Dark Water (3 page)

Yoshimi caught sight of the red Kitty bag again the next Saturday morning. This time, she unexpectedly found it in the garbage facility provided for the apartment tenants. She had gone to put out some non-burnable waste and had lifted off the lid of the large polyethylene garbage bin. The red bag had been wedged between two black plastic bags. Although she did momentarily stop and stare at the bag, it was far from difficult to conclude how it had got there. The super had thrown it away in the belief that there was no likelihood of the owner ever turning up. As if nothing had happened, Yoshimi dumped her own sack crammed full of sorted waste on top of the red bag and covered the garbage bin with the lid.

That should have been the end. The bag was to be carted off in a garbage truck with the rest of the incombustible waste destined to form new groundwork for a landfill.

On the first Sunday in September, Yoshimi and Ikuko had gone to buy a few things at the neighbourhood convenience store. They found that fireworks had been significantly discounted now that the summer season was nearly over. In fact, the price was so low that Yoshimi could not reasonably refuse Ikuko's pleas on grounds that fireworks were too expensive. The disappearance of the remaining fireworks from the store shelves would signal that the lingering embers of summer had finally gone out. Fond as she was of summer, even Yoshimi could not resist the allure of these last goods on the shelf, for there was something poignant about their impending disappearance. So Yoshimi found it perfectly natural when Ikuko said that she wanted to play with fireworks again that evening.

The two of them made their way up to the rooftop at exactly the same time in the evening as they had the week before. The instant she touched the knob to open the door of the penthouse, she was beset with an awful sense of foreboding. She felt an image in red flicker somewhere in her consciousness. As she pushed the door open, she found herself instinctively looking towards the right. Her line of vision locked onto its target in an instant, as if she had known all along that it would be there. An object of livid red highlighted the dark gray of the waterproofed surface of the rooftop. Despite the same poor visibility as the week before, the blazing red sped to the eye through the gloom.

'Oh…' Yoshimi stood with her mouth open and her entire frame rigid. She shrank back without a word, groping wildly with her hands behind her for her daughter. Ikuko, however, ducked in a flash, evading her mother's arms, and rushed over to the Kitty bag, which was placed exactly where it had been the week before.

'Stop!' Her voice trembled as she called her daughter back.

There was no explaining the dread she felt. Just as her daughter was about to pick the bag up, Yoshimi caught up with her, and swept the bag from her reach. The Kitty character on the side squished out of shape as the bag rolled over several times on the concrete. No question, it was the same one. The bag with the Kitty motif that they had discovered on the rooftop one week ago, the bag that had sat for three full days on the counter in the super's office before being thrown out unclaimed in the polyethylene garbage bin along with other garbage, that bag was here in front of them now. Undeterred, Ikuko reached out once again to where the bag had rolled. Yoshimi hit her hard.

'I said NO and I mean it!'

Her heart pounded violently in fear. She did not want her daughter to touch it. It was her instinctive loathing of strange objects. Ikuko stared wistfully at the bag and then looked up at her mother's face. Turning back to the bag, her face puckered and she burst into tears.

So much for fireworks. Yoshimi stroked her daughter's shoulders with a circular motion to comfort her as they went back into the penthouse and closed the door behind them. Nothing on earth would have induced her to lay a finger on that bag. She didn't want to bring it back to the super, and she never wanted to come up to the rooftop again.

More than anything else, she wanted to know how such a thing could possibly happen. The bag had been in the polyethylene garbage bin, so how on earth could it have made its way back up to the roof? Her temples ached. 'Made its way back' had been an unconscious choice of expression - as if the bag had a life of its own.

As soon as they returned to the apartment, Yoshimi tried to put the chain on the door, but found that she had no control over her hands. Her legs also trembled. As she tried to remove her sandals, one flew awry and knocked down a pair of Ikuko's boots. Ikuko's expression was reproachful as she set the sandals and boots straight; her face clearly betrayed a hankering for that Kitty bag.

Yoshimi emerged from the bath first and began drying herself with a bath towel. She could hear her daughter's muffled voice coming from inside the bathroom. Her daughter would not leave the tub until she had put away the toys she played with in the water. She had also been brought up to always remove the plug after a bath.

