End of the World Blues

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “You don’t think that maybe…”

  “No,” said Kit, “I don’t.”

  She glanced away, moonlight on her face. Kit saw it happen. She glanced aside and bit her lip. Say it, he wanted to tell her. Only Mary wouldn’t and if he was honest Kit wasn’t sure he wanted it said. Being wrong about his father was as bad as being right.

  “A pity,” said Mary, some time later.

  “What? About my mother?”

  “No,” she said, sighing. “About the band.”

  Art Nouveau, Vita Brevis, and Joshua Treece…Kit managed a smile. “Not really,” he said. “We were shit. None of us could even play.”

  “That’s harsh,” said the girl who’d briefly been Vita Brevis—bass/ vocals/keyboards/lyrics.

  “We were worse than shit.”

  One single, a week’s airplay on local radio, and a final fumble with Mary in the back of a van, while Josh pretended to sleep and Colonel Treece kept his eyes on the road. Kit had bought the Kawasaki with money he got selling his guitar and the only thing he’d kept was his new name, although the Art bit of that had gone the way of his hair.

  “You want a cigarette?”

  “No,” said Kit, “I’ve given up.” Kicking his bike onto its stand, he took the packet from her fingers and tapped one free, lighting it with a high-chrome Zippo that read, Iraq 2003, the Democracy in Action Tour. He’d borrowed it from an American Sergeant who was still waiting for him to give it back.

  “Here,” he said.

  “You know,” said Mary. “We should get out of the road.”

  So Kit rolled his bike through a gap in the hedge and parked it. In the old days people would have read meaning into the jagged clouds and back-lit sky, the wind that dragged shivers from both their bodies and a moon as cold and clear as a world trapped in the cross-hairs of a gun sight.

  “Time to go,” said Kit, watching Mary grind her cigarette underfoot.

  Mary raised her eyebrows.

  “Curfew, remember?” As if either of them could forget. One of the reasons Mary’s mother disliked Kit—he had treated her rules as something negotiable.

  “They’re away.”

  Kit looked at her.

  “Yeah,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe the lecture I got.”

  “I would…no friends back to the house and no staying out all night. Your dad knows exactly how many beers there are in the fridge and the level of every bottle in the drinks cupboard. I’ve had it,” he added, when she looked surprised. “That time my parents went to London.”

  Back in the days when my mother was alive.

  “The weekend you had the party?”

  Yeah, that weekend.

  Clouds continued to scuttle across the sky and eleven o’clock came and went, measured in bells carried on the wind from the village below. At Mary’s insistence, they counted off the bells, but called the first bell two and ended at twelve to muddle the devil.

  “Don’t ask,” she said. “Blame my grandmother.”

  A battered red Mini came by, followed by a taxi. It looked as if those unable to squeeze into Josh’s car had banded together to get a cab. Amy was among them.

  When the next round of bells began, Mary and Kit counted them from two to thirteen and then stood up. It was meant to be a simple thank-you for watching the clouds, letting him count bells, and not holding their last argument against him. A farewell to what had been, little more.

  Leaning forward, Kit took Mary’s face in his hands. He expected a kiss, a shrug, and to walk her home. A snog for old times’ sake. Something by way of goodbye. Only, something happened.

  As Mary’s hand came up to touch his face, his fingers brushed the bare skin of her waist and a circuit closed between them, the shiver of excitement catching them both by surprise. Her lips tasted of cheap cigarettes and expensive brandy that she’d stolen from home. She said nothing when his hand found the knot on her bandeau top for a second time and even less when he reached for the buttons on her skirt. He was her first, something unexpected.

  “I thought you and Josh…”

  Mary said nothing, just raised herself on one elbow and stared until Kit looked away. “No,” she said, into his silence.

  Slivers of daylight had begun to warm the chalk hills around them. A maroon Volvo trundled out of the village, headed for Southampton or London. Its headlights sweeping blindly over the spot where Mary and Kit lay.

  “Sorry,” said Kit. “Wrong question.”

  Reaching over, Mary patted his face. “You don’t say.”

