The Earthquake Bird

by Susanna Jones

  “No. I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

  “But he will in the future?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “But it’s a hobby. So he can put them on the walls to brighten them up, and give them to people and stuff. That’s nice.”

  Why did Teiji take photographs? He gave a few of them to me but mostly he did nothing with them. I realized it must have sounded odd to Lily but I didn’t want to talk about it with her.

  “Do you think you’ll stay in Japan long?”

  “I don’t know. It’s funny because I’ve only been here a couple of weeks, but I’m a bit homesick. There are things I miss that I probably wouldn’t even want if I was back at home now. Do you find that?”

  “This is home now so all I can think of is how homesick I would be if I ever left Japan.”

  “I miss fish and chips. And shops where I can buy what I want. I’ve noticed the shoes here are all too small for me. I could just do with a walk down Whitefriargate to look at shoes.”

  “That’s true. With my big feet I have a shoe problem too.”

  “Do you miss the Yorkshire coast?”

  “No.”

  “There must be something about it you like.”

  “There is. Erosion. That part of the coast has some of the worst erosion in the world. It’s falling into the sea as we speak. A foot or two every year falls off the edge and drowns itself. Or swims southward and becomes part of East Anglia. That’s something I like.”

  “I went to the seaside when I was a kid. We used to go at weekends. I remember paddling in the sea till my skin went blue. And there were those huge waves that knocked you over. I hated the cold but I did like being in water.”

  Lucy was jolted into the past and missed whatever Lily said next. Lucy was swimming, trying to go fast enough to keep warm when she felt furry hands stroking and clinging to her legs. At first she thought it was one of her seven brothers, a prank, but the touch was feminine and insistent like the caressing fingers of a mermaid. She thought it was pulling her down, under the waves to drown her, but not violently, softly and quietly. A couple of minutes later she was kneeling in shallow waves. Dark, heavy seaweed was wrapped around both legs.

  “I liked eating cotton candy at the beach,” Lucy heard Lily say.

  “I did, too. I loved cotton candy.”

  “And ice cream, but the sand always blew in and stuck to it.”

  We finished our drinks in silence. I had goose bumps from the air conditioning. When we went back into the warm humidity, I was disoriented to find myself in Tokyo.

  “Never thought I’d be in Japan,” Lily said, removing her cardigan. “If you’d’ve asked me a year ago I couldn’t’ve found it on a map.”

  I should have walked away then. She knew how to get home. But something occurred to me and I opened my mouth and shared it with Lily. Stupid me.

  “I’m going hiking on Sunday with Natsuko—she’s a colleague—and I think you’d like her. It’s not a particularly difficult hike but should be quite interesting. You might want to come.”

  * * *

  Lily was lost, lonely, out of her depth, in need of kindness. I knew that. Let me explain why I was so unwilling to spend time with her. It was because of another story, a story that I didn’t tell Lily. And one that I’m not telling the police. I told only Teiji. I told Teiji once and once is enough to tell the story of one’s life.

  This is how it happened. I lay between the covers of Teiji’s bed. He slipped in beside me, warmed my bare skin with his, held his camera at arm’s length, pointed it, and took a picture of me. It was one of the few photographs he took that included his own image. He tossed the camera aside and whispered something. What did he whisper? It seems to me now that Teiji and I never used words, but of course we must have. I remember times when I’m sure we were talking but I cannot recall a syllable of what we said. I have a sense that feelings and ideas passed between us like telepathy but that is too fanciful. I can’t hear Teiji’s voice but he must have had a voice. If I concentrate then what I hear is a sound like the patter of raindrops coming from our mouths. No pauses, no turn-taking, just water falling. I can’t be sure of his exact words, but this is what I believe he said that evening.

  “How did you get here?”

  I resisted the temptation to say, “I took the Yamanote line and then I walked,” for I knew that was not the answer to his question.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “But you’re here, in Japan. I found you. You came to Japan from another land, another continent, so far away, and I found you in my camera. How?”

