Number9Dream Read online

  ‘Be careful about falling.’

  Anju chews. ‘What?’

  ‘If you dream about falling and hit the ground you really die in your bed.’

  Anju chews some more. ‘Who says so?’

  ‘Scientists say so.’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘Scientists proved it!’

  ‘If you dreamed of falling, hit the ground, and died, how could anyone know that you were dreaming of falling in the first place?’ I think this through. Anju enjoys her victory in silence. Frogs start up and die down, a million marimbas. In the distance the sea is asleep. We chomp one omochi after another. Suddenly Anju speaks in a voice I don’t remember her using. ‘I never see her face any more, Eiji.’

  ‘Whose face?’

  ‘Mum’s. Can you?’

  ‘She’s ill. She’s in a special hospital.’

  Anju’s voice wavers. ‘What if that isn’t true?’

  Huh? ‘Sure it’s true!’ I feel as if I’ve swallowed a knife. ‘She looks like how she looks in the photographs.’

  ‘The photographs are old.’ Why now? Anju wipes her eyes on her nightshirt and looks away. I hear her jaw and throat sort of clench. ‘Wheatie sent me to buy a box of washing powder at Mrs Tanaka’s while you were at soccer practice this afternoon. Mrs Oki and her sister from Kagoshima were there. They were at the back of the shop and they didn’t notice me at first, so I heard everything.’

  The knife reaches my gut. ‘Heard what?’

  ‘Mrs Oki said, “Of course the Miyake girl hasn’t shown her face here.” Mrs Tanaka said, “Of course, she has no right to.” Mrs Oki said, “She wouldn’t dare. Dumping her two kiddies on their grandmother and uncles while she lives it up in Tokyo with her fancy men and fancy apartments and fancy cars.” Then she saw me.’ The knife turns itself. Anju gasps between tight chains of snivels.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She dropped her eggs, and hurried out.’

  A moth drowns in the moonlight.

  I wipe Anju’s tears. They are so warm. Then she brushes me away and hunches up in a stubborn crouch. ‘Look,’ I say, wondering what to say. ‘Mrs Oki and her sister from Kagoshima and Mrs Tanaka are all witches who drink their own piss.’

  Anju shakes her head at the daikon pickle I offer her. She just mumbles. ‘Broken eggs. Everywhere.’

  Fujifilm says 02:34. Sleep. Sleep. You are feeling sleepy. Your eyelids are veeeeeerrry heavy. I don’t think so. Let me sleep. Please. I have to work tomorrow. Today. I close my eyes but see a body falling through space. Cartwheeling. Cockroach is still fighting the glue. Cockroaches have sensors that start the legs running even before the brain registers the danger. How do scientists find these things out? Cockroaches even eat books if nothing juicier comes along. Cat would have kicked Cockroach’s butt. Cat. Cat knows the secret of life and death. Wednesday evening, I get home from work. ‘Good day at the office, dear?’ asks Buntaro, drinking iced coffee from a can. ‘Not bad,’ I say. Buntaro drains the last drops. ‘What are your co-workers like?’ ‘I haven’t met many. Suga, the guy I’m replacing, believes he is a sort of arch cybercriminal. Mrs Sasaki, my boss, doesn’t seem to like me much but I sort of like her anyway. Mr Aoyama, her boss, is so uptight I’m surprised he can walk without squeaking.’ Buntaro lobs his can into a bin, and a customer comes in with a stack of videos to return. I climb up to my capsule, slump on my futon and read Akiko Kato’s letter for the hundredth time. I practise my guitar as the room fills with suburban dusk. I can’t afford any light fittings yet, so all I have is a knackered lamp that the previous tenant stowed in the back of the closet. I suddenly decide to admit to myself that the vague hope I have entertained all my life, that by coming to Tokyo I would bump into my father sooner or later, is laughable. Lamentable. Instead of setting me free, the truth makes me too depressed to play the guitar, so I fold my futon into a chair and switch on the TV, salvaged from the trash last week. This TV is a pile of crap. Its greens are mauves and its blues pink. I can find five channels, plus one in a blizzard. All the programmes are crap, too. I watch the governor of Tokyo announce that in the event of an earthquake all the blacks, Hispanics and Koreans will run amok, loot, rape and pillage. I change channel. A farmer explains how a pig gets fat by eating its own shit. I change channel. Tokyo Giants trounce Hiroshima Carp. I get the box of discount sushi from the fridge. I change channel. A memory game comes on where contestants are posed questions about tiny details in a film section they have just watched. I imagine a shadow crouching in the corner of my eye. It launches itself at me and I half-drop my dinner.

