver jeans. She was Lady Neku, the original: the others were just copies.

  Swirling her cloak and raising her chin, Neku left the station by its first exit, ignored a poster featuring a winged, haloed, and very happy Santa Claus, and dodged two foreigners bus
y unpacking fake Rolex from a box on the corner. Harajuku Bridge was famous for its costume play gangs who gathered each day to parade their outlandish clothes; but the sky was getting dark, it was beginning to drizzle and most of the spectators had already gone home.

  No matter.

  A group of three cos-play glanced up and scowled when they realised the stranger in the scarlet cloak was no one they knew. Neku kept walking, sleet on her face. They’d know her soon enough.

  Korea issues complaint at Tokyo Olympic bid…Faceless corpse found on London motorway. So said the paper she tossed onto a bench, earning a glare from an old man and more tuts from a group of women. It was the front page that irritated Neku.

  Public Outrage Mounts

  She didn’t need their outrage, approval, or anything else to tell her what she already knew. In a bizarre suicide pact, the family of Tony Kitagawa was found dead on a beach near Koyurugi Point…

  Neku sighed.

  Beyond the bridge a path split, one direction heading to the Meiji Jingu Shrine. It was here a family had gathered, fifteen and a half years earlier, for the marriage of a son to an Italian girl he’d met in New York. A union strange enough to bring the Kitagawa clan together for the first time in five years.

  It had been brief, this marriage; and there’d been only one child, a daughter, nobody important. It had not even been his first marriage, so the girl was sent to live with her half brothers, part of the family but never quite equal. She had her gender, her foreign looks, and her mixed blood to thank for this.

  Neku was glad that girl was dead.

  Around her, winter-bare maples dripped with drizzle and swayed slowly in the chill wind as gravel shifted wetly underfoot. A stream beneath a tiny bridge had swollen, where rotted leaves created a natural dam, and a black man with an old-fashioned twig broom was busy trying to brush the leaves away.

  At the turning to a café, Neku made herself turn back. The black man had been staring at her anyway, as if to say someone dressed like her did not belong on the gravel paths beneath the trees leading to the Meiji Shrine, and he was right. She belonged on the bridge with the other girls, that gaggle of giggles and spite.

  A couple of cos-play glanced up and Neku looked right through them, rolling her shoulders and letting her arms hang loose. These were ijime-ko, suburban kids with unconvincing sneers, the kind of people who regarded pulling each other’s hair as a fight bad enough to talk about for days.

  Neku had seen real fights.

  “Careful where you walk.”

  When Neku stepped too close to a line of carefully arranged cosmetics their owner didn’t even bother to be polite. Just barked his order and went back to choosing a lipstick from a line of seven laid out in a row. Shu Uemura, Chanel, Dior, Shiseido, and Bourjois…

  Neku wondered if he’d even checked the colours or just bought by label.

  “You hear me?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “I hear you.”

  Kicking over his lipsticks, Neku stamped on the boy’s wrist before he had time to scramble away. Bones broke and Neku tried not to smile as a gaggle of girls parted to let her through. That was all it ever took, according to the Kitagawa brothers. One punch, one bullet, one kick…precedent was everything. Only, the Kitagawa were dead and no amount of precedent was going to change that.

  In front of Meiji-jingumae Station two uniformed officers were questioning the foreign couple who’d obviously only just finished unpacking their consignment of fake Rolex. When Neku paused to watch, the eldest of the two police officers waved her away.

  Go, his look said.

  It didn’t say, We’ve been looking for you. And it didn’t say, Stop right there, while I call base to see if you’re a runaway. It just said, Who cares if you’re upset? Go away. We’re too busy to bother with stupidly dressed children.

  Neku did as the look said.

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1 — Friday, 15 August 2003

  Later, Kit Nouveau was to realise that his world unravelled in Tokyo, six months after a cos-play stuffed large amounts of money into a locker that could be opened with a cheap screwdriver, had anyone known what it contained. Until then, he’d thought it ended fifteen years earlier, at 10.38 pm, on Friday, 15 August 2003, behind an old barn on the chalk hills above Middle Morton, a small town in Hampshire.

  Who knew? Certainly not the nineteen-year-old squaddie leaning against the barn’s wooden wall. He’d come to the party with his latest girlfriend, a high-breasted Welsh girl called Amy who had a filthy laugh and, he hoped, filthy habits. Only she was inside sulking and the girl whose bandeau top he’d just undone was going out with someone else.

  “Hey,” said Kit. “It’s okay.”

  Pushing him away, the girl re-tied a ribbon. “No,” she said. “It’s not.” Mary O’Mally wore lipstick, black eyeliner, and bare legs under a frayed white miniskirt…Both makeup and attitude put on in a bus shelter roughly half way between her parents’ house and the barn. She’d cut her hair since Kit last saw her and had red highlights put in.

