Number9Dream

by Unknown

  ‘I can promise, my mother will never call. But—’

  ‘Ever worked in a pizza kitchen, karate kid?’

  ‘A pizza kitchen? Why?’

  ‘Ai says you need a job as from tomorrow.’

  ‘True, but I never worked in a kitchen before.’

  ‘No worries. Chimpanzees could do the job. In fact, we have hired lots of furry, tree-dwelling higher primates in the past. The hours are lousy – midnight to eight a. m. – the kitchen is hotter than the core of the sun but on the graveyard shift the money is good. Central location – the Nero’s opposite Jupiter Café, site of legendary head-butt. Plus, you get to work with me. Has Ai mentioned my name?’

  ‘Uh . . .’

  ‘Obviously I am the last thing on her mind. Sachiko Sera. As in “Che Sarà, Sarà, whatever li-lah, li-lah.” Well, almost. Can you start tomorrow evening? Monday?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk you out of giving me a job I need so badly, Ms Sera, but, uh, don’t you want to meet me first?’

  Sachiko Sera does a beyond-the-tomb voice. ‘Eiji Miyake, native son of Yakushima . . . I know everything about you . . .’

  ‘Mr Miyake?’ At Amadeus Tea Room, Butler stops pedalling his fingers. Arched eyebrows: butlership is all in the eyebrows. ‘Please follow me. The Tsukiyamas are waiting for you.’ Tsukiyamas ? Could my grandfather have persuaded my father to come too? The place is busier than last week – a funeral party is meeting here, many of the customers are in black – and I have trouble trying to locate an elderly man and a middle-aged one who looks like me. So when Butler pulls a chair out at a table where a woman and a girl my age are seated, I assume he has made made a mistake. His eyebrows tell me there is no mistake, so I gawp, while they assess me. ‘Will you require an additional cup, madam?’ asks Butler. The woman dismisses him with a ‘most certainly not.’ The girl stares at me – a ‘will the turd round the U-bend?’ sort of stare – while my memory grapples with a similarity . . . Anju! A chubby, crinkle-cut, scowly Anju. We have the same feather eyebrows. ‘Eiji Miyake,’ she says, and I nod as if it were a question, ‘you are one sorry, shameless creep.’ All at once, I understand. My half-sister. My stepmother fingers the bronze torc around her neck – thick enough to halt an axe-swing – and sighs. ‘Let us try to keep this meeting as brief and painless as possible. Sit down, Mr Miyake.’

  I sit down. Amadeus Tea Room continues in the background, as if on a video screen. ‘Mrs Tsukiyama’ – I grope around for pleasantries – ‘thank you for your letter last month.’

  Fake surprise. ‘“Thank you”? Irony is your opening move, Mr Miyake?’

  I look around. ‘Uh . . . actually I was expecting my grandfather . . .’

  ‘Yes, we know all about that. Your little rendezvous was recorded in his diary. Regrettably, my father-in-law is unable to attend.’

  ‘Oh . . . I see.’ Have you locked him in a cupboard?

  Half-sister has a slappy voice. ‘Grandpapa passed away three days ago.’

  Slap.

  A waitress passes with a tray of raspberry cheesecake slices.

  Stepmother openly fakes a smile. ‘I am frankly astonished that you failed to see how sick he was last Monday. Running around at your beck and call, plotting conspiracies. I only hope you are proud of yourself.’

  This makes no sense. ‘I never met him last Monday.’

  ‘Liar!’ slaps Half-sister. ‘Liar! Mother already told you – we have his appointment diary! Guess whose name we found for a meeting here one week ago!’ I want to wrap this girl’s mouth in carpet tape.

  ‘But my grandfather was still in hospital last Monday.’

  Stepmother does a head-resting-on-hands pose. ‘Your lies really are rather embarrassing, Mr Miyake. We know my father-in-law left his hospice last Monday to meet you! He didn’t ask for permission from the duty nurse, because he wouldn’t have received it. He was far too sick.’

  ‘I am not lying! My grandfather was too sick to come, so he sent his friend.’

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘Admiral Raizo.’

  Stepmother and Half-sister look at each other. Half-sister snickers a jerky laugh and Stepmother smiles so that her mouth shrinks to a lipsticked tip. Those lips kiss my father. ‘Then you did meet Grandpapa,’ slaps Half-sister, ‘but you were too dumb to recognize him!’ My temper takes the strain. I look at Stepmother for an explanation. ‘My father-in-law’s last practical joke.’

