Out

by Natsuo Kirino

  'Oh,' Kenji said, turning around at last. 'You haven't left yet?' He had apparently been in a fight, and there was blood oozing from a cut on his lip. Yayoi said nothing but stood rooted to the spot, trying to control the anger that was coursing through her. 'What's the matter?' Kenji muttered, apparently oblivious to her rage. 'Can't you be nice once in a while?'

  At that moment, her patience snapped. With lightning speed she slipped off her belt and wrapped it around his neck.

  Kenji made choking sounds, trying to look around at her, but Yayoi pulled up and back, tightening the belt in one motion. Gasping, he tried to get his fingers around the belt, but it had already dug into his neck. Yayoi watched intently as he scratched at the leather, and then yanked even harder. His neck bent back at an odd angle, and his fingers twitched meaninglessly in the air. He needs to suffer more, she thought. He's got no right to go on living like this! She planted her left foot on the floor, and with the right one she pushed against his back. A sound like a frog's croak escaped from somewhere in his throat. It feels so good, she told herself. Strange that she'd never known she had such cruelty inside. Still, she found this thrilling.

  Kenji had gone limp by now. He sat awkwardly on the step, shoes still on his feet. His torso bent over his knees while his neck arched back.

  'Not yet,' Yayoi murmured, continuing to pull on the belt. 'I still don't forgive you.' It wasn't so much that she wanted him to die like this, just that she wanted to be sure she would never have to see his face again, never have to hear his voice.

  How long had she stayed like that? He lay on his back now, completely still, so she reached down and felt for a pulse in his neck. Nothing. There was a small wet patch on the front of his pants. Realising that he must have pissed himself in the final seconds made her want to laugh.

  'Couldn't you have been nice once in a while?' she said aloud.

  She had no idea how much longer she stood there, but at last she came to her senses, realising that Milk was crying.

  'What are we going to do now, Milk?' she muttered. 'I've killed him.' The cat made a sound like a little shriek, and Yayoi gave the same in reply. She had done something that was irreversible, but she felt absolutely no regret. So be it, she whispered to herself. She'd had no other choice.

  Going back to the living room, she calmly looked at the clock on the wall. Just eleven. Almost time to leave for the factory. She phoned Masako's house.

  'Hello?' Fortunately, it was Masako who answered. Yayoi took a deep breath.

  'It's me, Yayoi,' she said.

  'Hi,' said Masako. 'What's up? Are you taking the night off?'

  'No, I just don't know what to do.'

  'About what?' She sounded genuinely concerned. 'Has something happened?'

  'It has.' She might as well get it over with. 'I've killed him.' There was a brief silence, and then Masako spoke again, her voice still calm.

  'Are you serious?'

  'Dead serious,' Yayoi said. 'I've strangled him.' There was another pause, this one perhaps half a minute long; but Yayoi knew somehow that it wasn't because Masako was shocked but rather because she was thinking over the situation. When she spoke again, Yayoi knew she'd been right.

  'But what do you want to do?' Masako said. Yayoi was quiet for a moment, not fully understanding what she was asking. 'I mean, tell me what you want to do about this. I'm willing to help.'

  'Me? I'd like things to go on just as they have been. My kids are still small, and . . .'As she spoke, tears welled up in her eyes and the horror of the situation finally hit her.

  'I understand,' Masako said. 'I'll be right over. Did anyone else see what happened?'

  'I don't know,' Yayoi said, looking around. Her eyes fell on Milk, who was cowering under the sofa. 'Just the cat,' she told her.

  'Okay,' Masako said, a hint of gentle laughter in her voice. 'Wait right there.'

  'Thank you,' Yayoi said, hanging up. As she crouched down to wait, her kneecap rubbed up against her stomach, but she no longer felt any pain.