  Under his own waxed jacket Kit wore a Switchblade Lies tee-shirt, with jeans and biker boots. His fair hair had been cropped and the faintest trace of a blond, very non-regulation goatee ghosted his chin.

  Inside the hut someone took off Original Pirate Material and slung on Tight Smile, jacking up the volume.

  “Wait,” said Kit, when Mary tried to say something. And they both listened to the bass line, as Vita Brevis thumbed a Vintage five-string. Then came Art Nouveau, splintering Vita’s bass line with a three-chord crash, and Kit found himself fingering fret shapes onto empty air.

  Mary grinned.

  “I’ll walk you home,” he said.

  “Kit…”

  Undoing her top had been stupid but old habits died hard. Josh was a nice guy, in a rich-boy kind of way, but Mary was Kit’s ex-girlfriend and he still occasionally dreamed about her. Reassuring dreams, at least reassuring to someone who’d puked his way through an Iraqi firefight, put his sniper training into practise, and was on compassionate leave while his Colonel worked out what to do about an incident no one really wanted to make the papers.

  “I’d better go back.”

  “Okay,” said Kit.

  “You coming with me?”

  Shaking his head, Kit said, “Better not. Can you get Josh to give Amy a lift home? And, you know…” Kit stopped, wondering how to put his thoughts into words.

  “What?” said Mary.

  “You know. If you and Josh ever…”

  “If we…?”

  “If you split up,” said Kit, “then maybe we could try again?” His voice trailed off as he realised Mary wanted to slap him, which wouldn’t be the first time. “I know,” he said, holding up his hands.

  “No you don’t,” she said, dirty blonde hair brushing bare shoulders as she shook her head, each shake fiercer than the one before. “You have no fucking idea.”

  Mary and Kit went out for five months, right up to the start of last year’s exams. She’d just about convinced her mother that Kit and band practise weren’t about to ruin her grades when Kit broke up Switchblade Lies, dumped Mary, and talked himself into a thirteen-week Army Preparation Course, all in the same afternoon.

  Josh was the one who picked up the pieces and walked Mary to her exams and convinced her life could still be good. Josh was the one Mary’s mother liked, though she’d probably have liked him more if his mother hadn’t been Korean.

  “It was just a thought,” said Kit.

  “Yeah,” said Mary. “A shit one.” And there it might have rested, except the moon chose that moment to slip between clouds, and Mary caught tears in the eyes of the boy opposite.

  “You broke it off,” she said crossly.

  “It’s not that.”

  “What then?”

  “I don’t know,” said Kit. “Life, I guess…You’d better go back inside. Josh will be wondering where you’ve gone.”

  “He doesn’t own me.”
<
br />   “Hey,” said Kit. “No one owns you, I know that. No one owns me. No one owns anyone. We just get to borrow each other for a while.”

  She glared at him. “Did you make that up?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” Kit thought about it. “At least, I don’t think it’s stolen from anybody else.”

  Kit and Mary ended up pushing his Kawasaki between them, while the moon stretched an elongated couple and bike onto Blackboy Lane and night winds whispered through fields on the far side of the hedge.

  The barn was stained black and had been built before any of them had been born, the pub to which the hut belonged and the three farm cottages that made up Wintersprint were half a mile behind. Two of the cottages had been knocked together to make a house. It was his mother’s idea.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “About Mum.”

  Anyone else would have left it there. “Do you regret testifying?”

  Kit’s mother had been American, an artist from New York. His father was small-town Hampshire, a Sergeant on the local police force. It would have been hard to find two people more unsuited. Their marriage had been coming apart for most of Kit’s childhood; certainly for as long as he could remember, and Kit had a good memory.

  One night, three years before, his parents had argued, which was nothing new. And Kit’s mother had demanded a divorce, which was also nothing new. Only this time she meant it, which was. A jogger found her at the foot of Ashley chalk pit, her skull broken and her ribs badly fractured. She’d been dead for roughly two hours, according to the coroner.

  Suicide, said his father.

  Kit was interviewed and told the inspector what he’d heard. Which was far more than he’d ever wanted to hear. When asked, It was the first such argument, wasn’t it? He said no. And kept saying no, all the way through to appearing as a witness for the prosecution in court.

  Kit’s evidence was tainted, that was the position of the defence. He’d had his own argument with his father, a day earlier. A fierce and vicious argument, that saw Sergeant Newton forced to physically restrain his son. This was the boy’s revenge. A twisted attempt to use the death of his mother to hurt his father, a man who was already heartbroken by the loss. The jury believed the defence, and Kit and his father had not spoken since, not a single word. Although, until Kit enlisted, they’d shared the same house.