Authors: Mo Hayder
‘Yes.’
‘Make me a promise, will you? Promise me that one day I’ll get a letter from you. A nice letter, telling me how happy you are. Written by you, safe in another country—’ She broke off and studied my reaction. ‘Promise?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Yes,’ she said, still staring at me intently, as if she was reading my mind. ‘I think you promise.’ She released the money and held open the door for me. ‘Now go on. Get out. Get your coat and leave. And, Grey …’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t take the glass lift. It’s better you use the one at the back.’
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A
52
Nanking, 20 December 1937
The fire didn’t take long to die, its furious dragon-like glow drifting away across the sky. Almost immediately the snow came back, angelic and forgiving, drifting drowsily past me as I stood bedraggled and weak outside the remains of Liu Runde’s house, a handkerchief to my mouth, tears in my eyes. The fire had eaten everything in its path, leaving only smouldering rubble, a terrible skeleton of blackened timbers. Now it was finished the inferno had dropped with a whimper, dwindling to nothing but a small steady flame, very straight and controlled, on the floor in the centre of the building.
The alley was silent. I was the only soul who had come to look at these charred remains. Maybe Shujin and I are the only two souls left in Nanking.
The scent of kerosene lingered, the yanwangye must have doused the house before he torched it, but there was the other smell too - the smell that had been lingering in our alley, tantalizing me all these days, the smell that I now recognized with a sinking heart. I wiped the tears from my face and picked my way round to the side of the house. The Lius must still be in there, I thought. If they had managed to escape we would know - they would have come straight to our house. They must have been trapped inside: the yanwangye would have made sure of it.
A breath of smoke floated across the house, obscuring it for a short time. When it cleared I saw them. Two objects, lined up like
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blackened tree-trunks after a forest fire, their human shapes melted down so that they had no recognizable angles, only the charred silhouettes of hooded figures. They were upright, huddled in the little vestibule behind the back door as if they’d been trying to escape. One was large, one small. I didn’t have to look too closely to know it was Liu and his son. I recognized the buttons on the burned zhongshan jacket. Liu’s wife wouldn’t be there she would have been taken from the house for the yanwangye’s own purposes.
I pushed the handkerchief into my nostrils and stepped forward for a closer look. The smell was stronger, unbearable for the craving it started in me. Under the bodies puddles of fat had collected, already growing a thin white skin on the surface where it was cooling, like the fat I sometimes see cooling in the wok when Shujin has been preparing meat. I pushed the handkerchief harder into my nose and knew I would, from that moment on, be eternally afraid of one thing: I knew I would always be afraid of what I am eating. Swallowing will never again be comfortable for me.
Now, only an hour later, here I sit and shiver on the bed, clutching in one hand my pen, and in the other all I dared take of Liu Runde: a scrap of his hair, which came crisp away in my hand when I bent to touch his cooling body. It was still so hot that it burned all the way through my glove and left a scorchmark on my palm. And yet curiously the hair remains intact - eerily perfect.
I put a shaky hand to my head, my whole body trembling. ‘What is it?’ whispers Shujin, but I cannot answer because I am recalling, time and time again, the smell of Liu and his son burning. From nowhere a picture comes to me of a Japanese officer’s face, grinning dimly by the firelight in the camp at night. The officer’s face is greasy from army-issue amphetamines and some nameless meat. I think about the flesh taken from the little girl next to the factory. As a trophy, I’d imagined, or are there other reasons to remove human flesh? But the Imperial Army is well fed - fed and muscled and nourished. They’ve no reason to peck and scavenge like the bearded vultures of the Gobi. And something
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else is on my mind - something about the medicine bottles in the silk factory …
Enough. For now it’s enough to ponder. Here I sit, my journal on my knee, Shujin watching me wordlessly with the eyes that blame me for everything. The time has come. The time has come to tell her what will happen next.
‘Shujin.’ I finished the entry and set down the quill, pushed aside the ink stone and crawled across the bed to where she sat. Her face was white and expressionless, the candlelight flickering on it. She hadn’t asked about old Liu, but I am sure she knew from my face, and from the smell of him on my clothes. I knelt facing her, only a few inches away, my hands on my knees. ‘Shujin?’ Tentatively I put my hand to her hair - it was as rough, as heavy as bark against my palm.
