With My Little Eye (20 page)

Tentatively, as though some invisible hand were pushing me forward against my will, I approached the entrance and,
without
disturbing its glittering fall, peered through the bead
curtain
. Hiro was there, seated between Rex and, yes – I now shifted one strand of the curtain to one side to make sure – Dr Kawasaki. Hiro’s head was turned to Dr Kawasaki and he was saying something. Leaning across the bar, head turned to them and grinning, Rex was listening intently.

I all but went in. Then I turned and began to walk away at a faster and faster pace. The air tasted odd in my mouth, bitter and sulphurous. Somehow I lost the way home and wandered for some time. Then I came on the noodle man and he directed me. I noticed for the first time, as he pointed to the street that I should take, that the middle finger of his left hand was merely a stump. How had I failed to notice that before? My eyes often played that kind of trick on me, even long before my stroke. I saw only what I wanted to see or expected to see.

We are out on the lawn of the large, untidily sprawling house, at a tea party to celebrate my brother’s eighty-fifth birthday. His wife is determined to treat me as an invalid. ‘Is that table all right for you?’ ‘Are you comfortable in that chair?’ ‘Does the sun bother you?’ ‘Would you like me to bring you another scone?’ The children, of which there are five, all successful in their different professions, and their spouses are talking
simultaneously
and rarely listening. The grandchildren are splashing about in the shallow pool. Laura reaches out from her chair and puts her hand over mine. ‘All right?’

‘Fine.’

‘You’re very silent.’

The truth is that I’m not fine. I have a terrible headache. Then suddenly I see sparks drifting up and away, as though from a bonfire in a high wind, imposed on my view of the children splashing in the water. An invisible cord tightens around my temples. Some of the sparks are now cascading downwards. I grip the arms of the chair. Then I stagger to my feet.

‘Where are you going?’ Laura asks, clearly alarmed. I wonder if I look as ill as I feel.

‘Back in a moment. Loo.’

I think: I’m having another stroke. I’m dying. Strangely I feel no terror, not even alarm or surprise.

In the shadowy drawing room I sink into an over-
upholstered
armchair, my head back. I close my eyes but I go on seeing shower after shower and fountain after fountain of stars, stretching on and on into infinity.

My brother approaches. ‘Are you all right, old chap?’

‘I think so. I’m not sure. I feel so odd. And cold.’

‘Perhaps I’d better call an ambulance.’

‘No, wait. Wait. Let’s see.’

He hesitates, wondering whether to leave me or not.

Then the stars vanish as suddenly as they appeared. I stagger
out of the chair and almost topple back into it, as my brother seizes my arm. ‘Steady, old boy!’ He is still a handsome man, despite the nose broken when playing rugby for England. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to ring for an ambulance?’

‘Absolutely.’

In the car on the way home, I say, puzzled and wondering, to Laura, ‘It’s odd. I thought for a moment that I’d had it. I was either going to go completely blind or I was going to kick the bucket. But I really do think my sight has improved.’

‘Oh, if only!’

I can see that she doesn’t believe me. But yes, yes, the little eye has become a bigger eye. The tunnel is expanding slowly, slowly, like the shutter of a camera being constantly adjusted, bit by bit, to a different diameter.

The telephone rang while I was having supper. It was Laura. As when her beloved grandmother, source of all her wealth, had died of a sudden heart attack, the voice was clear and firm. Whereas I always go to pieces in a crisis or disaster, she acquires an astonishing calmness and strength.

They – for her the doctors at Great Ormond Street, at the Hospital for Tropical Medicine or Harley Street were always ‘they’ – had now confirmed that Mark had contracted amoebic dysentery. But there was one thing that continued to puzzle them. Something was also amiss with his kidneys. He had some of the typical symptoms of nephritic syndrome – not usually life-threatening but often capable of leaving a legacy of chronic pyelonephritis (she stammered repeatedly over that word) in adulthood. But they were now investigating whether he might not be in the first stages of Wilm’s tumour – a disease of which I had never heard. ‘It’s very worrying. The uncertainty is
terrible
. He’s so incredibly brave, poor little chap. But somehow that only makes the whole thing worse.’

‘I think I’d better get back as soon as possible.’

There was one of those silences when one thinks that the line must have gone dead.

I repeated, more loudly, ‘I think I’d better get back as soon as possible.’

‘Oh, I don’t know what to say.’ The previously strong voice sagged forlornly. ‘I do miss you. I miss you so much.’

