The Earthquake Bird (3 page)

The facts of Lily’s death, as far as I know at this stage in the interview, are few and easily open to misinterpretation.
She had been in Tokyo for several months when one night she disappeared. A few days later the torso of a young woman was fished
out of Tokyo Bay, with a couple of unattached but matching limbs, I forget which ones. Although the police were unable to
make an official identification because there were no hands and so no fingerprints, it seemed to be widely accepted that the
body was Lily’s. As you know, my connection with the event was that she had been seen knocking on the door of my apartment
earlier in the evening of her disappearance. My neighbor saw the door open, spotted me in the doorway speaking angrily to
Lily, and saw Lily walking away. Then she watched as I followed a few minutes later,
carrying a bundle
. This is certainly a lie. Why didn’t she say that she saw me tuck a revolver into my shirt after closing the front door?
Or that I held a dagger before me as I walked? I have never denied the other facts though I have chosen not to detail the
conversation we had at that time.

One of the suspects was Lily’s ex-boyfriend, though unless he was using a fake passport and traveling very quickly, it seems
that he was back in England with a foolproof alibi, worse luck for me. On the day in question he was captured on closed-circuit
television, entering a chip shop in Goole and asking for cod and chips with a pickled egg for lunch. He fiddled with the hem
of his anorak and scratched his ear before reaching into the pocket of his jeans for a couple of pound coins. The other main
suspect is the usual Mr. X who shows up in dark alleyways at night in every country in the world to remind us, by what he
does to a woman’s body, that the definition of a human being includes that which is not human.

Without further evidence it is hard to imagine what progress the police could have made. I don’t suppose my friend is going
to tell me, until I give him something more about Lily. I remain silent; my thoughts return to Teiji.

The morning after our first encounter I awoke early, scribbled my address on a scrap of paper and left it under his camera
before we went to the noodle shop. I didn’t write my telephone number. I wanted him to come and find me.

The doorbell rang while I was in the shower. A week had passed since our first meeting. I could tell from the sound of the
bell—less sudden than usual, a quietly confident ring—that it was Teiji’s soft fingertip pushing the button, so I didn’t bother
to pick up a towel. I opened the door more narrowly than usual—even then I knew my neighbor was nosy—and let Teiji slip through.

If only I could remember what he said to me. He might have told me I was beautiful, for I’m sure that he did say so sometimes.
He may have exclaimed upon finding me so perfectly, nakedly prepared for him. Perhaps I don’t remember what he said that day
because perhaps he said nothing. It may have been that we went straight into my room where we fell immediately into lovemaking.
And afterward, with a sheet around me, I looked into his camera while it snapped up my image. We could have done all this
without a single word. And yet, if he never spoke, how did I even know that his name was Teiji?

But every time I remember Teiji what I am doing is
not
remembering Lily. It’s all wrong. I still have not introduced Lily, not properly. I have been putting it off, hoping she
would walk in of her own accord. But I was wrong. She is already here, you see. She is there in the shadows of the room’s
corners, in the buzzing of the light over my head, the fruit fly at the corner of my vision that may just be a speck in my
eye. When I lean forward my hair flops over my left temple and then I know Lily is inside my face. Sometimes I feel I am walking
not quite like myself—my steps are shorter, quicker, a scuttle, almost—and so I know she’s got into my legs too.

* * *

I blink and realize that Kameyama has returned and together he and Oguchi are staring at me.

“You can’t just sit and gaze into space. You will have to tell me about Bridges-san. It won’t do to sit here all night and
not tell me anything. You knew her well. We already know that.”

“Yes, I did.” But not well enough. That is all.

Kameyama shouts questions at me, one after another. I close my eyes and ears. I see and hear nothing.

I
met Lily in a bar in Shibuya. It was only a few months ago, though it seems longer. She was with Bob, the teacher I’d become
acquainted with in a dentist’s waiting room, and some other English teachers, and I did not want to be there. I rarely socialized
with other foreigners, and since I’d started seeing Teiji I had no desire or need to see anyone else. But Bob had called to
ask me especially.

“There’s a new woman working at the British bar I go to, Lucy. Well, girl really. She’s a bag of nerves. She’s never been
abroad before and she looks as if she’s just landed on the moon. I don’t know how she’s going to cope.”

