Year of the Talking Dog: A Hana Walker Mystery (The Hana Walker Mysteries Book 2)

by Patrick Sherriff

  I stop in the street. Bloody voice mail.

  I’ve only just got my suitcase out of the locker. I think he’s going to be here to help me. Then I think, I’m being selfish. He’s not here because he’s dead, right? But he can’t be dead, not like this. I don’t know what to say. Here I am, talking with my fiancé. Who might be messing around. But also really might be dead. What do I say?

  I hang up. Someone is watching me. I look around. The scramble crossing at Shibuya is heaving as usual, even though it’s a Sunday. A sea of dark bobbing heads with sprinkles of bleach blondes, mousy reds and golden browns, like it was autumn, not spring. Half are wearing hay fever masks strapped to their faces. A few salarymen and many high school girls in uniform. With my red cloth suitcase I struggle across the road through the waves of people. My suitcase has a strap and two wheels on the back corner, but it’s too heavy for the wheels to turn properly and as I pull it I groan as much as the wheels. My hand is burning red from the effort and I’m only halfway up the hill from the Shibuya Hachiko exit, having to dodge out of the way of faster kids with little bags not weighed down with everything they own.

  A short stocky woman weaves past me through the crowds. She has bad skin, green tights, a green tube dress and a green foam crown. In one hand she’s holding a long stick with a torch. I follow the curve of her hips and watch the slither of skin between the tights and the dress disappear into the crowd. There was something about the way she walked that didn’t quite fit in. She walked like a man. But there’s nothing unusual about cosplayers in Shibuya, and this one is no exception: she was wearing a hay fever mask.

  Steve’s flat, my flat, is just ahead. Turn right at Tower Records, go under a rail bridge and walk up a steep hill. I hate his flat except for about 15 minutes a day. It’s tiny, no more than one room, a kitchen sink and a toilet, concrete grey and walls as thin as paper like every flat I’ve ever seen in Tokyo. But at sunset the room is bright with yellows and reds and everything that once was grey is now golden. The balcony, useless for drying clothes, suddenly becomes the most beautiful place to be. If you don’t look down. Lit up like that by the ball of fire in the sky, you see past the dirty watercolour paints in wine glasses and takeaway boxes strewn across the floor and really believe it’s what Steve calls it, an artist’s studio. But then the sun disappears behind the skyscrapers of Shinjuku and all that is left are dirty wine glasses and empty takeaway boxes.

  I tap the four digit code into the building and ram my shoulder up against the stiff glass door until I feel the click of the latch give way and I haul the case through the doorway. I’m in the empty lobby, sweating and pressing my thumbs into my raw palms. Of the 24 tin pigeonholes for mail, half are overflowing with bright adverts for loan offers, karaoke shops and pachinko parlours. I peer into Steve’s. I don’t have a key but you can squeeze your fingers into the gap for letters and pull out anything. I unfold the only pieces of mail in there, a glossy leaflet for a 24-hour-manga café and another with a picture of a woman in green and an address and business name, Liberty Pachinko. And in bright red letters, “Let’s Play!” I screw them both up. I want to toss them on the floor, but I smooth them out and stuff them in my back pocket to throw away when I find a bin.

  The suitcase. I should take it with me to the ninth floor, but I’m not good with lifts, and my hands can’t take the weight of it up the stairs. I wheel it under the mail slots. I pass the lift with a shudder and start up the concrete steps. After one flight I’m out in the open as the staircase winds around the building. I feel the chill of the air, the smell of mould on the stucco walls. On the second floor the smell of fat frying on a gas stove and soy sauce boiling is so strong I could sit down and tuck in to the fried eggs right there on the stairs. By the ninth floor the smell of breakfast is gone. I make it around the last corner of the stairs without looking down. Now I just have to survive the outside walkway. I pass the lift and doors to three flats. Steve’s place is the fourth door along. The last but one of the single apartments. He’s written his name in katakana as you are supposed to do on the outside of the door, but the slip where his name should be is empty. The wind must have blown it out. But I can’t see it along the passageway. I feel in my pocket for the spare key Steve secretly made for me. I slip it into the barrel of the lock in the steel handle.