She didn’t recoil. She met my eyes steadily. ‘What do you want to say to me, Chongming?’
want to say that I love you, I want to talk to you the way men talk to their wives in Europe. I want to say I’m sorry. I want to take the hands of the dock and wind them backwards.p>
‘Please don’t look at me like that.’ She tried to move my hand away. ‘What do you want to say?’
‘I …’
‘Yes?’
I sighed and dropped my hand, lowering my eyes. ‘Shujin.’ My voice was hushed. ‘Shujin. You were right. We should have left Nanking a long time ago. I am sorry.’
‘I see.’
‘And …’ I hesitated ‘… and I think that now we should do our best. We should try to escape.’
She looked at me steadily, and this time I could hide nothing. I stood undisguised, desperate and apologetic, letting her read every ounce of fear in my eyes. Eventually she closed her mouth and reached across the bed, took the candle and snuffed it out. ‘Good,’ she said evenly, putting her hand on mine. ‘Thank you, Chongming, thank you.’ She opened the curtains and swung her legs off the bed. ‘I’ll make guoba and noodles. We’ll eat some now. Then I’ll pack for the journey.’
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My heart is heavy. She has forgiven me. And yet I am afraid, mortally afraid, that this will be the last time I write in my journal. I am afraid that I am her murderer. What hope have we got? May the gods protect us. May the gods protect us.
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53
Outside it was freezing. The snow was coming fast now, almost a blizzard, and in the short time I’d been in the club it had settled on the pavement, on the roofs of parked cars. I stood in the lee of the building, huddled as close to the lift doors as I could, and peered up and down the street. I could see only about twenty yards into the swirling flakes, but I could tell that the street was unusually quiet. There was no one on the pavements, no cars on the street, only the snow-covered form of the dead crow in the gutter. It was just as if Mama Strawberry was right - as if something bad was creeping through Tokyo.
I fumbled out the money and counted it. My hands were trembling and it took me two goes to get it right, and even then I thought I must be wrong. I stood for a moment, staring down at what was in my hands. It wasn’t the week’s wages I’d expected. Strawberry had given me three hundred thousand yen, five times what she owed me. I looked up fifty floors through the swirling snow, to the club, to where Marilyn swung. I wondered about Strawberry, in her replica Monroe dresses, spending her life among young waiters and gangsters. I realized that I knew absolutely nothing about her. She had a dead mother and a dead husband, but apart from that she could have been all alone in the world, for all I knew. I had done nothing to make her like me. Maybe you’re never really aware of the ones who are looking out for you until they’re gone.
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At the crossroads a car went by cautiously, catching the snow in its headlights, making it appear to swirl faster. I shrank back against the wall, pulling up my collar, wrapping the thin coat tightly round me, shivering. What had Strawberry meant, don’t leave in the glass lift? Did she really think Fuyuki’s men were prowling the streets? The car disappeared behind the buildings and the street was quiet again. I peered out. It was important to think slowly. To think in stages. My passport, all my books and notes were in the alley next to the house. I couldn’t call Jason on the phone - the Nurse had ripped out the wires. I had to go back to the house. Just once.
I hurriedly counted out Strawberry’s money, divided it between my two coat pockets, a hundred and fifty thousand yen in both rolls. Then I pushed my hands into my pockets, and began to walk. 1 ducked into back-streets to keep from the main routes and found myself moving through a magical world - the snow falling silently on the air-conditioner units, piling on the lacquered bento boxes stacked outside back doors waiting to be collected by the takeaway drivers. I wasn’t dressed properly: my coat was too thin and my stilettos left funny exclamation-mark tracks behind me. I’d never walked in the snow in high heels before.
