Tokyo (27 page)

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‘What she really liked was for me to put her on her side like this,’ he whispered into my neck, ‘like I’m doing now. And lift up her knee like this, so that I could get my cock in her. Like this.’

I took a sharp breath and Jason smiled against my neck.

‘Do you see? Do you see why she liked it so much?’

Winter was creeping into spaces in the house. The few trees were bare, only the occasional papery leaf clinging to a branch, and the cold seeped up through the pavement. In public places they planted ornamental cabbage in Christmas colours of red and green. The heating in the house wasn’t working and Jason was too preoccupied with me to fix it. The air vents in the rooms rattled and whined and stirred the dust, but they gave off no heat.

I was never sure if it was normal, the way all Jason’s ex girlfriends came into bed with us. I didn’t like it, but for ages I didn’t say anything. Listen, he’d murmur in the dark, listen. I’m going to tell you something that you’re going to like. “Years ago I used to fuck this Dutch girl. I can’t remember her name but I do remember what she really liked… And he’d manoeuvre my limbs, choreographing a private dance between him and my body. He liked the way I was always ready for him. ‘You’re so dirty,’ he told me once, and there was admiration in his voice. ‘You are the dirtiest woman I’ve ever met.’

‘Listen,’ I blurted one night. ‘This is important. You keep telling me about those women. And I know it’s true because every woman you meet wants to do it with you.’

He was lying between my legs with his head on my thigh, his hands resting lightly on my calves. The know.’

‘Mama Strawberry. All the other hostesses.’

‘Yes.’

‘Fuyuki’s Nurse. She wants to.’

‘She? Is it a she? I can’t help wondering.’ Distractedly he pushed his nails into the flesh of my leg. I noticed he was pressing fractionally too hard. ‘I’d like to find out. I’d like to know what she looks like naked. Yeah, I think that’s mostly it, I’d like to see her naked and—’

‘Jason.’

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He swivelled his head. ‘Mmmm?’

I propped myself up on my elbows and stared at him. ‘Why are you sleeping with me?’

‘What?’

‘Why are you sleeping with me? There are so many other people out there.’

He seemed about to answer, but instead paused and I could feel his muscles tighten minutely. At length he sat up and groped for the bottom of my camisole. ‘Take this off—’

‘No. No, not now, I—’

‘Oh, for Chrissake.’ He pushed himself away, jumping to his feet. ‘This is—’ He got a cigarette from his jeans, which were lying on the floor, and lit it. ‘Look,’ he said, drawing in a lungful of smoke and turning to me. ‘Look—’ He shook his head and blew out the smoke. ‘This is turning into a long story.’

I stared at him, my mouth slightly open. ‘A long story?’

‘Yes - a long, long pain-in-the-ass story.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve been patient but you’re … It’s going on for ever. It’s not funny any more.’

A strange feeling came up through me, a horrible feeling, as if I was being swung round and round in a vacuum. Nothing looked right. The galaxies on the wall behind him seemed to be moving - drifting slowly across the sky over Tokyo like necklaces of light. Jason’s face looked dark and insubstantial. ‘But I…’! pressed fingers to my throat, trying to stop my voice wobbling ‘… I wanted to - to -1 wanted to show you. I really wanted to. It’s just I…’

I got to my feet and fumbled on the dresser for my cigarettes, knocking things over. I found the packet and shakily pulled one out, lit it and stood facing the wall, smoking in tight, feverish bursts, pushing the tears out of my eyes. This is stupid. Just do it. It’s like jumping off a cliff, like jumping off a cliff… There’s only one way to find out if you’ll survive.

I stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray on the dresser, and turned to him, breathing fast. There was a lump in my throat, as if my heart was trying to squeeze out of my mouth.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘what is it?’

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I pulled the camisole up over my head, dropped it on to the floor, and stood, facing him, my hands covering my stomach, my eyes locked on a point above his head. I took deep, deep breaths, imagining my body through his eyes - pale and thin, laced with veins.

‘Please understand,’ I whispered, mantra-like, under my breath. ‘Please understand.’

And then I dropped my hands.

