Kazuo Ishiguro (13 page)

But as it turned out, throughout that afternoon, Akira’s mother was making a dress, which for some reason required her constantly to move from room to room, and Akira declared it too risky even to contemplate our venture. I was certainly not displeased, but I am sure Akira was the one more grateful for the excuse.

The following day, however, was a Saturday and when I arrived at Akira’s house towards mid-morning, both his parents had gone out. Akira did not have an amah, as I did, and when we were younger we had often argued over which of us was the more fortunate. He had always taken the position that Japanese children did not need an amah because they were ‘braver’ than Western children. I had once asked him during one such argument who would see to his needs if his mother was out and he wanted, say, some iced water, or if he cut himself.

I remember his telling me Japanese mothers never went out unless the child specifically permitted them to do so - a claim I found hard to believe, since I knew for a fact Japanese ladies met in their circles, much as the European ladies did, at Astor House or Marcell’s Tea Room in Szechwan Road. But when he pointed out that in his mother’s absence there was the maid to see to his every need, while at the same time he was free to do whatever he pleased with no restrictions at all, I did begin to believe I was the one hard done by. Oddly, I continued to hold this view even though in practice, on those occasions we played at his house when his mother was out, one or another servant was always delegated to watch over our every move.

Indeed, especially when we were younger, this would mean some unsmiling figure, no doubt fearing dire consequences should any misfortune befall us, standing within inhibiting proximity while we did our best to play.

Naturally, though, by that summer, we were allowed to move much more freely without supervision. On that morning we entered Ling Tien’s room, we had been playing in one of Akira’s sparse tatami-floored rooms up on the third floor while an elderly maid - the only other person in the house - occupied herself with some sewing in the room directly below. I remember at one point Akira breaking off from what we were doing, tip-toeing to the balcony and leaning right over the rail, so far I feared he might topple over. Then when he came hurrying back, I noticed the strange grin had appeared on his face. The maid, he reported in a whisper, had as expected fallen asleep.

‘Now we must go in! Are you frighten, Christopher? Are you frighten?’

Akira had suddenly become so tense that for a moment all my old fears concerning Ling Tien came flooding back. But by this point a retreat for either of us was out of the question, and we made our way as quietly as possible down to the servants’ quarters until we were once more standing together in that gloomy corridor with its bare polished boards.

What I recall is that we strode down the corridor with little hesitation until we were all but four or five yards from Ling Tien’s door. Then something made us pause, and for a second neither of us appeared capable of continuing; if at that moment Akira had turned and run, I am sure I would have done the same. But then my friend seemed to find some extra resolve, and holding out his arm to me, said: ‘Come on, old chap! We go together!’

We linked arms and took the final few steps like that. Then Akira pulled back the door and we both peered in.

We saw a small, sparse, tidy room with a well-swept boarded floor. The window was covered by a sun-blind, but the light was leaking in brightly at the edges. There was a faint smell of incense in the air, a shrine in the far corner, a low narrow bed, and a surprisingly grand chest of drawers, beautifully lacquered, with ornate handles hanging on each little drawer.

We stepped inside, and for a few seconds remained still, barely breathing. Then Akira let out a sigh and turned to me with a huge smile, clearly delighted finally to have conquered his old fear. But the next moment his sense of triumph seemed quickly to be replaced by a concern that the room’s lack of any obviously sinister features would make him look ridiculous.

Before I could say anything, he pointed quickly to the chest of drawers and whispered urgently: ‘There! In there! Careful, careful, old chap! The spiders, they inside there!’

He was hardly convincing and he must have realised it.

Nevertheless, for a second or two, an image went through my head of those small drawers opening before our eyes as creatures - at various stages between hand and spider - put out tentative limbs. But now Akira was indicating excitedly a small bottle standing on a low table beside Ling Tien’s bed.

‘Lotion!’ he whispered. ‘The magic lotion he uses! There it is!’

