Mo Hayder - The Devil of Nanking aka Tokyo

There was a little food in my holdall. Maybe no one would notice if I got some of it out now. I had packed eight packets of Rich Tea biscuits. There was also a wool skirt, two blouses, two pairs of tights, a pair of lace-up leather shoes, three Japanese language books, seven textbooks on the Pacific war, a dictionary and three paintbrushes. I’d been vague about what was going to come after I’d got Shi Chongming’s film, I hadn’t really thought about the practicalities. There you go, Grey, I thought. What were the doctors always telling you? You’ll have to discover ways of thinking ahead – there are rules in society that you will always have to consider.

Grey.

Obviously it isn’t my real name. Even my parents, tucked away in the crumbling cottage, where no roads came and no cars passed, even they weren’t that odd. No. It was in hospital that I got the name.

It came from the girl in the bed next to me, a pale girl with a ring in the side of her nose and matted hair that she’d spend all day scratching: ‘Trying to dred it up, just want to dred it up a bit.’ She had scabs around her mouth from where she’d sniffed too much glue, and once she’d untwisted a coat hanger, locked herself in the toilets and pushed the sharp end up under her skin from her wrist all the way to her armpit. (The hospital tried to keep people like us together, I’ll never know why. We were the ‘self-harm’ ward.) The girl in the dreds always seemed to have a confident smirk on her face and I never thought she would speak to me of all people. Then one day we were in the breakfast queue and she sensed me waiting behind her. She turned and looked at me and gave a sudden laugh of recognition. ‘Oh, I get it. I’ve just sussed what you look like.’

I blinked. ‘What?’

‘A grey. You remind me of a grey.’

‘A what?’

‘Yeah. When you first got in here you were still alive. But,’ she grinned and pointed a finger at my face, ‘you’re not now, are you? You’re a ghost, Grey, like all of us.’

A grey. In the end she had to find a drawing of a grey to explain what she was talking about: it was an extra-terrestrial with a big head, blank, insect-like eyes set high and even, and strange, bleached-out skin. I remember sitting on my bed, staring at the magazine, my hands getting colder and colder, my blood slowing to a crawl. I was a grey. Thin and white and a little bit see-through. Nothing at all left alive in me. A ghost.

I knew why. It was because I didn’t know what to believe any more. My parents wouldn’t back me up, and there were other things that made the professionals think I was crazy – all the stuff about sex to start with. And then there was my weird ignorance about the world.

Most of the staff thought secretly that my story was a little outrageous: brought up with books, but no radio or TV. They’d laugh when I jumped in shock when a Hoover started up, or a bus rumbled by on the street. I didn’t know how to use a Walkman or a channel-changer and they’d sometimes find me stranded in odd places, blinking, forgetting how I’d got there. They wouldn’t believe it was because I’d grown up in isolation, cut off from the real world. Instead they decided it was all part of my madness.

‘I suppose you think ignorance is some sort of excuse.’ The nurse who used to come in the middle of the night and hiss all her opinions in my ear thought my being ignorant was the biggest of sins. ‘It’s not an excuse, you know, it’s not an excuse. No. In fact, in my book ignorance is no different from pure, straight evil. And what you done was just that – pure, straight evil.’

When the waitress had gone, I unzipped my holdall and took out my Japanese dictionary. There are three alphabets in Japan. Two are phonetic and they’re easy to understand. But there’s a third one, too, evolved centuries ago from the pictorial characters used in China, and it’s far more complex and far, far more beautiful. Kanji, it’s called. I’ve been studying it for years, but sometimes when I see kanji it still makes me think about the littleness of my life. When you stop to consider the lifetime of history and intrigue all hidden in a single scripted picture tinier than an ant how can you not feel like a waste of air? Kanji had a beautiful logic for me. I understood why the symbol for ‘ear’ pressed close up to the symbol for ‘gate’ would mean ‘listen’. I understood why three women clustered together meant ‘noisy’ and why adding splashy lines to the left of any character would change its meaning to include water. A field with an added water symbol meant sea.

The dictionary was my constant companion. It was small and soft and white and familiar, bound in something that could have been calfskin, and it fitted inside my hand as if it was moulded there. The girl with the dreadlocks had stolen it from a library when she got out of hospital. She had mailed it to me as a present when it got round the patients that I was leaving at last. She’d put a card between the pages that said: ‘ I believe you. Stick it to them all. Go and PROVE IT, girl.’ Even all those years later I was still secretly thrilled by that card.

I opened the dictionary to the front page, the page with the library stamp on it. The characters for the Chinese name Shi Chongming meant something like ‘He who sees clearly both history and the future.’ With a red felt-tip from the bottom of my bag I began to sketch out the kanji, intertwining them, turning them upside-down, sideways, until the page was covered with red. Then in the gaps, using very tiny letters, I wrote Shi Chongming in English, over and over again. When there was no more room I turned to the back page and sketched out a map of the campus, putting in a few hedges and trees from memory. The campus was so beautiful. I’d only seen it for a few minutes, but it had seemed like a wonderland in the middle of the city: shadowy gingko crowded around white gravel paths, ornate roofs and the cool sounds of a dark lake in the forest. I drew in the archery hall, then added a few stone lanterns from my imagination. Lastly over Shi Chongming’s office I carefully drew a picture of me standing in front of him. We were shaking hands. In his other hand he was holding a film in a canister, ready to pass it over to me. In my image I was trembling. After nine years, seven months and eighteen days, I was at last going to get an answer.

At six thirty the sun was still hot, but the big oak doors to the Institute of Social Sciences were locked, and when I pressed my ear to them I couldn’t hear anything inside. I turned and looked around, wondering what to do next. I’d waited for Shi Chongming in the Bambi café for six hours and although no one had said anything I’d felt obliged to keep buying iced coffees. I’d had four. And four more melon pastries, wetting my fingers and dabbing up the stray grains of sugar on the plate; reaching a sneaky hand under the table and digging surreptitiously in my bag for some Rich Tea biscuits whenever the waitress wasn’t looking. I had to break bits off under the table and put my hand casually to my mouth pretending I was yawning. The handful of yen notes dwindled. Now I realized it had been a waste of time. Shi Chongming must have gone a long time ago, leaving from a different entrance. Maybe he’d guessed I’d be waiting.

I went back to the street and pulled several folded pages from my bag. One of the last things I’d done in London was to photocopy a map of Tokyo. It was on a very big scale: it covered several pages. I stood in the late sunshine with the crowd streaming round me, and inspected the pages. I looked up and down the long thoroughfare I stood on. It seemed like a canyon because the buildings were so dense and precipitous, the crowds and the neon signs and the buildings bristling with shops and business and noise. What was I supposed to do now? I’d given up everything to come here to see Shi Chongming, and now there was nowhere for me to go, nothing more for me to do.