  ‘Why would my grandfather pretend to be this Admiral Raizo?’

  Half-sister thumps the table. ‘He is not your “grandfather”!’ I ignore her. Stepmother’s eyes glint with war. ‘Did he give you any documents to sign?’

  ‘Why,’ I repeat, ‘would my grandfather pretend to be somebody else?’

  ‘Did you sign anything?’

  This is going nowhere. I put my hands behind my head, lean back, and study the ceiling while I calm down. ‘Yes, my friend,’ observes Mozart, ‘you have a problem here. But it is your problem. Not mine.’ I badly want to smoke. ‘Mrs Tsukiyama, is this bad blood necessary?’

  ‘“Bad blood”,’ mutters Half-sister. ‘Nice expression.’

  ‘What do I have to do to prove to you that all I want is to meet my father?’

  Stepmother tilts her head. ‘Do calm down, Mr Miyake—’

  This makes me boil over. ‘No, Mrs Tsukiyama, I am tired of calming down! I do not—’

  ‘Mr Miyake, you are making a—’

  ‘Shut up and listen to me! I do not want your money! I do not want favours! And blackmail! How did you come up with the theory I wanted to blackmail you? I am so, so, so tired of scrubbing around this city trying to find my own father! You want to despise me, fine, I can live with that. Just let me meet him – just once – and if he tells me himself that he never wants to see me again, okay, I will vanish from your lives and start my own, properly. That is it. That is all. Is this too much to comprehend? Is this too much to ask?’

  I am so drained.

  Half-sister is unsure of herself.

  Stepmother has finally put away her unbearable sneer.

  I think I got them to listen. And half the customers in the Amadeus Tea Room.

  ‘Actually, yes.’ Stepmother pours herself and her pouty, piggy daughter weak tea from a fluted teapot. ‘It is too much to ask. Let us concede that I accept you mean my family no malice, Mr Miyake. Let us even concede that I feel some sympathy for your position. The basic situation still stands unchanged.’

  ‘The basic situation.’

  ‘There is no nice way to say it. My husband does not wish to meet you. You seem to believe in a dark conspiracy keeping you away from him – this is simply not true. We are not here to confuse your trail. We are at the behest of my husband to ask you, please, to leave him in peace. He has paid for your upkeep not to maintain hopes of a future reunion, but to buy his right to privacy. Is this too much to comprehend? Is this too much to ask?’

  I want to cry. ‘Why won’t he just tell me this himself?’

  ‘In a word’ – Stepmother sips her tea – ‘shame. He is ashamed of you.’

  ‘How can he be ashamed of a son he refuses to meet?’

  ‘My husband isn’t ashamed of who you are, he is ashamed of what you are.’

  At the far side a customer abruptly stands up, sliding his chair behind him.

  ‘You are causing pain for him, for us, for yourself. Please stop.’

  The waitress walks into the chair. Teacups and raspberry cheesecakes slide off her tray, and fine bone china chimes to pieces in a ripple of ‘Ooooooooo’s. Stepmother and Half-sister watch with me. Butler paraglides over to supervise the clean-up operation. Apologies, counter-apologies, assurances, orders, carpet sponges, dustpans. Sixty seconds later no evidence remains of the great cheesecake crisis. ‘Okay,’ I say.

  ‘Okay?’ Half-sister returns.

  I address the woman my father chose to marry. ‘Okay, you win.’ She did not expect this. Neither did I. She searches my face for a catch
. There is none. ‘My father – just by never getting in touch himself – made his, uh, position clear a long time ago. I . . . I . . . dunno, I never wanted to believe it. But tell him’ – an apricot carnation sits in a glass tear vase – ‘hi. Hi and goodbye.’

  Stepmother keeps her gaze steady.

  I stand up to go.

  ‘Did you get that from Grandpapa?’ slaps Half-sister. She nods at the kaiten journal, wrapped in its black cloth. ‘Because if so, it belongs to the Tsukiyamas.’

  I look at this anti-Anju. If she had asked nicely, I would have agreed and handed it over. ‘This is my lunch box. I have to go to work.’ I walk out of Amadeus Tea Room without looking back taking the journal with me. Butler summons an escalator and bows as the doors close. I have the box to myself – the muzak is ‘On Top of the World’ by the Carpenters, a tune which makes my teeth throb, but I am too drained to hate anything now. I am stunned at the decision I just took. I watch the floor numbers descend. Do I mean it? My father never wants to meet me . . . So my search for him is . . . not valid? Finished? My meaning is cancelled? I guess, yes, I do mean it. ‘Ground floor,’ says the elevator. The doors open and a crowd of very busy people surge in. I have to fight my way out before the doors close and I get taken back to where I came from.