  6

  When she hung up the phone, Masako noticed that the words on the calendar hanging right in front of her looked blurry. It was the first time she could remember being dizzy from shock. She had known something was wrong with Yayoi last night, but she didn't like to intrude in other people's lives. Still, here she was, getting involved. Was she just asking for trouble? She steadied herself against the wall and waited for her vision to return to normal, then suddenly remembered that her son, Nobuki, had been stretched out on the couch watching television. She spun around, but he was nowhere to be seen. He must have gone up to his room while she was talking to Yayoi. Her husband, Yoshiki, had had a drink after dinner and gone to bed early, so it seemed that no one in the house had heard what she'd said on the phone. Feeling slightly relieved, she began to think about what to do next. But she realised there was no time to think; she had to act. She would come up with some sort of plan in the car.

  Grabbing her keys, she yelled up the stairs, 'I'm leaving for work. Make sure you turn off the gas.' There was no answer. She knew that Nobuki had begun smoking and drinking recently while she was out of the house, but she also knew there was little she could do about it. He was heading into the summer of his seventeenth year, apparently without any idea what he wanted to do or be, without any hopes or passions.

  As a freshman at a public high school, the boy had been caught with some tickets to a rave that someone had forced on him. He was accused of trying to sell them and expelled from school. The harshness of the punishment was clearly meant as a warning to the other students, but, whatever the reason, the shock seemed to affect his nerves and he suddenly stopped talking. For a time, Masako searched desperately for a way to reach her son, but no one seemed to have the answer; and she suspected that Nobuki himself had become resigned to this state of affairs. At any rate, the time for searching for solutions had passed. It was enough, perhaps, that he went each day to his part-time job as a plasterer. When you had children, Masako believed, you couldn't just cut them off if things didn't go as planned.

  She stood in front of the small room off the entrance hall, listening to the faint sound of her husband snoring through the thin door. The room had originally been intended for storage, but at some point he had begun sleeping here. She lingered by the door for a moment, thinking. In actual fact, they had begun sleeping in separate rooms before they'd moved to this house, while Masako was still working in an office. She was used to it now, the three of them in different rooms, and she no longer thought of it as lonely or abnormal.

  Yoshiki worked for a construction company that was affiliated with one of the big real estate conglomerates. The name of the company sounded impressive enough, but he'd once said that when things got tough financially the parent company didn't treat them very well. Beyond that, though, he had never had much to say about work, and he disliked it when she brought up the subject. She had no idea what sort of businessman he was, what he was like at the office.

  He had been two years ahead of her in the high school where they'd met. She had been attracted to what seemed to be a personal integrity that kept him aloof from the world, but she had to admit that this same integrity, this unwillingness to deceive or embellish, made him uniquely unsuited to a competitive business like construction. And the proof was he had already strayed far off a successful career track. More than likely Yoshiki had his own path to follow, one that had very little to do with other people. It was his alone; no one else had made him follow it. Masako knew that there was more than a little resemblance between her husband, who hated the business world and spent his free time shut away in this little room like some mountain hermit, and her son who had given up communicating with the world altogether. For her part, she had decided that there was very little she could do or say to either of them.

  They were quite a trio: a son who had given up both education and conversation, a husband in the grips of a depression, and Masako who had opted for the night shift after b
eing downsized from her own company. Just as they had decided to sleep in separate bedrooms, they seemed to have chosen to shoulder their own separate burdens and inhabit their own isolated reality.

  Yoshiki had said nothing to her when she was unable to find another job and ended up on the night shift at the boxed-lunch factory. Masako had sensed, however, that his silence wasn't so much a sign of apathy as an indication that he had abandoned the • futile struggle and had begun building his own cocoon, a cocoon that she couldn't penetrate. Her husband's hands, which no longer reached out to touch her, were busy at work now constructing a shell. Both she and their son were somehow tainted by the outside world and so they had to be rejected along with everything else, no matter how much it hurt them.

  So if she couldn't even manage to get things right in her own family, why was she getting mixed up in Yayoi's affairs? At a loss for an answer, Masako opened the flimsy front door and stepped outside. The air felt much cooler than it had last night. She looked up, catching sight of a dim, reddish moon floating above the rooftops. An evil omen, she thought, looking away. Yayoi had just killed her husband. What could be more ill-omened than that?