  But it doesn’t turn.

  I try again. Maybe I have the wrong flat. I have to be certain. I steady myself with both arms against the balcony wall and peer over the edge. My muscles spasm and, instantly, I’m filled with panic. I know that at that moment if I do not fall to my death, I will throw myself over the edge. I can see it. I can see the ground. Exactly where my body will come to rest. So far away, but so easy to reach if I lose my footing.

  I close my eyes and shake my head. I scrunch myself up in a ball and rock myself against the wall opposite the balcony. But I know one thing. It’s the same terrifying view down I’ve seen before. This is the right floor and the right flat. I wait to gather my breath and focus. The lock. Try the lock again.

  I do. No luck. I stare at the stainless steel lock. Has it been changed? Has my key been replaced? I look at both, but can’t see why I can’t make either work. I press the button. I hear the usual electronic imitation of bells going ding dong on the other side of the steel door. But there is no movement. No sound.

  I bang on the door and call out: “Steve!” I do it all again.

  I lean against the door and slide down to the doorstep. I look at the single window on the walkway. I know even if I could find something to unscrew the metal bars with I would still have trouble breaking the reinforced glass. And really, what is the point if Steve isn’t there? Nothing about today is making any sense. Like Steve has been erased from my life.

  The last door in the row of five flats opens out a crack. A neighbour? I smile in his direction and bend my head in a sort of bowing gesture to mimic the Japanese when they are apologising for imposing or making too much noise.

  He says something, but I can’t catch the meaning. All I can tell is the tone of voice. Not friendly, matter-of-fact. I push myself to my feet and walk to the door. I try to remember who it is who lives there. Steve says there’s an old man on his floor who plays 1940s big band music all day, but I can’t remember which side of him that is. He doesn’t even know any of the people, beyond the names on the doors. At least Steve can speak reasonable Japanese, better than mine. So I let him. And mine stays at the beginner stage.

  As I reach the door, it clicks shut. I stand for a moment, unsure what to do. I study the name on the door. He has a name written in kanji, the Chinese characters that Japanese names use. That much I can figure out. But the two characters are a mystery to me. One of them looks a little like one of the characters in Aunt Tanaka’s name, but whether it’s the same and how you say it, I have no idea, really. It’s rude to knock on the door, but what else can I do? I look up and down the passageway. And look down at my feet.

  I hear the sound of a chain being removed. I jump out of the way as the door swings out into the passageway.

  An old man stands in the doorway. He has white hair, bloodshot eyes and is wearing a white vest. His chicken-bone arm props open the steel door. He speaks in stops and starts, but doesn’t say more than five or six words.

  Me too: “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Japanese.”

  He smiles. He shrugs. He pulls his arm in and the door eases back.

  “Wait! Please!”

  He cocks his head to one side.

  I point to Steve’s place.

  “Please. Have you seen Steve? The man? Do you know? I’m his fiancée. Er, his girlfriend.”

  He shrugs his shoulders. He speaks some numbers, I think, then shakes his head.

  I point at Steve’s place and hold both my hands with palms up and make a questioning face.

  He shakes his hand the way Japanese do to mean no. And points downstairs. Then waves both hands about above his head. He shrugs his shoulders. I shrug my shoulde
rs. He bows to me and smiles wearily. I bob my head in a little bow. He bobs his head to me slightly less than I do. And closes the door.

  So.

  There’s nowhere I can go and nobody I can ask to work out what is going on. Steve can’t be dead. But he’s making it hard for me to prove he isn’t. I have nothing to go on but the miming of an old man who may or may not like 1940s big band music. Think, Hana. He pointed downstairs so that’s where I’ll go. I pass the lift and take the nine flights of steps back down the stairs, carefully not looking at how high up I am and not thinking about falling or jumping. I look down at my feet and run my hands along the chipped walls on either side of me to steady myself. Back through the smells of mould, through the fried eggs.

  But what is there downstairs? The caretaker’s office. I’d never seen it open and today, as usual, a grey curtain conceals the glass window. In the corner there’s a faded plastic sign written in kanji and hiragana. I don’t know what it says, but I can guess. Not here. With a telephone number. I take a picture of the sign. It might come in handy later.