“Oh.” What was it to me?

“She needs help. I mean, she needs to find an apartment. She’s living in a seedy gaijin house now with some real assholes
and she’s the only woman. If she doesn’t get out soon, I think she’ll crack up.”

“It’s not hard to find an apartment. I’ve done it.”

“Lily doesn’t speak a word of Japanese.”

An unusual name. I liked it. “So can’t you help her?”

“I thought you’d be able to help. You found your place on your own so you know what’s around and what to look for. Besides,
your Japanese is better than anyone else’s. It was just an idea.”

“It sounds more like a plan than an idea.” But I am a Leo and respond well to flattery. Bob had won my help.

“Will you come out for a drink with us on Friday? We’re going to an izakaya in Shibuya. Just meet her, yeah? If you don’t
want to go around to real-estate agents with her, at least you could give her some advice.”

It’s not that I’m so ungenerous as a rule but I wanted to spend every minute of my time with Teiji, or by myself, thinking
about Teiji. There was no space for this wimpish woman. Lily. I imagined a tall, beautiful woman with pale skin and a long
white neck. She’d be in a corner of the bar sipping gin and tonic from an elegant glass. She would look at me and smile serenely.
Beautiful women are always pleased to look at me. My dark eyes are too piercing to be beautiful. I am the ugliness that defines
their beauty. For that matter, men are pleased to look at me too. They think, I may not get a supermodel, but at least I know
I can do better than get her. You could say, then, that I have a unique beauty; people like to look at my face, they like
me to be around for aesthetic reasons. I envied Lily before I’d seen her.

I entered the bar and found the English teachers sitting in a corner, talking loudly about work. Lily was the only one of
the group I didn’t know. She did have pale skin but she was short and jagged, all elbows and knees. She had a large tuft of
dyed auburn hair that rose an inch or so from her head and then flopped over her left eye. Her eyes were dark, like mine,
but without expression. They sat beneath her eyebrows like two fat plums. She peered at me from under the tuft. Her eyes and
fingers twitched. She was attractive, but also slightly comical and instead of envying her, I found myself smiling.

“’Ello.”

I located her accent immediately, to East Yorkshire. I am no Professor Higgins, it just happens that she sounded exactly like
the girls I was at school with. Years of traveling, speaking other languages, and trying to disassociate myself from my origins
have left me with no traces of my original accent. I speak in a neutral, hard-to-locate voice, and it suits me very well.
I have no patience with people who carry their accent like a flag or anthem, determined to assault you with their provincial
jingoism.

Lily smiled at me, then twitched and fiddled with her fringe.

“I like this Japanese beer,” she said to me. “It’s great.”

“I’ll have Guinness. When did you arrive?”

“Here? The pub? Tonight?”

“No. Japan.”

“Oh.” She dropped cigarette ash on her lap and brushed it clumsily with her fingers. Her hands were shaking slightly. “Last
Friday. To be honest I never thought I’d get here and now that I am I’m not really sure why, you know.”

I nodded.

“It’s like, I’ve got to get used to a new home, a new language, everything. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, you know,
everybody else really seems to fit in. This is my first night off and I’m all at sea.”

“You’ve only just got here. Of course it’s hard at first. What brought you to Japan?”

“I was in a relationship that ended. My boyfriend, Andy, I left him, you see.”

I thought she was about to start crying. She flicked her tuft off her face and lowered her voice, as if to let me in on a
secret.

“Well, I had to. We were going to get married but it all went horrible. And I was in a terrible state and I decided I just
had to leave, you know. You see, he was very possessive and even though I don’t think he liked me very much, he still followed
me around sometimes, to make sure I didn’t have fun with anyone else. I really don’t know what he thought I was doing. So
I wanted to escape from him, but it wasn’t just that. I wanted to start things all over again so I thought I’d travel, you
know, see the world and that.”

“Good,” I said. “A new start. I hear you’re looking for somewhere to live.”