  CHAPTER 2 — Friday, 8 June

  The bar occupied the second floor of a narrow building in Roppongi, behind a tourist drag of burger bars, clothes shops, and strip joints running south from Almond crossing. The building stood low on a slope in an area full of crooked, dirty alleyways, one of few such areas remaining in Roppongi or anywhere else.

  A small patch of cinder-block parking occupied what was once garden, but because the original garden sloped away from the road, a wall had been built and ground in-filled to make space for three cars. This had been done sixty years before, when most of Tokyo was crooked lanes or bomb sites, and US and British soldiers were abandoning Roppongi to the bar owners and pimps who’d kept them so well entertained.

  These days the cinder patch was empty by day and home to a row of motorcycles at night. This area, directly opposite the cemetery, smelled slightly of sewage; the whole of Roppongi smelled of sewage in summer. Mixed with the odour of noodles, it was one of Tokyo’s signature smells.

  The man who stared from Pirate Mary’s basement window inhaled a deeper sourness, one that danced in wisps of smoke from the heated foil in his fingers. Kit Nouveau kept his habit on a tight leash, limiting himself to one fix a day, but the dragon was restless and beginning to strain against its chains. One of them was winning and Kit guessed it wasn’t him.

  Crumpling blackened foil, Kit tossed it into a bin and went to fetch his wife. “Come inside,” he told her, shrugging himself into a bike jacket. “I need to go.”

  “Okay,” said Yoshi. “I’m leaving at nine.”

  “I’ll be back,” Kit promised.

  Yoshi Tanaka nodded, not really seeing her husband. She was wearing a blue yukata tied clumsily around her narrow waist with the belt from something else. Her feet were bare and clay splattered, and she’d twisted her sweat-darkened hair into a knot and fastened it with a yellow rubber band. In her hand was an unfired bowl, unlike any work of hers he’d ever seen.

  “What are you doing?” Kit’s voice must have been abrupt, because his question made Yoshi flip her gaze towards him. Her eyes were as glazed as the pots she made.

  “Getting rid of it,” she said.

  There were so many things wrong with this Kit barely knew where to begin, so he started with the first thing that came to mind. “You never waste clay,” he said. “I thought you told me it brought bad luck.”

  Yoshi scowled.

  “Anyway,” said Kit. “What’s wrong with it?”

  He watched her think. And just when he was sure her thoughts had turned to something else altogether, Yoshi glanced at the bowl and began to shake her head.

  “It’s not me,” she said.

  This, for Yoshi, was a statement of such overwhelming egotism that Kit was shocked. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “Look at the thing…”

  She peered at it doubtfully.

  “Bring it inside,” said Kit. “If you still hate it tomorrow we’ll chuck it out.” He led his wife through the basement door and into the utility room. It was no cooler inside than out, but at least Yoshi was away from direct sun and no longer standing semi-naked in full view of the street.

  Sweat slicked Yoshi’s face and gathered in the valley between her breasts. She’d been awake for thirty-two hours and treadling her potter’s wheel for almost fifteen of those. A stranger could have told how exhausted she was from the way her eyes kept sliding out of focus.

  “Get some sleep,” Kit
suggested. “Before we open again.”

  Pirate Mary’s was one of five Irish bars in Roppongi. The area still traded on its reputation for seediness and sex but it was rapidly becoming smarter than expats like Kit really liked. Exclusive designers opened as fast as brothels shut. The tiny cemetery behind Kit’s bar had started appearing on postcards, and the prostitutes walking Gaien-higashi-dori now wore faux rather than real fur in winter, so as not to upset their clients’ sensibilities.

  One day, the real Roppongi, with its hostess bars and filthy courtyards would vanish forever, like Montmartre or London’s Soho before it, leaving an ersatz theme park of perversion lite. In the meantime, the Irish bars pulled in regular crowds, with Pirate Mary’s gathering one of the largest.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you settled.”

  Footsteps followed Kit up three flights of stairs and when he led Yoshi into their bedroom he was relieved to discover that she’d left the bowl behind. “I’ll set the alarm clock for you.”

