End of the World Blues

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “On…?”

  “How about, scare someone, kill someone else, get killed yourself?”

  “Yeah,” said Charlie. “That works for me.”

  He’d wanted to see her again, obviously enough, which was a fair price. At least Neku thought it was, but she had to tell Charlie she was busy next day and that led into telling him about Kate O’Mally and Pat and all the other slivers of information she’d prised out of Kit as reward for translating his wretched forms.

  “Call me when you get back?” asked Charlie.

  Neku promised she would.

  The sky above the downs was a ridiculous shade of blue and the afternoon stank of warm earth, summer, and grass. It was all Kit could do not to put out one gloved hand to brush the hedge as he roared past.

  The mill at Little Westover looked unchanged, the White Bear, on the corner, where Blackboy Lane crossed with the ghost of a Roman road, was festooned with flowers, its car park as full as ever.

  But the old hut had gone.

  Kit expected to find overgrown foundations or rotten walls and a broken roof, but it was gone completely. Someone had cleared the site, concreted it over, and installed mesh fencing and a steel gate. A Ukrainian tractor and trailer now stood where the hut had been.

  For the first half of the ride, Neku had gripped his jacket and held tight. After they stopped at a café and Kit told her how to ride pillion, Neku loosened her grip and now leaned back, holding plastic handles that protruded from the Kawasaki’s cheap seat. They were using Sony earbeads, a modification that had cost almost as much as the old bike. Well, it did when you threw in the cost of earbead-compatible helmets.

  “Okay,” said Neku. “Who am I?”

  Kit twitched his head, then glanced back at the lane in time to see twin walls of cow parsley twist to one side. “Lean,” he ordered, and felt Neku ride the bend. Of course, Neku being Neku, explaining what she should do to ride pillion had also required him to explain why, so Kit ended up sketching a cross section of wheel onto a paper napkin.

  “Precision and deflection,” she said. “Combined with centrifugal force…Simple enough.”

  “If you say so.”

  Now Neku threw herself into bends, which actually translated as leaning with the bike rather than against it. Kit had ridden these roads a thousand times before in an earlier life, and swept the curves from memory as he headed for Middle Morton and the old humpback bridge, but first he had Wintersprint.

  The cottage was still there, although builders had removed the slate roof and added dormer windows. The thatch replacing the slates had been in place long enough to grow moss and turn black along its lower edges. The outside walls had been plastered and painted white. Half tubs, cut from beer barrels, overflowed with flowers on both sides of a glossy black door.

  “Well?” demanded Neku, her voice loud in his earbead.

  “Well, what?”

  “How are you going to explain me to Mrs. O’Mally?”

  “Hell,” said Kit. “How do I explain you to anyone?”

  “You don’t.”

  Flicking on his indicators, Kit kicked down a couple of gears and coasted to a halt beside a gap in the hedge. The potato field still existed. The earth bank around its edge might look a little flatter and the copse of trees at its far end a little closer than he remembered, but its dark earth was still cut into farrows and a trailer rusted in one corner beneath rotting sacks. A sign by the gate advertised, Pick Your Own.

  “Why have we stopped?”

  “Because I need to stretch my legs,” said Kit.

  Having watched him unbolt a five-bar gate, Neku said, “I’ll come with you.”

  “No,” said Kit, “you won’t. I need you to stay with the bike.”

  Fifteen years had gone and still he stood humbled at the site of a mindless fuck between teenagers, one of them half drunk, the other ramped on speed. A thousand other people would have been having sex that night, ten thousand, a hundred thousand…Yoshi had been wrong. No one could tie you tighter than you could tie yourself and it was the ropes you couldn’t see that bound you tightest.

  “You’re crying,” said Neku, when he returned.

  Kit put his helmet back on.

  Seven Chimneys had changed in the time he’d been away. The yellow brick had lost its rawness and ivy had fanned out around the upper windows. The rose bushes had thickened and the flower bed outside the study been weeded and cut back so many times its earth had changed colour.

