I thought the tunnel might be veering gently, though it was hard to tell so now I was probably going east, or maybe northeast, and then I came to a T-junction. I turned right, probably towards the south. I came to an intersection. How many turnings could I remember? It would only take one mistake to be lost. I thought of Theseus and the Minotaur; I needed a ball of string. I picked at the zip-up jacket I was wearing, trying to pull a thread that I could attach to something, and then, like a cartoon, my jacket would unravel and get shorter and shorter as I walked, and one by one the sleeves would disappear and I’d be left with two pockets, a collar and a zip, and a line to follow to get me out of this place. However, the special weave of the textile used for my jacket meant that it didn’t unwind so easily (in fact, not at all). I decided to go straight on. The tunnel was blocked off, bricked up. Back at the intersection, straight on would be the way I’d come from. I turned right, back towards the east.
I’d already burned a good hundred pages of The Divine Comedy, which was what, seven hundred pages long? Maybe it’s two in the morning. That’s fine. So long as I’m home by six. The path forked, but this time there was no choice because the right-hand passage was blocked by a steel door with a lock. I tried to recall my route so far, saying the directions I’d taken over and over in rhythm: left at the first fork, right at the junction, left at the intersection, left at the second fork . . . Then I came to a spiral stairway. I counted the steps. Thirty. And each step was say, thirty degrees, so twelve steps was a full circle. So I was facing in the direction opposite to the one I had come from. Maybe. Left at the first fork, right at the junction, left at the intersection, left at the second fork, down the stairs. Of course, if I went back after five thirty, then the metro would be running and I’d have to walk back to Buttes Chaumont with trains rushing past me. The tunnel turned left and right and I came to a big chamber with several possible exits. Dante wasn’t bright enough to light the whole room at once so I walked round, counting the passages. Was this the one where I came in? Six. I left a page by one of the exits and walked round to the beginning to see whether I’d counted correctly. I hadn’t. Seven passages then, although the page had moved slightly, which meant there was air movement to blow it, or maybe it was just my walking that created a current. I was tired and feeling delirious. What the hell was I doing here? Had I gone mad? It was time to get out.
I set off back the way I’d come, but there was no spiral stairway, or at least not yet. I thought about cities and maps. I thought about Venice and Havana and plodded on, getting lost in the rhythm of my feet. Half the book had gone. This was the wrong way. I had to turn back a couple of times because of water too deep to wade through and one time I found a fast-flowing stream. I should go back to the chamber with seven doorways and then I should sit down and get my head clear. I came to a new chamber. It was misshapen with a large rock in the middle, flattened off at table height, and a single pillar to the left made from large stones cemented together. There was no point in being cross with myself for having been so impulsive to walk down into this subterranean mess without any preparation or a map. I was coming to find Butterfly. That’s why I was here. This was a heroic and noble deed of friendship and love and I was far from dead. My feet were wet, though, as were my jeans up to my knees. I lay down in a loose foetal position on top of the rock and waited.
* * *
‘Wake up.’
I was trying to remember something about Dante telling me to take another route. It all seemed to make sense.
‘Wake up!’
Somebody was touching my shoulder. I opened my eyes, but it didn’t make any difference; I couldn’t see anything.
‘Hey, wake up, Ben Constable.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, trying to work out where I was and why I couldn’t see. ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you see in the dark,’ I said, ‘or have you got special night-vision spectacles?’
‘I’ve got a flashlight, but I turned it off so it wouldn’t hurt your eyes when you opened them.’
‘That’s funny. Normally I sleep with some sort of light to stop me being disorientated when I wake.’
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s OK. I hardly ever know where I am whether there’s a light or not.’
‘You’re in the tunnels underneath Paris.’
‘I recognised the dark. What time is it?’
‘Twenty past three.’
‘Can you turn the light on, please?’
Tomomi Ishikawa shone her torch around the chamber so I could see all its dimensions and then at herself in case I was in any doubt as to who she was (although her voice was a much more reliable method for me to identify her than her face).
‘How did you find me?’ I asked.
‘By accident. I walked in and saw you lying here like an effigy. You scared me. How long have you been here?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What time is it really?’
‘I don’t know; I don’t do time.’
‘No.’ I was unnecessarily dry and regretted it when I heard my voice. But she ignored me.
‘Or days for that matter.’
‘Well, I left my flat at about eleven thirty on Thursday evening. I came down here, wandered round for a couple of hours, got lost, fell asleep and now I’m awake and I’m hungry and still tired and probably late for work.’
‘We can probably presume it’s Friday then.’ She turned the torch off. ‘I don’t want to waste the batteries.’
‘You should get rechargeable ones.’
‘Oh, they are,’ she said. ‘You can turn this handle thing and charge them up.’ There was a whirring sound as she frantically whizzed the lever round. ‘Cool, huh?’
‘Butterfly, turn the light on.’