I was tempted to pour ridicule over this desperate attempt to preserve a fantasy we had in truth long outgrown, but at that moment I had another sudden vision of the drawers opening, and a residue of my old fear kept me from saying anything.

Moreover, I was beginning to grow anxious about a much more likely eventuality: namely, that we would be discovered in that room by the maid or some other unexpected adult. I could not begin to imagine the disgrace that would then follow, the punishments, the long discussions between my parents and Akira’s. I could not even think how we might start to explain our behaviour.

Just then Akira quickly stepped forward, grabbed the bottle and clasped it to his chest.

‘Go! Go!’ he hissed, and suddenly we were both gripped by panic. Giggling under our breaths, we rushed out of the room and down the corridor.

Back in the safety of the upstairs room - the maid had remained asleep below - Akira reasserted his claim that the drawers had been filled with severed hands. I could see now he was seriously worried about my ridiculing our longstanding fantasy and somehow I too felt the need to preserve it. I thus said nothing to undermine his claim, nor gave any suggestion that Ling Tien’s room had been a let-down or that our courage had been summoned on false pretences. We placed the bottle on a plate in the middle of the floor, then sat down to examine it.

Akira carefully removed the stopper. There was inside a pale liquid with a vague smell of aniseed. To this day I have no idea for what the old servant used this lotion; my guess is that it was some patent medicine he had purchased to combat some chronic condition. In any case, its nondescript appearance served our purpose well. Very carefully we dipped twigs into the bottle and let them drip on to some paper. Akira warned that we should not let even a drop touch our hands lest we wake up the next day with spiders at the end of our arms. Neither of us really believed this, but again, it seemed important for Akira’s feelings that we pretend to do so, and thus we went about our task with exaggerated caution.

Finally, Akira replaced the stopper and put away the bottle in the box he kept for his special things, saying that he wished to conduct a few more experiments with the lotion before returning it. All in all, when we parted that morning, we were both well pleased with ourselves.

But when Akira came to my house the following afternoon, I saw immediately some difficulty had arisen; he was very preoccupied and unable to concentrate on anything. Dreading to hear that his parents had somehow found out about our previous day’s deeds, I for some time avoided asking what was troubling him. In the end, though, I could bear it no longer and demanded he tell me the worst. Akira, however, denied that his parents suspected anything, then sank once more into his gloom. Only after much more pressure did he finally give in and tell me what had happened.

Finding it impossible to contain his sense of triumph, Akira had revealed to his sister Etsuko what we had done. To his surprise, Etsuko had reacted with horror. I say surprise because Etsuko - who was four years older than us - had never gone along with our view of Ling Tien’s sinister nature. But now, on hearing Akira’s story, she had glared at him as though she expected him to curl over and die before her eyes. Then she had told Akira we had had the luckiest of escapes; that she personally had known of servants previously employed in the house who had dared do what we had done, and who as a consequence had vanished - their remains discovered weeks later in some alley beyond the Settlement boundaries. Akira had told his sister she was simply trying to frighten him, that he did not for a moment believe her. But clearly he had been shaken, and I too felt a chill pass through me on hearing this ‘confirmation’ and from no less an authority than Etsuko - of all our old fears concerning Ling Tien.

It was then I appreciated what was so troubling Akira: someone had to put back the bottle in Ling Tien’s room before the old servant’s return in three days’ time. Yet it was plain to see our bravado of the previous day had all but evaporated, and the prospect of going into that room again now seemed beyond us.

Unable to settle to any of our usual games, we decided to walk to our special spot beside the canal. All the way there, we talked over our problem from every angle. What would happen if we did not return the bottle? Perhaps the lotion was very precious and the police would be called in to investigate. Or perhaps Ling Tien would tell no one of its disappearance, but decide personally to wreak some terrible vengeance on us. I remember we became quite confused about how much we wished to maintain our fantasy about Ling Tien, and to what extent we wanted to consider logically how best to avoid getting into serious trouble. I remember, for instance, our considering at one point the possibility the lotion was a medicine Ling Tien had bought after months of saving his money, and that without it he would become horribly ill; but then in the next breath, without abandoning this last notion, we considered other hypotheses which assumed the lotion to be what we had always said it was.