“Yeah. The place I’m living now, it’s…”

She appeared to run out of steam and sat staring at the table. I knew the kind of place it was and I knew its inhabitants.
I’ve seen them. A run-down building with a bunch of Western men coming home nightly with their conquests. Men who would be
nothing special in their home countries suddenly find themselves sought after by women because of their race. They get the
pretty women they’ve never had before and they have moved up to the next link in the food chain. It goes to their heads. They
live in splendid semen-saturated squalor. As many women as possible, as often as possible, and a fresh lie to each of them.
And there are cockroaches too.

“I’ve just got to get out. Can you help me? I don’t speak any Japanese and I really don’t know how to go about this. I only
came to Japan because my friend knew about this job at a bar here. Excuse me, I must go to the loo.”

She darted out of the room. I turned to Bob.

“I’ve got nothing in common with her. I don’t want to get stuck with looking after her.”

“Lucy, she’s new here.”

“Tokyo’s full of foreigners who are new here. Every day more arrive. If I look after all of them, I’d never have a life of
my own.”

“All right, all right. I just got the impression that she’s lonely.”

“Everybody’s lonely.”

“Fine.”

I thought of my first Japanese friend, Natsuko, and her smiling face welcoming me when
I
arrived, knowing nothing, in Tokyo.

“Bob, I’ll help her find an apartment, but I’m not getting stuck with her.” I hissed. “I can’t stand East Yorkshire people.”

“I didn’t know you were so prejudiced.” He laughed. “Besides, I thought Yorkshire was your part of the world.”

“It is. That’s my point.”

Lily returned.

“I’ll take you to find an apartment. It’s not so hard but there are places that will rent to foreigners and ones that won’t.
Also, money’s complicated. As well as a deposit and rent in advance, you’ll probably have to pay key money—like a deposit
except that you’ll never see it again.”

“I don’t care. I’ve brought my savings.”

“You’ll care when you see how much it is. And you’ll have to have a Japanese guarantor.”

“My boss’ll do that. He said so.”

“That’s fine, then. I’ll translate for you, if you want.”

“Thanks very much. It’s all a bit different from Hull.”

“It certainly is.”

Lily caught something in my voice. “Where are you from?”

“Near Hull, the coast.”

“What a coincidence! Me too. Fancy running into someone from home all the way out here. That’s made me feel a lot better,
that has. It’s so good to have friends from home, don’t you think so?”

“I haven’t lived there for a very long time.”

“It’s your roots that count.”

“Plants and trees have roots. People have legs.”

We arranged to meet the following weekend. I thought that I would help her find her apartment and never see her again.

That was the beginning of Lily, in my story. Clumsy and faltering. It was not so much of an entrance after all but then, as
you will see, Lily was so much better at exits.

I am not sharing this information with the policemen, not unless things get nasty. For the moment I am ignoring them quite
successfully. Kameyama is still shouting at me. His voice fades in and out of my hearing. I catch fragments. He tells me that
if I don’t cooperate they will keep me here all night, bring a colleague or two to ask more questions. He suggests we all
sit quietly while I think about what happened, and what I can tell them. The consequences of my words and my silences will
be severe. He doesn’t need to remind me that Japan maintains the use of the death penalty—hanging, in fact—for certain murders.
He informs me, unnecessarily, that I am unlikely to get much sleep tonight.

And silence falls in this small room with its table and three chairs. The room is a cliché but I want to believe my feelings
are wholly original. For what Lucy desires now, more than anything in this world, is a bowl of noodles. Specifically she would
like udon, big fat white worms of noodles, but she would settle for squiggly ramen, or even delicate skinny soba. She would
like noodles in a big brown bowl, with a raw egg broken into the soup, and a pair of lacquer chopsticks with which to catch
them and gobble them up. I bend my head toward my imaginary bowl, as if to inhale the flavor.

The only way to eat noodles is, of course, to fish them out of the broth, partially, and suck them straight into your mouth,
slurping continuously until the bowl has nothing left but soup and a few floating morsels. Most Westerners who come to Japan
find it hard to do. If you have been brought up with the guilt of noisy mastication, it is impossible to slurp well. And if
you can’t slurp, you can’t suck the noodles into your mouth so it becomes impossible to eat them efficiently. Most people
give up halfway through the bowl or eat horribly slowly. I took to slurping immediately. When I discovered that Teiji worked
in a noodle shop, I knew he was mine. Was it a coincidence that he worked in such a place?