“You’re not barging in. It’s fine. You can come around here any time.”
“Us Yorkshire women have got to stay together, eh?”
I thought she might cry so for once I went along with her. “Here’s a good Yorkshire way of solving your problem.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ll put the kettle on.”
Lily laughed and rubbed her eyes. “Thanks. I could murder a cuppa. Seriously though, if you’re expecting Teiji to come around later, after work—”
Is it Lucy’s imagination or did Lily really ask about Teiji so often that night?
I made tea and carried it through. Lily couldn’t drink hers without at least two heaped teaspoons of sugar and had to dash out to the convenience store to buy some. I never buy sugar. I eat sweet food once or twice a year, and that is plenty.
I blew gently on the hot surface of the tea between sips. Lily seemed calmer about Andy and accepted that she was safe in Tokyo.
“As safe as anyone ever is, anywhere.” She gulped her tea like a child drinking milk.
“Absolutely. So there is no point in worrying.”
“Yes. Lucy?”
“What?”
“I know it’s stupid of me but I don’t want to sleep in my own apartment tonight. I know he won’t come, it’s just that I’m all nervous now and I’ll never be able to sleep. Would it be OK if I stopped here?”
I didn’t mind at all. I had extra bedding. My apartment had attained a rare coziness that evening, with the cushions, the tea, and shared confidences. I knew already that if Lily left I would be suddenly lonely and my apartment would be bare again. I hadn’t seen Teiji for seven days. Busy at the restaurant. The previous couple of nights had been long and solitary. Stupid, ugly Lucy had slept fitfully in her cold bed. Every time she woke during the night the feeling that she had somehow made Teiji stop loving her came afresh and kicked her hard in the stomach.
We pulled the futons out of the wardrobe and laid them side by side. We turned our backs on one another and slept. I am sure that without disturbances we would both have slept soundly until the morning, but that was not the case. In the middle of the night there was a sharp jolt. The walls shook and one of the teacups slipped from the table and rolled across the floor. I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and saw that Lily was already sitting under my desk. The street lamp outside shone through the window and bathed her in a yellow light. She hugged her knees tightly against her chest. Her eyes were shut, screwed up like raisins.
“Lily. Are you all right?”
“I’m scared.”
“It’s not such a bad one.” I paused. “I think it’s stopped.”
The floor shuddered again.
“What’s that noise?”
I hadn’t been conscious of it until she mentioned it. Then I realized the sound had been there all along, since before I woke up, somewhere in my sleep.
“The earthquake bird.”
“The what?”
As I listened for it the noise faded and I knew the room had stopped moving.
“I don’t know what it is. It’s always there in a quake. I thought it was a piece of old metal being knocked against something. It sounds too far away to be anything moving in the gas station, though. Teiji thinks it’s a bird, some old night bird being knocked off its perch by the jolt.”
“Sounded like a boot kicking an old tin can somewhere in the distance.”
“Who’d be kicking an old can outside my apartment every time there happens to be an earthquake?”
“Good point.”
“The thing is, every time I listen more closely to work it out, I get confused. It’s hard to judge in the middle of the night. And as soon as I’m awake enough to concentrate, it’s stopped. If you and Teiji hadn’t heard it too, I’d think I was dreaming.”
What I didn’t tell Lily about the earthquake bird was that I’d noticed something else. It didn’t start at the same time as the rocking. It started just before. Was that a dream? If so, it was always the same. How could the bird, or tin can, or boot, know an earthquake was about to happen? I pondered on this many times. I could have been wrong of course. Nothing is certain in the middle of the night. But if I was right, was it a warning or a symptom? If it was a warning, of what use was it just a few seconds before the event, with no time to run or hide?
Tonight my bed may be in this police station. What noises will I hear? Sirens, perhaps, police gossip. Drunkards being locked up. I had imagined that the inside of a police station would be dark. It isn’t but I wish it were. This room is painfully bright. My eyes are tired and I would like to sleep a little.
In the morning I made tea and put it on the floor beside Lily’s head.
“Thank you. Ooh, I slept like a log. I don’t think I woke up once after my head hit the pillow.”
“Except for the earthquake.”
“Earthquake? Was there a tremor last night? I must have slept through it.”
“No, you were awake. We both were.”
“Must have dropped straight off again, then. Don’t remember a thing.”
It’s easy to forget things that happen in the night when you’re half asleep. I thought it odd though that she had no recollection of getting out of bed and hiding under the desk, no memory of our conversation about the earthquake bird.
We walked to the station together. She was bright and chirpy and didn’t mention the previous night, or Andy. From the station I caught the train to work and she went home to get changed before heading for the bar.
At work, I found a letter on my desk. The stamps on the envelope were British but I didn’t recognize the round, neat handwriting. The only person in Britain who knew my work address was Lizzie. We never wrote letters and I had no idea what she was doing now but we sent each other Christmas cards every two or three years with just a signature. Lizzie’s handwriting was long and spidery, though. For a stupid moment I thought the letter could have come from Lily’s boyfriend, but he couldn’t know who I was, or where I worked.