  The lift doors whisk open behind me, and the old man comes out. He’s carrying a white plastic bag tied at the top and a bundle of newspapers. He bows to me and indicates with a jerk of his head that I should follow him. We walk around the side. Out on the pavement against the rear of the building are stacks of newspapers, plastic bags, old clothes, cans, bottles and broken electric fans. It must be unburnable day today. He tips his head at the piles of clothes and adds his plastic bag to the pile of other bags, then leaves me alone with the rubbish.

  Has he been trying to tell me something? I look at the clothes. Paint-splattered and worn out. Like something Steve would wear even out on the town. In fact, this is exactly what Steve would wear. I pick up the bundle. It’s tied with plastic cord in perfect 50cm cubes, just like you are supposed to do, but something Steve would never do, being allergic to exactness, he would say. So it couldn’t be his clothes. But I look at the label sewn into the back of a worn-out shirt. “George” it says. Could be British but could just as easily be from one of the Shibuya boutiques eager to sound foreign.

  Under a pile of newspapers where the old man had put his pile are sketchbooks. My heart starts beating faster and my hands grow clammy. I pull the newspaper bundles aside and there I see watercolours. Stacks and stacks of his work. I open some at random. Landscapes of Tokyo. Sketches of penguins walking over Shibuya crossing. I remember the day we sat in the coffee shop overlooking the scramble. Hundreds of thousands of people waiting to cross the zebra crossing by the Hachiko exit. I’d said they looked like ants, Steve had laughed and said no, penguins.

  How could he throw it away? I look around at the rubbish. A coffee pot that was the same as Steve’s. An old futon mattress. A box of mugs and wine glasses still smeared with the different colours of paints. Cadmium yellow, orange and red, the colours Steve mixes to create the sunset pictures that he waits all day to capture from his apartment in the quarter of an hour when he comes alive, splashing water over a giant piece of paper, swirling paint around in the wine glasses throwing yellows down over everything, then splashes of blue, where they meet, they bleed together to make new colours, and just when you think the scene is impossibly bright, one devastating sweep of his brush and there is a purple horizon with all the skyscrapers of Tokyo. I leaf through the sketchbook in my hand. Pages of views of the Tokyo Skytree, only in some it’s tall and straight, in others it’s bent and the colours bleeding. I met him there at the base — he knew better than to invite me to the top—and we had considered eating out if it wasn’t so expensive. Then more pictures of moving figures, men and women.

  I have to find one sketchbook. The one with the drawings he’d made of me while I was sleeping. No one had ever wanted to do that to me, to picture me and when he showed me the sketches, I cried. They were so beautiful, nothing like me. A tan cover tied with brown ribbons. Identical to the one I can see in the pile of books in front of me. I push the other papers aside and grab it. On the cover is a company name, Holbein Drawing Book F4. And in a single brushstroke across the front in red: Hana. He’d painted my name on the book on the day he proposed.

  Tears fall now onto the sketchbook. My tears blending with the H in Hana. How can this be here in the rubbish? I hold it in my hands, clutch it to my chest.

  I pull out a loose sheet. It’s a sketch in pencil. A man sleeps on a bench below a window with bars. On the walls are scribbled the letters “AOI AOI” in different sizes, but they cover the whole wall. The man’s face is turned to the wall, but he looks like Steve, only smaller and more pitiful. There is nothing else in the room but the wall and under the bench has been shaded in with pencil. It looks cold and miserable. The man looks weak and under pressure, weighted down by the strange words on the wall. It’s sad, nothing like Steve’s other pictures. And why is it in the collection with my pictures? I rub the corner of the paper where he had written his name. S. Kemp. It’s heavy watercolour paper, almost the thickness of card, but the paper feels grooved and pitted. I run my fingers over it like Steve used to do in the art department of Joyful Honda. I close my eyes and just feel the paper. I can hear Steve stammering with excitement: “Just feel that. Feel the beauty of the texture, it’s as tough as denim and you can paint or draw on both sides.”

