The Earthquake Bird (2 page)

“I’ve already told you about that.”

“I’d like you to tell me again.”

“I was in my apartment. The doorbell rang. I answered it. It was Lily. We spoke for a minute or so and she left.”

“And?”

“I went back inside.”

“After that?”

“Nothing. I don’t remember. I was bringing my washing in when Lily called. I probably returned to doing that.”

“One of your neighbors saw you on the walkway outside your front door, speaking to Bridges-san.”

I rolled my eyes. “Then presumably he or she saw what I just told you.”

He stares at me. Like a teacher waiting patiently for a child’s confession, knowing it will come.

“OK. I went after her about five minutes later. There was something I’d forgotten to tell her.”

“So you spoke to her again?”

“No, I didn’t find her.”

“You assumed she was going to the station?”

“Yes. I don’t know where else she could have gone. I don’t believe she knew my area of Tokyo well.”

“The route from your apartment to the station is fairly straightforward, is it not? And the streets are well lit at night.”

“That’s true, but I didn’t find her. I don’t know where she went.”

“Would you tell me the nature of the conversation you had at your front door?”

I shake my head.

“You don’t remember it?”

“I remember it.”

“Then please share it with me.”

“No.”

“Your neighbor reported that you were angry. You shouted at Bridges-san.”

“I don’t shout.”

“You weren’t angry?”

“I was angry.”

“Your neighbor said that you appeared to be carrying something, a bundle of some kind.”

I snort. “Who is this neighbor? Miss Marple?”

I know very well that it was my vacuuming neighbor from next door. She has always struck me as having a fertile imagination.
She vacuums aggressively for hours every day and sometimes in the middle of the night. There must be some wild ideas inside
her head. Besides, she is my only immediate neighbor. There are just two apartments above the gas station and one is mine.
I suppose it’s a pity we never became friends, but it’s too late now.

His face is blank.

“I was carrying nothing. Nothing at all.”

He stares at me. “Think carefully. Please.”

I think hard, to be polite, but I am feeling tired.

“As I told you, I was bringing my washing in. It’s possible that when I answered the door, I was holding some item of clothing.
But still, I am not so absentminded that I could have gone after Lily with something in my hands. And if I had found myself
running down the street with a pair of knickers in my grasp, I would remember.”

“I wonder what it could be that your neighbor saw.”

“My hands were empty.”

“Bridges-san was a close friend of yours.”

I pause. “Yes.”

“Tell me about your friendship.”

“No.”

“Lily was your best friend, wasn’t she?”

“She became a close friend. I didn’t know her very long.”

“Other friends?”

“Mine or hers?”

“Yours.”

I am not going to tell him of Teiji, my friend above all friends.

“Natsuko. She’s my colleague. Bob. He’s American. I met him in the dentist’s waiting room. I taught him how to say ‘a dull
nagging pain’ in Japanese. He’s an English teacher so he can’t really speak Japanese. And Mrs. Yamamoto. She ran the string
quartet I used to play in. Mrs. Ide and Mrs. Katoh too. Second violin and viola.”

“Did Lily Bridges know these people?”

“Only Natsuko and Bob. Mrs. Yamamoto died before Lily came to Japan. She never met Mrs. Ide and Mrs. Katoh.”

“Why did Lily Bridges come to Japan? What is your understanding of her intentions?”

“She liked Hello Kitty.”

He looks up, suspicious.

“I don’t know why she came.”

I do know. I’m not going to tell him about Andy, her boyfriend, and how he followed her and planted bugging devices in her
handbag and beat up a window cleaner for climbing up his ladder to the bedroom window while Lily was changing her top, as
if he could have known she was there. I will not tell him that she came to Japan secretly, giving up a job she loved, to escape
from that boyfriend. I won’t tell him because he already knows. I told the police before. So did Bob.