It was the first time that she had said that since her
departure
. I had said it – and written it – so often to her.

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really.’

After the end of the conversation I returned to the dining room, sat down and picked up my knife and fork. But I could not finish the veal escalope half-eaten on the plate. I felt vaguely sick and dizzy. Outside the open window a bird was making a clattering noise, three notes constantly repeated. I winced. Ever
since her departure with Mark, I had been first exasperated and now haunted by the discordant racket of birds.

Eventually Hiro entered.

‘Excuse me. I thought maybe you finish.’

‘I can’t eat any more. Sorry.’ I put down knife and fork on the plate and then nudged them so that they lay symmetrically side by side. It might have been Miss Morita who had
performed
that fussy act, so unlike my usual behaviour. I cleared my throat, which seemed suddenly to choke with phlegm. ‘Sorry.’

With pitying eyes he stared at me. They narrowed. ‘There is a problem?’

‘Yes. My son. My baby. I think – I’m afraid – perhaps he’s dying. No one knows what’s really wrong with him.’ I put a hand up to my mouth. I thought that I was going to vomit but instead sobs began to jerk out of me.

He went behind me. He put his arms around my shoulders. He lowered his head and placed a smooth cheek against my rough, tear-spattered one. It was weird. That was how my brother had comforted me when, a small child three years younger than he was, I was particularly distressed or disturbed.

‘Please,’ I heard. ‘Please.’ Then firmly, ‘No. No, master. No. Please stop.’

Like Englishmen of my generation, Japanese men of that period were expected never to weep. I drew a handkerchief out of my trouser pocket and put it to my eyes and then to my mouth. Hiro released me and picked up my plate. Plate in hand, he looked down at me. He gave a little nod – perhaps of congratulation that at last I’d controlled myself. ‘You wish
pudding
? Apple turnover.’

I shook my head. ‘I think that I may have to leave Japan. Soon. After a few days. I miss them so much. I want to be with them. What am I to do?’

He did not answer. I might not have spoken. Head and torso stiff, plate in hand, he walked to the door.

That night I swallowed three sleeping pills. I longed to glide into oblivion and to be free of my torment. After I have taken even one sleeping pill, my sleep is usually without dreams. But on this occasion it was seething with them. Other people’s
dreams, when recounted to me, amaze me by how sequential and coherent they are. Mine are always a maelstrom of fleeting images; all that is consistent in them is one dominant emotion. On that night, as I flung myself feverishly from one side of the bed to another, that dominant emotion was terror.

Even today I remember one moment when, in a sinisterly crepuscular light, I approached the pram at the far end of the garden under the persimmon tree. I stooped to look at Mark. His face was covered with a blanket. I tweaked it aside and there before me was lying not Mark but Bruin. His throat had been cut; there was a dark stain of blood on the pillow; his eyes were merely black holes.

I remember another moment, when, in the crowded
concourse
of an unrecognisable station, I was frantically searching, from platform to platform, for a train due at any moment to depart. Laura and Mark were on it. If I did not find the train, they would be lost forever. As I ran, I tripped over an
abandoned
suitcase that, with my tunnel vision, I had failed to see, and crashed to the ground. A horde of scurrying passengers paid me no attention.

I was woken from this phantasmagorical sleep by the creak of the bedroom door. The dawn, early at that time of year, was breaking. The light that filled the room seemed to be mistily opalescent. Out of it emerged a figure in the sequined dress that had hung, unworn, for so many weeks in the wardrobe in the little room at the end of the narrow corridor. I peered. It was Hiro, his face heavily made up like the faces of the ‘sister boys’ that Rex had pointed out to me in the Cock Bar. He was
wearing
a wig of long, thick, straight, blonde hair, similar to Laura’s, and his eyes, perhaps because of the mascara caking the lashes, looked huge. He neared the bed. He looked down at me. Then he lifted the skirt of the dress and pulled it off over his head with a single gesture so decisive that I heard fabric tearing. Underneath he was naked. He stooped and with one hand daintily removed first one high-heeled shoe and then the other. He had never before worn shoes in the house or, if he could help it, had allowed me to do so.

He sat down on the edge of the wide bed, next to me. Then he rolled over, so that our bodies touched. Suddenly I smelled that unmistakeable odour, cloying and insinuating, associated
with my lovemaking with Laura. He must have drenched
himself
in the Caron Pour Un Homme.