  Both sides. I open my eyes and turn the paper over. On the back are rougher practice pencil sketches of hands. A girl’s hands. Some reaching out, others in fists, some with fat fingers and others with thin. But on each wrist there are letters. The same letters from different angles. Letters tattooed onto the wrists. In one sketch the hands are holding onto a skyscraper jutting into the sky.

  Each hand has one of three letters. A or O or I.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I stuff the picture back into the sketchbook and clasp it to my chest. Why is everything that was in the flat out here in the rubbish? Who put it here? Why? Could Steve have done it himself? Why?

  I have to think. I crouch down and sit with my arms wrapped around the sketchbook, pressing it to my knees. I’m surrounded by all the neat piles of everything that was Steve’s. I have to get some answers. I start with the easiest.

  It wasn’t Steve who dumped all this stuff here. Steve isn’t capable of cleaning up his apartment and sorting everything neatly into burnables, unburnables and recyclables, certainly not in neat Japanese bundles. Not even in the 48 hours since I had last seen him. And Steve would never throw out his old pictures. And not the ones of me. I’m sure of that. So, if it wasn’t Steve, then it was someone else. The landlord? He would have had only 12 hours to have chucked everything out since the 11:12 train. And why, in a half-unrented building, would he be so eager to clear out the room and change the lock in the middle of the night? No, that makes no sense.

  I have a feeling eyes are on me. Someone is watching me. I look around, but there is no one on the sliver of street I can see. Behind me lies concrete and a two-foot wide space between manshun buildings. Above me are black windows each with a little red triangle reaching up into the sky. I shudder. The triangles mean each window has an emergency escape chute in case of earthquake. But nobody is looking at me. That I can see.

  I know I should move on, but I’m not exactly sure where. I have to think. The thought of lugging that suitcase back to the station lockers fills my burning fingers with dread. I check my purse. My life savings of ¥4,327 make it easy to decide. I will leave my suitcase where it is. It’s not like there’s anything of any value in it. Not even for me. And I might need the ¥200 locker charge for something else. Like food. When did I last eat? It feels like a long time ago.

  I walk back down the hill, under the rail line and past Tower Records onto the main street. If I turn left I’ll come to Shibuya Station, to the Hachiko exit where people who don’t know anywhere else in Tokyo meet before crossing the zebra crossing scramble to go shopping at the 109 clothes place. I’d watched them while Steve sketched them, and then we’d eat something from a co
nvenience store.

  I call his number again and get the same voice mail message. Steve can’t really be dead, he just can’t. Can he? I get an icy cold feeling in my gut and have to crouch down on my heels. My mind is spinning. If he died in an accident, he wouldn’t have tidied up before. He wasn’t capable of it, even if he wanted to disappear without telling me. So is Detective Watanabe telling the truth, and the body on the tracks really was Steve’s? If falling in front of the train was an accident, why has everything been conveniently removed from his apartment? I don’t know why, but I’m sure the two facts are connected.

  Then I get another pain, spreading out from my gut. I feel sick. And I know why: If he didn’t clear out his apartment, his landlord didn’t and I didn’t, there was another possibility. A girlfriend.

  I dry heave and wretch, spitting out the acid that has built up in my mouth onto the street. Three girls in high school uniforms push their way past me. One says: “Hello,” another “Oh my God,” the third, “Don’t touch me!” but I don’t think they know or care what they are saying, they just want to speak the only English they can remember at me. The tallest girl’s bag bumps into my back and I’m knocked off balance, my hands scuffing through the dirt. For a moment I think they’re going to apologise to me, but it’s just a pause before laughter. I’m ashamed. I skip to my feet and lunge forward with my arms raised above my head and bring them down like I’m going to slice off their heads.

  “Ra - men- do,” I hear myself chanting in Japanese.

  The three stare at each other, amazed that a foreigner can speak Japanese, as if they had just heard a talking dog. And then the tallest girl bows her head. She’s showing respect, that I know the basic commands of kendo swordsmanship. I pull back to avoid striking her. But her bow is just a feint to the side, and I hurtle forward and lose my balance again, grazing knees and hands on the concrete. The tallest girl laughs, and says something to the other two that I don’t catch, but the meaning is clear. Don’t bother with the freak, she’s nothing. I’m not a talking dog, I’m less than a dog.