Tokyo (6 page)

‘Yes. I’ve got blisters.’

‘Haven’t you got anything else to wear?’

‘No.’

‘What’s in your bag? It looks heavy.’

‘Books,’ I said.

‘Books?’

That’s right.’

‘What sort of books?’

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‘Books with pictures.’

Jason laughed. He lit a cigarette and watched in amusement as I got the slippers on. I pulled my cardigan straight, pressed my hands down on my hair and stood up in front of him, and that made him laugh again. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what’s your name?’

‘Grey.’

‘Grey? What sort of a name is that?’

I hesitated. It was so strange to be in a place where no one knew me. I took a breath and tried to sound casual. ‘It’s my surname. Everyone always calls me by my surname.’

Jason took me down the right-hand corridor, stopping to point things out as we went. The house was curiously soft and organic feeling - the floors were covered in straw tatami matting and each movement released the secret smell of insect cocoons. Rooms led off from one side of the corridor; on the other, battered wooden screens concealed the facing walls, from waist height up.

‘The bathroom’s traditional so you squat. Think you can do that?’ He looked me up and down. ‘Squat? Wash out of a bucket? You know that’s the point of living in Japan - to do things differently.’ Before I could answer he turned away, to the other side of the corridor, and slid back a shutter. Sunlight flooded in through grimy glass. ‘The air-conditioner’s fucked so in the summer you gotta keep these closed all day.’

We stood at the window and looked down at an enclosed garden. It was deep and lush like a jungle, overgrown to above the height of the ground-floor windows, packed with dark persimmon and heavy leaves that cracked the walls and stole the sunlight. I put my hands on the pane, my nose up to the glass, and stared out. At the foot of the garden was the rear of a white skyscraper.

‘The Salt Building,’ Jason said. ‘Don’t know why it’s called that, just got handed on, I s’pose, like the rooms, from one hostess to another.’

I was about to turn away when I noticed, almost a hundred feet away across the tops of the trees, a red-tiled roof basking in the heat.

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‘What’s that?’

‘That?’ He pressed his nose against the window. ‘That’s the third wing. Closed off too.’

‘Part of this house?’

‘I know. We inhabit a zip code. The Forbidden Palace. There are maybe twenty rooms in this place that I know exist for sure, another twenty you only get to hear about in rumours.’

Now I could see how much ground the house took up. It covered most of a city block and was arranged round the garden, on three sides of a square. From above, it would look like a bridge with the Salt Building blocking the fourth side. The house was decaying; rot had started in the far wing and Jason said he didn’t like to think what was in the closed-off rooms downstairs. ‘That’s where the ghosts hang out,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘According to the baba yaga twins.’

We passed countless sliding shoji doors, some locked, some open. I got glimpses of belongings in the gloom, piled-up furniture, dusty and forgotten - a teak butsudan, an ancestor’s shrine, empty except for a stack of dusty glass jars. My slippers slapped in the silence. Out of the gloom ahead of us appeared the door to the closed wing, padlocked and braced with an iron bar. Jason stopped at the barricade. ‘This is no go.’ He put his nose to the door and sniffed. ‘And, Jesus, in the hot weather the stink.’ He wiped his face and turned back, tapping the last door on the corridor. ‘Don’t worry, you’re cool here - this would be yours.’

He slid back the door. Sunshine poured through grimy sheets tacked over two windows at right angles. The walls had once been covered in pale brown silk and the remains of it hung down, disintegrating in long, vertical slashes, as if a huge clawed animal had been kept locked in here. The tatami mats were fraying, there were dead flies on the windowsill and spiders’ webs in the light fitting.

‘What do you think?’

I stepped inside and stood in the centre of the room, slowly turning round and round. On the near wall there was a tokonoma alcove, with a battered rattan rocking-chair pushed against the wall where the seasonal scroll should hang.

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‘You could do anything you wanted to it. The landlord doesn’t give a shit. Even forgets to collect the rent most times.’

I closed my eyes and held out my hands, feeling the softness of the air, the dusty sunlight on my back. It was twice the size of my bedroom in London and it seemed to me so welcoming. There was a soft smell in there, of decaying silk and straw.

‘Well?’

‘It’s …’ I said, opening my eyes and fingering the silk on the walls ‘… it’s beautiful.’