The whole scene was an even more terrifying culmination of the dreams that had filled the hours before it. With a violence that still astonishes me, I shoved him away from me, so that he crashed to the floor. He let out a sharp yelp and began to moan, head turned away and palms of hands rapping on the bare floor. I made out a muffled ‘Please.’

I jumped off the bed. ‘Get out!
Out
!’

I began to kick out at him with mounting frenzy, totally unconscious of any damage to my bare foot. He did not move. Except that I could hear his gasped ‘Yes, yes,
yes
!’ he might have been unconscious.

Then, suddenly, his whole body was convulsed as though in a fit. After it, he lay curled up motionless in a foetal position, his hand over his face. No longer frenziedly kicking, I stared down at him. I was simultaneously overwhelmed with horror and with the outrageous desire to possess and so destroy the naked body sprawled totally at my mercy on the floor before me.

Then I did something that I had never done or wanted to do before, and that I have never done or wanted to do since. I threw myself upon him. I all but throttled him as, an arm locked round his throat, I plunged into him as though to tear him into two. I began to thrust in and out with a mixture of rage, despair and passion. All the time I again heard his panting ‘Yes, yes.
Yes
!’

Later, brooding on that act of frenzied brutality, I
remembered
an incident from a trip that an undergraduate friend and I made to Mount Athos soon after the war. We had hired, for a sum amazingly small by present-day standards, a donkey and its owner to transport our luggage. As we trudged behind
animal
and elderly man up and up a rock-strewn ravine, the already exhausted creature slipped and fell over. With rolling eyes it remained there, half on top of one of our bags, while the other bag bumped for some distance down the precipitous slope beside us. The owner, previously so calm and sunny, tugged and tugged with increasing annoyance at the tether. Obstinately, the donkey refused to move. Suddenly, in a frenzy of rage, his face red and contorted, the owner began to kick viciously at the animal until my friend and I managed to pull
him away. The same sort of demon had possessed me on that fatal morning, with a man and not an animal as the victim of my savagery.

Later, after that night of fitful nightmares when my sleep had been so light and constantly broken, I slept deeply. The whole incident seemed to have become no more than a part of that maelstrom of dreams that had previously swirled inside my brain. Even now, in recollection, I ask myself: ‘Did that really happen? Might it not have been only another of those
nightmares
induced by my loneliness, my anxiety for Mark, and my longing for Laura?’

When I awoke the next morning it was past ten. Always, even on an English winter’s morning, an early riser, I had never slept so late during the course of my whole stay in Japan. I all but fell back on the bed as I got out of it. The muscles of my neck and arms were aching, and somehow I had managed to graze an elbow. I stared down at a small bloodstain on the white rug by my feet. I bent down and touched it, touched it again. Already it was dry. Could the graze have been the source of the blood? But there was no sign of a scab. The blood must have come from elsewhere.

I went into the bathroom and began to splash cold water over my face. Then, suddenly, there floated up from my
unconsciousness
the memory of something that I had read when in my early teens. As a birthday – or it may have been a Christmas – present, an uncle of mine had given to me a sensational,
best-selling
anthology of newspaper articles entitled
Believe
It
or
Not
, compiled by an American journalist called – if I remember correctly – Ripley. It included one story that haunted me at the time and still sometimes comes back to haunt me. At the age of sixteen a girl in a small mid-west town had to undergo an operation for a huge tumour of the womb. When the tumour was dissected, it was found to contain the remains of a tiny embryo, the patient’s girl twin, fated never to be born. When I had made my demented assault on Hiro, it was as though my own dead twin, for so long calcified in my body, had suddenly come to life, to force himself out as an entity wholly separate from me, before expiring from the demonic violence of his action.

Now, chilled to the marrow despite the already soaring
temperature, I pulled on a kimono and, in bare feet, limped down the stairs. My right foot felt extremely tender, and I winced at each step. Then the cause of the pain came back to me, as I again recalled, with horror and self-loathing, that relentless kicking and what, even more terrifying, had followed it.

I had prepared what I was to say to him:
Please
go.
Now. I never want
to
see
you
again
. But when I glimpsed him down at the bottom of the stairs, gazing up at me, I somehow found myself incapable of producing the words.

‘Good morning, master.’ The tone was neutral and natural.

I hesitated. ‘Good morning, Hiro.’

‘I will make coffee. You want boiled egg?’

He was now giving me, without any evidence of
embarrassment
or guilt, that small, elusive, faintly ironic smile of his.

Amazingly it was a morning like any other morning.

No less amazingly, I left it like that.