  Her Corolla was squeezed into the small parking space in front of the house. The driver's side door could only be opened a crack, but Masako managed to slip in. Starting the car, she pulled out into the street and set off. The noise of the engine seemed to echo through the quiet residential streets and surrounding fields. The neighbourhood was a remote and peaceful one, but no one had ever complained about the late-night noise. Instead, when she had started at the factory her neighbours had grilled her about where she was going so late at night.

  Yayoi's house was quite close to the factory in Musashi Murayama. She would go there before heading to work, but she was already conscious that she would have to avoid being seen. She suddenly remembered her standing agreement to meet Kuniko at the parking lot at 11.30 to walk together to the factory. She might not be in time for that. Kuniko was always suspicious when it came to things like this, so she would have to find a way to throw her off the scent.

  Still, the whole errand would probably be useless. More than likely, someone in the neighbourhood had already guessed that something had happened at the Yamamoto house. Or maybe Yayoi herself had already gone to the police. It was even possible that the whole thing was some fantasy that Yayoi had made up. Suddenly impatient, Masako stepped on the accelerator. As she did so, the scent of gardenias growing in the hedge that lined the road came pouring in through the open window. It filled the car for a moment and then disappeared again into the darkness. In much the same way, the sympathy she'd felt for Yayoi seemed to be dissipating. What does she want from me? What a nuisance this all was! She decided to wait until she saw Yayoi face to face, and then decide whether she would help her.

  A white figure was standing at the corner of the cinderblock wall that ran along the alley where Yayoi lived. Masako stepped on the brake.

  'Masako!' Yayoi seemed bewildered. She was wearing a white polo shirt and loose jeans. As she looked at her, Masako swallowed hard, moved by the defencelessness of this pale shadow floating in the darkness.

  'What are you doing?' she asked her.

  'The cat's run away,' Yayoi said, beginning to cry as she stood by the car. 'The kids love it, but it saw what I did and it was terrified.'

  Masako put her finger to her lips to signal for silence. It took a moment, but finally Yayoi seemed to understand what she meant and glanced around nervously. Her fingers were braced against the glass of the car window, and the instant Masako noticed they were trembling ever so slightly, she decided that she would do what she could to help.

  As she drove on slowly down the alley, Masako looked up at the windows of the neighbouring houses. At eleven o'clock on a weekday night, the only lights left on were shining dimly in what appeared to be bedroom windows. Everything else was quiet and dark. Since it was cooler now, air-conditioners had been turned off and windows were open. They would have to be careful about noise. She was suddenly conscious of the clatter of Yayoi's sandals.

  The Yamamotos rented a place at the very end of the alley, one of a cluster of prefabricated houses put up about fifteen years ago. Despite the relatively high rent for places like this, the house was small and inconvenient, and the family would have been saving up to get out of here. But that was all over now. People were always being driven to do stupid things. What could have driven Yayoi to do this? Or rather, what was it her husband had been driven to do that made Yayoi so angry? Turning these questions over in her mind, Masako climbed out of the car as quietly as she could. Yayoi was running down the alley toward her.

  'Now don't be shocked,' she said, seeming to hesitate slightly before opening the door to the house. Masako realised immediately that Yayoi had been referring not to what she'd done but to the sight that greeted her as the door swung open: there was Kenji, right in front of her, laid out limp on the floor. He was very clearly dead, the brown leather belt still wrapped around his neck. His eyes were half open and the tip of his tongue protruded between his lips. His complexion was pale and bloodless rather than red and congested.

  Masako had been prepared for a shock, but now that she was actually staring at the body, she found that she was surprisingly calm. Perhaps because she didn't know Kenji at all, the corpse seemed to be nothing more than a person who was lying absolutely still and whose face looked ridiculously relaxed. Still, the idea that Yayoi, who had always seemed like the image of the perfect wife and mother, was in reality a murderer - that would take some getting used to.

  'He's still warm,' Yayoi said. She had rolled up the leg of his pants and was feeling his shin. Her hand played over his skin, as if needing to confirm that he was dead.