With a bath towel wrapped around her chest, Yoshimi took a carton of milk from the refrigerator in the dining area and poured herself a glass. She made it a rule to drink a glass of milk before going to bed. It kept her bowels regular. Ikuko still showed no signs of getting out of the bath when Yoshimi had finished drinking her glass of milk. She bent down near the door and was about to tell Ikuko to get out of the bath when she heard her daughter talking to herself. She could only catch snatches.

That's 'cos I'm playing all by myself… but… bear… no fair… It isn't yours… mi…'

The 'Mi…' caught Yoshimi's attention as probably being the name of Ikuko's friend. But, as far as Yoshimi knew, none of Ikuko's friends at the nursery school or in the neighbourhood where they used to live in Musashino had names beginning with 'Mi'. Who on earth was Ikuko having her imaginary conversation with, then? Ikuko did have a classmate called Mikihiko, but she always called him by his surname instead.

Yoshimi opened the bathroom door. The 'unit' bathroom was one of those comprising a bath and western-style toilet. A plastic washbasin floated on the water in the cream-colored bathtub. In the centre of this basin was a small drenched towel that rose up in the form of a column. It somehow resembled a wayside
jizo
statue, but one with its head tilted to one side. Having soaked the towel and wrung it into this shape, Ikuko now seemed to be talking to the towel as if it were a playmate. A trickle of water dripped from the tap into the bath, linking the opening of the tap and the surface of the bathwater with a slender column. As the little washbasin floating in the bath came into contact with this column of water, it tilted a little and started spinning.

'Ikuko, what are you doing in there? Come out at once.'

Immersed in the bathwater, Ikuko had her back to the door when she answered her mother.

'My friend loves taking a bath all by herself. She never, ever gets out.'

Yoshimi asked herself again who on earth her 'friend' might be.

'Never mind. Just get out,' she told her daughter.

Ikuko put the washbasin in the sink and stood up with a swoosh. Yoshimi wrapped Ikuko in a bath towel and held her. Despite having been immersed in the tub for so long, Ikuko's shoulders were strangely cold to the touch.

Ikuko fell asleep on her futon, with the picture book she had been reading open in front of her. Yoshimi debated whether to stay up for a while and read, but finally decided to turn the light off and go to sleep. She fell asleep as soon as she pulled the light summer sheet over her chest.

She had been asleep for about two hours when her consciousness began to edge its way back up from slumber to wakefulness; her casually extended hand could no longer detect that familiar warm presence at her side. Yoshimi's body rolled frantically to and fro. Sliding her hand along her side, she could feel nothing. She was wide awake in an instant. Half sitting up, she groped the surface of the futon where Ikuko had been sleeping, and began calling her daughter's name. The tiny nightlight at the foot of the futon was enough to reveal the emptiness of the small room: Ikuko wasn't there.

'Ikuko! Ikuko!' Yoshimi tried shouting louder.

This kind of thing had never happened before. Ikuko was a deep sleeper. Once she had snuggled down to sleep, she always slept soundly through to the next morning without ever waking up during the night. She would rarely get up to go to the toilet.

After checking the living room and dining area, Yoshimi was about to check the toilet, but the bathroom light was out so Ikuko obviously wasn't there. Just then, she heard the sound of tiny footsteps in the passage outside.

Yoshimi dashed to the door, where she noticed that the door chain was not fastened. Did she forget to fasten the chain when they returned from the rooftop, or did Ikuko unchain the door?

Unconcerned about being clad in nothing more than her negligee, she rushed out into the corridor outside. She could hear the sound of the elevator moving. The elevator hall was halfway down the corridor. She stood there and watched the floor numbers light up in succession. The fifth-floor lamp went out and the sixth-floor lamp came on. Then the sixth-floor lamp went out, the seventh-floor lamp blinked on, and it stopped. The elevator had gone to the top floor, where no one lived. Someone had just gotten off on the seventh floor. In that instant she suspected that that someone was Ikuko. That suspicion was being confirmed in her mind. Ikuko could not bear the thought of the red Kitty bag being left out there on the apartment rooftop, Yoshimi concluded. She must have been desperate for that bag. At the same time, though, Ikuko knew better than to believe that her mother would allow her to pick up something that someone else had thrown away. That's why she had waited until her mother was asleep before heading for the apartment rooftop. Although Yoshimi doubted that Ikuko had the courage to overcome her fear of the dark, she pressed the elevator button to call the cage back down from the seventh floor. The elevator stirred, made its way down to the fourth floor, and flung its doors open. Yoshimi pulled the sides of her negligee close together over her chest as she entered the elevator. She pushed the button for the seventh floor, only to feel the elevator plunge softly downward, contrary to her expectations. Yoshimi took several steps away from the door, until her back was against the wall of the elevator. She brought her clenched elbows together to cover her chest more closely.