  Her nod was slight.

  Lifting the yukata from her shoulders, Kit steered his wife towards a naked lavatory in the corner and listened to her piss. She didn’t bother to clean her teeth in the basin or remove the smear of lip gloss that served as makeup. When she finally moved it was to examine herself in a long mirror.

  “You can stop,” he said.

  Yoshi shook her head. “No,” she said. “I can’t.”

  Rope burns circled her wrists, thighs, and breasts. The knots had been too loose the first time and she’d made him tie them all again. It was a regular ritual, one he still failed to understand.

  Outside on the balcony her treadle was sticky with slops and the bucket of raw clay had been left uncovered. So Kit found a cloth, ran it under water, and protected the clay. Having done that, he cut the slops from her table and cleaned its wheel with the edge of a wooden blade, flicking the scrapings on the floor to dry. He could sweep them up later.

  Yoshi was asleep by the time he finished.

  The new bowl was where Yoshi left it, next to one of the bins on the cinder patch beside the bar. She’d been carrying it clumsily and her thumb had smudged a dark print beneath the rim, the bowl already dry enough to produce a white bloom around the edge.

  Kit’s first instinct was to run the bowl under a tap, but its rim was so thin that it looked as if it might bend at the slightest pressure. So he put the bowl on a tray, found some gauze, and soaked this in water and draped it over the bowl, protecting both with a large upturned ceramic cake tin. As an afterthought he put the cake tin in a cupboard by the back door, checked the front door was also locked, and went to get his motorbike.

  “Noovoo-san…”

  The old man who tended the graveyard was waiting for Kit by the railings. In his arms, Ito-san carried a long bundle of prayer sticks, stained with age.

  “Mr. Ito…”

  “Police were here.”

  “What?” said Kit. He should have said, I’m sorry, who…? And thank you for letting me know. But all he wanted to do was arrive in time for his language lesson.

  “Police,” Mr. Ito said. “From the ward office. One kept trying the door. I said you were probably out…”

  Mr. Ito seemed embarrassed.

  “It’s okay,” said Kit. “Thank you for telling me.”

  Ito-san gave a brief bow.

  CHAPTER 3 — Friday, 8 June

  “Oniji-chan,” said Kit, “I probably shouldn’t ask this, but where’s your husband?”

  Elegant, middle-aged, and happily naked, the Japanese woman lifted herself onto one elbow, revealing a heavy breast. “He’s busy.”

  Kit considered that.

  “What kind of busy?” he asked finally. There were many things about Mrs. Oniji’s life that puzzled him. Including why her husband spent so little time with his wife.

  “Torturing someone.”

  “God…” Kit sat up in bed. “Why?”

  Mrs. Oniji shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I never ask.” She smiled. “Does my answer make you feel afraid?”

  When Kit shook his head, Mrs. Oniji sighed.

  “It should,” she said, “but then I’m not sure you feel much anything.” She paused. “Is that correct?”

  “Just about,” said Kit. “Much about anything or anything much would be better…”

  “Ahh,” said Mrs. Oniji. “I see.”

  Later, when they’d made love again, rinsed themselves under a power shower, and returned to the bed, Kit put his hand on Mrs. Oniji’s stomach and felt it rumble.

  “We should eat…”

  Mrs. Oniji rolled over to stare into the pale blue of his eyes. She seemed puzzled. “Is that an order?”

  “No,” said Kit. “More of a suggestion. An order would be, We must eat now, or You will eat.”

  Mrs. Oniji smiled. “I’ll remember that,” she said. Having understood its meaning and how the phrase should be used, Mrs. Oniji would undoubtedly return to it, probably the next time they met. “You know,” she said a minute later, “there is no food in this house. However, I have booked a restaurant.”

  Kit’s heart sank.

  The bed on which he and Mrs. Oniji lay was a hundred and fifty years old and as uncomfortable as the day it was made. It sat in the upstairs room of a wooden house in the lanes behind Aoyama-dori. The building originally belonged to her grandfather, and if Mrs. Oniji’s husband ever knew his wife owned it he’d forgotten.