  Seven

  CARDS

  Sachiko Sera, my third boss in four weeks, was not exaggerating: the Nero kitchen is hot as hell and a monkey could do my pizza-by-numbers job. The kitchen is a rat-run – it measures five paces by one, with a sort of cage at one end with lockers and chairs where the delivery bikers wait. Sachiko and Tomomi take the orders by telephone or from walk-in customers and pass the slips through the hatch from the front counter. I dress the crusts in the correct toppings by matching the pizza name to the giant chart that takes up an entire wall, coded with coloured icons for monkeys who never learned to read. So, for example, in the big circle marked ‘Chicago Gunfight’ are little pictures of tomato puree, minceballs, sausage, chilli, red and yellow peppers, cheese; Hawaii Honeymoon is tomato, pineapple, tuna, coconut; Neromaniac is pepperoni, sour cream, capers, olives and chariot prawns. Then you have the crust types: thick, crusty, herb, mozzarella-filled. The toppings live in a cave-sized fridge – each container lid has a picture of the contents. When dressed, you slide the pizzas into a two-lane gas-fired inferno. Rollers convey the pizzas through its molten innards at about ten centimetres per minute, although if the orders are piling up you can reach in with a pair of forceps and give the pizza a premature birth. ‘Timing is the trick,’ says Sachiko, tying back her hair. ‘Ideally, the pizza lands in its box – tape the order slip to the lid thusly – the same moment the biker lands from his last delivery.’ After half an hour, Sachiko leaves me to it. It is sort of fun, and the orders never stop, not even at 1 or 2 a. m, so unlike Ueno lost property or Shooting Star I never have much time to think. Our customers include students, card sharks, businessmen working through the night – Shinjuku is a nocturnal jungle. I drink litres of water, sweat litres of water, and never need to piss once. There is an extractor fan as loud as a ferry and a tinny radio that only picks up one local station trapped in the 1980s. There is a gunk-smattered world map to taunt the slaves of the inferno with thoughts of all the countries in the world – and their diversely tinted women – where we are not free to go. A clock lurches forward. Sachiko is how I imagined her on the telephone – loopy, organized, neurotic, stable. Tomomi is an evil hag who has been at Nero’s since Admiral Perry sailed into Old Edo Bay and has no intention of upsetting her cosy life by ever getting promoted. She chats with her friends on the phone, flirts with privileged bikers, selects arts courses she will never get around to applying for, and drops heavy hints about the affair she had with the owner of Nero’s x years ago and the damage she could inflict on his marriage if her pleasant equilibrium were ever threatened. Her voice could slice sheet steel, and her laugh is a loud glittery fake. The bikers come and go week by week, but tonight they are Onizuka and Doi. Onizuka has a lip spike, custard-yellow hair and wears a death’s-head biker’s jacket instead of the Nero Pizza uniform. When Sachiko introduces us, he says this: ‘Last guy before you, he fucked up the orders. Customers gave me shit. Don’t you fuck up the orders.’ He comes from Tohoku and still has a northern accent as thick as crude oil – this worries me, in case I mistake a mortal threat for a weather remark. Doi is ancient, over forty, walks with a limp and has a Jesus-being-crucified expression. Suffering, spaced-out screensaver eyes, not much hair on his head but loads on his chin. ‘Don’t let Onizuka get you down, man,’ he tells me. ‘The man is mellow. Saw to my motor for free, man. Smoke dope?’ When I say no, he shakes his head sadly. ‘Youth of today, man, you misspend the prime of your life, you’ll repent at your leisure, man. Got friends who know how to party? Premium quality, discreet service.’ Tomomi enters the cage – she is a gifted eavesdropper. ‘Discreet? As discreet as a mile-wide UFO playing the Mission Impossible music over the Imperial Palace.’ At 3 a. m. Sachiko brings me a mug of the thickest coffee known to chemistry – thick enough to stand pencils in – which makes my body forget how tired it is. Onizuka waits in the staff cube at the end of my rat-run, but never says another word to me. Twice I smoke a JPS outside the shopfront. I have a prime view of PanOpticon. Anti-aircraft lights blink on and off from dusk till dawn. Very Gotham City. Both times the inferno summons me back before I can finish the cigarette. While I am waiting for a Health Club to emerge from the inferno – asparagus, sour cream, olives, potato wedges, garlic – Doi leans over the hatch. ‘You know how hungry I am, Miyake?’

