Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa

by Benjamin Constable

  ‘Do you want one?’ I held out the packet and Tomomi Ishikawa jumped back and pointed the gun at my face. ‘Shhh, it’s a cigarette,’ I said.

  ‘Stay back from the gate.’

  ‘OK. Would you like a cigarette?’

  ‘No, thank you. I don’t really smoke anymore. Do you have any chewing gum?’

  ‘No. All I’ve got is your bitter toffee almonds.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s what I feel like right now. Maybe later.’

  She stood up straight.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Carry on improvising until a plan comes.’ Then she walked off.

  * * *

  While I slept she put a yoghurt inside the gate for me, and a jug of water and a glass. I didn’t know what time it was or what day. I found my phone in my bag. There was still some battery left but no signal, of course. It was three twenty on Saturday afternoon. I should save the battery, just in case. I turned it off. There was nothing left to count. I was hungry and bored. I needed some substantial food; a big meal. I needed to get clever and find a way out of this situation. I smoked my last cigarette. My brain swam in circles like a goldfish and I felt miserable and stuck. The torchlight shone down the corridor. Tomomi Ishikawa waved the pistol at me and told me to get back from the gate and I did. She came and squatted on the floor in front of the doorway. She didn’t speak.

  ‘I feel stupid,’ I said.

  ‘You’re lots of things, Ben Constable, but stupid isn’t one of them.’

  ‘I feel stupid for believing you when you said you were dead, and for thinking that maybe if I had done things differently, I might have been able to save you. I thought that if I had called or sent you a text that you might not have committed suicide. I felt as though it was my fault. And I feel stupid for mourning you, and for being in shock. I was so shocked, I couldn’t control it. It was like being mad. And I feel stupid for believing Beatrice when she said she didn’t know you. She even wanted me to not believe her, but I just carried on thinking stuff that fit neatly into my idea of how things should be. And for missing you so bloody much when I hardly even know you. Who the hell’s Tomomi Ishikawa? I think I just made up an imaginary friend who happened to have your name. That makes me feel stupid. This whole story is just one long string of idiocy on my part, and now I’m locked up underground waiting for my psychotic friend to kill me.’

  ‘I’m sorry you’re here,’ she said. ‘This really isn’t what I wish for you. I’ll find a way to sort it out. I promise.’

  ‘Funny when the person working round the clock for your freedom is your captor.’ She did a half shrug and a half smile. ‘And do you know what’s even funnier?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It was kissing that got me into this room.’

  ‘Ha-ha-ha!’ She laughed loudly. ‘God, I’m so sorry about that, and really quite embarrassed. I was desperate.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No, not desperate like that.’

  And now I laughed.

  ‘No, no, no,’ she protested.

  I looked at her and she grinned at the floor. ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t expecting to find you lost in the tunnels. I couldn’t let you go. I had this padlock that I’d stolen, and this strange scary room with a steel gate. I put the padlock in my pocket and did the kissing trick and the rest, well . . . sorry.’

  ‘There are so many endings I could have imagined for this story. And this isn’t any of them. This can’t be how it ends.’

  ‘Why? How did you want it to finish?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Would it be completely unreasonable to ask for a happy ending?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like we go out from here and you get help from some genius psychologist and realise that you’ve got your whole life ahead of you and it’s beautiful and exciting and perhaps you even get it on with the psychologist because he is dashingly handsome and intelligent and in love with you.’

  ‘And what would happen to you, Ben Constable?’

  ‘Well, I’d go home a little wiser but just as innocent. And I would write a book and would feel very pleased with myself. And you and I might meet for coffee now and then and talk about stuff and laugh.’

  ‘Excellent. It sounds completely boring. How about if there was something that nobody had anticipated? Another person who had organised the whole thing.’

  ‘It actually crossed my mind that there was some kind of grander conspiracy. I never wanted to admit it, but I kept thinking that people were following me, or looking at me in strange ways.’

  ‘I followed you a couple of times.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I wanted to know if you were finding the treasure.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Butterfly; that’s disturbingly no good.’

  ‘Hey, only a couple of times. Any more than that and it’s your paranoia playing up again.’

  ‘My paranoia?’

  ‘People looking at you in strange ways? A conspiracy?’ She stroked an imaginary beard and laughed at me.

  ‘I thought maybe you were being held prisoner and had left me clues to help you.’

  ‘No, sorry,’ she said. ‘But look, how about this for a grim twist? You spend the whole book hoping that everything you’ve read is fiction, but in fact I really am a murderer and I kill you . . .’

  ‘But who writes the book if I’m dead?’

  ‘This is the twist: you die here underground and I leave and go back to your apartment and I sit down and write the book from beginning to end, but in your voice. I write it under the name Ben Constable and at the end he witnesses Tomomi Ishikawa dying and so nobody ever comes looking for her—me—and I would live happily ever after. In fact, it might even be the beginning of a writing career with my new nom de plume. Who would have imagined that Ben Constable was in fact a woman?’

  I laughed. ‘That’s the most disturbing ending imaginable. It’s wrong in every way.’

  ‘Sorry. That’s the way my mind works.’

