The Phone Box at the Edge of the World

Home > Other > The Phone Box at the Edge of the World > Page 8
The Phone Box at the Edge of the World Page 8

by Laura Imai Messina


  ‘I know,’ Takeshi finally interrupted. ‘But these things take time; the paediatrician said so too.’

  Had the doctor really said that? He couldn’t remember now. He might have done, but Takeshi was no longer sure. He knew, though, that the authority of a third party, preferably a man, was the only way to stop his mother.

  ‘Some things take time, but some things will keep burrowing down if you leave them … and if you don’t do something, the marks will remain. Try not to overdo it either though,’ she replied.

  It had now been more than two years since Hana last spoke; if his mother was talking about scars, they were already far beyond that point, and nobody was under any illusions. But Takeshi didn’t said anything. He knew it was best to stay quiet when someone believed something so simple could fix everything.

  ‘You’ll see, she’ll get better, I’m sure. Take her to Bell Gardia and show her how it all works.’

  From the window the sky seemed to spill over Mt Fuji, the clouds strangling its slopes. The train ran along the base of the mountain, the pairs of tracks snaking closer together then venturing apart again. Takeshi had thought about moving house after his wife’s death, but then he realised how much he loved the view from the window that changed every day.

  ‘The first time you told me about the telephone, I thought of the butsudan. If you think about it, the butsudan also helps us to live with the idea that everything comes to an end. It’s like always having a little bit of death in the house.’

  Takeshi agreed. The household altar was a custom upheld in many Japanese homes. Some people chose not to have one, because of the maintenance it required, but it was undeniable that it helped people to become more familiar with death and the possibility of establishing a different relationship with our loved ones after they’ve gone.

  ‘When I was a little girl, you know, it taught me that things are still there even when we can’t see them anymore; that when people disappear from our everyday lives, it doesn’t mean they vanish completely. Like my grandparents on my mother’s side, who died long before I was born, or the two brothers I had who were dead by the time my mother gave birth to them. They were invisible, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. They had just moved home, so to speak; from the kitchen or the bedroom into the living room, onto the butsudan. One day my grandparents were over here, the next they were there.’

  Takeshi nodded, remembering the profile of his great-grandparents in the only photo he had ever seen of them. The picture was taken in the severe style of back then: the woman sitting, in a kimono, the man standing beside her. Their facial expressions were formal and haughty. Takeshi’s mind wandered; when did we start smiling in photographs?

  ‘And these are things that as a child you can only understand through the idea of magic, or a gentle religion like our one,’ the woman continued. ‘And I tell you, talking to my parents once they were dead was a lot easier than it was when they were alive. They would always hush me up, saying, “You’re the youngest, so be quiet.” It’s rather funny when I think about it now, because I’d always be the youngest, wouldn’t I?’

  Takeshi picked up the tangerine peel that was left on the table, threw it into the bin and started pushing it down for the waste collection.

  ‘The butsudan gives me that kind of consolation; I feel as if your father is still here with me.’

  Takeshi remembered his mother being in constant dialogue with his father, who had passed away when she was forty and he, who had married her in his fiftieth year, was twenty years older. He mostly remembered her interminable outbursts and the figure of that fair, impassive man standing patiently and listening. She would pour the overflowing bucket of her day out onto the table and he would search through the sand, turning over every microscopic fragment of shell until she was happy.

  And now, in front of the household altar where he too rested, the woman would kneel down with her back erect, light the incense, offer some sweets and rice and invoke him to listen to her again, just like she did when he was alive. Her son would often find her asleep in the tatami room, her upright pose turned horizontal, her head resting on the zabuton.

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ she happily responded when Takeshi reminded her of that. ‘Your father loved me that way, chatty and chaotic.’

  And her laughter swallowed up the tinge of sadness that overcame her whenever she felt too old or too stupid to make things better.

  ‘On the subject of bringing Hana to Bell Gardia, I’m going to ask my friend what she thinks,’ Takeshi returned to their previous conversation to wrap it up. ‘It might be worth a try.’

  ‘The friend you always go up to Iwate with?’

  ‘Yes, I was thinking of her. Yui’s more observant than I am. She’ll know whether it’s a good idea to take Hana there or not,’ Takeshi said. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

  He switched off the light on the cooker hood, which was illuminating one last square of the kitchen, and their shadows slipped away.

  chapter

  thirty-four

  The Ten Most Vivid Memories Takeshi Had of his Father

  When they went up the Tōkyō Tower for the first time and saw how huge the city was.

  His habit of unscrewing and rescrewing the caps of bottles at the table.

  The way he drummed his fingers on things.

  The clumsy and confusing way he tried to explain how babies were made.

  The times he would go into the other room and phone his younger sister. The intense conversations he had with her in a low voice.

  The little model Ferrari he brought back from a trip to Italy.

  When he saw him cry for the first and last time: his little sister had died.

  When they went to see rakugo in Asakusa together.

  The day he found him in his armchair, stock-still, with the newspaper at his feet. He looked like he was sleeping, but he’d had a heart attack.

