Number9Dream (21 page)

On Thursday lunch-time I go back to the same branch of the same bank to try out the ATM again. The same woman is on duty – she avoids eye contact the moment she recognizes me. I insert my card, type in my PIN, and the virtual bank teller bows. Look!
‘What dark room has no exits, but only entrances into rooms darker than the one before? Father waits for your answer.’
I search for meaning – is this some sort of warning? I look around for Minnie Mouse, but Captain Smug has been lying in wait for me. ‘Another inexplicable message, sir?’

‘If this isn’t an inexplicable message’ – you sarcastic bastard; I rap the screen with my knuckles – ‘then give me another name for it.’

‘Oh dear, sir, not exactly Bill Gates, are we? Perhaps the message was telling you that you lack the funds necessary to complete your transaction?’ Of course, the screen has returned to normal: my pitiful bank balance. I look around – is somebody watching? Erasing the message when a witness comes up? How? ‘I know this looks weird,’ I begin, not sure how to continue. Captain Smug just raises his eyebrows. ‘But somebody is using your ATM to mess your customers around.’ Captain Smug waits for me to go on. ‘Shouldn’t that worry you?’ Captain Smug folds his arms and tilts his head at an I-went-to-a-top-Tokyo-university angle. I storm off without another word. I cycle back to the lost property office, as suspicious of parked cars and half-open windows as yesterday. My father was influential enough to have his name left off my and Anju’s birth certificates, but surely this is in another league. I spend the rest of the afternoon attaching labels to forgotten umbrellas, and weeding out the ones we have held for twenty-eight days for destruction. Might my stepmother be somehow trying to intimidate me? If it is my father, why is he playing these pranks instead of just calling me? Nothing makes sense.

Friday is pay-day for us probationary employees recruited in the middle of the year. The bank is packed – I have to wait several minutes to get to a machine. Captain Smug hovers in the wings. I pull my baseball cap down low. A woman with ostrich feathers in her hat keeps sneezing over me, and groaning. I insert my card and ask for 14,000 yen. The virtual bank teller smiles, bows, and asks me to wait. So far so normal.
‘Father warns you that your breathing space is all used up.’
I am expecting this: from under the visor of my cap I study the queue of impatient people. Who? No clue, no idea. The machine shuttles my money. The virtual bank teller bows again.
‘Father is coming for you.’
Come on, then! What else do you think I am in the city for? I drum the the virtual teller with the bases of my fists. ‘You aren’t from Tokyo, are you, sir?’ Captain Smug is at my shoulder. ‘I can tell because our Tokyo customers usually have the manners to refrain from assaulting our machines.’ ‘Look at this! Look!’ I show him the screen and curse. What did I expect?
‘Please take your money and remove your card.’
It beeps. I know if I say anything to Captain Smug, or even look at the guy, I will be seized by an urgent desire to make him hurt, and I don’t think my cranium could take another head-butt less than seven days since the last. I ignore his vexed sigh, take my money, card and receipt, and walk around the bank lobby for a while, trying to meet stares. Queues, marble floors, number chimes. Nobody looks at anyone in banks. Then I notice Captain Smug talking to a security man, and glancing in my direction. I slink off.

Between the bank and Ueno is the seediest noodle shop in all of Tokyo. As Tokyo has the seediest noodle shops in Japan, this is probably the seediest noodle shop in the world. It is too seedy even to have a name or a definite colour. Suga told me about it – it is as cheap as it should be and you can drink as much iced water as you want, and they have comic book collections going back twenty years. I park my bike in the alley around the side, smell burnt tar through the fan outlet, and walk in through the strings of beads. Inside is murky and fly-blown. Four builders sit around four greasy bowls in silence. The cook is an old man who died several days ago. The single round light is dappled with the bodies of dead insects, and the walls are decorated with spatters and dribbles of grease. A TV runs an old black-and-white Yakuza movie, but nobody watches it. A gangster is chucked into a concrete mixer. Fans turn their heads, this way and that. With a shudder, the cook reanimates his corpse and sits up. ‘What can I do for you, son?’ I order a tempura-egg-onion soba, and take a stool at the counter. Today, the message said. This time tomorrow I will know everything – whether this Plan E is the true lead, or whether it is yet another dud. I must keep a lid firmly on my hopes. My hopes boil over. Who else could it be, but my father? My noodles come. I sprinkle on some chilli pepper and watch it spread among the jellyfish of grease. Tasted better, tasted worse.

Outside in the glare, the bike is missing. A black Cadillac takes up the side alley, the sort that the FBI use for presidential missions. The passenger door inches open and a lizard pokes his head out – short, spiky, white hair, eyes too far apart that can do 270-degree vision. ‘Looking for anything?’ I turn my baseball cap around to shade my eyes. Lizard leans on the Cadillac roof. He is about my age. A dragon tail disappears up one arm of his short-sleeved snakeskin shirt, and a dragon head twists out of the other.