I tore open the envelope and pulled out the letter. I stared at the signature for several seconds before I was able to read the whole page. It was from Jonathan, the second youngest of my remaining brothers. I hadn’t heard from any of them since before I left home. I assumed the cause of this letter was either a joke or a death.
Dear Lucy
It has been a very long time since any of us received news from you. We are all fine and we hope you are too. Your old schoolfriend, Lizzie, gave me this address and I trust my letter will reach you. I bumped into her at Waterloo Station not long ago. She’s doing very well for herself at the BBC, as some high-flying executive, but perhaps you already know that. I remember you two used to be very close.
Mum doesn’t get about much these days. Her arthritis is bad though she is as sharp in mind as ever. My wife, Felicity, pops in every Tuesday and Sunday to see how she is and give her a casserole or an apple crumble. You’ll be surprised to learn that Mum is something of a poet these days and has had a few of her creative dabblings appear in print in the local Recorder. We’re all very proud of her as you can imagine.
I have made a few changes in my own life. I suppose you won’t think of them as changes because you don’t know what I was doing before. Let me fill you in. I was enjoying a career in the police force for several years and looking forward to my promotion when the whole course of my life shifted on its axis. You see, I found the Lord. It happened quite suddenly and unexpectedly while I was pruning a rosebush and saw a beautiful blackbird hopping along the wall beside me. I understood for the first time in my life that such a perfect creature must have been created by someone and was not just a freak of nature or product of so-called evolution. Moreover, we seemed to know each other, as if we’d been together once in some other world. I left the police force after that and am now with the church, training to be a minister. It was the right decision. I met Felicity in the choir stalls and we married last year. She’s the head chorister a
nd has a lovely voice. We are very happy together and hoping to hear the patter of little feet in the not-too-distant future.
It is on my conscience, Lucy, that I have you—a sister created for me by Him—and yet I don’t even know you. It would be nice to hear from you one day and learn of all your adventures out there in the mysterious Orient.
Let me close this letter with a poem written by Mum. She didn’t say why she wrote it but I feel sure that it’s about you and how she wishes you would walk back into our lives. I think you’ll find it very touching.
Yours in Him,
Jonathan
The poem was on a separate sheet of paper, folded. I opened it and then folded it again, without reading the poem. I sat at my desk for twenty minutes or so, drumming my fingers, unable to do anything else. Finally, I slid the paper out of the envelope, prized it slowly open, and began to read.
Evenings With No Comfort
by Miriam Fly
Evenings bring me no comfort now
Just tea from my favorite cup
As I sit in my old, old chair
And my arthritis plays me up
There is no sound of children playing
Or laughter in the rooms
I’m living in a haunted house
With a garden full of tombs
The door is always open though
And I wish that you’d come through it
To bring a little welcome light
And not to say I blew it
Though I know I did
I laughed aloud at Miriam’s doggerel, decided the poem was more likely to have been written about wanting Felicity to arrive in the doorway with one of her casseroles than about Lucy coming home.
My feelings toward Jonathan were a little more complicated. I wasn’t impressed that his attempt to befriend me was transparently part of a larger scheme to befriend God, at least for long enough to get a job out of Him. Still, it’s always exciting to receive an airmail letter, in its fat, stamp-covered envelope. It’s impossible to begrudge the writer at least a little gratitude. But I put the letter in a drawer and resolved to do nothing about it at present. I would take it out again in a few months and decide whether or not to send a Christmas card. I wondered if Jonathan had given my address to Miriam. I hoped not. I wished her no ill and hoped that the arthritis wasn’t too painful, but I had no intention of going to see her. And I didn’t want any more poems.
I returned to my work. I’d been given a difficult translation to do and a time limit of three weeks. It was a set of lengthy manuals on the production of a new type of electric wheelchair and I could not make head or tail of the diagrams. I don’t normally mind long and boring translations but this one was causing me great annoyance. It had been badly written in Japanese and I had to spend a day studying the engineering of wheelchairs in order to grasp the instructions. I even constructed a model wheelchair using paper cups, an old birthday card, and a couple of toothpicks. The air conditioning blew it repeatedly to the floor until I smashed it up and threw it away. Every day for three weeks I worked from early morning until it was time to catch the last train home.
I didn’t see Lily or Teiji during those weeks. I wanted to see Teiji but when I wasn’t working, I was sleeping. There was no time. He was on my mind, though, and as I worked at the translation I counted down the days until I would be with him again. The only person I spoke to was Natsuko. She was busy too but we had our lunches together, shared complaints about dictionaries and badly drawn diagrams.
One lunchtime, in the middle of all this, Natsuko suggested we go for a quick walk.
“I want to show you something,” she said.
That is one of my favorite sentences. I didn’t mind that the thing might be nothing, or something bad. Just those words were enough to give me that exquisite feeling that reminds me of lights going down in an auditorium, ready for the thrill to begin.
I followed Natsuko out to the street, almost skipping as I went. The streets were packed. Shibuya is teeming with teenagers every hour of the day, every day of the week. It is enough to make a thirty-four-year-old feel ancient. Why were these kids never in school? We pushed through the crowds of wedge heels and pink mobile phones until we emerged in a little side street. Here there were just two small shops. One sold potted plants, another vintage clothing. Apart from these it was a calm, quiet, residential area. Apartment buildings next to old garages next to small houses.