  Even the huge brass lion of a door knocker had lost its brashness and been cleaned and polished into something that felt greasy beneath Kit’s fingers as he lifted its heavy ring and brought it down with a bang.

  He had to knock another three times before he got an answer.

  “Who is it?”

  “Me,” he said, before realising how ridiculous that sounded. “It’s Kit,” he said. “I need you to look at something…” On the far side of the door bolts were drawn back, and when the door opened it was still held by a heavy chain.

  “Who’s she?” demanded Kate.

  Neku sighed. “Told you,” she said.

  While Kit looked through the attics for a trunk or box that might take the little brass key, Neku and Kate made lunch, which mostly involved slicing tomatoes and sticking fat chunks of cheese between even fatter slabs of bread.

  “Make a dressing,” Kate ordered. When Neku looked blank, Kate pulled wine vinegar, olive oil, and black pepper from a cupboard and dumped them in front of the girl.

  “Mix them,” she said. “Then grate in some pepper.”

  “What proportions?”

  “How would I know?” Kate asked, dumping an empty mustard jar in front of Neku. “My husband used to make it.” She nodded at the jar. “He used that.”

  Having poured oil and vinegar into the jar, Neku added black pepper and screwed the jar shut before shaking it hard. Then she drizzled the dressing over the top of the sliced tomatoes, because she couldn’t see what else she was meant to do with it.

  “It’s pretty here,” she said.

  Kate grunted.

  Horses ran in a field beyond the kitchen windows and bees clustered around a vast spread of lavender that overflowed a stone trough next to a bench on the lawn immediately outside. The room itself was huge, with stone slabs for a floor and work surfaces cut from railway sleepers. The kitchen was too big for one person, almost too big for one family. It looked as if it belonged in a hotel.

  “You and Kit,” Kate asked. “What’s that about?”

  So Neku told Kate how she’d met Kit by accident while she’d been stealing a pen, notebook, and ink from a shrine shop in Tokyo because she had a story she needed to write.

  “What’s the story about?”

  “A marriage.”

  “Whose marriage?”

  “Mine,” said Neku, “to the son of a lizard prince.”

  Kate raised her eyebrows. So Neku told Kate how she met Kit a second time on the streets of Roppongi, when he gave her a coffee one morning, because it was raining.

  “Because it was raining?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “And when was this?”

  “Last Christmas,” said Neku. “He brought me coffee every day after that, and often daifuku cake. Stuffed with sweet bean curd,” she added, when Kate looked puzzled. “I came to rely on it. The days Kit forgot I went hungry.”

  “You couldn’t just beg?”

  “Maybe that would have been better,” Neku admitted. “Less trouble for everybody, but it seemed wrong.” She told Kate how she’d actually had a coin locker stuffed with millions of dollars she was unable to use. And how taking coffee from Kit had somehow felt different. “Anyway,” she said. “I saved his life from an assassin. So that was repayment.”

  “Seems to be catching.”

  “What is?” asked Neku.

  “Wanting Kit dead.”

  Neku shrugged. “He was fucking the wife of a gang boss and bikers used his ba
r to deal drugs, plus lots of uyoku felt Yoshi Tanaka should be married to someone Japanese. Then there’s chippu he owed to the local police and unpaid bills from a Brazilian transvestite who mends his motorbike. It could have been anyone.”

  Kate laughed. “You tell a good story,” she said. “Almost as good as Patrick. All the same, I’d like the real story next time.”

  After lunch, Kate carried her own plate to the sink and ran it under cold water, leaving it to dry on a wire rack. It was the action of someone grown used to living alone, life reduced to simple habits. Neku did the same for her own plate, Kit’s plate, and the plate on which she’d put the tomatoes, washing each before placing it next to the plates already there.

  Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water… Neku found it hard to remember which actions carried weight and which got lost as static and dust in the slipstream from other people’s lives.