  'So it actually happened,' Masako said quietly in a grim voice.

  'Did you think I was making it up?' Yayoi asked. 'You know I would never do something like that.' She almost seemed to be smiling, in spite of the dark look Masako gave her, though it could have been just a twitch.

  'So what are you going to do? You're not going to the police?'

  'I'm not,' Yayoi said with a firm shake of the head. 'You may think I'm crazy, but I don't feel like I've done anything wrong. He deserved to die, so I've decided to pretend that he just went off somewhere instead of coming home tonight.'

  Masako glanced at her watch, the wheels beginning to turn in her brain. Already 11.20. They needed to be at the factory by 11.45 at the latest.

  'Well, I guess there are a lot of people who just wander off and are never heard from again. But do you think anyone saw him coming from the station?'

  'You don't usually pass anybody at this time of night. I really doubt it.'

  'If he phoned anyone along the way, it's all over,' Masako told her.

  'I could still say that he never made it home.' Yayoi was warming to her role.

  'I suppose. But if the police question you, could you really play dumb?'

  'I'm sure I could. I'm sure ' Yayoi nodded, her eyes wide. She looked so sweet, and much younger than thirty-four. With a face like that, no one was likely to suspect her. Still, the whole thing was risky.

  'Then what do you want to do?' Masako's tone was cautious.

  'Put him in your trunk, and then ... '

  'And then?'

  'Go somewhere tomorrow and get rid of him,' she concluded. Masako knew that was probably their only option, and all too quickly she found herself agreeing to it.

  'All right, but we've got to hurry. Let's get him out to the car.'

  'I don't know how to thank you, but I'll find a way. I can pay you,' Yayoi said.

  'I don't want your money.'

  'Why not? Why would you be willing to do all this?' she went on as she lifted Kenji by the arms.

  'I'm not sure,' said Masako, grabbing the limp legs of the man who had once been Yayoi's husband. 'But I'll figure that out later.' Kenji had been about 168 centimetres tall, roughly the same height as Masako. But men were heav
ier, bigger boned, and the two of them were barely able to lift him and carry him out the door. If someone had seen them, it would probably just have looked like two women carrying a man who was dead drunk. Except for the belt . . . which was still wrapped around his neck and was now scraping along the ground. Masako watched in silence as Yayoi yanked it off and wrapped it around her own waist.

  'You haven't left anything he had with him?' she asked.

  'No, he wasn't carrying anything.' They bent his arms and legs and stuffed him into the trunk.

  'We can't miss work tonight,' Masako said when they'd finished. 'For one thing, we've got to start building your alibi. So we'll have to leave him in the parking lot overnight. We can think about what to do with him while we're at the factory.'

  'I suppose I'd better take my bike like always.'

  'Right. And act as though nothing's happened.'

  'OK then. Masako-san, I'm grateful to you for taking care of him like this.' Now that the body was out of the house, Yayoi suddenly seemed almost businesslike. There was even a hint of relief on her face, as if she'd just finished a particularly difficult chore. Or had she already convinced herself that Kenji really had simply vanished off the face of the earth? Feeling a bit rattled by the change that had come over her, Masako walked around and got in the car.

  'You'll give yourself away if you're too cheerful,' she murmured as she fastened her seat belt.

  Yayoi's eyes grew wide and she pressed her hand over her mouth, as though trying to control her excitement. 'Is that how I look?' she asked.

  'A bit,' said Masako.

  'Okay,' she said. 'But what should we do about the cat? It might be a problem if the kids make a fuss.'

  'It'll come back,' said Masako, but Yayoi shook her head as if she knew better.

  'It might be a problem,' she repeated. 'What'll we do?'

  -

  Masako started the car and pulled out of the alley. As she drove, the body in the trunk began weighing on her mind. What if she were stopped and searched for some reason? Or rear-ended? But thoughts that would make most people more cautious sent Masako speeding through the darkened streets as if someone were chasing her; and in fact someone was - the body in her trunk. Careful now, she told herself.