“You’ll love this.” Natsuko was confident in everything she said. And her confidence is always justified. I have never known her to be wrong, though I can see her deliberating now on my role in Lily’s death. “I discovered it last week. I came around here looking for a hairdresser someone told me about but I couldn’t find it. I’m glad I got lost, though. Look.”
She had climbed onto an overturned bucket on the street and was peering over the stone wall of a private garden. Her frizzy ponytail stuck out behind her. She stared for a minute or two, jumped down.
“You have a look.”
From the ground I could see that the small garden contained a couple of ragged pine trees. I could make out flowers of pink and white through a gap in the wall. A ginger cat came and rubbed its back against my legs, looked up at me, mewed. I stroked it until it was bored and went to Natsuko for affection. I stepped onto the bucket.
In the center of the garden was a camellia tree. It had shiny green leaves, pale pink clusters of petals that looked as though blood was pumped into them through tiny capillaries. Its dark branches were so beautifully curved, so perfectly distanced from one another that it looked like a tree from a storybook, a tree that would hold strange, magical properties if you rubbed a branch or nibbled a leaf.
“I’ve never seen a camellia tree so beautiful.” Natsuko had poked one eye and her nose through the gap in the wall. “I just want to stand here and look at it all day.”
Lucy hasn’t always had a happy relationship with trees but it isn’t fair to condemn all for the crimes of one.
“It’s lovely.” I looked for another minute or so. The image of the tree will always be inside my head, not because it was beautiful—though it was—but because it made Natsuko so incredibly happy and because she took me to see it.
“Thank you for bringing me.”
“My pleasure. If I ever have my own house, I want a tree like that in the garden. I suppose I’d have to buy this house. There can’t be another tree just like this one. I’d like to look for one, though. But if I had this tree I’d be happy forever. If I had this tree, I wouldn’t want anything else.”
Natsuko was a natural smiler, as Lucy has mentioned, but on that short break from our cramped office her smile used up her whole face, her mouth, eyes, cheekbones, nose, and chin. Even her bouncy fringe had extra spring in it. I think it was infectious because, as we returned to the office, I felt a little lighter on my feet.
I finished the wheelchair translation on the day of the deadline. I went home and called Teiji, hoping to see him soon. He couldn’t come to the phone. He was busy and would be working in the restaurant every night for the next few weeks. I was bitterly disappointed. I wondered if he was really so busy or if he was still brooding about Lucy opening his boxes, looking at his photographs. Or Sachi. Had I somehow brought her back by yanking her from her place in the middle of the box and out into the open air? Was he with Sachi now, or thinking about her?
But perhaps I was being unfair. I had been genuinely busy at work for the same period of time. There was no reason why Teiji shouldn’t also have to work hard. I sat in my apartment feeling bored and lonely, trying not to think of Jonathan and Felicity, or Miriam in her old, old chair with her apple crumble. I wondered whether or not to call Lily.
And then the phone rang. It was Lily. She was calling to tell me that she would be leaving Japan at the end of the month.
“Why?”
“I don’t belong here. I should go home and face up to my life. I need to get back to nursing. I’m so bad at being
a barmaid. Everything just goes wrong.”
“But what about Andy?”
“I might not bump into him.”
“Of course you will. What are you talking about? You don’t want to walk right back into the problems you left, do you?”
“Maybe I’ve been hard on him.” She spoke in a soft voice, slightly soppy. “I miss him a bit. I was all right when I wasn’t thinking about him but now I am, he’s got right under my skin again. I’ve suddenly started to get really homesick and I want to go back. Tokyo will never be my home.”
“Whatever you want.” I slammed the phone down and wondered why I was so upset. It had nothing to do with me. I should have been glad to be rid of her.
The truth was, I had grown used to having her around. She made me feel competent, at home in Tokyo, clever. And something else. When I was alone at night and closed my eyes, I always remembered the moment when I tumbled on the mountainside, the sharp pain in my ankle. That memory would then lead to deeper thoughts, of all the people I’d lost, the disasters I’d caused. And then the touch of fingers as Lily made me better. Her warm nurse’s hands soothed me to sleep and were there should I fall again. I didn’t want her to go.
But I was not motivated by pure selfishness. I became depressed on Lily’s behalf at the thought of her return to Hull and Andy, for Lucy cannot hear of another person’s plan without living through it in her head. However I conjured it in my brain, Andy and Lily were bound for a sticky end. Lily had tasted escape and to return to captivity would never work. No, this was a bad plan and it became Lucy’s purpose to keep Lily in Japan, at least for a little longer.
I had an idea. An idea of a place. Could there be a better place in Japan for Lucy and Lily to visit than the one I had just thought of? This rugged island in the north had provided exile for criminals and the politically undesirable for centuries. It was perfect for these two modern-day exiles. I called her back.
“Come to Sado Island with me.”
The Earthquake Bird Page 10