We were shy for a second and I watched her standing a couple of metres from me, wearing a simple top, a calf-length skirt gathered at the waist and flat shoes like a ballet dancer. She smiled and swung the torch around without thinking, hurling monstrous shadows on the walls and ceiling.
I lit a cigarette because that’s what happens with smokers when they’re not sure what to do with their hands.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘I came to find you.’
‘Do you have a map?’
‘No.’
‘What about a torch?’
‘No.’
‘Wow, that’s cool. This place is really hard to navigate if you don’t know your way around. People get lost and die. They can’t get out and they just starve to death, I guess.’
‘Saves you the effort of killing them.’
‘I suppose so.’ She sighed. Then giggled. ‘Killing them’s the best bit, of course.’
‘I liked your stories of killing everyone, you know,’ I said. ‘Not at the time, of course, but in retrospect they were quite funny and scary.’ She didn’t answer and the lightness evaporated for a moment and we went back to shy. ‘I thought there would be arrows and clues and stuff to follow,’ I said.
‘Oh, there were. I went round and rubbed them all out.’
‘Why?’
‘I didn’t want you to find me anymore.’
‘Why?’
‘Things change.’
I sighed and thought for a second. Things felt heavy inside me and I wanted to be on my own all of a sudden. I really wanted to be on my own.
‘Butterfly?’
‘Yes?’
‘I want to go now. Can you tell me how to get out of here?’
‘You said you were hungry. We should eat.’
‘I’m late for work. I should go.’
‘OK. Come with me.’ She turned and the beam from the torch disappeared down a tunnel. I couldn’t see. I thought about just staying where I was. I remembered what I’d thought in Bryant Park on that last night in New York: in real life there is no dénouement. No matter how far I travel and to what lengths I go to find Butterfly, I will never be satisfied. There was nothing
she could say that would make me understand, nothing that could make it all right. Frustrating as it was, the story was already over.
‘Come on,’ she said.
‘I can’t see.’
She turned and shone the light at my feet. I put my cigarette out on the floor and she walked back towards me, bent down and picked up the filter. ‘You mustn’t leave trash,’ she said, and I was embarrassed. Then she raced carelessly into the dark, shining the light backwards for me.
‘How can you walk without the light?’
‘Oh, I can see a tiny bit, but I’m used to it. I know my way round pretty well.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Since I died.’
‘So you are one of the undead after all!’
She looked over her shoulder at me and grinned.
I was silent and we walked on.
‘So, did you like New York?’
I smiled a bit and pouted at the same time. ‘Yeah, I did.’ She shot a glance back at me, pointing the light up at my face to see my expression and blinding me. ‘It was kind of difficult sometimes. But I liked it.’
‘Hey, I’m sorry it turned out like that. It was meant to be fun. It was your adventure; my present. I was proud to show you round my wonderful Gotham Town.’
My head raced for a second. I’d already imagined this conversation in Bryant Park. This wasn’t the same, though. There was nothing sweet here. I felt like I could see her madness. Had it always been there? I didn’t say anything and we walked on in silence. There were junctions and passages and we turned left and right. Butterfly never hesitated, never needed to look or check.
‘Are we in the catacombs?’
‘They call them catacombs, but mostly they were quarried for the stone. This is what they built Paris out of, until they dug up so much that the world they were constructing up there started sinking back into the ground it had come from. Whole buildings and streets collapsed.’
‘How much of this tunnelling is there?’
‘This side of the Seine, not much.’ Tomomi Ishikawa was always happy giving tour guide information.
‘It feels like a lot to me.’
‘There are a fair few kilometres spread over various networks, but a lot of it has been blocked off or filled in for structural reasons. On the Left Bank it’s crazy, though. There’s almost as much tunnelling as there are streets.’
We reached a door and she took out a key ring and a rubber cosh. Holding the torch in her mouth, she put a key into the lock, hit it firmly with the cosh whilst turning the key and the door was open.
‘Huh? How did you do that?’ I couldn’t understand what I’d just seen.
‘Oh, it’s a trick I learned. It’s called bumping. It’s easy with a little practice, much easier than picking, and it works with just about all barrel locks.’
‘Do you mean opening locks that you don’t have the key for?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did you learn a thing like that?’
‘The Internet,’ she said, and led the way into what seemed like an even darker tunnel.
‘You’re not showing me out of here, are you?’
‘Oh, sorry, you said you were hungry. I haven’t seen you for such a long time. I thought you might have questions. I thought you might like to see where I live now.’
There was something wrong. I still wanted to be on my own. I don’t know what I had imagined I would find down here, but it wasn’t this. My breathing went heavier, as if I were dealing with something difficult. I wasn’t scared, I couldn’t get scared with Butterfly, but I’d asked her to show me out and she had led me here.
There was another door and she repeated her trick with a key and the cosh. We walked into some kind of chamber and she closed the door behind me. ‘Well, it’s not much, but it’s home,’ she said, and turned off the torch. I couldn’t see a thing.