Jason pulled back the sheet covering the window and opened it, letting some of the hot air into the room. ‘There,’ he said, pointing out of the window. ‘Godzilla’s playpen.’

Coming here, dwarfed by all the skyscrapers, I hadn’t realized how high Takadanobaba was. It was only now that I saw the land dropped away from this vantage-point. The tops of buildings stood level with my window and everywhere faces shouted from video screens hung up high. A vast advertising hoarding, only fifty feet away, filled most of the view. It was a huge sepia photograph of a movie star smiling a crooked smile, holding a glass up, as if he was toasting the whole of Takadanobaba. The glass had the words ‘Suntory Reserve’ etched on it.

‘Mickey Rourke,’ said Jason. ‘Babe magnet, evidently.’

‘Mickey Rourke,’ I echoed. I’d never heard of him, but I liked his face. I liked the way he was smiling down at us. I held the window frame and leaned out a little. ‘Which way is Hongo?’

‘Hongo? I don’t know - I think it’s … that way, maybe.’

I stood on tiptoe, looking sideways, out over the distant roofs and the neon signs and the TV aerials painted gold by the sun. We must be miles away. I’d never be able to see Shi Chongming’s office among all those other buildings. But it made me feel better to think that it was there, somewhere out there. I tipped back on to my heels.

‘How much is it?’

‘Two hundred dollars a month.’

‘I only need it for a week.’

‘Fifty dollars, then. It’s a steal.’

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‘I can’t afford it.’

‘You can’t afford fifty dollars? How much d’you think it costs to live in Tokyo? Fifty dollars is so outrageously not expensive.’

‘I haven’t got any money.’

Jason sighed. He finished his cigarette, chucked it out on to the street and pointed at the skyline. ‘Look,’ he said leaning out. ‘Look there, to the south-east. Those tall buildings are Kabuki Cho. And see beyond them?’

In the distance, black against the sky, a behemoth of tinted glass supported by eight massive black columns, rocketed up above all the other skyscrapers. Four gigantic black marble gargoyles crouched on each corner of the roof, gas streams in their mouths blowing fire jets fifty feet out until the sky seemed to be on fire.

‘The building is private. It’s one of the Mori brothers’ buildings. But see that, on the top floor?’

I squinted. Bolted by a mechanical arm to the crown of the skyscraper there was a vast cut-out of a woman sitting on a swing. ‘I know who that is,’ I said. ‘I recognize her.’

‘It’s Marilyn Monroe.’

Marilyn Monroe. She must have been thirty feet from her white high heels to her peroxide hair, and she swung back and forward in fifty-foot arcs, molten neon flickering so that her white summer dress appeared to be blowing up above her waist.

‘That’s Some Like It Hot. The club where we work - me and the baba yagas. I’ll take you there tonight. You’ll pay your week’s rent in a few hours.’

‘Oh,’ I said, backing away from the window. ‘Oh. No - you already said about it. It’s a hostess club.’

‘It’s cool, laid back - Strawberry’s really gonna go for you.’

‘No,’ I said, suddenly uncomfortable and clumsy again. ‘No. Don’t say that, because she won’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because …’ I trailed off. I couldn’t explain to someone like Jason. ‘No. She definitely wouldn’t hire me.’

‘I think you’re wrong. And, anyways, from where I’m standing it seems like you don’t have a choice.’

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The hostesses who lived in the rooms on the north wing, the baba yagas, were twins from Vladivostok. Svetlana and Irina. Jason took me in to see them when the sun was getting low and the heat had let up a little. They were in Irina’s room, getting ready for work at the club, almost identical in their black leggings and Spandex bras: tall as stevedores, and well fed, with strong arms and muscular legs. They looked as if they spent a lot of time in the sun and both had lots of long, bobbly, permed hair. The only difference was that Irina’s was yellow-blonde and Svetlana’s was black. I’d seen the dye, Naples Black, in a faded pink box on the kitchen shelf.

They sat me on a stool in front of a small vanity table and started firing questions at me.

‘You know Jason? Before you come here?’

‘No. I met him this morning.’

‘This morning’?’

‘In the park.’

The girls exchanged glances. ‘He work fast, eh?’ Svetlana made a clicking noise in her throat and winked at me. ‘Fast work.’

They offered me a cigarette. I liked to smoke. In hospital the girl in the next bed had taught me how, and it made me feel very adult, but I hardly ever had the money to keep it up. I looked at the carton in Irina’s red polished fingertips. ‘I haven’t got any to give you in return.’