  His peaceful face as he lay in the coffin, the flowers (mostly lilies) scattered all around him, along with crossword puzzles and his favourite sweets (manjù).

  chapter

  thirty-five

  TAKESHI REALISED EARLY ON THAT the most important thing Akiko, his wife, wanted to teach their daughter was trust.

  Of course, like all mothers, she harboured the constant fear that something would happen to her child. A bad thing, mostly, and that this bad thing would happen at the hands of another person. ‘I fear objects less and less,’ she said. The solid materials of the world, cars for example, or tumbling down on a sloping pavement. It was Hana’s childish attempts to make eye contact with passers-by that worried her, such as the gaze of a slightly depraved-looking old man.

  Yet when it came to choosing between fear and trust, Akiko always opted for the latter.

  The only argument Takeshi could remember having had with his wife was when she and Hana had been walking home from the cafe one day after breakfast and Hana had walked up to a homeless man in the street to proudly show him her drawing. ‘Look, look!’ she had exclaimed, and Akiko, rather than pulling her daughter out of the man’s reach, got Hana to sit down on the edge of the pavement and have a conversation with him.

  It was necessary to instil a bit of suspicion in children, didn’t she understand? It was up to the adults to teach them, Takeshi said later that evening, as soon as he was sure Hana was asleep. Children don’t recognise danger, they don’t even know what death is: if Hana saw the carcass of an insect, she would probably think it was sleeping. If an adult didn’t hold her hand at the level crossing, she would probably run in front of a train with her arms wide open.

  No! Akiko replied fiercely. Being afraid of life and of people only makes you weaker. It was up to them, she said, to protect Hana until she was capable of protecting herself. But first they needed to teach her joy.

  ‘Knowing how to love life is a necessity, Takeshi, and she needs to learn to trust people. Not to hate them, there’s no way out of hate,’ she said, lowering her voice.

>   Then she immediately hugged her husband tight, the way she’d learned to do with their daughter whenever the little girl got carried away in a tempestuous tantrum for reasons Hana herself wasn’t even sure of.

  That night they would make love, thinking perhaps it was the right time to give Hana a brother or sister. Three months later, while searching for the signs of pregnancy, Akiko discovered the tumour.

  Childhood disappears for everyone. All children die one day.

  So Hana would disappear one day too, her father thought. He needed to help her find her childhood again, fast.

  Giving up work because of the pregnancy had hit Hana’s mother hard: she had been studying to become a singer since she was four years old and the complications of the pregnancy, which had kept her bed-bound for five months, had made singing difficult. The fact that nobody was forcing her to give it up, and that Takeshi and his mother were always offering to look after the baby once it was born, didn’t make the decision any easier. She was sure she had to do it.

  After Hana was born, she and Akiko lived in a state of absolute symbiosis, the mother appearing to need her baby even more than the baby needed her mother. Akiko’s career was over and she didn’t have the courage to go back to it after the break that she herself deemed too long. It undoubtedly weighed on her, yet her love for Hana was an immense thing and she often mentioned how much she enjoyed spending her days with her.

  She could have asked for help from her mother-in-law, who lived nearby and wasn’t working, but as a child she’d been told hundreds of times that ‘Our choices shape our lives,’ and she really wanted to see what kind of life would come out of the choices she had made. On top of that, she struggled with her mother-in-law’s loquacity, and she didn’t like the woman’s habit of rolling up Takeshi’s shirtsleeves, or of stroking his hand at the end of a meal. She found the way the old woman corrected Hana bewildering, and didn’t understand why she had to ruffle the elaborate hairstyles Akiko did for her daughter in front of the mirror every morning. She was jealous, to the point where a sort of affectionate rivalry emerged between them.

  The mother-in-law admired her daughter-in-law. She didn’t always understand her – for example how Akiko could be so melancholic one day and so happy the next; and she couldn’t fathom how such variation could exist within one person. And yet it was optimism that prevailed in the young wife, and that alone she found astonishing.

  Takeshi’s mother had spent twenty years clearing her name of the scoldings she had subjected her son to, especially during that long period of confusion after her husband passed away and she found herself left alone to manage a life that, practically speaking, she’d had little to do with until that point. She could forgive herself only by recalling the difficulties of her own childhood.

  On second thoughts, it was a miracle that her son had got a degree (in medicine!), and that was something she told herself every time she worried she had thrown her life away: my son, the doctor! A son who saves people’s lives!

  Yet when she was with friends or strangers, she hid this amazement. Taking his success for granted made her look as though she was perfectly at home in this lifestyle, in the luxurious apartment in Naka-Meguro, the eternally fresh flowers in the hallway, her granddaughter’s private kindergarten.

  She also felt she’d accumulated a certain amount of credit from the struggles in her life. A good companion for her son and a nice daughter-in-law for herself was the least she deserved.

  And there was Akiko, who swooped in like Mary Poppins to the house of the Banks family. What she loved most about that girl with the melodious voice was the way she was with Takeshi and their little girl. She was extremely precise when it came to looking after the house and she never forgot a birthday or to pay a bill. And yet she was also a dreamer, and she had the inborn lightness of someone who never stamps her feet when things don’t go her way.

