End of the World Blues

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “But I’ve lost…”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said the castle. “All memories get filed twice, once in the bracelet and once in your head. Use the wetware,” it said. “And start now, while your mind is still imprinted on that body. Begin with something simple, something recent. What’s the very last thing you can remember?”

  “Waking,” said Lady Neku.

  “Where was this?”

  “In my bedroom. Someone asked me a question.”

  “Begin there,” said the castle. “Try to recall what happened next…”

  She was asleep in her room at High Strange, a circular room at the top of a spire. In the old days the spires were called spindles and there was a lot of history attached to them, but Lady Neku did her best to ignore it.

  Lady Neku had chosen her room because it looked towards the stars, what few remained within her light cone, rather than towards the earth, which a room at the other end of the spire would have done.

  Her mother had an earth room as tradition demanded; so the head of the family could view the lands she protected. Although the Katchatka did little to protect anyone these days, now that the sails of nawa-no-ukiyo were ripped and the sun was free to lay waste to their segment.

  How strange, everyone said, when Lady Neku chose that room. Which was odd, because it seemed to make perfect sense for her to live as far from her family as possible.

  Words woke her on the night she remembered. Unexpected, because she’d added a filter to her thoughts to keep her brothers away.

  “Neku…Hey, you there?”

  She recognised his voice instantly. Young, well spoken, and slightly arch. I mean, she thought, how many boys—excluding brothers—were there in High Strange…

  None.

  And how many boys in the overworlds?

  Thirty-eight, working to a tolerance of two years either way. Eleven of these were blood related within the last three generations. Of the remaining twenty-seven, just over half were habitually female. Not that Lady Neku had anything against that, obviously…that left thirteen spread across six segments. Two of those segments were hostile and Lady Neku knew of their five possibilities from records only. Which left eight boys, ranging in age from thirteen to seventeen. Who were, almost without exception, contemptible in their hunger to make friends with her. The exception was Perfect.

  This wasn’t his real name. That was something so absurd he refused to use it when introducing himself. If segment titles had suffered from inflation, then names in the Menham Segment had suffered worse still. Lady Neku had her own suspicions about why this had happened.

  “Neku?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m here.”

  “Oh, right.” Per sounded puzzled. “You sound different.”

  The fact they were even talking would be regarded as an outrage by Lady Neku’s mother. That Lady Neku and Per one day planned to meet, albeit at ground level…

  “Take a guess why?”

  “Don’t know,” Per said, sounding cross. “I’m rubbish at guessing games. Your throat’s sore?”

  “Close,” said Lady Neku. “I cut it with Nico’s knife.”

  “You…?”

  “I want a new body. My dear Lady Mother won’t give me one.”

  Perfect Lord Menham was eighteen months older than Lady Neku. Whoever told him that girls liked their men dissolute, damned, and dangerous (and Lady Neku’s bet was on his sister), they should also have told him there was no point asking questions if he was going to be shocked at the answers.

  “It’s healing,” she said. “Worst luck. Why did you call me?”

  “The d’Alamberts,” said Per.

  Information flowed from the web of beads around Lady Neku’s wrist, maps of d’Alambert influence and schematics showing their sections of the rope world, flicking across her mind until she told the information to stop.

  “What about them?” demanded Lady Neku, more crossly than was polite.

  “It’s just,” said Per. “I’ve heard…”

  Whatever Perfect had heard was obviously so stupid he decided not to say it; because Lady Neku suddenly got a head full of static and then silence. When she was certain Per was gone, she tried to call Nico, Petro, and Antonio in turn, but apparently her brothers didn’t want to talk to her either.

  CHAPTER 21 — Thursday, 21 June

  Kit intended to leave Kate where she slept, he really did. The bench was large, Shinjuku Chuo Park was safe, not even the homeless would disturb a middle-aged woman snoring drunkenly in front of an artificial waterfall under the gaze of a lost Mandarin duck.

  The last thing he needed was Kate O’Mally bringing her hangover to his meeting with Tetsuo, who really was going to help Kit with his problems in Roppongi…well, according to No Neck.