  ‘Gaaah!’

  A black cat lands at my feet. It yawns a mouth of hooks. Its tail is dunked in white. It has a tartan collar. ‘Cat,’ I blurt pointlessly, as my pulse tries to calm itself. It must have jumped on to my balcony from a ledge and entered through the gash in the mosquito netting. ‘Get lost!’ Cat is the coolest customer. I do the sudden stomp people do to intimidate animals, but Cat has seen it all before. Cat looks at my sushi and licks its lips. ‘Look,’ I say to it, ‘go and find a housewife with a freezer full of leftovers.’ Cat is too cool to reply. ‘One saucer of milk,’ I tell it, ‘then you go away.’ Cat downs it as I pour. More. ‘This is your last saucer, okay?’ As Cat laps more genteelly, I wonder when I started talking to animals. It watches me blow the fluff off the last of my sushi. So I end up eating a box of crackers while Cat chews on fresh yellowtail, octopus and cod roe.

  Leave Ueno station through the park entrance, go past the concert hall and museums, skirt around the fountain, and you come to a sort of tree shrubbery. Homeless people live here, in tents made of sky-blue plastic sheeting and wooden poles. The best tents even have doors. I guess Picture Lady lives there. She appeared at the claims counter just before my lunch break on Thursday. It was the hottest day this week. Tarmac was as soft as cooking chocolate. She wore a headscarf tied tight, a long skirt of no clear colour or pattern, and battered gym shoes. Forty, fifty, sixty years old – hard to tell beneath the weathering and engrained grime. Suga saw her coming, did his smirk, announced it was his lunch break, and slipped away to flagellate himself in the toilet. The homeless woman reminds me of the farming wives on Yakushima, but she’s more spaced out. Her eyes don’t focus properly. Her voice is cracked and hissed. ‘I lost ’em.’

  ‘What have you lost?’

  She mumbles to her feet. ‘Has anyone given ’em to you yet?’

  My hands reach for the claim pad. ‘What is it you lost?’

  She shoots a glance at me. ‘My pictures.’

  ‘You lost some pictures?’

  She takes an onion out of her pocket and unpeels the crispy brown skin. Her fingers are scabby and dark.

  I try again. ‘Did you lose the pictures on a train or in the station?’

  She keeps flinching. ‘I got the old ones back . . .’

  ‘It would help me if you could tell me a little more about—’

  She licks the onion. ‘But I ain’t got the new ones back.’

  ‘Were the pictures valuable?’

  She bites. It crunches.

  Mrs Sasaki appears from the side office, and nods at the picture lady. ‘Roasting weather we’re having, isn’t it?’

  Picture Lady talks through onion cud. ‘I need ’em to cover up the clocks.’

  ‘We don’t have your pictures today, I’m afraid. Maybe tomorrow you’ll come across them. Have you looked around Shinobazu pond?’

  Picture Lady scowls. ‘What would me pictures be doing there?’

  Mrs Sasaki shrugs. ‘Who knows? It’s a cool spot on a hot day.’

  She nods. ‘Who knows . . .’

  I watch her wander away. ‘Is she a regular customer?’

  Mrs Sasaki straightens up the desk. ‘We’re a part of her schedule. It costs nothing to be civil to her. Did you work out what her “pictures” are?’

  ‘Some sort of family albums, I figured.’

  ‘I took her literally at first, too.’ Mrs Sasaki
speaks carefully, the way she does. ‘But I think she’s talking about her memories.’ We watch her disappear in the shimmer. Cicadas wind up and wind down. ‘All we are is our memories.’

  The moon has moved. Anju sips her tea, calm again. I am between sleeping and waking. I am doing my best to remember our mother’s face. I think I remember a perfume she wore, but I can’t be sure. I feel Anju settle inside my sleeping curl. She is still thinking. ‘The last time we saw her was at Uncle Money’s in Kagoshima. The last time we left Yakushima.’

  ‘The secret beach birthday. Two years ago?’

  ‘Three. Two years ago was the rubber dinghy birthday.’

