Jon Grimwood - End of the World Blues

Kit thought of Mr. Oniji and his promise that Yoshi’s death had nothing to do with him. And he thought of the strange cos-play returning to collect her knife. Neither seemed like an enemy to him.

“None,” Kit said.

After a final question, about any enemies Yoshi might have, Major Yamota stood up, bowed very slightly, and left without bothering to say goodbye.

“Put the following statements in order of descending incongruity…” On screen the final round of a trivia quiz kicked off and a man in a black suit and dark glasses began to read from his list.

As Kit was the only person in the room, he got up and changed channels. A teen drama, in which three school friends tried to talk a new girl out of throwing herself off the roof. A comedy cop show about an ex- Yakuza turned policeman and a documentary about spawning eels. He’d lived too long in Tokyo to find anything about that selection unusual.

In Kit’s hand was a photograph, found tucked into the back of his wallet. One of those thumbnail pictures that everyone was printing out back when camera phones were still news. It showed a girl with dirty blonde hair, a smile to kill, and wide eyes, wrapped up in a face that was all cheekbones.

She looked more fragile than he remembered.

As fifteen minutes crawled towards thirty and finally became forty-five, Kit stood up from his bench in Roppongi’s police station and decided to see what happened if he tried to leave. At which point a young officer stuck his head round the door and glanced from Kit to the suitcase he’d just picked up. Kit was pretty sure it was an officer he’d seen at the hospital.

“Are you all right?”

Rather sheepishly, Kit nodded.

“Major Yamota won’t be much longer.”

“What’s he doing?” asked Kit, quickly adding, “Of course, I realise he’s very busy.”

For a second it looked as if the young man was about to say that Major Yamota was doing something both important and secret. Instead, he shrugged. “Who knows,” the man said. “He’s from Organised.”

It seemed the junior officer was there to inspect the level in the water cooler and check that the coffee machine was functioning. As the water cooler was virtually empty, the officer removed its old bottle, upended a fresh one, and left Kit to his thoughts and memories. In an ideal world, of course, he’d have left the rubbish and taken the memories.

On the morning Yoshi died, Kit and Yoshi had made love, if that was the right word. Kit bound nine metres of cord around his wife’s body, in a complicated pattern that went between her legs and around her neck, squeezed both breasts and constricted her hips, before coming to a knot over her belly button.

Edo rope bondage.

On the days she really needed to lose herself, Yoshi had Kit hoist her from the floor, in the gyaku-ebi-tsuri position. For this they used a single rope, a hook attached to the storeroom ceiling, and a pulley bought from a chandler in Chiba, where her brother-in-law got fittings for his precious yacht.

That morning was simpler. Kit just bound Yoshi tight, lay her flat on a tatami mat, and left her alone for an hour. Then he untied her and helped her shower, telling her to get some rest. The next time they saw each other, she had been standing by the bins behind Pirate Mary’s, about to destroy a pot so perfect it was almost not there…

On screen a Korean girl raced towards a finish line, with her mouth open and one hand stretched desperately for a Japanese child waiting to start the next lap. The Korean was too self-conscious to run happily, her bust thick beneath a black tracksuit. Although ten girls ran at any one time, five in black and five in white, the camera stayed with the girl at the back, its focus tight to her upper body. In the final seconds, it flipped to the face of the girl she needed to reach.

Although this one ran herself into the ground, rolling onto her side to gasp for air, the race was already lost. When she raised her face for the camera, her eyes had flooded with tears. Child by child, the camera cut from one losing face to another, twenty-five schoolgirls in black, every single one crying.

What was interesting was that the Korean—who was large by Japanese standards, but would pass unnoticed on the streets of any capital in the Western world—had known her team was losing before she even began to run, as had the girl who took her place. Yet both had run themselves into gasping despair at not being able to close the gap. Maybe that had been how Yoshi felt.

A police car had collected Kit from hospital and delivered him to this room on the ground floor of the new Azabu Police Station. A courtesy, that was how his transport arrangements had been presented. Equally, there had been no suggestion Kit might refuse the ride.

He would have signed himself out of hospital days before, but this suggestion had produced the administrator. A small man in a dark suit and tortoiseshell glasses who appeared in the doorway and announced, politely but firmly, that the doctors insisted Kit stay in bed for at least a week. He still needed to recover.

“From this?” said Kit, indicating the cast on his left arm.

The small man had smiled.

“Is it really broken?” Kit’s fingers worked perfectly, and apart from a dull ache in the elbow, his arm felt fine. The worst thing that could be said was that his skin itched like fuck beneath the plaster.

“We have X-rays showing a minor fracture. Nothing too serious.” The man spoke with a Hokkaido accent, the extra stress on each Z added a harshness to words someone from Tokyo would have left soft.

“What about my ankle?” Kit said.

The administrator appeared to think about this. “All right,” he said. “The cast on that can come off.” He hesitated. “You were killing yourself with drugs,” he said finally. “I don’t expect you to believe that because addicts never do, until they become ex-addicts. Only you know on which side of that line you now stand…”

The arrival of a police driver at lunchtime the following day was enough to make the administrator reappear, flanked by two technical assistants who looked as if they’d been chosen mostly for the width of their shoulders. Standing once again in Kit’s doorway, the administrator looked as if he personally intended to stop his patient and the police officer from leaving.

“I am troubled by this,” said the small man. He looked at the driver, who nodded to indicate that the administrator’s reservations had been noted. “Obviously, we are happy to do everything we can to help the authorities, but…”

“I have my orders,” said the driver.

The administrator sighed, his sigh obviously intended to indicate both his unease and the fact the matter was now out of his hands. “I’ll have his cases sent to the station,” he said. It was all Kit could do not to ask, What cases?

Half an hour after Kit arrived at the police station, still in pajamas and a dressing gown, a pair of matching leather suitcases turned up, full of clothes in his size. A brown envelope tucked into the top of his case contained a broken watch, a broken bead bracelet, and Kit’s wallet, minus its last twist of heroin. Mind you, the wallet bulged with money, far more than when Kit was bundled into an ambulance outside Pirate Mary’s.

So now Kit wore dark cotton trousers, a pale blue shirt with short sleeves, and a tan leather belt. Not his style at all, but they seemed to play well with everyone who came through the waiting room door.

“If you’re ready?”

“If I’m…?” Kit shut his mouth and followed a young policewoman along a corridor and up a flight of stairs. It was obvious that the carpet in the public areas was more expensive than the carpet in areas seen only by the police and those they brought in for interviews.