I don’t know if it was me who gasped, or Jason, but there was a distinct intake of breath in the room. I stood, my hands in fists clenched at my sides, my eyes on the ceiling, feeling as if my head was going to burst. Jason was silent, and when at last I dared to look down at him I found his face was very still, very controlled, nothing in his expression as he studied the scars on my stomach.

‘My God,’ he breathed, after a long time. ‘What happened to you?’ He got up and took a step towards me, his hands lifting up, reaching curiously to my stomach, as if the scars were emanating a glow. His eyes were calm and clear. He stopped a pace away from me, to the side, his right hand flat against the scars.

I shuddered and closed my eyes.

‘What on earth happened here?’

‘A baby,’ I said unsteadily. That’s where my baby was.’

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36

They taught me about condoms in the hospital, when it was far, far too late anyway. In the few months before I was discharged, when everyone was talking about AIDs, we had HFV-awareness groups, and one of the nurses, a girl called Emma with a nose-ring and sturdy calves, would sit in front of us, blushing a bright red as she showed us how to roll a condom on to a banana. A sheath, she called it, because in those days that was what the newspapers called them - and when she talked about anal sex, she called it ‘rectal sex’. She said it with her face turned to the window as if she was addressing the trees. The others would be laughing and joking, but I’d be sitting at the back of the group, as red-faced as Emma, staring at the condom. A condom. I’d never heard of a condom. Honestly, how could anyone so ignorant have managed to live for so long?

For example, the significance of nine months. Over the years I’d caught jokes and muttered asides: ‘Oh, yeah, cat’s got the cream now, but wait till you see his face in nine months’ time.’ That sort of thing. But I didn’t understand. The really stupid thing was that if they’d asked me the gestational period of an elephant I’d have probably known. But truths about humans I was lost with. My parents had done a good job of filtering the information that got through to me. Except for the orange book, of course, they weren’t that vigilant.

The jigging girl in the next bed stared at me really hard when I admitted how ignorant I was.

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‘You’re not serious?’

I shrugged.

‘Well, bollocks,’ she said, a faint note of awe in her voice. ‘You really are serious.’

In their exasperation the nurses found me a book about the facts of life. It was called Mummy, What’s That In Your Tummy? and it had a pale pink cover with a cartoon of a girl in bunches looking up at a big pregnant stomach in a flowery dress. One of the reviews on the back said: ‘Tender and informative: everything you need to know to answer your children’s little questions.’ I’d read it from cover to cover and I kept it in a brown bag pushed right to the back of my locker. I wished I’d had it earlier. Then I’d have understood what was happening to me.

I didn’t tell a soul in hospital what those weeks after the van were like. How it took me weeks and months to piece it all together from whispers and odd allusions in the ravaged paperbacks on the shelves at home. How when I realized there was going to be a baby I knew, beyond any doubt, that my mother would kill either me or the baby or both. This, I suppose, is the true price of ignorance.

In the alley outside a car door slammed. Someone jingled keys, and a woman giggled in a high thin voice, ‘I’m not going to drink a thing, I swear.’ Their laughter dwindled as they continued down the alley to Waseda Street. I didn’t move, or breathe - I was staring at Jason, waiting to hear what he would say.

‘You’re a good girl.’ Eventually he took a step back and gave me a slow, sly smile. ‘You’re a good girl, you know that? And now things are going to be fine.’

‘Fine?’

‘Yes.’ He put his tongue between his teeth and ran his finger carefully along the biggest of the scars, the central one that ran from two inches right of my navel diagonally to my hipbone. He clicked his nail over the knotty place in the centre of it, and navigated his way round the little holes where the surgeon had tried to stitch me up. There was a note of curious wonder in his voice when he spoke: ‘There are so many of them. What made them?’

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‘A—’ I tried to speak but my jaw was locked. I had to shake my head to make it move. ‘A knife. A kitchen knife.’

‘Aah,’ he said, wryly. ‘A knife.’ He closed his eyes and slowly licked his lips, letting his fingers linger on the gristly whirl of scar tissue in the middle. The first place the knife had gone in. I flinched and he opened his eyes, looking at me intently. ‘Did it go deep here? Hmmm? Here?’ He pressed his finger into it. ‘That’s what it feels like. Feels like it went in deep.’

‘Deep?’ I echoed. There was something in his voice, something rich and horrible, as if he was taking immense pleasure in this. The air in the room seemed staler than it had a few minutes ago. ‘I—’ Why did he want to know how deep it went? Why was he asking me this?