  We were silent for a moment and then I remembered something. ‘Hey, there was somebody else, though.’

  ‘Who?’ she asked.

  ‘Charles Streetny.’

  ‘Oh, yes. The executor of my posthumous wishes. How funny that you thought it was his name.’

  ‘How did he know I was in New York? Did you trace the IP address from my email?’

  ‘What’s an IP address?’

  ‘It’s a network address that all computers connected to the Internet have. It’s encoded in the emails you send.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. I knew you were in New York because I’d given you clues telling you to go there, then you disappeared, and finally you sent me an email telling me you’d arrived. It was pretty easy.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ I remembered the email that I’d sent. ‘I thought maybe Streetny had specialist computer knowledge.’

  ‘Would that he did. Sadly he was my better-organised alter ego. I needed somebody who would be more compliant than the awkward Beatrice.’

  ‘Was Beatrice awkward? I thought you got her to do pretty much everything you wanted.’

  ‘No, not really. She was a bit unimaginative.’

  ‘I liked her. She’s coming to Paris next week. She might already be here.’

  ‘Are you going to see her?’

  ‘That kind of depends on you.’

  Tomomi Ishikawa looked at stuff, but not at me. ‘We’ll have to see. I don’t have a plan yet.’ Then she waved the pistol. ‘Can you get away from the gate, please?’

  I wasn’t even near it, but I stood up and walked to the corner. She reached her hand through the bars and picked up the water jug and the empty pot of yoghurt. ‘I’ll get you more,’ she said.

  * * *

  After a few hours alone in the dark, my brain felt completely mad. I had no more cigarettes and all I’d had to eat in (how many?) days was a few pots of yoghu
rt. Tomomi Ishikawa had been twice to empty my bucket and a couple of times to bring me water or just to stare at me. Each time she would shine her torch, wave her gun around and tell me to get away from the gate and I obeyed because I didn’t fancy getting shot. She would have to let me go, though. I knew this and she knew it too. I was bored of being alone.

  I found the stainless steel pen in my bag and tried to scrape a hole to escape through. I spent hours. Hours and hours. The pen started to wear down, and I scratched a furrow about two inches long and half an inch deep. I don’t know where exactly I was planning to scratch my way to. It was looking unlikely that the pen was going to save me.

  ‘Butterfly!’ I shouted. Maybe she wasn’t here anymore. I couldn’t remember whether I’d heard the door. ‘Butterfly! I know why you’re mad.’ I waited, but she didn’t answer. ‘It’s because you only eat yoghurt. You can’t live on just yoghurt and water; it makes you go mad.’ There was no noise.

  * * *

  Dreams weren’t made for remembering. We have no special equipment or capacity to keep hold of them and nature doesn’t care whether they are documented or not. Like all thoughts in the dark, they just come and then they are forgotten.

  ‘Of course, it nearly turned out very differently.’

  I opened my eyes and she was sitting by the gate with a torch and a gun clamped together like something from a cop show. She was pointing the gun at my head, lining me up in the sights.

  ‘Don’t point that at me,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry. I’m trying to get used to the idea. I don’t know what else to do other than kill you. I can’t keep you here.’

  ‘Butterfly, why can’t you envisage a happy life for yourself? It’s never even been your ambition, has it?’

  ‘Life isn’t like that,’ she said.

  ‘It could be. You could choose to aim for good things. I’m not saying it would be easy, but that could be your goal.’

  ‘It’s too late. They should have taught me that when I was a child. I can’t go back aboveground and just change my past. I’m a danger to myself and others. But I can’t keep you here either, you’re right about that. But it was so nearly different.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You came back to my apartment. You were supposed to come and get the computer, which you did, but you came back again. Why would you do a thing like that?’

  ‘Sorry. I’d forgotten the power supply,’ I said. ‘For your computer. It wouldn’t turn on. I had to come back to it.’

  ‘OHHHH! Fucking fuck. Now I understand. It so nearly changed everything.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I was there.’

  ‘No you weren’t.’

  ‘I was. I’d come back to pack my things and I’d had a shower and had filled a bag with stuff and was in some state of seminakedness when I heard your voice outside the door. I don’t know who you were talking to. I panicked and grabbed the bag and climbed into the wardrobe and you came in. You nearly found me. You were inches away and you were talking to somebody.’

  ‘I wasn’t with someone.’

  ‘You were, I could hear you both talking.’

  ‘You couldn’t hear them talking because they can’t talk.’

  ‘You just said you weren’t with anybody.’

  ‘I wasn’t. I was with a cat.’

  ‘What were you doing with a cat?’

  ‘Look, there’s something about me that you don’t know.’

  ‘What?’ Butterfly barked with excitement.

  ‘I’ve got an imaginary cat.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘If only I was.’

  ‘Have you always had it?’

  ‘No. Since, I don’t know, maybe eight or ten years ago?’

  ‘How did you get an imaginary cat?’

  ‘It’s a long story, but basically anyone can have one.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You just think of a cat.’

  ‘I’m thinking of a cat now.’

  ‘That’s a bit like what Cat is like.’

  ‘It’s called Cat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are a fucking freak, Ben Constable! I love you.’