  That’s where Akiko’s beauty came from: she knew how to let go. Unlike her, her daughter-in-law didn’t make a big fuss when things went wrong. Sure, she ate a little too much (she was crazy about banana special eclairs and would never dream of sharing them), and she was always kissing Takeshi and their daughter. Also, she was definitely excessively sentimental, as women sometimes are when they sacrifice themselves for their family, but the joy and the trust she embodied were rare. However hard she tried, Takeshi’s mother would never have that level of courage.

  But then Akiko got sick and, as if a rift had opened up in the earth, everything collapsed.

  Two weeks after the funeral, when they realised that the little girl’s silence was more than a passing phase, Takeshi’s mother feared that it was a direct consequence of her mother’s love. If we are destined to lose certain things, wouldn’t it be better to do without them from the start? she wondered, not sure of the answer.

  At first, putting on a brave face, she told herself that at least she was still around, a young grandmother in good health.

  Takeshi didn’t do enough; he handled Hana like a precious china doll. But really, she was no better. As the months went on, she developed a distant fear of this soundless creature whose innermost thoughts she couldn’t begin to imagine.

  Would Hana always bear the marks of having lost a mother who was so special?

  The old lady would poke her head round the door of Hana’s little bedroom and ask if she wanted to go out for a walk or watch the TV together, but the girl would shake her head and go back to cutting and folding origami or flicking through picture books by herself. The thing she most loved was standing at the window and watching the trains go by, passing through the neighbourhood and then vanishing again.

  Hana wasn’t ready to let anybody take her mother’s place.

  Takeshi’s mother just hoped there had been enough time for Akiko to instil in her daughter that remarkable sense of joy, untouched by whatever else was going on in the world.

  As the months went by, she found comfort in her son’s frequent mentions of this new person, Yui. All she knew of this woman were the digits of her phone number and her profile picture of a ballerina dressed in red, flying through the air. Not that there was anything going on between them, not that she knew of. But who knows, she would think when she needed a dose of hope, perhaps she’ll be the bandage that heals this beautiful, bruised family.

  She started to include Yui’s name in her daily prayers before the butsudan.

  chapter

  thirty-six

  Ten Things Plus One that Hana and Akiko Loved Doing Together

  Counting the kan kans at the level crossing and losing count when the train passed.

  Pressing all the odd-numbered buttons in the lift.

  Saying ‘Akkanbe! Bero bero be!’ and sticking their tongues out.

  Going to the Mori Building to see Tōkyō from above, asking each other ‘Where’s our house?’ and pointing at random.

  Playing trains (Hana would grab onto the strap that Akiko had connected to her handbag, and Akiko would say, Choo, choo. Off we go!).

  In cherry-blossom season, running back and forth along the bank of the river in Naka-Meguro, at dawn, before the crowds arrived. Then pretending to speak an invented language when surrounded by tourists.

  Saying ‘I’m as full as an elephant!’

  Taking the Inokashira line and getting off at Eifuku-chō to eat a pizza.

  Opening their mouths when it rained and saying, ‘How delicious! Compliments to the chef!’

  Greeting all the tanuki statues next to restaurants and private houses.

  Ordering three slices of cake at the cafe, all different flavours, and then cutting them into five pieces and playing jan ken for the fifth piece.

  chapter

  thirty-seven

  ‘WHAT DO YOU THINK? SHOULD we try bringing Hana to Bell Gardia?’ Takeshi asked her that evening in a text message.

  Yui said she didn’t know. But her first thought was that perhaps it would be best to explain to Hana how the Wind Phone worked, tell h
er about the journey, the garden, how it made her dad feel. Make a story out of it. And then, if she seemed curious, invite her to join them the following Sunday. But not to put any pressure on her.

  Takeshi followed her advice.

  In the evening, after the usual goodnight story, he read his daughter a children’s picture book about the Wind Phone.

  He told her that this was how he talked to her mother and kept her up to date with how he and Hana were doing. He felt close to her there and felt sure that she was listening.

  The journey? Well, the journey was very, very long, but they saw the most wonderful views.

  ‘The sea, Hana – do you know how many colours there are in the sea in winter?’

  That same night, Yui remembered a Friday five years earlier.

  Her daughter was nearly two and they were on the train; she was screaming and Yui was trying, unsuccessfully, to calm her down. Now, looking back, she couldn’t say whether they were howls of joy or distress, whether she wanted something Yui wasn’t giving her (a biscuit? her phone?), or whether she was excited and expressing that in the only way she knew. Whichever it was, her voice was high-pitched and loud; it pressed against the walls of the carriage, and there was no sign she was going to let up soon.

  Then somebody shouted, ‘Urusai!’ Shut up!

  Yui turned around in the carriage and saw a man with a heavy stomach, a white mop of hair and large thin-framed glasses that encircled his eyes. Eyes that were neither good nor bad. Just eyes.

  Even before turning, Yui had instinctively said sumimasen. She was so used to apologising before doing anything else. When you had children you had to learn quickly to bow your head and seek forgiveness. It was just a few words, at the end of the day.

 

‹ Prev