Kazuo Ishiguro - Nocturnes - five stories of music and nightfall

I went into the room in a crouched posture, so as to see it from something like Hendrix’s eyeline. Immediately, the glossy magazines piled up on the coffee table revealed themselves as an obvious target, and so I pushed them off the surface along a trajectory consistent with a shove from a rampant muzzle. The way the magazines landed on the floor looked satisfyingly authentic. Encouraged, I knelt down, opened one of the magazines and scrunched up a page in a manner, I hoped, would find an echo when eventually Emily came across the diary. But this time the result was disappointing: too obviously the work of a human hand rather than canine teeth. I’d fallen into my earlier error again: I’d not merged sufficiently with Hendrix.

So I got down on all fours, and lowering my head towards the same magazine, sank my teeth into the pages. The taste was perfumy, and not at all unpleasant. I opened a second fallen magazine near its centre and began to repeat the procedure. The ideal technique, I began to gather, was not unlike the one needed in those fairground games where you try to bite apples bobbing in water without using your hands. What worked best was a light, chewing motion, the jaws moving flexibly all the time: this would cause the pages to ruffle up and crease nicely. Too focused a bite, on the other hand, simply “stapled” pages together to no great effect.

I think it was because I’d become so absorbed in these finer points that I didn’t become aware sooner of Emily standing out in the hall, watching me from just beyond the doorway. Once I did realise she was there, my first feeling wasn’t one of panic or embarrassment, but of hurt that she should be standing there like that without having announced her arrival in some way. In fact, when I remembered how I’d gone to the trouble of calling her office only several minutes earlier precisely to pre-empt the sort of situation now engulfing me, I felt the victim of a deliberate deception. Perhaps that was why my first visible response was simply to give a weary sigh without making any attempt to abandon my all-fours posture. My sigh brought Emily into the room, and she laid a hand very gently on my back. I’m not sure if she actually knelt down, but her face seemed close to mine as she said:

“Raymond, I’m back. So let’s just sit down, shall we?”

She was easing me up onto my feet, and I had to resist the urge to shake her off.

“You know, it’s odd,” I said. “No more than a few minutes ago, you were about to go into a meeting.”

“I was, yes. But after your phone call, I realised the priority was to come back.”

“What do you mean, priority? Emily, please, you don’t have to keep holding my arm like that, I’m not about to topple over. What do you mean, a priority to come back?”

“Your phone call. I recognised it for what it was. A cry for help.”

“It was nothing of the sort. I was just trying to…” I trailed off, because I noticed Emily was looking around the room with an expression of wonder.

“Oh, Raymond,” she muttered, almost to herself.

“I suppose I was being a little clumsy earlier on. I would have tidied up, except you came back early.”

I reached down to the fallen standard lamp, but Emily restrained me.

“It doesn’t matter, Ray. It really doesn’t matter at all. We can sort it all out together later. You just sit down now and relax.”

“Look, Emily, I realise it’s your own home and all that. But why did you creep in so quietly?”

“I didn’t creep in, darling. I called when I came in, but you didn’t seem to be here. So I just popped into the loo and when I came out, well, there you were after all. But why go over it? None of it matters. I’m here now, and we can have a relaxing evening together. Please do sit down, Raymond. I’ll make some tea.”

She was already going towards the kitchen as she said this. I was fiddling with the shade of the standard lamp and so it took me a moment to remember what was in there-by which time it was too late. I listened for her reaction, but there was only silence. Eventually I put down the lampshade and made my way to the kitchen doorway.

The saucepan was still bubbling away nicely, the steam rising around the upheld sole of the boot. The smell, which I’d barely registered until this point, was much more obvious in the kitchen itself. It was pungent, sure enough, and vaguely curryish. More than anything else, it conjured up those times you yank your foot out of a boot after a long sweaty hike.

Emily was standing a few paces back from the cooker, craning her neck to get as good a view of the pot as possible from a safe distance. She seemed absorbed by the sight of it, and when I gave a small laugh to announce my presence, she didn’t shift her gaze, let alone turn around.

I squeezed past her and sat down at the kitchen table. Eventually, she turned to me with a kindly smile. “It was a terribly sweet thought, Raymond.”

Then, as though against her will, her gaze was pulled back to the cooker.

I could see in front of me the tipped-up sugar bowl-and the diary-and a huge feeling of weariness came over me. Everything felt suddenly overwhelming, and I decided the only way forward was to stop all the games and come clean. Taking a deep breath, I said:

“Look, Emily. Things might look a little odd here. But it was all because of this diary of yours. This one here.” I opened it to the damaged page and showed her. “It was really very wrong of me, and I’m truly sorry. But I happened to open it, and then, well, I happened to scrunch up the page. Like this…”I mimicked a less venomous version of my earlier action, then looked at her.

To my astonishment, she gave the diary no more than a cursory glance before turning back to the pot, saying: “Oh, that’s just a jotter. Nothing private. Don’t you worry about it, Ray.” Then she moved a step closer to the saucepan to study it all the better.

“What do you mean? What do you mean, don’t worry about it? How can you say that?”

“What’s the matter, Raymond? It’s just something to jot down stuff I might forget.”

“But Charlie told me you’d go ballistic!” My sense of outrage was now being added to by the fact that Emily had obviously forgotten what she’d been writing about me.

“Really? Charlie told you I’d be angry?”

“Yes! In fact, he said you’d once told him you’d saw his balls off if he ever peeked inside this little book!”

I wasn’t sure if Emily’s puzzled look was due to what I was saying, or still left over from gazing at the saucepan. She sat down next to me and thought for a moment.

“No,” she said, eventually. “That was about something else. I remember it clearly now. About this time last year, Charlie got despondent about something and asked what I’d do if he committed suicide. He was just testing me, he’s far too chicken to try anything like that. But he asked, so I told him if he did anything like that I’d saw his balls off. That’s the only time I’ve said that to him. I mean, it’s not like a refrain on my part.”

“I don’t get this. If he committed suicide, you’d do that to him? Afterwards?”

“It was just a figure of speech, Raymond. I was just trying to express how much I’d dislike him topping himself. I was making him feel valued.”

“You’re missing my point. If you do it afterwards, it’s not really a disincentive, is it? Or maybe you’re right, it would be…”

“Raymond, let’s forget it. Let’s forget all of this. There’s a lamb casserole from yesterday, there’s over half of it left. It was pretty good last night, and it’ll be even better tonight. And we can open a nice bottle of Bordeaux. It was awfully sweet of you to start preparing something for us. But the casserole’s probably the thing for tonight, don’t you think?”