  All Kit had to do was walk away. He could fold Mary’s letter back into its envelope and place the envelope inside Kate’s coat, and leave the woman to her sadness and a hangover that would do little to ruin a day already ruined from the moment she woke.

  It was so tempting.

  He owed her nothing. After all, Kate O’Mally was the person he’d once promised to destroy, in a fit of teenage bravado. But life had already done that for him. Her daughter was dead, Kate’s relationship with Patrick Robbe-Duras was ended, and the house above Middle Morton echoed with so much loneliness she could barely stand to live there.

  Who knew Kate could be so poetic? So honest about the horror she was facing. It was that honesty which put its hook into Kit’s flesh. So that every time he stood up to walk away, sharp tugs of guilt sat him down again. It was her honesty, and one final admission.

  “You know,” said Kate, when they first reached the bench. “There’s another possibility.”

  “There is?”

  “Pat originally thought Mary was running away.”

  “From what?” asked Kit.

  The face Kate turned to Kit was ravaged by alcohol, guilt, and a level of self-awareness more cruel than anything a teenage Kit could have wished on her. “From me,” she said. “And you know what Pat said? Better late than never…”

  It took the duck an hour to realise the couple on the bench were useless as a source of food and get cross. By then, the sun had got stuck behind the government buildings to Kit’s right and the roads around the little park had become crowded with traffic. Carbon monoxide mixed with the sour smell of camp fires from a collection of blue plastic tents nearby. It was no longer early and the homeless were hanging out their blankets to air or washing shirts in the splash pool of the waterfall.

  Mrs. Oniji had once explained to Kit that ducks divide into ahiru and kamo, those that are white and those that are not, but then Mrs. Oniji used different words for water, depending on whether it was hot, cold, or merely warm. Maybe she’d miss the lessons? Kit hoped so, at least he thought he did.

  “Shoo,” Kit told the duck. One tiny eye peered at him from a slash of white like plate armour along the side of its head. After a moment, the duck decided to leave anyway.

  When it came the ring tone was loud enough to make Kit jump. Tokyo was a city of video phones that doubled as DVDs, diaries, and e-mail organisers. The big problem for tourists was that only Japanese-registered phones seemed to work. One needed to rent a phone on arrival and top it up with credit.

  It seemed that Kate O’Mally had.

  The longer Kit ignored the phone, the louder the ring tone got and less likely it seemed that Kate would wake. In the end, Kit simply reached into her pocket and found the phone, flicking it to voice only.

  “Hello…?” All Kit got was an echo of his own voice and the sense of distance which satellite lag imparts, technology making the world tiny and then guaranteeing it felt very large again.

  “Hello,” repeated Kit.

  Satellite distance, and a taste of something else.

  “Katie?”

  “No,” said Kit. “She’s sleeping.”

  For a moment it sounded as if the man at the other end ha
d broken the connection and then Kit heard his own name, the authorised version. “Christopher Newton?”

  “Nouveau,” said Kit, without even thinking. “And it’s Kit.” Only then did he realise who was on the other end of the line.

  “Oh fuck,” said Patrick Robbe-Duras. “Katie found you.”

  “Yes,” said Kit. “That she did.”

  “She’s been looking for months. You know, I told her you’d probably moved. For all we knew you were in Australia or back in England.”

  “Mr. Duras…”

  “Patrick,” said the man. “Call me Patrick.” He hesitated. “Katie’s already told you what this is about?”

  “Of course,” Kit said. “You believe Mary’s still alive and you want me to find her.”

  There was a silence. “That’s what she said?”

  “Yes,” said Kit. “Did I get it wrong?”

  “You could say that…” Patrick Robbe-Duras said. His voice was ghostly, made distant by more than the five thousand nautical miles and fifteen bitter years between them. “My daughter killed herself. She booked a ferry, left her shoes by the railings, and stepped into the sea. Katie is the one who believes Mary is alive. She’s the one who has spent the last six months of her life trying to find you. And you know why?”