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Irina half dropped her eyelids and pursed her lips as if she was kissing the air. ‘No problem.’ She waggled the box at me again. ‘No problem. You take.’

I took one and for a while we all smoked, looking back and forward at each other. If their hair hadn’t been so different Svetlana and Irina would have been almost indistinguishable: they both had a sort of confident glitter in their eyes that I recognized from some of the girls at university. I must have looked very odd to them, all scrunched up like a bundle of dirty laundry on their stool.

‘You going to work in club?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘They won’t want me.’

Svetlana clicked her tongue against her mouth. ‘Don’t be stupid. It easy easy easy. Easy like eating the candy.’

‘Is it sex?’

‘No!’ They laughed. ‘Not sex! You do sex, you do it outside. Mama don’t wanna hear about it.’

‘Then what do you do?’

‘Do? You don’t do nothing. You talk to customer. Light his cigarette. Tell him he’s great. Put ice in his fuckink disgustink fuckink drink.’

‘What do you talk about?’

They looked at each other and shrugged. ‘Just make him happy, make him to like you. Make him laugh. He gonna like you no problem, because you are English girl.’

I looked down at the heavy black skirt I was wearing, second hand. Its original owner would have remembered the Korean war. My black buttoned-up blouse had cost me 5 Op in the Oxfam shop in the Harrow Road and my tights were thick and opaque.

‘Here.’

I looked up. Svetlana was holding out a little gold makeup bag. ‘What?’

‘Do your face. We gotta go in twenny minutes.’

The twins knew the art of holding two conversations at once. Everything they did was achieved with the phone glued to their ears, cigarettes between their teeth. They were doing the nightly

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dial-round of customers: ‘You going to be there tonight, eh? I’ll be so sabishi without you.’ As they talked, they painted in eyebrows, fixed on eyelashes, squeezed themselves into shiny white trousers and impossibly high silver sandals. I watched them silently. Svetlana, who spent a long time standing in front of the mirror in her bra, her arms above her head, studying her armpits for hairs, thought that I should wear something gold to brighten myself up.

‘You gotta look sophisticated. You wanna wear my belt, eh? My belt is gold. Black and gold nice!’

‘I’d look stupid.’

‘Silver, then,’ said Irina. I was trying not to stare at her. She’d stripped off her bra and was standing topless near the window picking with her long nails at a roll of Sellotape, tearing off strips with her teeth. ‘You wear black, you look like widow.’

‘I always wear black.’

‘What? You mourning someone?’

‘No,’ I said, steadily. ‘Don’t be stupid. Who would I be mourning?’

She studied me for a moment. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘If it make you happy. But you go to club looking like that you probably gonna make the men to cry.’ She put one end of the tape in her mouth, squashed her breasts together as tightly as she could, and passed the tape under them from left underarm to right and back again. When she released her breasts they remained where she’d lifted them, precarious on a shelf of Sellotape. She pulled on an off-the shoulder blouse and stood in front of the mirror, smoothing it down and checking her shape under the flimsy fabric. I bit my fingers, wishing I had the courage to ask for another cigarette.

Svetlana had finished her makeup - her lips were outlined in dark pencil. She got on her knees, rummaged in one of the drawers and pulled out a stapler. ‘Come here,’ she said, beckoning to me. ‘Come here.’

‘No.’

‘Yes. Come here.’ She shuffled towards me on her knees, wielding the stapler. She caught the hem of my skirt, folded it up and under and clamped the stapler’s jaws, fastening the hem to the lining.

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‘Don’t,’ I said, trying to push her hand away. ‘Don’t.’

‘Wassamatter? You got sexy legs, better you show them. Now keep still.’

‘Please!’

‘Don’t you wanna job, eh?’

I put my hands over my face, my eyes rolling under my fingers, and took deep breaths while Svetlana moved round me, clipping my hem up. I could feel from the air that she’d exposed my knees. I kept imagining the way my legs would look. I kept imagining the things people would think if they saw me. ‘No …’

‘Jjjzzzt!’ Svetlana put her hands on my shoulders. ‘Let us work.’

I closed my eyes and breathed in and out through my nose. Irina was trying to draw a line around the outside of my lips. I jumped up. ‘Please, no …’