251/2
Cigarettes and Water
She struck a match (the sound made me jump) and lit candles. There was a table against the wall and two chairs. Apart from that the room was bare, with two open doorways leading into darkness. All colours seemed to be tones of orange or black and there was the smell of candle wax and stone. Long shadows danced tiny movements on the walls like winter, her bare ankles so delicate they could snap beneath the downy skin.
My heart was pounding heavy in my chest and the hairs on my arms were alert.
‘What is this place?’
‘I don’t actually know. When I found it there were odd things, probably from the war. I think people might have hidden here when the Nazis came.’
‘I thought the Nazis occupied the catacombs.’
‘They had a bunker; it’s miles away, though. They stuck to their bit. The Resistance used the tunnels as well and all sorts of other people. They couldn’t fight a war down here. It was too complicated. Do you want some water?’ she called, disappearing through one of the dark openings.
‘Please,’ I said, more out of reflex than thirst.
‘There isn’t much to eat, I’m afraid. Can I get you a yoghurt?’
I could hear water pouring from a jug, not a tap. How could she see?
‘Yeah. Yoghurt’s good.’
She put two glasses on the table and then came back a moment later with two pots of yoghurt and teaspoons. ‘There.’ She sat on one chair and I took the other.
‘Butterfly?’ My voice had a look-I’ll-come-straight-to-the-point tone to it which wasn’t natural (we had never come straight to the point).
‘Ben Constable?’
‘What’s going on?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean you told me you were dead and I haven’t seen you for seven months or something. You left me a trail of clues leading me to stories where you said you’d killed people, and to the other side of the world where you’d constructed a crazy scheme to entertain me, and now I’ve followed you down here where you live like a hermit/ballet dancer/fugitive on yoghurt and water. You are stranger than fiction and seem mad like I’ve never seen you before. I can’t work out why you would have done any of this.’
‘Oh God. Why is complicated. You never used to ask about why, that’s what I liked about you. We spent whole evenings drinking and talking, but you never wanted to know reasons for things.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s a rare and endearing quality.’
‘I kind of came to save you,’ I said from nowhere. I felt I should explain myself.
‘Well, that is the sweetest thing anybody has ever done in my life. I don’t know that I can explain why I did all those things. Even if I told you everything I know, I don’t think the pieces would fit together, or that everything would make sense.’
‘How about if you just told me why you said you’d killed yourself?’
She looked at the floor and I could hear her breathing.
‘OK. I’ll try to explain.’ She peeled the top off her yoghurt pot and I did the same.
‘I really was going to kill myself. I’d known it for a while and I was starting to make a plan; things were beginning to fall into place . . .’
‘So there never was a terminal illness or anything like that?’
‘I was depressed; depression’s a sickness, and if it makes you kill yourself, then it’s terminal.’
‘OK, I agree, but what you wrote was misleading. You made it sound like you were in the terminal phase of cancer or something.’
‘Yeah, I know. I thought that would make it easier.’
I’d already finished the yoghurt and was running my finger round the inside of the pot to get the last bit. Now that I’d eaten I was really hungry.
‘So what went wrong?’ I felt drunk on that yoghurt.
‘I’m trying to explain. I wanted to kill myself because I was desperately unhappy. I had been brought up to do things that I would regret every waking hour of my life and I started to understand that no matter how far I ran, no matter how much I changed the way
I thought, or who I was, my past was chained to me. It would never fade. Nothing and nobody would ever free me from that weight. There was no hope of any kind of honest happiness.’
‘I thought you were happy sometimes when we talked. We laughed a lot.’
‘We did laugh a lot. Those are good memories. But they were only ever interludes from the endless disgust at my life. And so I decided to die.’
I felt my throat constrict. She was wrong. Depression makes you think like that, but there are always other ways to think. We’re not chained to our past. Her past is only stories that she made up—I mean there was a real past as well, but not the stories. They were a way of expressing something else. That’s how stories work.
‘So I started planning my death and organising things, in particular the treasure hunt, and it took over my brain. I thought about it all the time. When I slept I dreamed about it and when I woke I wanted to get up and carry on planning, and I was writing you letters every day and screwing them up and starting again and I was going through my journals looking for interesting things and throwing out embarrassing stuff. And I was happy. I was happy to be playing with you. For the first time in my life I wanted something to go on forever. I’d never known what that felt like before.’
Part of me wanted to hold her hand, but part of me didn’t as well. I drank my water and lit a cigarette. She watched me enviously.
‘Could I have one of those?’ she said.
‘Help yourself.’ I pushed the packet towards her.
She lit one and it sat uncomfortably between her fingers as she took a deep, trembling drag. She noticed me noticing. ‘Nicotine rush,’ she said. ‘I don’t really smoke anymore.’
Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa Page 24