  ‘She left suddenly. She was staying all week, then she just wasn’t there.’

  ‘Want to know a secret?’

  I am awake again. ‘A real one?’

  ‘I’m not a little kid any more. ‘Course it’s a real one.’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘Wheatie told me never to tell anyone, not even you.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘When she left that day. Mum, I mean.’

  ‘You kept a secret for three years? I thought she left because she was ill.’

  Anju yawns, indifferent to what I think or thought.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I was sick that day. You were at soccer practice. I was doing homework on the downstairs table. Mum started making tem-pura.’ Anju’s voice has gone sort of limp. I prefer it when she blubs. ‘She dipped weird stuff into the batter.’

  ‘What weird stuff?’

  ‘Stuff you can’t eat. Her watch, a candle, a teabag, a light bulb. The light bulb popped when she put it in the oil and she laughed funny. Her ring. Then she arranged everything on a dish with miso leaves and put it in front of me.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said she was playing. I said, “You’ve been drinking.” She said, “It’s all Yakushima’s fault.” I asked her why she couldn’t play without drinking. She asked me why I didn’t like her cooking. She said to eat my dinner up like a good girl. I said, “I can’t eat those things.” So she got angry. You remember how scary she got on her visits sometimes? I can’t remember what she looks like but I remember that.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Auntie Money came and led her to the bedroom. I heard her.’ Anju swallowed. ‘She was crying.’

  ‘Mum was crying?’

  ‘Auntie Money came back and told me that if I told anyone what had happened, even you, a bad doctor might take Mum away.’ Anju frowns. ‘So I kind of made myself forget it. But not really.’

  An owl hoots.

  I must go to sleep.

  Anju rocks herself, slowly, slowly.

  A dog in the distance barks at something, real or remembered.

  ‘Don’t go to Kagoshima tomorrow, Eiji.’

  ‘I have to go. I’m in defence.’

  ‘Don’t go.’

  I don’t understand. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Go, then. I don’t care.’

  ‘It’s only two days.’

  Anju snaps at me. ‘You’re not the only one who can do grown-up things!’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Me to know and you to guess!’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘You’ll find out when you get back from your soccer game!’

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘I can’t hear you! You’re in Kagoshima!’

  ‘Tell me!’ I’m worried.

  Her voice turns spiteful. ‘You’ll see. You’ll see.’

  ‘Who cares what you do anyway?’

  ‘I saw the pearly snake this morning!’

  Now I know my sister is lying. The pearly snake is a stupid tale our grandmother tells to scare us. She says it has lived out in the Miyake storehouse since before she was born, and that it only ever appears to warn of a coming death. Anju and I stopped believing her ages ago, only our grandmother never noticed. I am offended that Anju thinks she can awe me into submission with the pearly snake. I listen to the March midnight bird trying to remember the words to its song. It is always losing track and starting again. Every year I re-remember this bird, but by the rainy season I forget it again. Much later, I try to make friends with my sister, but she is asleep, or pretending to be.

  Fujifilm smuggled three o’clock over the border without me noticing. Two more hours to dawn. This sticky web of a night is three-quarters spun. I am going to be exhausted all day at work. Mrs Sasaki warned me Saturday is busier, not quieter, than weekdays, because commuters are more careful with their baggage than weekend shoppers and Friday-nighters, and because a lot of people wait until Saturday before coming in to claim lost items. I guess the media people will be snooping around for follow-up stories about Mr Aoyama. Poor guy. Sudden and rude as a bullet through a drumskin, the telephone riiiiiiiiings. That noise drills me with guilt and dread. The telephone riiiiiiiiings. Weird. I only got my number last week. Nobody knows it. The telephone riiiiiiiiings. Suppose a pervert is out there, trawling for kicks at random? I answer, and before I know it I have a psycho in my shower. No way am I answering. The telephone riiiiiiiiings. Buntaro? Some kind of emergency? What kind of emergency? The telephone riiiiiiiiiings. Wait. Someone at Osugi and Bosugi knows my number – suppose a co-worker of Akiko Kato read my letter before she shredded it, and felt an unaccountable empathy with my plight? She contacts my father, who has to wait until his wife is asleep before daring to contact me. He is whispering coarsely, fiercely, in a closed-off part of his house. ‘Answer!’ The telephone riiiiiiiiings. I have to decide now. No. Let it die. Answer it! I dive off my futon, trap my foot in a folding peg-frame, stub my toe on my guitar case and lunge for the receiver. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Never fear-o, ’tis a Nero!’ A singing man.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Never fear-o, ’tis a Nero.’ A mildly irritated man.