I went quietly, cutting over the crossing near the Hanazono shrine, with its ghostly red lanterns, and back into the alleys again. I passed lighted windows, steaming heating vents. I heard television sets and conversations, but in all the time I walked I only saw one or two other people. Tokyo seemed to have shut down its doors. Someone in this city, I thought, someone behind one of these doors, had the thing I was searching for. Something not very big. Small enough to fit into a glass tank. Flesh. But not an entire body. So, a piece of a body, maybe? Where would someone hide a piece of flesh? And why? Why would someone steal it? A line from a long-ago book came back to me, Robert Louis Stevenson maybe: The body-snatcher, far from being repelled by natural respect, was attracted by the ease and safety of the task …’
I traced an arc across Takadanobaba so that I arrived back at the house via a small passageway between two apartment
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buildings. I stopped, half hidden behind a Calpis drinks machine, its blue light flickering spectrally, and cautiously put my head round the corner. The alley was deserted. The snow fell silently, lit by the lanterns outside the ramen restaurant. On my left rose the house, dark and cold, blotting out the sky. I’d never seen it from this angle - it seemed even bigger than I remembered, monolithic, its curved, pantiled roof almost monstrous. I saw I had left the curtains open in my bedroom and I thought of my futon all laid out in the silence, my painting of Tokyo on the wall, the silent image of Jason and me standing under the bead galaxies.
I dug in my pocket for the keys. I checked once over my shoulder, then slipped silently into the alley, staying close to the buildings. I stopped at the cleft between the two houses and peered over the air-conditioner. My holdall was still there, tucked in the dark, snow piling on it. I continued along the edge of the house, under my window. Ten yards away from the corner, something made me stop. I looked down at my feet.
I was standing in a gap in the snow, a long black groove of wet Tarmac. I blinked at it. Why had instinct halted me here? Then I saw, of course, it was a tyre track. I was standing in the greyed out shadow left by a car, recently parked. Adrenaline bolted through my veins. The print stretched out all round me. The car must have sat there for a long time because the outline was clear, and there was a pile of soggy cigarette ends exactly where the driver’s window would have been, as if they’d been waiting for something. I backed hastily into the shadows of the house, my blood pressure spiking. The tyre tracks led straight ahead, all the way to Waseda Street, where I could make out one or two cars passing as usual, silent, muffled by the snow. The rest of the alley was deserted. I let out a nervy breath, and glanced up at the windows in the tumbledown old shacks, some lit yellow, shapes moving in them. Everything was as normal. This doesn’t mean anything … I told myself, licking my sore lips, and staring at the car print. It means nothing. People were always parking in alleys, privacy was so difficult to find in Tokyo.
I moved on cautiously, avoiding the car shadow, as if it might be a trick trap-door, and keeping close to the house, my shoulders
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brushing the snow from the security grilles on the ground floor. At the corner I leaned round and peered at the front door. It was closed, as if it hadn’t moved since I’d left, a snowdrift already piled up against it, perfect and downy. I glanced once more up the alley. Although it was deserted I was trembling as I stepped forward and hastily fumbled my key into the lock. |
Jason’s TV was on. A flickering blue light was coming from under his door, but the bulb on the landing had been shattered by the Nurse and the house was unusually dark. I climbed the steps slowly, jumpily, all the time imagining something shadowy and rapid hurtling down the corridor towards me. At the top I stood in the dim light, breathing hard, the memories of last night like shadows racing away from me along the walls. The house was silent. Not a creak of floor or a breath. Even the usual sound of the trees rustling in the garden was muffled by the snow.
My teeth chattering now, I went to Jason’s room. I could hear him breathing inside the wardrobe, a congested, bloody sound that quickened when I pulled back the door. ‘Jason?’ I whispered. The room was freezing and there was an unpleasant organic smell in the air, like animal dung. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Yeah.’ I could hear him shifting painfully in the wardrobe. ‘Did you speak to someone?’
‘They’re on their way,’ I hissed, scrambling over the dressing table and dropping silently to the floor. ‘But you can’t wait, Jason, you’ve got to get out now. The Nurse is coming back.’ I stood next to the wardrobe, put my hand on the door. ‘Come on, I’m going to help you downstairs and—’
‘What’re you doing? What the fu— Stay back! Stay away from the wardrobe.’
‘Jason! You’ve got to get out now—’