  Only, Kit had stopped listening.

  Water tumbled from the long lip of the artificial fall onto carefully placed rocks below, watched only by a duck, Kit, and a homeless couple, both of whom had stripped to the waist before washing themselves in its pool. At Kit’s side, Kate O’Mally slept off a hangover that would have felled a man half her age, while Kit gripped her phone in trembling fingers, already thumbing its Off button.

  Six months. Late December.

  “Oh fuck,” Kit said, vomiting udon noodles, green tea, and alcohol onto the paving at his feet. As Pat’s words finally managed what Yoshi’s death had been unable to achieve, make Kit face what had really happened.

  I’m not sure if this is going to reach you. I hope so. There are some things I really should have told you at the time… When she’d written that, the inhabitants of Middle Morton had already burned their famous bonfire. In Tokyo, the kouyou season was over, each day’s news no longer ending with an update on the autumn foliage. And Mary O’Mally, the only person he’d ever really loved, was preparing to kill herself.

  Kit tried to remember the date of its postmark, thought about it some more and realised he could. He could also remember the day her card arrived. It was the day he fucked Namiko and the day he went to pray at the Meiji Jingu Shrine. Although it began as the day he woke to discover Yoshi had gone for a walk.

  CHAPTER 22 — Flashback to Winter

  The dampness in Pirate Mary’s storeroom was made worse by a broken window, which let rain dribble down the inside of one wall. Yoshi said she liked the cold, that everyone from Hokkaido liked the cold.

  Kit often wondered if that was true.

  The sunken bath had been given a little room of its own near the stairs, but everything else on the third floor was stripped back to bare walls and rafters, so that any footsteps across the floor could be heard clearly in the bar below.

  A long bench, an expensive black leather and steel punishment rack, and something that looked like medieval stocks comprised its only furniture. All three had arrived with Yoshi and never been used, at least not during the years that Kit had known her.

  A hook in the ceiling, a coil of rope, carefully boiled to silk-like softness, and a twelve-foot length of bamboo, made up the three items that Yoshi still used. The bamboo pole was the most versatile, being utilised in more ways than Kit would have thought possible.

  It had been five weeks since Yoshi had even looked at a potter’s wheel. She’d served behind the bar at Pirate Mary’s, talked ceramics to first year students at the Tokyo Design School, and cooked impossibly complicated dishes involving three kinds of eel and two types of noodle. She took to walking in the Meiji gardens to watch crimson leaves fall from the winter trees. When that failed, she tracked Kit down at the bar, where he was mending a beer pump, and told him she wanted tying.

  That was the deal. She always asked, Kit wasn’t expected to volunteer. Like most such deals it was unspoken and possibly entirely unconscious.

  “You know,” said Yoshi, as she stripped off her yukata. “All I want is an empty mind…” She looked for a second as if she was about to ask, Is that so unreasonable?

  She began to relax the moment the ropes began to constrict her body. Her eyes glazed and turned inwards and the tightness around her eyes smoothed away. Kit needed a hit to reach anything approaching that state. Even then, Kit doubted if what he extracted from the dragon came close to the utter serenity Yoshi seemed to find.

  “Thank you,” she said, when the final knot was tied.

  “Shhh…” Kit touched his finger to her lips.

  Yoshi smiled.

  Her needs had little to do with masochism and even less to do with sex, at least in any way Kit understood those terms. Edo rope bondage was Yoshi’s way of reaching clarity and if Yoshi lacked clarity…Well, for Yoshi, work was what made life worth living.

  She was still smiling as he went back to mending his pump. An hour and a half later, about ten minutes after Kit unbound her, the sound of Yoshi’s wheel could be heard as it spun steadily. An hour after that Kit decided he might as well take himself for a walk.

  “Nouveau-san…” The post boy held out one white gloved hand and bowed slightly. The dark blue uniform he wore already looked familiar, though the firm he represented was new. A dozen stories had already run about the fall in standards now that Japan’s post office was privately run. To Kit the service seemed immaculate.