  ‘Yes, I thought you said that.’

  ‘I never wrote that stupid jingle!’ A buttered voice.

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘Look here, young man – you delivered some fliers to our office, which promise that the first two hundred people to phone up off-peak and sing “Never fear-o, ’tis a Nero!” are entitled to one free medium-size pizza of their choice. That is what I just did. I’ll plump for my regular Kamikaze: mozzarella crust, banana, quail’s eggs, scallops, treble chilli, octopus ink. Don’t chop the chilli. I like to suck them. Helps me concentrate. So – am I one of the first two hundred or am I not?’

  ‘Is this a joke?’

  ‘It had better not be. All-night overtime makes me ravenous.’

  ‘I think you misdialled.’

  ‘Impossible. This is Nero’s Pizzeria, right?’

  ‘Wrong.’

  ‘Are you quite sure?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘So I called a private residence after three in the morning?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I am so, so dreadfully sorry. I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Not to worry. I have insomnia tonight, anyway.’

  ‘But I was so patronizing! I thought you were a numbskull pizza boy.’

  ‘No problem, really. But you have one weird taste in pizzas.’

  He chuckles with devious pride. He is older than I thought. ‘I invented it. At Nero’s they nickname it the Kamikaze – I heard the telephone girl tell the chef. The secret is the banana. It glues all the other tastes together. Anyway, I mustn’t take up any more of your time. Once more – my sincerest apologies. What I did is inexcusable. Inexcusable.’ He hangs up.

  I wake up alone. A window of summer stars melted to nearly nothing. Anju’s futon is a discarded pile. So Anju. Could she be out on the roof? I slide the mosquito net across. ‘Anju? Anju!’ The wind sifts the bamboo, and the frogs start up. Fine. She wants to sulk, let her. Fifteen minutes later, I am dressed, breakfasted and walking down the track to Anbo harb
our with my sports bag and my new baseball cap which Anju bought me with her pocket money from Uncle Tarmac. I catch sight of the Kagoshima ferry lit up like a starship on its launch pad and feel a vhirrr of excitement. This day is finally here. I am leaving for Kagoshima, on my own, and I refuse to let my stupid jealous sister make me feel guilty about leaving her for one night. I refuse. How can I even be sure the stuff she said last night about our mother was true? She’s been acting weird lately. A meteor scratches the dark purple. The dark purple unscratches the meteor. And then a fantastic idea comes to me. It is the greatest idea of my life. I am going to train, train, and train, and become such a brilliant soccer player that I will play for Japan on my twentieth birthday against Brazil in the World Cup final. Japan will be eight–nil down in the sixtieth minute, then I will be called on as a substitute and score three hat tricks by the end of injury time. I will be in newspapers and on TV all over the world. Our mother is so proud that she gives up drinking, but better still our father sees me, recognizes me, and drives to the airport to meet the team jet. Of course, Anju is waiting there too, and our mother, and we are reunited with the world watching. How perfect. How obvious. I am burning with genius and hope. A light is on in Anbo, and crossing the hanging bridge I see a flash. A salmon leaps.

  Where the river widens into an estuary, the valley is steep and narrow. Wheatie and the Anbo old people call it the Neck. It is the most haunted place, but I’m not afraid. I half-fear and half-hope Anju will ambush me. The faces between the pine trees are not really there. Where the water floods the track in the rainy season, a tori gate marks the beginning of the path that winds up the hill to the shrine of the thunder god. Wheatie warns us not to play there. She says that apart from the Jomon cedars themselves, the thunder god is the oldest living thing on Yakushima. Show any disrespect to him, and the next time you cross water a tsunami will come and drown you. Anju wanted to ask if that was what happened to our grandfather, our mother’s father, but I made her promise not to. Mrs Oki told a kid in our class that he drowned face down in a ditch, drunk. Anyway, the villagers never bother the thunder god with small-fry favours like exams, money or weddings – they go to Father Kakimoto’s new temple next to the bank for that. But for babies, and blessings for fishing boats, solace for dead relatives, they climb the steps to the shrine of the thunder god. Always alone.