‘You seem very different.’ Shi Chongming was studying me from where he sat on the steamer chair. His coat was wrapped tightly round him, his white hair had been brushed and maybe oiled so that it lay long and straight over his ears, and the pink skin was showing through, like the skin of an albino rat. ‘You’re shivering.’
I looked down at my hands. He was right. They were shaking. That was from a lack of food. Yesterday morning, as the sun was coming up, Jason and I had made breakfast from the convenience-store snacks. And that was the last thing I could remember eating in almost thirty hours.
‘I think you’ve changed.’
‘Yes,’ I said. I had allowed a day and a half to go by, and it was only when he’d called me that I mentioned I’d been at Fuyuki’s. Shi Chongming had wanted to come over straight away – he was ‘astonished’, ‘disappointed’ that I hadn’t called earlier. I couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t describe what he couldn’t see – that in just one day something hard and sweet and old had spread out under my ribs, like a kiss, and that somehow things that had once seemed urgent didn’t sting any more. ‘Yes,’ I said quietly. ‘I suppose I have.’
He waited as if he expected me to say something else. Then, when he saw I wasn’t going to, he sighed. He opened his hands and looked round the garden. ‘It’s beautiful here,’ he said. ‘ Niwa, they call the garden, the pure place. Not like your corruptible Edens in the West. To the Japanese a garden is the place where harmony reigns. A perfect beauty.’
I looked at the garden. It had changed since I was last out here. The subtle varnish of autumn was on it: the maple was a deep butterscotch colour and the ginkgo had dropped some of its leaves. The tangled undergrowth was bare, like a collection of dried bird bones. But I could see what he meant. There was something beautiful about it. Maybe, I thought, you have to work to experience beauty. ‘I suppose it is rather.’
‘You suppose it is rather what? Rather beautiful?’
I looked carefully at the long line of white Hansel-and-Gretel stones leading past the do-not-go-here stone and into the undergrowth. ‘Yes. That is what I mean. It’s very beautiful.’
He tapped his fingers on the chair arm and smiled thoughtfully at me. ‘You can see a beauty in this country that you’re living in? At last?’
‘Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?’ I said. ‘Aren’t you supposed to adjust?’
Shi Chongming made a small sound of amusement in his throat. ‘Ah, yes. I see you are suddenly very, very wise.’
I adjusted the coat across my legs, moving subtly on the chair. I hadn’t bathed, and the smallest movement released the trapped smell of Jason. Under my coat I wore a black camisole I’d bought weeks ago in Omotesando. Tight-fitting and ribbed with tiny silk flowers stitched on the neckline, it stretched all the way down over my stomach, clinging tightly to my hips. I still hadn’t had the courage to show Jason my wounds, and he hadn’t pushed me. He was so confident that one day I’d reveal everything. He said I should realize that for every person on the planet there was another who would understand them perfectly. It was like being two pieces in a huge metaphysical jigsaw puzzle.
‘Why didn’t you call me?’ Shi Chongming said.
‘What?’
‘Why didn’t you call me?’
I fumbled out a cigarette and lit it, blowing the smoke up into the cloudless sky. ‘I – I don’t know. I’m not sure.’
‘When you were at Fuyuki’s did you see anything?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not.’
He sat forward and lowered his voice. ‘You did? You saw something?’
‘Only a glimpse.’
‘A glimpse of what?’
‘I’m not certain – a sort of glass box.’
‘A tank, you mean?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ I blew a lungful of smoke into the thin air. The clouds, I noticed, were reflected in the windows of the gallery. Jason was asleep in my room, lying on his back on the futon. I could see the layout of his body in my head, I could hold all the details of it – the way his arm would be curled across his chest, the sound his breath would make coming in and out of his nose.
‘What about at a zoo?’
I looked sideways at him. ‘A zoo?’