  ‘How hungry are you, Doi?’

  ‘I am hungry enough to cut off my thumb and chew it.’

  ‘Really hungry, then.’

  ‘Pass me that knife, will you?’

  I make a ‘do I have to?’ face.

  ‘Pass me the knife, man, this is a hunger crisis.’

  ‘Be careful with that knife. Razor sharp.’

  ‘Why else would I want it, man?’ Doi places his left thumb on my chopping board, places the blade over it, and thumps the handle with his right fist. The blade slices clean through the knuckle. Blood spills over the counter – Doi reins in his breath. ‘There, that wasn’t so bad! He picks up his thumb with his right hand and dangles it in his mouth. Plop. I gargle dry air. Doi munches slowly, deciding if he likes the taste. ‘Gristly, man, but not bad!’ Doi spits out his thumb bone, sucked shiny and white. I drop whatever it was I was holding. Sachiko appears in the hatch – I point, and glug. ‘Doi!’ scolds Sachiko. ‘You prima donna! You just can’t resist a captive audience, can you? Sorry, Miyake, I should have warned you about Doi’s little hobby: magic school.’ Doi mimes a kung-fu retaliatory shuffle. ‘The Sacred Academy of Illusionists ain’t no hobby, chieftainess. One day there’ll be queues outside the Budokan to see me perform.’ He waggles his two attached thumbs at me. ‘You can tell from his eyes that Shiyake is one cat in sore need of the magic arts.’ ‘Miyake,’ corrects Sachiko. ‘Him too,’ says Doi. I don’t know how to respond to all of this – I am just relieved that the blood was only tomato juice. Five o’clock. Morning comes in for landing. Sachiko asks me to prepare some mini-salads, so I wash some lettuce and cherry tomatoes. The pizza orders thicken again – who eats pizzas for breakfast? – and before I know it Sachiko is back, doing a high-court voice. ‘Eiji Miyake, by the powers vested in me by Emperor Nero, and in view of your satisfactory behaviour, I declare your life sentence suspended for the period of sixteen hours. You will, however, present yourself at this correctional institution at midnight, for a further eight hours hard labour.’ I frown. ‘Huh?’ Sachiko points at the clock – ‘Eight o’clock. Surely you have a home to go to?’ The shop door slides open. Sachiko glances around, and looks back at me with an ‘aha!’ look. ‘The prisoner has a visitor waiting outside the gates.’

  Ai says anywhere except Jupiter Café, so we walk towards Shinjuku to find a breakfast place. Talking is a bit awkward – we have not actually me
t since the day in Jupiter Café, even though we must have spent over twenty-four hours on the telephone last week. ‘If it was any more humid than this,’ I venture, ‘it would be raining.’ Ai tilts her face skyward. ‘Y’know, it is raining.’ She caught a coach back from Niigata yesterday evening, and looks travel-worn. I am as sweaty and dishevelled as a whorehouse bed. I imagine. ‘So how did it go with your father?’ Ai hums. ‘Pointless. I knew it would be . . .’ she begins. I make the right noises at the right time, but as usual when people discuss parental problems, I feel as if I am being told about a medical condition in an organ I lack. Still, I am booming with pleasure that Ai came to meet me for breakfast. We pass a tiny shrine – Ai breaks off to look at the trees, tori gate, straw ropes and twists of paper. A jizo statue sits behind an orange, a bottle of Suntory whisky and a vase of chrysanthemums. An old man is having a good long pray.

  ‘Are musicians superstitious?’ I ask.

  ‘Depends on the instrument. String players, technically including pianists, have the luxury of being able to practise until we get it right, and any mistakes we do make usually get swallowed up by the orchestra. Woodwind, and especially brass, have it tougher. However good you are, one unlucky blast and Bruckner’s celestial ninth gets blasted open with a – well, my last conductor’s metaphor – a shotgun fart. Most trumpet players I know have beta-blockers instead of cookies with their morning coffee. Are Yakushima pizza chefs superstitious?’

  ‘The last time I went to a shrine it was to, uh, decapitate its god.’

  ‘With a lightning bolt?’

  ‘I only had a junior carpenter set hacksaw.’

  She sees I am serious. ‘Didn’t the god give you what you wanted?’