  And I told him. I started from the beginning and told him almost everything.

  3

  I began with my birth.

  Lucy Fly was born in Scarborough in 1965, in a Victorian terraced house with severe gray brickwork and three solid steps up to the front door. The North Sea wind blew so hard against the door that you needed to put on a coat and hat just to put the milk bottles out. Lucy was the youngest of eight children belonging to George and Miriam Fly, and the only girl. She was born at home, in darkness. The bedroom lightbulb went out with a pop just as the midwife urged Miriam to give a final push. George was downstairs watching the rugby league but tore himself graciously away for long enough to replace the bulb with the one from the outside loo. When finally she could see, Miriam, the very proud mother of seven sons, stared miserably at the red mess that was lifted from the aching gap between her legs. She had been waiting for her eighth son. He would have been called Jonah.

  “Very fitting,” George had said under his breath the week before, “since he’ll be springing forth from a great whale.”

  But all Miriam could see was a boy without a willy.

  “It’s a lovely girl!” said the midwife wiping the baby clean.

  Miriam did not see the loveliness. She saw a scrawny pink girl with no neck and beady black crow’s eyes. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she could produce a girl. She was an efficient male-producing factory and considered it her right to be so. Miriam wasn’t a cruel person but her own childhood had been blighted by its lack of any men. Her father had died during the war. She had two sisters, no brothers, and, to compound the unfairness, she was forced to attend all-girls’ schools. The only men she spoke to were bus conductors and the coal man. She wanted a man who would pick her up, tell her she was a little princess. Miriam’s suffering was rewarded in adulthood. She claimed her rightful place as the center of male attention and her seven sons were part of the entitlement.

  “Oh well,” she said, feeling the pain at the core of her and knowing this was the last baby she would have. “Some help folding the bedsheets. Crow’s eyes or not.”

  Such was Miriam’s admirable stoicism in the face of overwhelming disappointment. She thought, at first, of naming the baby Linda, meaning “beautiful.” That was the name she had wanted as a child. But the paradox was cruel and so, at the midwife’s suggestion, the baby girl was named Lucy, which means “light,” because George was on a chair changing a lightbulb when Lucy flopped out. He left the room immediately and without looking, to let the women do their things with blood and warm water. He awaited the news downstairs.

  “A girl?” His face showed genuine surprise. “Bugger me.”

  There is no evidence of elucidation of this remark. At any rate, life for George and Miriam did not change so much. They still had shepherd’s pie for tea on Tuesdays, and fish fingers on Fridays. A girl could wear boys’ clothes, for the most part, and didn’t seem to need any special treatment. She toddled around learning things for herself and keeping out of the way of her brothers, who didn’t see the point of her, though she made a good cannonball when they wanted to test the glass of the greenhouse. Little Lucy was not much good to Miriam, even as an assistant, because she was so clumsy. She broke the dishes she washed and dropped hot plates coming from the oven. She couldn’t cook, no matter how hard she tried.

  Miriam grunted. “How w
ill you ever get married if you can’t make pastry? You’ll never get anywhere, mark my words.”

  “I will,” said Lucy, with the voice inside her head that always said the same thing, “I’ll get away from here.”

  But when Lucy was seven they moved away from Scarborough and it was worse. The family moved to a small town farther down the coast so that Miriam could complain about being isolated. Unlike Scarborough, this town had no cliffs, no hills. It was flat and empty. There was nothing else to do but go to the beach. Every Sunday they ate sandy picnics in the eye-watering wind, swam in the rough, cold North Sea. The seven brothers played Death on the breakwater while Lucy preferred to go up to a bench on the promenade and read a book. It was too windy even there, but it was better than being thrown onto the jagged wooden breakwater and having all your skin pulled off. Miriam did not approve.

  “We come all this way and spend money on a house by the sea and you go and stick your big beak in some book. You think you’re too good for us. You’re not. You’re just allergic to fresh air.”

