Mo Hayder - The Devil of Nanking aka Tokyo

‘I’m going out,’ I said, throwing open the door.

‘It’s okay,’ I heard him say behind me. ‘It’s okay. You’ll be okay soon.’

Even as recently as 1980, it was possible in England for a stillborn baby not to be buried. For her not to be buried in a grave, but instead to be taken in a yellow waste-bag and incinerated with other clinical waste. It was even possible for her mother, a teenage girl with no experience, to let the baby go and never dare ask where she went. It was all possible, because of a simple accident of the calendar: my baby had failed to live inside me for a crucial twenty-eight weeks. Just one day short, and the state said that my baby should not be buried, that she was a day too small to be a human being, a day too small to get a funeral or a proper girl’s name, and so would for ever carry the name foetus. A name that is full of sickness and nothing like my little girl when she was born.

It was a late December night when the trees were heavy with snow and the moon was full. The nurses in the emergency room thought I shouldn’t be crying like I was. ‘Try to relax.’ The doctor couldn’t meet my eyes when I came to, stretched out on the operating table, and found him dressing the wounds in my stomach. He worked in chilly silence, and when eventually he told me the outcome, he did it standing in profile, speaking to the wall and not to me.

I tried to sit up, not understanding what he’d said. ‘ What? ’

‘We’re very sorry.’

‘No. She’s not dead. She’s-’

‘Well, of course she is. Of course she’s dead.’

‘ But she’s not supposed to be dead. She’s supposed to be -’

‘Please.’ He put his hand on my shoulder, edging me back down on to the table. ‘You didn’t really expect anything else, did you? Now, lie down. Relax.’

They tried to hold me down, they tried to stop me looking. But I cheated. I looked. And I discovered something I’ll never forget: I discovered that it is also possible, along with all the other incredible possibilities in life, to see, in one brief moment, everything a child might have been – to see through that almost transparent, inadequate skin, and see her soul, her voice, her real and complex self, to see the long story of her life stretching away ahead of her. All of these things are possible.

There was an agency nurse who didn’t know or care how I’d ended up like this. She was the only one who saw what it meant to me. She was the one who pressed a tissue into the corners of my eyes and stroked my hand. ‘You poor little thing, poor little thing.’ She looked across the room to the humped shape in the kidney bowl, to the small curve of shoulder, the dab of dark hair. ‘You’ll have to stop worrying about her now, lovey. You’ll have to stop worrying. Wherever her soul is, God will find it.’

The moon was still out when I left the house, hurrying down the alley clasping my coat at the neck, but by the time I reached Shiba-Koen dawn was coming – you could see it between the buildings. The sky was a pretty washed-out pink, and an artificially warm wind blew through the streets, as if a nuclear wind was coming from the west. It made the bare branches in the Zojoji temple spin and whip. At the purifying bowl in front of the rows of child statues, silent and sightless in their red bonnets, I stopped and ladled freezing water first into my left hand, the way you were supposed to, then into the right. I dropped a few yen into the offertory box, tugged off my shoes and went into the freezing grass, wandering up and down the rows of stone children.

The shadows of the white prayer slips tied in the branches over my head moved and shifted. I found a place in the corner of the gardens, a place between two rows of statues where I couldn’t be seen from the road, and sat down on the ground, my coat pulled tightly round me. You were supposed to clap your hands when you prayed. There was a sequence, but I couldn’t remember it, so in the end I did what I was used to seeing people do in my own, Christian country. I put my hands together, dropped my forehead on to the tips of my fingers and closed my eyes.

Maybe the nurse had been right. Maybe ‘God’, or the gods, or something greater than any of us, knew where my baby’s soul was. But I didn’t. I didn’t know where she was buried, so I had nowhere to start. Without a grave to visit I had learned to imagine her as nowhere and everywhere, flying somewhere above me. Sometimes when I squeezed my eyes closed I would picture her in the black, pitted night sky, so high up that her head was brushing the roof of the world. In my dreams she’d be able to fly anywhere she wanted. Maybe even from England to Tokyo. She would have to set her course straight for the east, then off she’d go, fast, looking down from time to time and seeing the travelling lights beneath her: Europe, with all its bridges lit up and decorated like wedding cakes. She’d know when she was over the sea from the dark stretches, or the ridged reflection of the moon, or the little pearl drops of tankers. After Europe she’d fly fast into the rising sun. Over the Russian steppes and bottomless Baikal lake with its strange seals and landlocked fish. And further, past rice fields and industrial chimneys and oleander-fringed roads, over the stretching, hardening crust of the whole of Shi Chongming’s homeland. Then Tokyo, and on and on until she was over Takadanobaba, and she would see the curled eaves of the old house. Then she would be above my window and at last…

But, of course, she hadn’t come. Even at O-Bon, when the dead were supposed to visit the living, when I’d sat in my window watching lighted candles floating down the Kanda river as the Japanese guided their dead back, all the time I thought stupidly that maybe she’d find me. But she didn’t. I told myself that I shouldn’t have expected it, that she’d probably tried hard. It was such a long way from England for only a small spirit, maybe she’d got lost, or just very, very tired.

I lifted my head from my pseudo-prayer. Around me the children’s windmills were spinning in the warm wind, the wooden memorial slats clicking and clattering. Every hand-made bonnet, every bib, every toy ornamenting the statues had been placed there by a mother who had prayed, like I had just prayed. It was getting light and the first commuters were walking fast along the street next to the temple.

Jason, I thought, getting to my feet and brushing down my coat, Jason, believe me, you are stranger, stranger and more insane than I have ever been. What I did was ignorant and wrong, but I was never as wrong as you are. I took a few deep breaths of clean air and looked up into the sky. He had brought me back to something. I had almost forgotten, but he’d reminded me. There was only one way I could go. There had only ever been one way.

Nanking, 20 December 1937 (the eighteenth day of the eleventh month)

This is how you learn.

As the sun came up I listened to the radio for a while. Still no official announcement that it was safe to go into the streets. When full daylight was at last with us I drank some tea, dressed quietly, tied my quilted jacket and slipped out into the alley, barricading the door behind me and stopping once to check for any movement. Outside, a light snow was falling: thin white flakes covering the old dirty snow. I slipped silently between the houses, reached the Liu house within minutes, went to the back door and gave a coded series of knocks. After a while the door was opened by Liu’s wife, who stood back wordlessly and allowed me to pass. Her eyes were red, and she was wearing a tattered man’s winter robe over several layers of her own clothes.