He stands and opens the door to let another one in. Now there are two. I squint to read the kanji on their name badges. The
old one is called Kameyama (“turtle mountain”) and the new one is Oguchi (“small mouth”). Oguchi is young, with soft, hairless
arms and the stoop of a teenager who has grown too quickly. He sits a little farther back than Kameyama and looks worried.
Kameyama leaves the room saying that he will be back soon. Oguchi plays with the left knee of his trousers. His fingers are
long and bony, like his nose which he reaches to scratch. His eyes dart all around the room but he knows I’m watching him
and he doesn’t look at me. He bats a mosquito from his neck. It dances up before his eyes and moves closer and closer to his
face. He bravely attempts to ignore it but it is starting to make a fool of him. Then, with more violence than is necessary,
he smashes his hands together, wipes the squelch nonchalantly on a white handkerchief. He turns his eyes to the door, waiting
hopefully for Kameyama’s return. I notice he is blushing slightly. I think he fancies me.

Kameyama is very busy wherever he is and does not reappear for a while. Oguchi bows his head and scribbles something on a
notepad. I am left to wonder at my future, and what control I now have. I think of Teiji and how, if he were here with me,
I would not care what happened next. But it’s nicer to reflect on the past, and more useful. If I think of what has already
happened, I can start to make out how the past became the present, how my friendships turned to nothing, and why I’m here.

I picture Teiji sitting opposite me in Oguchi’s chair, taking my hand and stroking the tips of my fingers, caressing them
like soft cool water. I shiver at the imagined sensation and that is enough to take me back to Shinjuku, the place where I
first saw him. That night I believed he was made of rain and nothing else.

I was wandering around central Tokyo. It was soon after Mrs. Yamamoto’s string quartet had disbanded and I was now at a loss
every Sunday evening. I came to the famous skyscrapers of Nishi-Shinjuku and had every intention of walking straight past.
Guidebook writers are enthralled by this
Blade Runner
setting of futuristic buildings, but to Lucy’s mind they are nothing more than dull hotels, banks, and government offices
that happen to be very high and cast long shadows. Exciting if you’re standing on the fifty-second floor, a crick in the neck
if you’re on the pavement. It was raining steadily and I was the only person not bothering to use an umbrella. Umbrellas are
cumbersome and a menace to the streets with their inhuman span and sharp, dangerous spokes. Lucy’s skin is waterproof and
her clothes can always be dried.

A young man stood in front of the Keio Plaza Hotel, with streams of umbrella-wielding people passing him on both sides. He
was leaning over a puddle, apparently taking photographs of it. Water slid over his hair and face but he seemed not to notice.
His camera clicked and he moved fluidly to the other side of the puddle. I stared. He appeared to be made of water and ice.
I had never seen a man with such delicate fingers, sharp brittle shoulder blades, transparent brown eyes. He glinted in the
neon dark more sharply than the vast ice sculptures of the Sapporo Festival I had marveled at when I first came to Japan.
He was an exhibit of the Tokyo night and so beautiful that I couldn’t walk past him.

I went to his puddle and looked in to see what had captivated him. The reflection of the Keio Plaza Hotel divided the dirty
water into two. On one side were shiny windows and lights, on the other, darkness and a couple of cigarette butts floating.
To my eyes the stubby ends looked like people jumping from the hotel windows, but he was looking deeper into the puddle than
I could see. I took a small step forward so that the tips of my shoes entered the water and were reflected over the hotel.
He didn’t look up. He shifted around the puddle with the camera against his eye all the time. Then he shot the picture, including
my feet. I kept my position and he lifted his head to look at me. His eyes searched my face as if he couldn’t quite find what
he wanted. He put his camera back to his eye and looked at me through the viewfinder, like a child peering through an empty
toilet-paper tube to see the world in another way. And the camera clicked and flashed. Those were the first pictures he took
of me. I have never seen them.

The moment was so intimate that I knew it must be followed by an even deeper intimacy. After all, I had flirtatiously invited
myself into his photograph. He had led me in and captured me with a single snap. My feet and face were now inside his camera.
He had got me inside him and the next step was obvious, though brazen.

We may have spoken, but if we did, I don’t remember it. I don’t even remember the point at which I knew where we were going.
I believe that we walked together in silence. We could hardly afford a room at the Keio Plaza—no one can—and so we headed
to his apartment in Shin-Okubo. It is a walk of about twenty minutes but another part of Tokyo altogether. We left the neon
towers and entered backstreet Tokyo. Old houses nestled between small apartment buildings. Narrow gray streets were lined
with tiny shops and bars. Orange lanterns decorated cheap eating houses. Alley cats hissed at dogs that barked from balconies.
We passed many puddles but he took no more photographs until we reached his apartment.