‘Did it? Did it go in deep?’

‘Yes,’ I said faintly, and he gave a delighted shiver, as if something was walking across his shoulders.

‘Look at this.’ He ran his palm down the skin on his arm. ‘Look, my hair’s standing up on end. I get such a stiff for this kind of thing. The girl I told you about? In South America?’ He circled his fingers around his bicep, half closing his eyes in pleasure at the memory. ‘She’d lost her arm. And the place where they took it off … it was like a …’ He held his fingers bunched up, as if he was balancing the most delicate, the softest fruit on his fingertips. ‘It was beautiful, like a plum. Whoah—’ He grinned at me. ‘But you’ve always known about me, haven’t you?’

‘Always known? No - I—’

‘Yes.’ He dropped to his knees in front of me, his hands on my hips, breathing hotly on to my stomach. ‘You did. You knew what gets me.’ His tongue, dry and corrugated, stretched out to meet my skin. ‘You knew I just love to fuck freaks.’

My paralysis broke. I pushed him away and stumbled backwards. He rocked back on his heels, looking mildly surprised, as I grabbed up my camisole, fumbling it on. I wanted to run out of the room before I started to cry, but he was between me and the doorway, so I turned and crouched in the corner, facing the wall. Everything was coming back to me - the photographs in his room, the videos the Russians swore he watched, the way he’d

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talked about the Nurse. I was one of them - a freak. Something mangled to turn him on, just like in the videos he watched.

‘What is it?’

‘Um …’ I said, in a tiny voice, using my palms to wipe my eyes. ‘Um … I think, I think maybe I’d—’ The tears were running into my mouth. I cupped my hands to catch them so he wouldn’t see them dropping on to the floor. ‘Nothing.’

He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘See? I told you it would be okay. I told you I’d understand.’

I didn’t answer. I was trying not to sob.

‘This is what we’ve been moving towards all along, isn’t it? It’s what pulled us together. I knew the moment I saw all this - your paintings, all the freaky photos in your books - I knew you and me were … I knew we were the same.’ I heard him fumble out another cigarette and I imagined his face, smirking, confident, finding sex in this, sex in the scars I’d been hiding for so long. I imagined what I looked like to him, crouched in the corner, my thin, cold arms wrapped round me. ‘It just took you a little longer,’ he said. ‘A little longer to recognize that we’re a pair. A pair of perverts. We’re made for each other.’

I leaped up and grabbed my clothes from the chair, dressing quickly, not looking at him, my legs shaking helplessly. I pulled on my coat and fumbled for my keys in my handbag, all the time taking short, desperate gulps of air, trying to hold back the tears. He didn’t say anything or attempt to stop me. He watched me in silence, smoking thoughtfully, a half-smile on his face.

‘I’m going out,’ I said, throwing open the door.

‘It’s okay,’ I heard him say behind me. ‘It’s okay. You’ll be okay soon.’

Even as recently as 1980, it was possible in England for a stillborn baby not to be buried. For her not to be buried in a grave, but instead to be taken in a yellow waste-bag and incinerated with other clinical waste. It was even possible for her mother, a teenage girl with no experience, to let the baby go and never dare ask where she went. It was all possible, because of a simple accident

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of the calendar: my baby had failed to live inside me for a crucial twenty-eight weeks. Just one day short, and the state said that my baby should not be buried, that she was a day too small to be a human being, a day too small to get a funeral or a proper girl’s name, and so would for ever carry the name foetus. A name that is full of sickness and nothing like my little girl when she was born.

It was a late December night when the trees were heavy with snow and the moon was full. The nurses in the emergency room thought I shouldn’t be crying like I was. ‘Try to relax.’ The doctor couldn’t meet my eyes when I came to, stretched out on the operating table, and found him dressing the wounds in my stomach. He worked in chilly silence, and when eventually he told me the outcome, he did it standing in profile, speaking to the wall and not to me.

I tried to sit up, not understanding what he’d said. ‘What?9

‘We’re very sorry.’

‘No. She’s not dead. She’s—’

‘Well, of course she is. Of course she’s dead.’

‘But she’s not supposed to be dead. She’s supposed to be—’