The Devil of Nanking (7 page)

‘The building is private. It’s one of the Mori brothers’ buildings. But see that, on the top floor?’

I squinted. Bolted by a mechanical arm to the crown of the skyscraper there was a vast cut-out of a woman sitting on a swing. ‘I know who that is,’ I said. ‘I recognize her.’

‘It’s Marilyn Monroe.’

Marilyn Monroe. She must have been thirty feet from her white high heels to her peroxide hair, and she swung back and forward in fifty-foot arcs, molten neon flickering so that her white summer dress appeared to be blowing up above her waist.

‘That’s Some Like It Hot. The club where we work – me and the
baba yaga
s. I’ll take you there tonight. You’ll pay your week’s rent in a few hours.’

‘Oh,’ I said, backing away from the window. ‘Oh. No – you already said about it. It’s a hostess club.’

‘It’s cool, laid back – Strawberry’s really gonna go for you.’

‘No,’ I said, suddenly uncomfortable and clumsy again. ‘No. Don’t say that, because she won’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because . . .’ I trailed off. I couldn’t explain to someone like Jason. ‘No. She definitely wouldn’t hire me.’

‘I think you’re wrong. And, anyways, from where I’m standing it seems like you don’t have a choice.’

The hostesses who lived in the rooms on the north wing, the
baba yaga
s, were twins from Vladivostok. Svetlana and Irina. Jason took me in to see them when the sun was getting low and the heat had let up a little. They were in Irina’s room, getting ready for work at the club, almost identical in their black leggings and Spandex bras: tall as stevedores, and well fed, with strong arms and muscular legs. They looked as if they spent a lot of time in the sun and both had lots of long, bobbly, permed hair. The only difference was that Irina’s was yellow-blonde and Svetlana’s was black. I’d seen the dye, Naples Black, in a faded pink box on the kitchen shelf.

They sat me on a stool in front of a small vanity table and started firing questions at me.

‘You know Jason? Before you come here?’

‘No. I met him this morning.’

‘This
morning
?’

‘In the park.’

The girls exchanged glances. ‘He work fast, eh?’ Svetlana made a clicking noise in her throat and winked at me. ‘Fast work.’

They offered me a cigarette. I liked to smoke. In hospital the girl in the next bed had taught me how, and it made me feel very adult, but I hardly ever had the money to keep it up. I looked at the carton in Irina’s red polished fingertips. ‘I haven’t got any to give you in return.’

Irina half dropped her eyelids and pursed her lips as if she was kissing the air. ‘No problem.’ She waggled the box at me again. ‘No problem. You take.’

I took one and for a while we all smoked, looking back and forward at each other. If their hair hadn’t been so different Svetlana and Irina would have been almost indistinguishable: they both had a sort of confident glitter in their eyes that I recognized from some of the girls at university. I must have looked very odd to them, all scrunched up like a bundle of dirty laundry on their stool.

‘You going to work in club?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘They won’t want me.’

Svetlana clicked her tongue against her mouth. ‘Don’t be stupid. It easy easy easy. Easy like eating the candy.’

‘Is it sex?’

‘No!’ They laughed. ‘Not sex! You do sex, you do it outside. Mama don’t wanna hear about it.’

‘Then what do you do?’

‘Do? You don’t
do
nothing. You talk to customer. Light his cigarette. Tell him he’s great. Put ice in his fuckink disgustink fuckink drink.’

‘What do you talk about?’

They looked at each other and shrugged. ‘Just make him happy, make him to like you. Make him laugh. He gonna like
you
no problem, because you are English girl.’

I looked down at the heavy black skirt I was wearing, second hand. Its original owner would have remembered the Korean war. My black buttoned-up blouse had cost me 50p in the Oxfam shop in the Harrow Road and my tights were thick and opaque.

‘Here.’

I looked up. Svetlana was holding out a little gold makeup bag. ‘What?’

‘Do your face. We gotta go in twenny minutes.’

The twins knew the art of holding two conversations at once. Everything they did was achieved with the phone glued to their ears, cigarettes between their teeth. They were doing the nightly dial-round of customers: ‘You going to be there tonight, eh? I’ll be so
sabishi
without you.’ As they talked, they painted in eyebrows, fixed on eyelashes, squeezed themselves into shiny white trousers and impossibly high silver sandals. I watched them silently. Svetlana, who spent a long time standing in front of the mirror in her bra, her arms above her head, studying her armpits for hairs, thought that I should wear something gold to brighten myself up.

