With My Little Eye (21 page)

‘It’s miraculous.’

Dr Szymanovski smiled. ‘Patients like you always use that word when they’ve confounded a prognosis. I prefer’ – he paused and smiled again – ‘atypical. Anyway I’m delighted. This is one of those rare occasions when I welcome such
convincing
proof that I am capable of error.’

He opened the drawer of his desk and took out a small, oval box. When he had eased off the lid and placed it between us on the desk, I read ‘Gold Chocolate Dragées’ and, above that in smaller letters ‘Fortnum & Mason’. ‘Please.’ He held out the box. I took one of the golden eggs and crunched on its shell. He took one and did the same. Then he replaced the lid and put the box back into the drawer.

It was like a symbolic celebration of my emergence from the tunnel and sudden rebirth.

I had read in the English-language
Mainichi
Shimbun
that Laurance P. Roberts, whose
Dictionary
of
Japanese
Artists
I
constantly
consulted at the British Council library, was on a visit to Tokyo. After a number of telephone calls – to the American Embassy, to the American Information Centre and, on five or six occasions, to the Imperial Hotel only to learn that he was out – I finally managed to arrange a meeting. I then booked myself for a couple nights into a far more modest hotel. I had decided that, once back in Kyoto, I’d set about preparing for my departure to England.

When I met the pixie-like American and his imposing giraffe of a wife, I was able, in my excitement, to forget both my constant anxiety over Mark and my self-disgust and self-
loathing
over that strange incident with Hiro. After an elegant and extremely expensive Japanese dinner for which Roberts, a rich man, had insisted on paying to the ill-concealed disapproval of his wife, I wandered back to my hotel through the pleasure district of Shinjuku. Suddenly two passing sister boys, disguised as geisha in elaborate kimono and jet-black wigs above simian faces plastered with wet-white, rushed up to hail me. ‘Hi, stranger! Where you from?’ one of them screamed. ‘Where you from?’ the other took up. This was followed by giggling from behind disconcertingly beefy hands.

I paused momentarily and almost spoke to them. Then, heart and head thumping, I hurried on without a word.

It was late in the evening of the following day when at last I reached home. The express trains that whisk travellers at
miraculous
speed from Tokyo to Kyoto then did not exist. I felt not merely exhausted from the interminable journey but also leaden with fear and depression. I turned the key in the front door, in the expectation that at the sound Hiro, his hearing always so sensitive, would at once emerge, as in the past, through the
kitchen door. But as so often when I have just returned to an empty house, I already knew that there was no one in it.

Nonetheless I shouted, ‘Hiro! Hiro!’ Then, getting no answer, I entered his room. It was totally empty, its window, to my annoyance, left wide open. I strode across and shut it. I went to the rickety wardrobe and tugged at its door. Nothing. I went to the chest of drawers. Nothing there, either. I stared, hands on hips, down at the bed. The sheets, pillowcases and single blanket had been neatly folded and left at the bottom.

I returned to the kitchen. Everything was spotless. The pedal bin had been emptied and its interior scrubbed. The rubber gloves that he himself had bought and for which he had refused to allow me to reimburse him had gone from the peg on which he used to hang them. He must have taken them. But nothing else had gone.

I felt an unrelenting sadness, even despair. It was the same emotion that I had felt in the immediate aftermath of Laura’s and Mark’s departure. My mood darkened yet further when I entered the bathroom. I had been complaining that the
floor-to
-ceiling white tiles were blotched with grime. Now clearly he had scrubbed them. When he had first arrived, I had indicated to him that the small cupboard and the shelf above the
washbasin
were exclusively mine. Another small cupboard, next to the combined bath and shower, was for him. The mirror above this second cupboard gave me back my pale, stricken face. I tugged at the door and peered inside. Empty too. I thought: You might never have been here. I thought: Were you just a figment of my deranged mind?

I was hungry. I was desperate to eat. I wanted some ice for the drink that might dull my sense of desertion. I went into the kitchen and took out two eggs from the ancient refrigerator. Then I looked around to locate a frying pan. But I consumed only a few mouthfuls of the omelette that I eventually made.

Later I rang Rex. He condoled with me in an offhand way. ‘Oh, I imagine some loss of face was involved. He didn’t want to have some kind of trivial confrontation and so made his escape. That’s the Japanese way.’ If he heard anything, he’d of course let me know. He was sorry that he couldn’t talk for longer but he and Masa were listening to a live broadcast of
Tannhäuser
given by the Vienna State Opera in Tokyo. Wagner was their favourite composer, he added.

The next day I telephoned Katinka and the Shotts. They, like Rex, thought the disappearance in no way remarkable. Hiro had probably found a better job, Katinka said, and hadn’t had the courage to face me to tell me. That was the Japanese way. Would I like her to look around for a replacement? Mrs Shott offered to come over to cook me a meal. I politely declined both these offers.

Finally, after some hesitation, I telephoned Dr Kawasaki.

‘Your houseboy? No, I’m sorry. I’ve not seen him around for some time.’ I was tempted to tell him that I had seen the two of them together at the Cock Bar only five days before, but
decided
not to embarrass him by doing so. ‘To walk out like that is not at all strange in this country. That’s how things happen in Japan. Perhaps, until you find a replacement, our maid might be able to come by for an hour or two to help out.’ That suggestion I also declined.