  Everything Kit knew about Mr. Oniji he’d learned from Mrs. Oniji, relayed to him in increasingly complex and confident sentences. Kisho Oniji had interests in construction and shipping, both of which kept him very busy. Also, fuzoku, the ejaculation industry. He owned a hostess bar in Roppongi, five soapland brothels, a large love hotel in Kabukicho, and Bottomless Kup, a franchise where ostentatiously subservient waitresses waxed their pubic hair and served coffee, without knickers.

  He also liked gold watches and ceramics, but hated golf. Which was a problem because he owned a golf course in sight of Mount Fuji. The members, who paid handsomely for their membership, would have liked their chairman to play.

  When Kit first arrived in Tokyo it was to work for an exclusive and very expensive language school that catered to the wives of high-ranking executives expecting to be sent overseas.

  The job was well paid and secure in the way that only Japanese jobs back then could be. It was also fantastically boring. Although what finally drove Kit out were the classroom posters, one of which read, Talent requires reformatting what you know. Having identified the Japanese as the world’s first post-modern race, Per Sorenson had created post-modern language tuition, ideally suited to a country where people inevitably told you something by telling you something else.

  Kit’s second job paid substantially less but catered to a wider variety of students, one of whom was Mrs. Oniji. It was only later that Kit discovered A1 Language Learning was owned by her husband.

  When Kit resigned from A1 it was on the understanding he would continue to give Mrs. Oniji her monthly lesson, and that was ten years ago. She’d been thirty-one and he’d been twenty-five. The arrangement had continued happily until six months earlier, when they’d somehow ended up in bed.

  “Are you happy?”

  It was unusual for Mrs. Oniji to ask such questions. And the fact she felt able to ask a question quite that personal came as a shock.

  “Why?” asked Kit.

  “Just wondered,” she said.

  Pushing her down, Kit pulled aside the sheet and stilled the hand that came up to cover her breasts. “I’m not unhappy,” he said, positioning himself over her.

  Mrs. Oniji sighed. “That makes two of us, I guess…”

  Most people when they mention Tokyo mean the twenty-three wards. Metropolitan Tokyo is actually formed of twenty-three wards, twenty-six cities, three towns, one village, and two islands. For Mrs. Oniji the city was smaller still, contained within only three wards: Chiyoda-ku, Chuo-ku, and Minato-ku.

/>   Within these could be found the restaurants of Akasaka, the shopping district of Ginza, and Marunouchi itself, the centre of all things commercial and political. It was in Marunouchi that Kisho Oniji had offices.

  Inevitably enough, the restaurant to which she took Kit was in Akasaka, set back behind Hitosuki-dori and separated from the bustle of the street by wooden fencing and a quiet garden. In its courtyard a senior and junior salaryman were finishing one of those clipped conversations that looked—to outsiders—like the verbal equivalent of a punishment beating. Whatever was said, the younger of the two bowed deeply and turned for the exit, standing aside to let Mrs. Oniji pass.

  Kit doubted she even noticed.

  Walking into the restaurant was like walking into a bamboo grove; dried lengths had been used to divide the low room into waiting area, bar area, and restaurant proper. Not by making walls, because that would be far too obvious, it had been used to suggest where walls might be, as if each upwards stroke of bamboo existed to provide structural supports for a wall that had never been built.

  Maybe the lengths were real, or perhaps they were cast from resin. Whatever, the light within each was bright enough to illuminate its skin like neon bars on a cage. There were three dozen such strands, rising from a slate floor and disappearing into the ceiling. The tables were also slate, the chairs wooden. A length of counter was lined with rattan stools, each claimed by someone smart enough to pass muster. The tables might need reservations, but despite complaints Café Ryokan resolutely refused to take reservations for places at the bar.

  It was a million miles from Pirate Mary’s in Roppongi, where bozozoku bikers mixed with Western expatriates, Tokyo’s art crowd, and a smattering of Japanese students who believed, sometimes rightly, that they were living dangerously.