‘You gotta look sophisticated. You wanna wear my belt, eh? My belt is gold. Black and gold nice!’

‘I’d look stupid.’

‘Silver, then,’ said Irina. I was trying not to stare at her. She’d stripped off her bra and was standing topless near the window picking with her long nails at a roll of Sellotape, tearing off strips with her teeth. ‘You wear black, you look like widow.’

‘I always wear black.’

‘What? You mourning someone?’

‘No,’ I said, steadily. ‘Don’t be stupid. Who would I be mourning?’

She studied me for a moment. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘If it make you happy. But you go to club looking like that you probably gonna make the men to cry.’ She put one end of the tape in her mouth, squashed her breasts together as tightly as she could, and passed the tape under them from left underarm to right and back again. When she released her breasts they remained where she’d lifted them, precarious on a shelf of Sellotape. She pulled on an off-the-shoulder blouse and stood in front of the mirror, smoothing it down and checking her shape under the flimsy fabric. I bit my fingers, wishing I had the courage to ask for another cigarette.

Svetlana had finished her makeup – her lips were outlined in dark pencil. She got on her knees, rummaged in one of the drawers and pulled out a stapler. ‘Come here,’ she said, beckoning to me. ‘Come here.’

‘No.’

‘Yes. Come here.’ She shuffled towards me on her knees, wielding the stapler. She caught the hem of my skirt, folded it up and under and clamped the stapler’s jaws, fastening the hem to the lining.

‘Don’t,’ I said, trying to push her hand away. ‘Don’t.’

‘Wassamatter? You got sexy legs, better you show them. Now keep still.’

‘
Please!
’

‘Don’t you wanna job, eh?’

I put my hands over my face, my eyes rolling under my fingers, and took deep breaths while Svetlana moved round me, clipping my hem up. I could feel from the air that she’d exposed my knees. I kept imagining the way my legs would look. I kept imagining the things people would think if they saw me. ‘No . . .’

‘Jjjzzzt!’ Svetlana put her hands on my shoulders. ‘Let us work.’

I closed my eyes and breathed in and out through my nose. Irina was trying to draw a line around the outside of my lips. I jumped up. ‘Please,
no
 . . .’

Irina took a step back in amazement. ‘What? You don’t wanna look sexy?’

I grabbed a tissue and wiped the lipstick off my face. I was trembling. ‘I look weird. I just look weird.’

‘It only old Japanese men. Old squinters. They not gonna touch you.’

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

Svetlana raised an eyebrow. ‘We don’t understand? Hey, Irina, baby, we don’t understand.’

‘No, really,’ I said. ‘You
really
don’t understand.’

You don’t have to understand sex to want to do it. So say the bees and the birds. I was the worst combination you could imagine – ignorant of the nuts and bolts and as fascinated as the day is long. Maybe it’s no wonder I got into trouble.

At first the doctors tried to get me to say that it had been a rape. Why else would a girl of thirteen allow five teenage boys to do something like that to her, if it hadn’t been rape? Unless she was crazy, of course. I listened to this with a sort of dreamy puzzlement. Why were they focusing on
that
part of what happened? Was that part wrong too? In the end I’d have saved myself a lot of problems if I’d agreed with them and said it had been rape. Maybe then they wouldn’t have gone on and on about how my sexual behaviour alone was evidence that something was very wrong with me. But it would have been a lie. I’d
let
them do it to me. I’d wanted it maybe even more than the boys did. I’d welcomed them into that van, parked down the country lane.

It had been one of those misty summer evenings where the night sky stays an intense blue in the west, and you can imagine all sorts of astonishing pagan dances happening just over the horizon where the sun has gone. There was new grass and a breeze and the sound of traffic in the distance, and when they stopped the van I looked down into the valley and saw the ghostly white smudges of the Stonehenge monument.