I can hear the click of his key in the door. Then, in lamp-light and with the curtains open, he took one final picture. It
was of my naked body. I was kneeling on the bed, leaning back, waiting to become beautiful under his touch. I didn’t mind
being looked at through the camera. It had more kindness than a naked eye. A camera can’t blink or sneer, at least not when
the picture is taken. It saves its opinion until the film is developed.

And then Teiji closed his eyes. He did not open them again until much later and I like to believe it was because the image
of my body was framed under each eyelid. He was watching that still image when I crawled on top of his ice body, rocked him
back and forth until the ice turned to water and his icicle penis melted inside me. I stayed in my position long after our
breathing had slowed, wondering how this had happened so easily. Then I lifted myself off his slender frame, pink and aching
inside and outside with something that felt unusually close to joy.

Since his eyes were closed and the room was light, I took the opportunity to look around the space to acquaint myself better
with this man. The room was like a large closet. His clothes hung from the walls, blue and gray sweaters, soft T-shirts, old
trousers, and a pair of jeans. There was a tie hanging over the curtain rod but it was covered in dust and I could see no
shirt that it could be worn with. There was no bookcase, just piles of books stacked high. I could not see the titles. On
top of the books were piles of CDs. There was a large begonia in the corner of the room with a pair of swimming goggles entwined
among the leaves. There were three or four cameras strewn on the floor, two cardboard boxes full of camera shop envelopes.
But there were no photographs on display anywhere. The walls were painted white, a little dirty. Apart from his clothes they
were bare. The curtains twitched against them in the night breeze, bluish white.

We must have slept, but I don’t remember. In the morning, he took me to the small noodle restaurant where he worked. I learned
later that it belonged to his uncle and he would inherit it one day. It wasn’t open yet but we sat behind the scratched wooden
counter at the back of the shop and drank tall glasses of iced barley tea. A small fan on the wall behind me turned noisily
from side to side, blowing cold air down the back of my neck. We didn’t look at each other. Our bodies touched, side by side,
and I absorbed his warmth, made it mine.

Oguchi is watching me now. He pours me a glass of water and I am grateful for this apparent token of kindness, though for
all I know it is a right written into the Japanese constitution. I am hot. I dip my fingers into the glass, smear cold water
across my face. He seems to take this as a sign that the ice is broken.

“You have been in Japan a long time. Nine years?”

Is this part of the official questioning or is he chatting me up? I’m not certain. Surely he should be recording everything
I say, to be used in evidence against me.

“Ten.”

“What brought you here?”

This is more like it. I have been asked this question fifty thousand times in ten years. I don’t have an honest answer because
there isn’t one, or I am not honest enough to think of it. But I have a few pat answers for when I’m asked. This is a special
occasion and so I use all of them.

“An interest in Japanese culture, I wanted to study the language, I needed to save some money, I wanted to see the world,
I wanted to get away from dreary old England, I like tofu.” I am enjoying this so I ad lib and give him a few more. “Chopsticks
are lighter than knives and forks and are held in the same hand—you don’t get that metallic taste, the trains are so much
better here, both reasonably priced and reliable, sumo wrestlers have beautiful calves although their thighs can be too dimply
for my liking. It’s so clever the way you can pay your bills at a convenience store instead of having to wait until the banks
are open and then being late for work. The irises are beautiful in May, just as good as the puffy pink cherry blossoms that
people go on and on about like they do with geisha who are not so special when you look at them close up because you can see
their spots even through all that makeup, schoolgirls on the trains are always laughing, I can’t stand my family.”

I can see he is not sure where to take this. I am a little surprised, and rather impressed, by my fluent collection. I’ll
be quiet now. I will not tell Oguchi anything more than he asks for, because everything else I say will lead to Lily. I will
have a job convincing the police that I am innocent, but one thing is indisputable. If Lily had never met me, she would be
alive now.