'Oh dear, someone's getting on.'

That someone, thought Yoshimi, must have called the elevator from one of the floors below before she pushed the button at her end. Whoever it was had to be on the ground floor, actually. No doubt it was one of those men living alone on the fifth or sixth floor coming home drunk. It was already past one o'clock in the morning. Her horror of being harassed by a drunk made her resent the cramped elevator itself, which offered her no means of escape. As the elevator began its descent, the scorched buttons began to light in succession.

The elevator came to a sudden halt. She looked up at the row of numbers indicating the floor. It had stopped at two.

…Why the second floor?

She braced herself. She'd never get used to riding elevators late at night; it was a nerve-wracking experience. The doors opened, but no one was waiting for the elevator. Yoshimi gasped, made her way slowly forward, then peered outside, scanning both sides twice. The dark deserted passage seemed to stretch on to infinity. Obviously, there was no one there. Who on earth then, had summoned the elevator? The doors started to slide shut automatically. Yoshimi stepped back reflexively. Yet, the second before the door had shut completely, she was quite certain that she sensed a presence steal swiftly into the elevator. Maybe it was just her imagination, but the temperature in the confined space of the elevator seemed to have dropped suddenly. She was not alone in the elevator; there was something else with her. She felt someone's breath on her abdomen, the kind that turns white on a cold winter's day.

The elevator made its ascent, then stopped at the seventh floor.

When she reached the landing of the staircase leading to the rooftop from the seventh floor, Yoshimi turned on the lights of the penthouse. Two fluorescent tubes on the ceiling flickered to life. Encouraged by the light, Yoshimi bounded up the staircase to the rooftop.

She pushed the door wide open and left it there so that the fluorescent lighting would spill out to the roof.

'Ikuko!' she called.

No matter how much she strained her eyes, she couldn't locate the small figure she sought. She looked down from the western edge of the rooftop, but the light of the street-lamps along the road did not show the dark stain that would signal tragedy. She heaved a sigh of relief. Ikuko hadn't fallen to her death. The northern, southern, and eastern sides of the building all had balconies protruding on the seventh floor. Even if Ikuko had fallen, the fall wouldn't be fatal.

Where did she go?

Yoshimi's stomach threatened to rise to her gorge. Who knew? Ikuko could be somewhere in the apartment. Was it too much to hope? Such thoughts passed through her mind as she looked back at the penthouse. The white fluorescent light spilled out onto the rooftop. Immediately above the penthouse sat the creamy-skinned overhead water tank, held aloft by a turret of iron poles. Bathed in light from beneath, the coffin shaped body protruded straight up in the center of the clear night sky, holding water within its walls. This was where the household water was collected and stored before being fed to each of the apartments below.

Two cord-like objects could be seen swaying in the shadows of iron poles that supported the overhead tank. Straining her eyes further, Yoshimi was just able to make out a tiny shadow playing under the tank. It puzzled her that she could only see the shadow, but not the object casting it. The image she began to conjure up in her mind was that of a little girl crouching directly beneath the overhead water tower.

'Ikuko, is that you?'

There was no reply. To search the top of the penthouse, she'd have to scale the perpendicular aluminium ladder set in the concrete wall of the penthouse. It was a vertical climb of more than six feet that would fully engage both her hands and feet. Though such a climb, crawling spider like up the side of a wall, would normally be difficult for someone of Yoshimi's delicate build, she hauled herself up, fuelled by the desperate desire to get a look at what was up there. No more than halfway up, she looked down to gauge how far she had climbed. She spied a dark object lodged in the darkness of the drain that ran the length of the penthouse wall. It was just where it had been the night before, where she had swept it from Ikuko's grasp and caused it to roll away. Yoshimi's mind began to race in confusion. Something didn't fit. She was missing some essential point.