  “I’m going for a stroll,” said Kate. “You can keep looking,” she added, speaking to Kit. “But there’s no trunk here and no tuck box. Mary didn’t go to that kind of school.” And, with this, Kate headed for the kitchen door.

  Neku made to follow her.

  “Neku,” Kit said.

  “What,” said Neku, “I’m not allowed to take a walk too?”

  CHAPTER 39 — Thursday, 28 June

  Cars locked up the M25, London’s orbital. They crawled towards turn offs, negotiated endless road works, and slid gratefully away, like single fish leaving a shoal as they finally headed home to leafy and not-so-leafy suburbs. About ten minutes short of his own turn off, Kit spotted a BMW up ahead and thought no more about it, filtering through the gap between the BMW and a white van.

  As he did so, an arm reached through the driver’s window and fixed a blue light to the roof. Sirens blipped and the BMW would have remained trapped in molasses-slow traffic if Kit hadn’t obediently pulled over.

  “Licence…”

  Kit had already removed his helmet and dark glasses, so he smiled and nodded politely. “I’m sorry. Is there…”

  “Licence,” said the man.

  “Of course,” said Kit. Without hesitation, he unzipped a side pocket and flipped open his wallet, offering the man a small square of plastic. The only instantly recognisable words were Kit Nouveau, everything else was in Japanese.

  “What’s this?”

  “My licence.”

  The policeman turned over the square of plastic. It was obvious from the irritation on his face that he found the vehicle categories outlined in kanji on the back equally incomprehensible. At least the front had a photograph of Kit, a reference number, and something that looked like an end date.

  “Where’s your international permit?”

  “I don’t need one,” said Kit, careful to keep a smile on his face. “This is good in the UK for a year.”

  “Great,” said the man. “I’ve got myself a lawyer.”

  “Not at all.” Kit shook his head. “But I checked with the British embassy in Tokyo before I left.” As a lie it was next to impossible to refute, and besides, Japanese driving licences were legal in the UK, everyone knew that.

  “What about her?”

  Before Kit had time to answer, Neku produced a red and gold passport and handed it over. As an afterthought, she remembered to execute a small bow. A smile was fixed firmly on her face.

  “How long’s she been here?” demanded the policeman.

  “Almost a week,” said Kit.

  “And when she’s due to leave?”

  “Soon,” he said, pretending not to notice Neku’s frown.

  “Wait here,” the man ordered. A few minutes later he was back. Without a word, he returned Neku’s passport and the Japanese licence taken from Kit, then nodded at the bike. “You can go.”

  Car after car had been crawling past even more slowly than traffic conditions demanded, as drivers braked slightly to stare in vague interest at whatever was happening. When the policeman raised his head to stare back, a handful of faces immediately looked away.

  “Come on,” Kit told Neku, putting on his helmet and waiting for her to do the same. “Let’s go home.” He turned the Kawasaki in a slow circle and touched his rear brake as he reached the unmarked police car, slowing slightly to peer inside. Two men sat in the front. The one who’d just demanded sight of Kit’s licence and Sergeant Samson, the police officer from three days before.

  “Evening,” said Kit, and left the Sergeant to his calls and the numbers he’d been reading to someone over a car radio…

  Every city has its own night noises. The talking police cars in Tokyo. A fog horn from a freighter heard between New York’s rumble of trucks. The braying of a tethered donkey in Tunis.

  In London the late sounds were composed of lorries, banging doors, and people fighting in the streets. At least, that was how it sounded to Kit as he lay awake and listened to the hours crawl by as slowly as that evening’s traffic on the M25. It was noisy, if less noisy than Sophie had said.

  As well as using the mews to piss, drunks stopped off to try their phones or slumped half conscious against a wall, waiting for a call to remind them where they were meant to be. Couples dipped into its depths to kiss or fuck or squabble away from the main street. A typed note in a plastic folder—nailed to a door just under the arch, where it could be read by street light—assured johns that no prostitutes worked from any of the flats in Hogarth Mews.