‘Yes,’ Shi Chongming said. ‘Have you seen anything like it at a zoo? I mean, the sort of tank that could be climate-controlled, maybe.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Were there gauges? The sort that would monitor the air inside? Or thermometers, humidity monitors?’
‘I don’t know. It was…’
‘Yes?’ Shi Chongming was sitting forward in his seat, looking at me intently. ‘It was what? You said you saw something in the tank.’
I blinked at him. He was wrong. I hadn’t said that.
‘Maybe something…’ he held out his hands to represent something the size of a small cat ‘… about this big.’
‘No. I didn’t see anything.’
Shi Chongming closed his mouth tightly and looked at me for a long time, his face perfectly still. I could see sweat breaking out on his forehead. Then he pulled a handkerchief from his coat and quickly mopped his face. ‘Yes,’ he said, returning the handkerchief and sitting back in his seat with a long exhalation. ‘I see you’ve changed your mind. Haven’t you?’
I tapped the ash from my cigarette and frowned at him.
‘I have invested an enormous amount of time in you and now you’ve changed your mind.’
He left by the big gates, and when he’d gone I went upstairs. The Russians were wandering around the house, cooking and squabbling, and while I’d been in the garden Jason had been to the One Stop Best Friend Bento Bar and brought back rice, fish and pickled daikon. He’d put it all on the dresser with a bottle of plum liquor and two beautiful pale-violet glasses, and was lying on the futon when I came in. I locked the door behind me and walked straight past the food to the futon, pulling off my coat as I went.
‘So? Who was the old guy?’
I knelt astride Jason, facing him. I wasn’t wearing knickers, just the camisole. He pushed my knees further apart and ran his hands up my legs. We both looked down at the long expanse of cool flesh he was unpeeling. It seemed to me dense, very unmodern flesh. I still found it amazing that Jason liked it so much.
‘Who was the guy in the garden?’
‘Something to do with my university.’
‘He was looking at you like you were saying the most incredible thing in the world.’
‘Not really,’ I murmured. ‘We were talking about his research. You wouldn’t call it incredible at all.’
‘Good. I don’t like you saying incredible things to anyone else. You spend too much time with him.’
‘Too much time?’
‘Yes.’ He flipped out his palm, holding it up to me. ‘See?’
‘See what?’
The dim light glinted on his broken nails as he dabbled his fingertips in his palm, slowly at first: tiny, tiny movements. I stared at his fingers, transfixed. They lifted from his palm, flew up swiftly into the air, coming to rest at eye-level, flapping slowly like a bird’s wings, yawing and dipping on an air current. It was Shi Chongming’s magic crane. The crane of the past.
‘You were watching us,’ I said, my eyes fixed on his hand. ‘Last time.’
He smiled and made the bird do a slow, graceful dive. It twisted elegantly, swooped back up again, dived. He dipped and rolled his hand, humming under his breath. Suddenly it turned and came at me, his fingers flying forward, the bird-hand flapping crazily at my face. I flinched away, half up to my feet, breathing fast.
‘Don’t do that!’ I said. ‘Don’t.’
He was laughing. He sat up and grabbed my wrists, pulling me back towards him. ‘Did you like that?’
‘You’re teasing me.’
‘Teasing you? No. Not teasing you. I wouldn’t tease you. I know what it’s like to be searching.’
‘No.’ I resisted his pull. ‘I don’t understand you.’
He laughed. ‘You won’t get anywhere.’ He pulled me gently backwards, dropping his head back on to the futon, putting my hands to his mouth: licking my palm, chewing gently at my flesh. ‘You won’t get anywhere pretending to me.’
I watched his teeth, clean and white, fascinated by the healthy glint of dentine and red membrane. ‘I’m not pretending,’ I murmured vaguely.
‘You almost forgot, didn’t you?’ He slid his hands between my thighs, tangling his fingers in my pubic hair, his eyes on my face. I let my fingers stay on his lips as he spoke. ‘You almost forgot that I only have to look at you and I know everything, everything that goes on inside your head.’