  The North Sea became Lucy’s first enemy. George told her that at the other side lay Norway. And if you dug a hole in the sand, and kept digging, you’d come out in Australia standing on your head. Lucy decided that of the two options, Norway was the more realistic. One east coast summer’s afternoon, when the sea and sky were gray and the wind swept the beach, Lucy set off. She lay on the family’s inflatable raft and paddled as fast as she could, knowing that all she had to do was not fall off and not get swept back. The North Sea was having none of this. It rocked and pushed. Finally it tipped her over so that she was clinging to the underneath of the raft with a mouth full of salt-water. Her feet didn’t touch the bottom and for the first time in her short life she felt panic. But the monster was not going to gobble Lucy up. She swam as fast as she could and reached the shore several minutes before the raft. No one had noticed her absence, but then it was rare that they ever noticed her presence.

  The seven brothers hardly spoke to Lucy. Miriam didn’t like them to. Somehow she felt that it would belittle them to give their attentions to a small girl instead of their mother. To Miriam, the seven sons were angels. They were not. They were pigs who threw water bombs from behind doors, emptied water bombs in the eyes of neighborhood children, wiped their butts on the bathroom towels when it was too much trouble to find the end of the toilet paper.

  For Lucy, the misfortune of having seven such older brothers was not relieved even when one of them—Noah, the nastiest of all—died. Since Miriam continued to refer to her seven sons when there were only six, it was hard for Lucy to see Noah’s death as much of an achievement. She did, however, have some claim in its coming about.

  It happened on a bright day in the summer holidays in the shade of the biggest apple tree in the garden. When Lucy was seven or eight, this was the best tree for climbing. She was large enough to lever herself up the trunk but not too big to endanger the thinner branches. The trunk divided into two, like a pair of legs in a wobbly handstand. Either leg could be climbed but Lucy liked the one that stretched over the lawn. She could crawl along it and jump onto the soft grass below. Lucy had no fear and was happy to fling herself from the top. Sometimes, to make it harder, she stuck objects—a pitchfork, a couple of garden spades, sharp planks of wood—into the grass to leap beyond. And when that lost its ability to challenge Lucy, she began to jump backward. She sustained many scrapes, bruises, and gashes those long summers, but she could not stop herself.

  When she didn’t feel like jumping, Lucy would crawl along to the end of the bough and sit in a nook of branches, watching the world beneath. Lucy liked observation points, not so much because she liked to watch but because, in a carefully chosen position, she could be fairly sure that no one was observing her. Sometimes she took a book. Pippi Longstocking and The Secret Garden were her favorites. She admired feisty Pippi and empathized with miserable Mary who’d lived in India and ended up in Yorkshire.

  On that cloudless day Lucy was reading Pollyanna. A teacher had lent it to her but so far she was disgusted. This drippy girl didn’t know how to complain but looked for good things everywhere when clearly they were bad. Lucy stopped every few pages to rearrange herself in the branches and to shake the tree to see if she could turn any loose apples into windfalls. The seven brothers appeared, back from a fishing trip with the Boy Scouts. They were delighted to spot Lucy in her crow’s nest over the garden. At the command of Noah, they surrounded the apple tree and pounded it with stones to knock their sister to the ground. Lucy knew that if she jumped down they would get her. But if she stayed on her perch she might very well be stoned to death, like St. Stephen. She could become a Christian martyr but that was no good because she’d decided some years before that she was an atheist. If she screamed for help nothing at all would happen because Miriam was running a jumble sale at the town hall and George was never around. Lucy saw on the grass a sharper, heavier stone than the ones hitting her arms and legs. It had multiple angles that would cut your fingers just holding it. If you threw it, you could probably kill an elephant by cutting its head right off. And before she had finished noticing the stone, there was a hand on it. Noah’s fat fingers had grasped the weapon and were lifting it from the grass. He looked up at her with pale blue eyes full of bubbling malice. Lucy pulled herself back a little on the long bough. As Noah’s arm came up, poised to throw, she pushed down with all her might. She sprang out of the tree in a perfect trajectory and landed on Noah. Noah fell back and was impaled between the shoulder blades on a long rusty nail sticking out of one of Lucy’s planks of wood. He sat up with the plank attached to his back and for once was speechless. Then he fell again and let the stone slip from his grasp. His curly blond hair was pasted to his forehead with sweat. His eyes were open, still staring at Lucy. He died in the hospital that night.