‘My bike.’

Lizard says something to somebody in the Cadillac. The driver’s door opens, and a man in sunglasses with a Frankenstein scar down the side of his face gets out, walks around the back of the Cadillac and picks up a mangle of metal. He brings it around to me and hands it to me. ‘Is this your bike?’ His forearms are more thickly muscled than my legs and his knuckles are chunky with gold. He is so big he blocks out the sun. In shock, I hold the metal for a moment before dropping it.

‘It was, yeah.’

Lizard tuts. ‘People are such mindless vandals, ain’t they?’ Frankenstein shunts my ex-bike aside with his foot. ‘Get in.’ He jerks his thumb at the Cadillac. ‘Father sent us to pick you up.’

‘
You
came from my father?’

Frankenstein and Lizard find this funny. ‘Who else?’

‘And did my father tell you to trash my bike?’

Lizard hoicks and spits. ‘Get in the car, yer lippy cock-wart, or I’ll break both yer fucking arms right here, right now.’ Traffic drags its heat and din to the next red light. What choice do I have?

The Cadillac purrs over the Sumida river bridge on air cushions. The tinted windows retune the bright afternoon, and the air-con chills the inside to fridge-beer temperature. I get goose bumps. Frankenstein drives, Lizard is in the back with me, sprawled pop star fashion. I could almost enjoy the ride if I weren’t being abducted by Yakuza and if I weren’t going to lose my job. Maybe I could find a phone and call Mrs Sasaki to say . . . what? The last thing I want to do is lie to her. Mrs Sasaki is okay. I tell myself these things are trifles – my father has sent for me. This is it. Why am I unable to get excited? Northside Tokyo slides by, block after block after block. Better to be a car than a human. Highways, flyovers, slip roads. A petrochemical plant runs pipes for kilometres, lined by those corkscrewing conifers. A massive car plant. Acre upon acre of white body shells. So my father is some kind of Yakuza man. Makes sense, sort of. Money, power and influence. The white lines and billowing trees and industrial chimneys are dreamlike. The dashboard clock reads 13:23. Mrs Sasaki will be wondering why I am late. ‘Any chance I could make a phone call?’ Lizard gives me the finger. I push my luck – ‘All I—’ but Frankenstein turns around and says, ‘Shut the fuck up, Miyake! I cannot
stand
whinging children.’ My father gives me no status. I should stop guessing, sit back and wait. We pass through a toll-gate. Frankenstein moves into top gear and the Cadillac eats the expressway up: 13:41. The buildings get more residential, and densely pyloned mountains shuffle this way. On the right the sea pencils in the horizon. Lizard yawns and lights a cigarette. He smokes Hope. ‘Travelling in style, or what?’ says Frankenstein, not to me. ‘Know how much one of these babies costs?’ Lizard toys with a death-head ring. ‘Fuck of a lot.’ Frankenstein wets his lips. ‘Quarter of a million dollars.’ Lizard: ‘What’s that in real money?’ Frankenstein thinks. ‘Twenty-two million yen.’ Lizard looks at me. ‘Hear that, Miyake? If yer pass yer entry exams, slave in an office all yer life, save your bonuses, get reincarnated nine times, yer’ll be able to zip around in a Cadillac too.’ I stare ahead. ‘Miyake! I’m talking to yer!’ ‘Sorry. I thought I had to shut the fuck up.’ Lizard whistles and a switchblade knife hisses open. ‘Watch yer lippyliplip’ – the knife flashes at my wrist; the blade slices through the casing of my wristwatch and scrapes through its innards – ‘fuckhead.’ The knife is spinning back in his fingers. Lizard’s eyes flare, daring me to open my mouth. He wins his dare and laughs this scratchy, staccato laugh.