In the back was an old tartan blanket that smelt of grass seed and engine oil. I took all my clothes off and lay down on it and opened my legs, which were very white, even though it was summer. One by one they got inside and took their turns, making the van creak on its rusty axle. It was the fourth boy – sandy-haired with a lovely face and the beginnings of stubble – who spoke to me. He pulled the van doors closed behind him so that there was no light, and the others sitting out on the verge smoking cigarettes couldn’t see us.

‘Hi,’ he said.

I put my hands on my knees and opened my legs wider. He didn’t move towards me. He knelt there in front of me, looking between my legs, with an odd, uncomfortable expression on his face.

‘You know you don’t have to do this, don’t you? You know nobody’s forcing you?’

I was silent for a while, looking at him with a puzzled frown. ‘I know.’

‘And you still want to do it?’

‘Of course,’ I said, holding out my arms. ‘Why not?’

‘Didn’t anyone talk about protection?’ The nurse who didn’t like me said that this just went to show how diseases like herpes and gonorrhoea and syphilis were spreading round the world, through the lack of control of disgusting people like me. ‘Don’t tell me that out of all those five boys not one of them even suggested using a contraceptive.’ I lay in my bed in silence, my eyes closed. I wasn’t going to tell her the truth, that I didn’t really know what a contraceptive was, that I hadn’t known it was wrong, that my mother would have died rather than talk to me about these things. I wasn’t going to let her go on and on about my stupid ignorance. ‘And as for you! Not even trying to stop them.’ She’d lick her lips then, a sound like legs slapping together in the dark. ‘If you want my opinion, you’re the sickest person I’ve ever met.’

The doctors said it was all about control. ‘We all have impulses, everyone has urges. They are what make us human. The key to a happy and balanced life is learning to control them.’

But by that time, of course, there wasn’t much I could do to put things right. You can’t mend something without practising, and you only had to take one look at my hospital notes, or see me naked, to know that there wasn’t going to be much of a sex life for me in the future.

In the end the Russians and I reached a compromise. I let them leave the staples in the skirt, they let me flatten down my hair and wipe off the iridescent eyeshadow. Instead I drew very careful black lines above my eyelashes, because when I sat and thought hard about makeup the only thing that came to my mind were the pictures I’d seen in a book of Audrey Hepburn. I thought I’d have liked Audrey Hepburn if I’d met her. She always looked kind. I rubbed off the blusher and painted my lips in a plain, matt red. The twins stood back to look at the result.

‘Not bad,’ Irina admitted, with a sour look. ‘You still look like widow, but this time not-bad widow.’

Jason said nothing when he saw me. He looked thoughtfully at my legs and gave a short, dry laugh, as if he knew a rude joke about me. ‘C’mon,’ he said, lighting a cigarette. ‘Let’s go.’

We walked in a line, strung out across the pavement. The sun was low in the sky, lighting up the sides of the buildings. In the little streets they were preparing the lanterns for the O-Bon festival later that week – the stalls and the banners were going up in Toyama park, and a cemetery that we passed was dotted with vegetables, fruit and rice wine for the spirits. I looked at it all in silence, every now and then stopping to check my footing. Irina had given me black high heels to wear, they were too big so I’d stuffed paper into the toes and I had to concentrate hard on walking.

You wouldn’t need a street map to get to the club: the building was visible for miles around, the gargoyles choking their red flames into the night. We reached the building as darkness came. I stood and stared up at it until the others got bored waiting, and took my arm and guided me into a glass lift that went up the outside of the skyscraper, all the way to the top where the Marilyn Monroe sign was swinging to and fro among the stars. The ‘crystal lift’, they told me it was called, because it was like a crystal catching and scattering all the lights of Tokyo. I stood with my nose pressed to the glass as it soared up outside the building, amazed by how quickly the greasy street dropped away beneath us.

‘Wait here,’ said Jason, when the lift stopped. We were in a marble-floored reception area, separated from the club by doors of industrial aluminium. A giant model of a red rose, five foot tall, stood in a huge vase in one corner. ‘I’ll send Mama-san out.’ He indicated a plush velvet
chaise-longue
, and disappeared with the Russians through the doors. I caught a glimpse of a club as big as a skating rink – occupying the entire top of the building, skyscrapers reflected in the polished floor – a constellation of lights. Then the door swung closed and I was left, sitting on the
chaise-longue
, with only the top of the hat-check girl’s head visible over the counter for company.