  I will not recall the devastation of this act upon the parents of this beautiful young boy. It is enough to say that Lucy did not bother to bother anyone in the family after that and kept herself to herself, though she did not like to sit in her tree anymore. She had only meant to squash Noah, not to puncture him. Eventually, and against the wishes of the town council, George chopped the cooking apple tree down, hacked it into pieces, and burned it in a crackling orange bonfire. Did the smoke billow and make tears gather at the corners of his eyes? Lucy never knew. She wasn’t watching.

  Lucy didn’t speak for the next three years. The last person she talked to was the kind nurse who took her away from the hospital ward, holding her small hand tightly, along a corridor that smelled of sick and disinfectant. She said to Lucy, “You understand that it’s not your fault, don’t you?”

  And Lucy answered, “Yes, no, yes,” because she didn’t understand the question and didn’t know which answer the nice nurse wanted to hear.

  She did not, could not, utter a word after that and life was much simpler. At home they either didn’t notice or were relieved. The seven (six) brothers had lost their appetite for Lucy’s blood since the accident. At school the teachers left her alone; after all, there were bound to be a couple of odd ones in every year. The other children whispered about her but never came too close because they knew she could kill so easily. Three silent, blissful years passed. Then she won the county junior chess contest.

  The local newspaper had prepared a piece about Lucy the Tragic Mute Genius. There is one thing above all that Lucy has never been able to tolerate and that is presumption about Lucy. So complacent, so unquestioning they wrote their fantasy about her loneliness, her reach for chess as a desperate last hope of communication with the world. Lucy had taken up chess precisely because there was no need to speak. Check can be communicated with the eyes and eyebrows. If some pedant insists on the use of the word, it can be written on the back of the hand. So at the prize-giving ceremony she opened her mouth and spoke clearly but casually into the microphone, “Thanks,” as if she had been speaking every day. Checkmate. Except that she had only cornered he
rself. Once she had spoken again, it was impossible to rediscover the silence.

  At secondary school, Lucy made a friend, her first and only friend until she left home at eighteen. Her name was Lizzie. Although Lucy was speaking now, the other children had long ago pronounced her weird. Lucy accepted weirdness as her definition and quite naturally took to her role of friend to other weirdos. Lizzie was as gangly as Lucy was stumpy. Even at eleven, she was as tall as the tallest teachers. She had long, lank hair and a thin, sad face. They made each other look stranger but they had plenty in common. Lucy played the cello and Lizzie the trombone. Sometimes they played together during the ten-minute breaks between lessons. They would find a corner of a classroom or the playground and play simple duets based on pieces stolen from the school orchestra, or songs they heard on the radio. They were a freak show and, naturally, people stared, sneered, sometimes teased. But no one ever tried to stop them.

  They had nothing to complain about. They enjoyed being left on their own. Name-calling from these bumpkins couldn’t wound. They made many attempts at inventing their own language, though they usually failed. But in French class they bounded ahead of the other pupils. Lucy and Lizzie read Asterix books, copied words out of their French dictionaries, spoke together in French. Where they didn’t know the vocabulary or grammar, they invented it and pronounced it with French accents copied from Debbie Harry on Top of the Pops. They truly believed they were speaking French, though now Lucy wonders if any French person would have understood a word they said.

  But it was not enough to satisfy Lucy. (Was anything?) The secret language was not sufficiently secret to guarantee total separation from others. And anyway, Lizzie was always taking time off school because she thought she was sick. Over the years she contracted cancer, arthritis, lumbago, flu, meningitis, gout, dengue fever, and more. Lucy knew Lizzie couldn’t have had all of them but she suffered as though Lizzie did. Lucy was as strong as an ox and lonely without her friend.