  According to Sophie, a couple of Estonians had started conning tourists in Soho by giving them a key and an address in Hogarth Mews, with a promise that young and beautiful East European girls would be waiting. A Glaswegian trio tricked into visiting the nonexistent brothel had been angry enough to kick down a door.

  For all this, Hogarth Mews was a good address. A quick look in the window of a local estate agent had told Kit just how good. Not central Tokyo prices, of course, because few cities in the world had anything approaching those, but Mary had still left him a flat worth more than he’d earned in the previous ten years.

  And staring into the half darkness, Kit just wished he knew why. Apology, guilt, some weird attempt to make peace? Any of those would have worked, if only things had been the other way round. If he’d been the one offering Mary everything he owned.

  Kit was still worrying at this question when he heard the door from the roof garden open and then the sound of Neku’s key in the front door of the flat. This was not unusual. Neku often passed ghost-like through the hall on her way to get a glass of water or use the bathroom.

  Only this time she stopped outside his room.

  “You awake?”

  “Yeah,” he said, watching his door open.

  “Are you okay to talk?”

  “It’s three in the morning,” said Kit. “Can’t it wait?”

  “No,” Neku said, shaking her head. “Probably not.”

  He caught the sweep of one hip, a shoulder, and a curve of breast in silhouette as she turned back from shutting the door behind her. Absolute certainty of her nakedness came with a splinter of street light between her thighs as she walked towards him.

  “I’m not going back to Japan,” said Neku. Sitting on the edge of Kit’s bed she reached for the covers, her fingers tugging at the edge of his quilt.

  “Neku.”

  The tussle was brief and Kit won.

  “Why?” she asked, when she’d done what Kit demanded and put on his yukata, tying its belt tight around her. She still sat on his bed, only now her legs were folded under her and only one foot could be seen. Her arms were folded and she’d hunched inside herself, visibly furious with him.

  “You’re a kid,” said Kit.

  Neku snorted. “In some prefectures,” she said, “the age of consent is thirteen. Anyway,” Neku added crossly, “you wouldn’t be my first.”

  “Maybe not,” Kit said, “but that’s hardly the point.”

  “So it’s definitely my age?”

  He nodded.

&
nbsp; “Would it help,” said Neku, “if I told you how old I really was?”

  “Probably not.” Kit had her pegged at fifteen or sixteen. Although, since Japanese girls could look young for their age, she might be seventeen, though he doubted it. She behaved like a child, for all that she sometimes pretended to be something else.

  “Well?” he said.

  “I’m hundreds of years older than you.”

  “Hundreds?”

  “Thousands,” said Neku. “Ten of thousands. I don’t even know when this is, it’s so long ago…”

  CHAPTER 40 — Nawa-no-ukiyo

  “Where’s Luc?” Lady Katchatka demanded.

  “Being miserable somewhere,” said Nico. “Knowing him.”

  “And your sister?”

  Lady Katchatka glanced at her three sons. Nico sat at her feet, sharpening the blade of a katana said to be older than the family itself, while the two elder boys knelt by a wall, playing cards. Something simple, like clans.

  “Well?”

  “She was in the gardens,” said Antonio. “Playing with her stupid cat.” Antonio dealt another card, only to swear when his brother scooped the pile.

  “And when was this?” asked Lady Katchatka.

  “After lunch.”

  The old woman sighed. “Nico?”

  Her youngest son ran a sharpening glass down one edge of his blade, then wiped the metal with a finger, checking the silver dust he found there. “She’s asleep in the spire,” he said, without looking up.

  Petro snorted.

  “I thought it best to check,” Nico said coldly.

  She was going to have to deal with this, Lady Katchatka decided. But not now and certainly not before the wedding banquet was over.

  “Sound asleep?”

  Nico scowled.

  “Well,” Lady Katchatka demanded. “Was she sound asleep?”

  “Dead to this world,” said Nico.

  Also curled up in a corner. Although Nico didn’t need to mention this, because everyone knew how Neku slept. She’d been curling up in stray corners from the day she was born.