Jon Grimwood - End of the World Blues

Mrs. Oniji had once explained to Kit that ducks divide into ahiru and kamo, those that are white and those that are not, but then Mrs. Oniji used different words for water, depending on whether it was hot, cold, or merely warm. Maybe she’d miss the lessons? Kit hoped so, at least he thought he did.

“Shoo,” Kit told the duck. One tiny eye peered at him from a slash of white like plate armour along the side of its head. After a moment, the duck decided to leave anyway.

When it came the ring tone was loud enough to make Kit jump. Tokyo was a city of video phones that doubled as DVDs, diaries, and e-mail organisers. The big problem for tourists was that only Japanese-registered phones seemed to work. One needed to rent a phone on arrival and top it up with credit.

It seemed that Kate O’Mally had.

The longer Kit ignored the phone, the louder the ring tone got and less likely it seemed that Kate would wake. In the end, Kit simply reached into her pocket and found the phone, flicking it to voice only.

“Hello…?” All Kit got was an echo of his own voice and the sense of distance which satellite lag imparts, technology making the world tiny and then guaranteeing it felt very large again.

“Hello,” repeated Kit.

Satellite distance, and a taste of something else.

“Katie?”

“No,” said Kit. “She’s sleeping.”

For a moment it sounded as if the man at the other end had broken the connection and then Kit heard his own name, the authorised version. “Christopher Newton?”

“Nouveau,” said Kit, without even thinking. “And it’s Kit.” Only then did he realise who was on the other end of the line.

“Oh fuck,” said Patrick Robbe-Duras. “Katie found you.”

“Yes,” said Kit. “That she did.”

“She’s been looking for months. You know, I told her you’d probably moved. For all we knew you were in Australia or back in England.”

“Mr. Duras…”

“Patrick,” said the man. “Call me Patrick.” He hesitated. “Katie’s already told you what this is about?”

“Of course,” Kit said. “You believe Mary’s still alive and you want me to find her.”

There was a silence. “That’s what she said?”

“Yes,” said Kit. “Did I get it wrong?”

“You could say that…” Patrick Robbe-Duras said. His voice was ghostly, made distant by more than the five thousand nautical miles and fifteen bitter years between them. “My daughter killed herself. She booked a ferry, left her shoes by the railings, and stepped into the sea. Katie is the one who believes Mary is alive. She’s the one who has spent the last six months of her life trying to find you. And you know why?”

Only, Kit had stopped listening.

Water tumbled from the long lip of the artificial fall onto carefully placed rocks below, watched only by a duck, Kit, and a homeless couple, both of whom had stripped to the waist before washing themselves in its pool. At Kit’s side, Kate O’Mally slept off a hangover that would have felled a man half her age, while Kit gripped her phone in trembling fingers, already thumbing its Off button.

Six months. Late December.

“Oh fuck,” Kit said, vomiting udon noodles, green tea, and alcohol onto the paving at his feet. As Pat’s words finally managed what Yoshi’s death had been unable to achieve, make Kit face what had really happened.

I’m not sure if this is going to reach you. I hope so. There are some things I really should have told you at the time… When she’d written that, the inhabitants of Middle Morton had already burned their famous bonfire. In Tokyo, the kouyou season was over, each day’s news no longer ending with an update on the autumn foliage. And Mary O’Mally, the only person he’d ever really loved, was preparing to kill herself.

Kit tried to remember the date of its postmark, thought about it some more and realised he could. He could also remember the day her card arrived. It was the day he fucked Namiko and the day he went to pray at the Meiji Jingu Shrine. Although it began as the day he woke to discover Yoshi had gone for a walk.

The dampness in Pirate Mary’s storeroom was made worse by a broken window, which let rain dribble down the inside of one wall. Yoshi said she liked the cold, that everyone from Hokkaido liked the cold.

Kit often wondered if that was true.

The sunken bath had been given a little room of its own near the stairs, but everything else on the third floor was stripped back to bare walls and rafters, so that any footsteps across the floor could be heard clearly in the bar below.

A long bench, an expensive black leather and steel punishment rack, and something that looked like medieval stocks comprised its only furniture. All three had arrived with Yoshi and never been used, at least not during the years that Kit had known her.

A hook in the ceiling, a coil of rope, carefully boiled to silk-like softness, and a twelve-foot length of bamboo, made up the three items that Yoshi still used. The bamboo pole was the most versatile, being utilised in more ways than Kit would have thought possible.

It had been five weeks since Yoshi had even looked at a potter’s wheel. She’d served behind the bar at Pirate Mary’s, talked ceramics to first year students at the Tokyo Design School, and cooked impossibly complicated dishes involving three kinds of eel and two types of noodle. She took to walking in the Meiji gardens to watch crimson leaves fall from the winter trees. When that failed, she tracked Kit down at the bar, where he was mending a beer pump, and told him she wanted tying.

That was the deal. She always asked, Kit wasn’t expected to volunteer. Like most such deals it was unspoken and possibly entirely unconscious.

“You know,” said Yoshi, as she stripped off her yukata . “All I want is an empty mind…” She looked for a second as if she was about to ask, Is that so unreasonable?

She began to relax the moment the ropes began to constrict her body. Her eyes glazed and turned inwards and the tightness around her eyes smoothed away. Kit needed a hit to reach anything approaching that state. Even then, Kit doubted if what he extracted from the dragon came close to the utter serenity Yoshi seemed to find.

“Thank you,” she said, when the final knot was tied.

“Shhh…” Kit touched his finger to her lips.

Yoshi smiled.

Her needs had little to do with masochism and even less to do with sex, at least in any way Kit understood those terms. Edo rope bondage was Yoshi’s way of reaching clarity and if Yoshi lacked clarity…Well, for Yoshi, work was what made life worth living.

She was still smiling as he went back to mending his pump. An hour and a half later, about ten minutes after Kit unbound her, the sound of Yoshi’s wheel could be heard as it spun steadily. An hour after that Kit decided he might as well take himself for a walk.

“Nouveau-san…” The post boy held out one white gloved hand and bowed slightly. The dark blue uniform he wore already looked familiar, though the firm he represented was new. A dozen stories had already run about the fall in standards now that Japan’s post office was privately run. To Kit the service seemed immaculate.

Barely noticing the boy’s bow, Kit took the card and flipped it over, his thoughts already on which of a dozen tasks he needed to do first. And then Kit saw the writing, read Mary’s message before realising he’d even done so, and everything else ceased to matter.

About the baby, wrote Mary. I lied.

Usually it was No Neck who wanted Kit’s help getting drunk. This time round, Mary’s postcard still clutched in one hand, Kit went in search of the other man. Although, in Kit’s defence, he really did think he just needed to talk.