  Barely noticing the boy’s bow, Kit took the card and flipped it over, his thoughts already on which of a dozen tasks he needed to do first. And then Kit saw the writing, read Mary’s message before realising he’d even done so, and everything else ceased to matter.

  About the baby, wrote Mary. I lied.

  Usually it was No Neck who wanted Kit’s help getting drunk. This time round, Mary’s postcard still clutched in one hand, Kit went in search of the other man. Although, in Kit’s defence, he really did think he just needed to talk.

  No Neck was doing what he usually did on Tuesday afternoons…handing out highly inaccurate flyers to any tourist stupid enough to think Roppongi was a place worth visiting in daylight.

  “Doing okay?” No Neck asked three Swedish backpackers.

  Glancing round, they saw a shaven-headed man with a tattooed ring of barbed wire around one naked bicep. In the hot days of summer No Neck wore a tank top to show off his abs. In winter, he added a waistcoat to the mix. If one got close enough, which was not necessarily a good idea, it was possible to see frayed stitches across the back, where a three-part patch had once announced his nomad status within Australia’s Rebel MC.

  “Here,” said No Neck, thrusting out one hand.

  All new girls, said his latest flyer. Highly trained & highly professional. Which was code for, Have danced before/not sex workers. Both these statements were open to argument, but were included to convince the local police that Bernie’s Bar was clean, tourist friendly, and not going to give them trouble.

  “Filthy,” said No Neck to the backpackers. “Absolutely filthy. You guys been to Bangkok?”

  All three nodded.

  “Infinitely dirtier,” No Neck said. “Show this at the door for a twenty percent reduction.”

  They took a flyer each.

  “Not quite fun for all the family,” he told an American couple, “but not far off. A bit like burlesque, only the Japanese version…”

  Taking a flyer, the man gave it to his wife. A hundred paces down the road, the woman handed the flyer back to her husband, who dumped it into a bin.

  “Can’t win them all,” said Kit.

  The deal was that No Neck got 500 yen for each tourist who arrived at Bernie’s Bar clutching a flyer. If he got arrested
, then someone he met on the street sub-contracted the work, the club had never seen him and certainly hadn’t employed him. It was a convenient fiction.

  “Want a drink?”

  No Neck glanced from the flyers in his hand towards the entrance to Kaballero Kantina, which happened to be just across the street. Beer money or free beer? If Kit had been feeling less upset it would probably have been funny.

  “Come on,” he said. It was enough.

  Stuffing the rest of the flyers into his sleeveless jacket, No Neck wrapped one heavy arm around Kit’s shoulders and waded into the traffic.

  “Let me see if I’ve got this right,” said No Neck. “You get your best friend’s girlfriend pregnant, freak out when she tells you, and blame your friend when her psycho ma comes calling?”

  Kit nodded.

  “What I don’t understand,” No Neck said, taking a pull at his bottle, “is why your ex-friend had nothing to say about this.”

  “Because he was dead.”

  That got everyone’s attention. Kit had intended this to be a quiet drink, but the crowd around their table was growing and No Neck wouldn’t let the matter lie.

  “Crashed his bike,” added Kit, before No Neck had time to ask.

  “Fuck,” No Neck said, “that’s harsh. Did he know about you and…?”

  That was No Neck for you. The bozozoku could always be relied on to go straight to the heart of the matter, and, having got there, rip it out and dump it on the table in a bloody puddle so everyone else could get a good look.

  “Yeah,” said Kit, admitting the unthinkable. “I think he did.”

  No Neck picked up his empty bottle and peered at it. The signal Kit should buy everyone another round. At present, everyone included Kit, No Neck, Micki, and Namiko, a girl No Neck used to fuck before he started going out with Micki.

  “Get some nachos,” suggested Namiko.

  Having eaten half the nachos and emptied his next bottle, No Neck wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and sat back, considering. “Okay,” he said. “She told you she was pregnant, then she told you she wasn’t, and now she says she was…”