  ‘Thanks. Talking of freaks, what about you? You’ve kept me here for days. I want to go home and have a shower and cook some real food and sleep in my bed. You have to let me go, Butterfly. You can’t keep people prisoner, and you can’t kill people.’

  ‘I’m stuck, Ben Constable,’ she said. ‘And talking to you doesn’t really help me.’ She shone the torch in my face for a moment, then turned it out and left.

  * * *

  My stubble was itching against my neck and I wasn’t hungry anymore. I was thirsty, though. I dreamed of water in my mouth. When I was awake I spoke with Cat. He was good company and an attentive listener. I tried to explain Butterfly’s situation to him and he acknowledged the complexity of it but had no answers. We reminisced on places we had visited and I told him about places I would like to see. We travelled a lot. I told him that even though I didn’t know what day it was, I thought Beatrice had come to Paris and gone. She must have thought me rude not to answer her calls or emails, as though I was ignoring her. I wondered whether she would stay in contact with me. And then wondering seemed futile. Some things happen; some things don’t. I took Cat’s silence as agreement. I considered doing exercise, but seeing as I didn’t know when I would eat or drink again, I thought I should conserve my energy. Maybe she was just going to leave me to dehydrate. How long can you go without water? It’s not long. Two days maybe? Sometimes I was mad, and other times I was more sane than I would have thought possible. I remembered being four.

  When I was four I got lost in the supermarket. The illusory bubble burst and the mundanely comprehensible world of food shopping was clearly endless aisles stacked with mind-boggling repetition, strip lighting and grey vinyl floor tiles to eternity. Adrenaline coursed through my veins and all direction ceased to exist. Another time I shut myself in a cupboard with the handle solely on the outside. I was surprised by the total dark. The door wouldn’t open and the joy of adventure flipped to panic. I let out an inhuman cry of self-pity. I had foreseen my own death.

  27

  An Ending

  ‘Wake up,’ she said. The gate was open and there was a jug of water on the floor next to me. She had a torch in one hand and the gun in the other. ‘Wake up, Ben Constable. It’s time to go.’

  I gulped the water straight from the jug. ‘Come on,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll get my bag.’

  She made me stand back as we went through her two locked doors and she closed them again after me.

  ‘Do you have cigarettes?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Can I have one of those bitter toffee almonds I gave you?’

  ‘Yep.’ I went in my bag, got the little tin, opened it and held it out.

  ‘Two of them,’ she said. ‘One for you, one for me.’

  ‘I don’t like almonds. I was just keeping them as a souvenir.’

  ‘OK. Now listen. You walk in front and I will give you directions. But whatever happens, you mustn’t look back. OK?’

  ‘Who do you think I am, Orpheus?’

  ‘Do as I say, your life depends on it.’ I don’t think I believed her. I didn’t believe anything anymore.

  Butterfly walked close behind, shining the torch around me. I thought of turning quickly and taking the gun out of her hand, but they don’t recommend messing with armed people. So I walked on slowly; it felt as if my body needed to warm up and stretch before it would be able to walk at a normal pace. After a while, I reached out my hand behind my back and stopped. I wanted her to take it. It was my last olive branch. Let’s leave together. Everything’s all right.

  She nudged my back with the gun. ‘Keep going,’ she said. I felt it touching my spine through my shirt and I understood something.

  We walked left and right in sil
ence and after several minutes, maybe ten or twenty, we came to the chamber with seven entrances.

  ‘I know this place,’ I said.

  Butterfly pointed to the passage I was to follow with the torch. I could hear her dragging her feet a little and her steps became just slightly irregular. We came to the thirty spiral steps and I paced up. She seemed to find them more difficult than I did. I must have been out of her sight the whole time. I could have outrun her easily. I knew the way out from here. All her aggression was fake. Butterfly was crumbling behind me.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. She was controlling her voice so it wouldn’t shake. I carried on and she walked behind me. But the torchlight wasn’t shining past me anymore. She was falling behind.

  ‘Butterfly, keep up.’ I took a couple of steps more, but she wasn’t following. I stopped and listened. I could hear her breathing heavily. She sniffed. What are you up to, Butterfly? What is this plan with a gun and dark tunnels? Then I heard her lean against the wall. She sniffed again. She was crying. I heard her slide down to the ground and the light went out.

  ‘Butterfly!’

  She didn’t say anything. I could hear small sobs and her quick, heavy breaths.

  ‘Butterfly!’

  Nothing happened.

  ‘Butterfly!’

  I tried walking backwards, but I stumbled. I took out the remains of The Divine Comedy from my bag, ripped a page out, rolled it up and lit it. I turned and walked towards her.

  I had to take a few steps before I could see her properly. She was squatting with her back against the wall and her arms around her knees. She unwrapped the sweet I had given her and put it in her mouth.

  ‘Butterfly?’

  ‘You’d better go on without me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not coming. Here’—she opened her bag and took something out—‘take this but don’t look at it until you get aboveground.’ She handed me a plastic bag with notebooks in it. ‘Put them in your bag.’ I did.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I’m dying.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘Cyanide.’

  ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘The sweet. Bitter toffee almond. It’s poison.’