Our spot by the canal, some fifteen minutes’ walk from our homes, was behind some storehouses belonging to the Jardine Matheson Company. We were never sure if we were actually trespassing; to reach it we would go through a gate that was always left open, and cross a concrete yard past some Chinese workers, who would watch us suspiciously, but never impede us. We would then go round the side of a rickety boathouse and along a length of jetty, before stepping down on to our patch of dark hard earth right on the bank of the canal. It was a space only large enough for the two of us to sit side by side facing the water, but even on the hottest days the storehouses behind us ensured we were in the shade, and each time a boat or junk went past, the waters would lap soothingly at our feet. On the opposite bank were more storehouses, but there was, I remember, almost directly across from us, a gap between two buildings through which we could see a road lined with trees. Akira and I often came to the spot, though we were careful never to tell our parents of it for fear they would not trust us to play so near the water’s edge.

On that afternoon, once we had sat down, we tried for a while to forget our worries. I remember Akira starting to ask me, as he often did when we came to our spot, if in an emergency I would manage to swim to this or that vessel visible further up the water. But he could not keep it up, and suddenly, to my astonishment, he began to cry.

I had hardly ever seen my friend cry. In fact, today, this is the only recollection I have of him crying. Even when a large piece of mortar fell on to his leg when we were playing behind the American Mission, for all his turning a ghastly white, he did not cry. But that afternoon by the canal, Akira had clearly reached his wits’ end.

I remember he had in his hands some piece of damp flaking wood from which, as he sobbed, he broke off bits to hurl into the water. I wanted very much to comfort him, but being at a loss for anything to say, I recall getting up to find more such pieces of wood to break off into pieces and hand to him, as though this were some urgent remedy. Then there was no more wood left for him to throw, and Akira brought his tears under control.

‘When parents find out,’ he said eventually, ‘they be so angry.

Then they not let me stay here. Then we all go to Japan.’

I still did not know what to say. Then, staring at a boat going by, he murmured: ‘I don’t ever want to live in Japan.’

And because this was what I always said when he made this statement, I echoed: ‘And I don’t ever want to go to England.’

With that, we both fell silent for a few more moments. But as we continued to stare at the water, the one obvious course of action to prevent all these awful repercussions loomed ever larger in my mind, and in the end I simply put it to him that all “we had to do was to replace the bottle in time, then all would be well.

Akira did not appear to hear me, so I repeated the point. He continued to ignore me, and it was then I realised how very real his fear of Ling Tien had grown since our adventure the previous day; indeed, I could see it was as great now as it had ever been in our younger days, except of course that Akira was now unable to admit to it. I could see his difficulty and tried hard to think of a way out. In the end, I said quietly: ‘Akira-chan. We’ll do it again together. Just like last time.

We’ll join arms again, go in, put the bottle where we found it. If we do it together like that, then we’ll be safe, nothing bad can happen to us. Nothing at all. Then no one will ever find out anything about what we did.’

Akira thought about this. Then he turned and looked at me and I could see deep and solemn gratitude in his face.

‘Tomorrow, in afternoon, three o’clock.’ he said. ‘Mother will go out to park. If maid fall asleep again, then we have chance.’

I assured him the maid was bound to fall asleep again, and repeated that if we went into the room together, there was nothing at all to fear.

‘We do together, old chap!’ he said with a sudden smile and got to his feet.

On the walk back, we finalised our plans. I promised to come to Akira’s house the next day well before his mother’s departure, and as soon as she left, we would go upstairs and wait together, Ling Tien’s bottle ready, for the maid to fall asleep.

Akira’s mood lightened considerably, but I remember, as we parted that afternoon, my friend turning to me with an unconvincing nonchalance and warning me not to be late the next day.