Xanadu, way out beyond Tokyo bay, is having its grand opening today. Bunting flutters over the expressway exit, a giant Bridgestone airship floats above the enormous dome. The glands in my throat start to throb. Valhalla opens in the new year, and Nirvana and its new airport monorail terminus are still under construction. The traffic slugs to a crawl. Coaches, family wagons, jeeps, sports cars, coaches queue bumper to bumper through the toll-gate. Flags of the world hang limp. An enormous banner reads ‘Xanadu Open Today! Family Paradise Here on Earth! Nine-Screen Multiplex! Olympic Pool! Krypton Dance Emporium! Karaoke Beehive! Cuisine Cosmos! California Lido! Neptune Sea Park! Pluto Pachinko! Parking space for 10,000 – yes, 10,000! – automobiles.’ A motorbike cop waves us into an access road. ‘Cadillacs get you in anywhere.’ Lizard stubs out another Hope. ‘One of ours,’ says Frankenstein as the window slides down. ‘The good old days are back. Before your time every fucking cop in the fucking city recognized us.’ The Cadillac veers up a slope straight into the sun, tinted by the windscreen into a dark star. Over the top we enter a building site, walled off from Xanadu by a great screen of metal sheeting. Gravel piles, slab stacks, concrete mixers, unplanted trees with roots in sacks. ‘Where are all the happy workers?’ asks Lizard. ‘Holiday for the Grand Opening,’ says Frankenstein. Rounding a block of Portakabins comes Valhalla. This is a dazzling black glass pyramid built of triangles rising from building rubble. The Cadillac drives down a ramp into shadow, surfing to a halt in front of a barrier arm. A porter slides open the window of his box. He is about ninety and is either drunk or has Parkinson’s disease. Frankenstein’s window lowers and Frankenstein glowers. The porter repeatedly salutes and bows. ‘Open,’ growls Frankenstein, ‘fucking sesame.’ The arm rises and the porter bows out of sight. ‘Where did they dig him up?’ asks Lizard. ‘The pet sematary?’ The Cadillac cruises into the black, reverses and halts. I feel a lurch of excitement. Am I really in the same building as my father?

‘Out,’ says Lizard.

We are in a basement carpark smelling of oil, petrol and breeze blocks. Two Cadillacs are parked alongside ours. My eyes need more time to adjust – it is too dark to see the walls, or anything. Frankenstein pokes me in the small of my back. ‘March, cub scout.’ I follow him – a ball of dim light flickers on and off. A round window in a swing-door. Beyond is a gloomy service corridor smelling of fresh paint and echoing with our footsteps. ‘Hasn’t even been built yet and the lighting’s already fucked,’ notes Lizard. Other corridors run off from this. It occurs to me to be afraid. Nobody knows I am here. Wrong: my father knows. I try to fix landmarks in my memory – right at this fire hose, straight on past this notice-board. Frankenstein halts by a men’s toilet. Lizard unlocks it. ‘In you go.’

‘I don’t need the toilet.’

‘It wasn’t a fucking question.’

‘When do I meet my father?’

Lizard smirks. ‘We’ll tell him how eager yer are.’ Frankenstein foots the door open, Lizard clamps my nose and shoves me in – the door is locked before I regain my balance. I am in a white bathroom. The floor tiles, wall tiles, ceiling, fittings, sinks, urinals, cubicle doors – everything is snowblindingly white. No windows, no other exits. The door is metal and unkickdownable. I bang on it a couple of times. ‘Hey! How long are you going to leave me in here?’

Behind me a toilet flushes.

‘Who’s there?’

A cubicle door unbolts and swings open. ‘Thought I recognized that voice,’ says Yuzu Daimon, doing up his belt. ‘What timing. You caught me in mid-dump. So what are you doing in a bad dream like this?’

Yuzu Daimon washes his hands, watching me in the mirror. ‘Are you going to answer my question or am I going to get the silent treatment until our prison guard comes along to take me away?’

‘You have a nerve.’

He shakes his hands under the dryer but nothing happens, so he dries them on his T-shirt. Its picture shows a cartoon schoolgirl lowering a smoking gun; her speech bubble reads
So that’s what it feels like to kill
 . . .
I like it
. ‘I get it. You’re still sulking about the love hotel.’

‘You are going to make one great lawyer.’

‘Thanks for the non-compliment.’ He turns round. ‘Are we going to keep up this period of mourning or are you going to tell me why you are here?’

‘My father brought me.’

‘And your father is whom?’

‘I dunno yet.’

‘That seems rather careless of you.’

‘Why are you here?’

‘To have the shit kicked out of me. You may get to watch.’

‘Why? Did you maroon them in a love hotel?’

‘Pretty funny, Miyake. It’s a long story.’

I look at the door.

‘Okay.’ Daimon perches on the washbasin. ‘Sit on any chair you like.’

There are no chairs. ‘I’ll stand.’

The toilet cistern stops filling and the silence sighs loudly.

‘This is an old-fashioned war of succession tale. Once upon a time there was an ancient despot called Konosuke Tsuru. His empire had its roots way back in the Occupation days, in outdoor markets and siphoned-off cigarettes. You don’t happen to . . . ?’ I shake my head. ‘Half a century later Konosuke Tsuru had progressed to breakfast meetings with cabinet members. His interests span the Tokyo underworld and the Tokyo overlords, from drugs to construction – a handy portfolio in a country whose leaders’ sole remedy for economic slumps is to pour concrete down mountainsides and build suspension bridges to uninhabited islands. But I digress. Konosuke’s right-hand man was Jun Nagasaki. His left hand man was Ryutaro Morino. Emperor Tsuru, Admiral Nagasaki and General Morino. Are you with me so far?’