At the Miyako Hotel I drew another blank. The barman to whom I spoke said that he knew no employee of that name. If Kanaseki-san had been one of his customers, then they usually remained anonymous, preferring it that way. The deputy
manager
to whom he directed me shrugged. ‘Sorry. I cannot assist. Such person I never employed.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Excuse me.’ A gaggle of American tourists was standing at the entrance to the bar, noisily arguing about whether to enter or not. Having persuaded them to do so and then placed them on two facing banquettes, with a lot more of noisy arguing as to who should sit by whom, he vanished.

Miss Morita also offered to help out. But when she added, ‘I am not domestic person, I am afraid’ – something that by now I did not need to be told – I replied that, no, thank you, I could manage perfectly well on my own. I couldn’t imagine what could have happened to him, I told her. He had given me no warning. He had seemed perfectly well when I had left for Tokyo. For God’s sake, I had even owed him money – having forgotten to pay him before my departure.

She shrugged. ‘All this is not unusual in Japan. Such people are like birds. They fly into your garden, they sing a nice little song, they fly away. Maybe some day they return to sing
another nice little song. Maybe they never come back.’ She leaned forward, hands clasped. ‘I think that maybe you are lucky.’ She gazed into my eyes and then shook her head. ‘He is not good man, I think.’

I am alone in Kew Gardens. Laura said that she would come with me and then at the last moment cried off. ‘I have so many letters.’ As with so many elderly people, her contacts with the outside world are now largely through letters, emails and
telephone
calls.

‘Put on something warm,’ she calls out as I am leaving. ‘There’s a really icy wind.’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘And don’t forget your stick.’

‘I don’t need it.’ I feel proud that, after all those months of using a stick as an antenna to guide me through shops and streets without a collision, I can leave it behind me.

Perhaps because it is a Monday afternoon, the Gardens are emptier than I have ever known them except in mid-winter. The light is oddly vaporous, with shreds of mist drifting from tree to tree or settling on flower beds to rob them of any clear definition. Distant sounds – the clattering of a mower, the squeak of the tyres of one of those electric buses transporting visitors either too lazy or too ancient to walk, the squawks, yells and shrieks of laughter of a group of children in dark-blue school uniform – seem eerily close.

I sit on a bench by the lake. At first I read a few pages of Soseki’s
Kokoro
in a new and far better translation than that old one that Dr Kawasaki lent me so many years ago. Then I put it down, to stare out over what – so hard, so still, so immutably grey – might be not water but a vast expanse of metal. A
moorhen
descends and engraves a dark, erratic line across it. I feel a strange shiver of excitement, as I used once to feel when, up at Oxford, I knew that soon, at any moment now, I’d lean forward to put my lips to those of some girl. Even today I still feel a similar shiver of excitement when I am bidding for a Japanese print and know, as my rival bidder falters, that soon, soon it will be inalienably mine.

All at once it happens, as for months now I have been both
longing for it to happen and half-expecting that it will happen. It happens not inside my head but out there before me. There are wisps of mist hovering over the lake and out of them a vision slowly forms. Firstly I see the huge television screen, and then I see the old man slumped in the wheelchair and the young man standing by him. There are two or three other people present, curators in this strange, beautiful, somehow
sinister
building. The old man says something to Miss Morita and I realise that among the hoarse, muffled Japanese words, there are two English ones.

‘He is asking – do you know snuff movies?’

‘Snuff movies? Yes, I’ve heard of them. Do they really exist?’

She translates. The old man nods vigorously. ‘In Japan more than anywhere,’ she says. ‘But they are difficult to find. Very difficult. For the museum he has found seven.’ She turns to check with him. ‘No, sorry, sorry, very sorry. Eight. Now you will see snuff movie.’

The young man beside the wheelchair reaches out to pick up a remote control from a nearby table, raises an arm as though in a Nazi salute, and clicks it.

At first the picture, clearly taken with a hand-held camera, sways vertiginously from side to side. I see, in flickering black and white, a room white-tiled from top to bottom. It must be a bathroom. Someone with a white hood over the head is
strapped
to an upright chair in front of an old-fashioned washbasin with high taps. He – or is it she? – is motionless, inert. Then I make out the narrow, shiny, black shoes – clearly a man’s. Six figures, in raincoats uniformly dark and belted and reaching almost to their ankles, are standing with their backs to the camera. One grasps what looks like a metal bar in one hand; the others hold baseball bats. The man with the bar approaches the figure, raises it high up in the air, so that I see its magnified black shadow on the white tiles of the wall beside him, and then brings it down with tremendous violence on the head of the victim. I try to see the assailant more closely. He is
extraordinarily
tall for a Japanese. The figure reminds me of
someone
– who, who? Then one of the others moves forward. That dandelion clock of hair so blonde as almost to be white, the sloping shoulders, the wide hips … But surely I know him! He swings the baseball bat. Such is the force that, though the film
has no sound, I wait in horror for the crunch of splintering bone.

Suddenly I see it. Above the victim, above the washbasin, on a glass shelf, there it is.
POUR UN HOMME
. Then in smaller lettering, no capitals,
eau
de
toilette.
Then below that
CARON
, and below that again
Paris
.

At that moment the vast television set seems to explode with a blinding flash of light and a noise like a deafening clash of giant cymbals. But the explosion is not out there before me but inside me, in the infinitely complex and mysterious recesses of my brain. It hurls me to the marble floor. It hurls me into oblivion.

Francis King is a former International President of PEN and drama critic of the
Sunday
Telegraph
. His fiction includes
Act
of
Darkness
‚
Dead
Letters
and
The
Custom
House
. Arcadia published
Prodigies
to great acclaim in 2001, while his 28th novel
The
Nick
of
Time
was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2003.