Around me the room was emerging slowly from the darkness. On the futon I sat very still, my heart thudding, and waited for the noises outside to become recognizable. But every time I thought I’d got the tail of it between my fingers it faded under the racket of the storm. Shadows of leaves carried by the wind passed the window, and sitting in the semi-dark like that I began to imagine all manner of things: I hallucinated that the house was a little raft in the dark, juggled on the waves, that outside my room the city was gone, blasted away in an atomic attack.
The sound again. What was it? I turned to the door. My first thought was of the cats in the garden. I’d seen their kittens sometimes, clinging like monkeys to the mosquito screens, screaming into our rooms like baby birds. Maybe a kitten was in one of the other rooms, crawling froglike up a screen. Or maybe it was…
‘ Jason? ’ I whispered, sitting up straight, my skin crawling. This time it was louder, an odd, ululating sound lisping round the house. I tipped on to my hands and knees and crawled to the door, opened it a little way, very silently, trying to take its weight so it didn’t shriek on the runners. I peered out. Several of the shutters had been pulled back and opposite Jason’s room a window stood open, as if he’d stopped there after our argument just long enough to smoke a cigarette. Outside, the garden was rearing and thrashing in the wind – branches had broken, and near the window a Lawson’s Station carrier-bag, brought on the wind and caught in a tree, shifted and hissed and crackled, throwing its eerie shadow skittering round the corridor, up the walls and across the tatami matting.
But the storm wasn’t what had woken me. The more I looked at the familiar passageway, the more I knew something was wrong. It was something about the light. Usually it wasn’t this dark. Usually we left the overhead lamps on at night, but now the light coming under the doors from the Mickey Rourke poster was the only source of luminance, and instead of a row of lightbulbs, I could see jagged glitters of broken glass. I blinked a few times, my thoughts moving curiously slowly and calmly, allowing time for this to sink in. The lightbulbs in the corridor had been smashed in their fittings, just as if a giant hand had reached up and pinched them out.
Someone’s in the house, I thought, still strangely calm. There’s someone else in the house. I took a breath and stepped silently into the corridor. All the doors on this side of the house were closed – even the kitchen door. We usually left it open, in case someone was hungry or thirsty in the night. The toilet door, too, was shut tight, eerie in its blankness. I took a few steps up the corridor, stepping over the broken glass, trying to ignore the howling wind, trying to concentrate on the noise. It was coming from the third section of the corridor, where the gallery bent sideways and Jason’s room lay. As I stood there, breathing carefully, the sound began to separate itself, detaching minutely from the wind, and when at last I recognized it my pulse leaped. It was the soft sound of someone whimpering in pain.
I stepped sideways and opened one of the windows a crack. Another noise was coming from the same part of the house: an odd, furtive rummaging, as if every rat in the house had converged on one room. The trees bent and whipped, but from here I had a view directly across the garden to the far corridor. When my eyes got used to the tree shadows bouncing off the glass, what I saw made me drop to a crouch, gripping the frame with trembling fingers, peering cautiously over the sill.
Jason’s door was open. In the half-light I could see a shape in his room: a hideous, stooped shape, more a shadow than anything. Like a hyena crouching over a meal, intent on disjointing its prize, unnaturally crabbed, as if it had dropped straight down on to its prey from the ceiling. All the hairs went up on my skin at once. The Nurse. The Nurse was in the house… And then I saw another figure in the room, standing slightly to one side, half bent over as if he was looking at something on the floor. He was in shadows too, his back to me, but something about the shape of his shoulders told me that I was looking at the man who had sworn his allegiance to Fuyuki earlier that evening: the chimpira.
I blinked a few times, thinking in a surreal, fevered way: What is this? Why are they here? Is it a joke? I straightened a little, and now I could see the top of Jason’s head and shoulders: he was face down, prone, pinioned to the ground by the chimpira, whose foot was planted directly on the back of his head. Just then the Nurse shifted a little, and settled herself in a sitting position, her big, muscular knees in the black nylons parted wide and high either side of her shoulders, her arms straight down between them. That thin, awful sound I’d heard was Jason pleading, struggling to get free. She wasn’t listening to him – she was going about her business with unnerving concentration, her shoulders hunched, rocking herself calmly back and forth. Her hands, which were just below the frame of my vision, operated in small, controlled motions, as if she was performing a complex and delicate operation. I don’t know how I knew, but I had a moment’s rare clarity: You’re watching a rape. She’s raping him.
My trance fractured. A sweat broke out across my back and I stood up, opening my mouth to speak. As if she had smelt me on the wind, the Nurse looked up. She paused. Then her huge shoulders rose, the polished wig swayed round her great angular head, which she held back a little, as if she was rising from an interrupted meal. I froze: it was as if the whole world was a telescope, containing me at one end, the Nurse at the other. Even now I wonder how I must have looked to her, how much she saw: a moving shadow, a pair of eyes glinting in an unlit window at the far, lonely end of the house.
At that moment the wind made a ferocious lap of the garden, screaming like a jet engine, filling the house with noise. The Nurse tilted her head and spoke in a low voice to the chimpira, who immediately became rigid. Slowly he straightened and turned to stare down the long corridor to where I stood. Then he pulled back his shoulders and flexed his hands. He began to amble casually towards me.
I lurched away from the window and bolted for my room, slamming the door and locking it, tripping and scuttling backwards like a crab, stumbling over the books and papers in the dark, banging into things blindly. I stood, pressed against the wall, staring at the door, my chest as tight as if I’d been thumped in the ribs. Jason, I thought, feverishly. Jason, they’ve come back to get you. What games have you been playing with her?
At first no one came. Minutes seemed to pass – time when they could have been doing anything to Jason, time when I thought I should open the door, get to the phone, call the police. Then, just as I thought the chimpira wasn’t coming, that he and the Nurse must have left the house in silence, I distinctly heard, through the wind, his footstep creak in the corridor outside.
I shot to the side window, scrabbling crazily at the edges of the mosquito screen, breaking my nails. One of the catches gave. I flung away the screen, threw open the window and looked down. About four feet below, an air-conditioning unit that might hold my weight stuck out from the neighbouring building. From there it was another long drop into the tiny space between the buildings. I turned and stared at the door. The footsteps had stopped and, in the awful silence, the chimpira muttered something under his breath. Then a kick splintered the flimsy door. I heard him grab the frame, getting a hold so he could punch his foot straight through.
I scrambled on to the windowsill. I had time to see his arm splinter through the hole, his disembodied hand in the lavender suit groping in the dark for the doorlock, then I pushed myself out, landing noisily, the air-conditioner shuddering under my weight, something ripping my foot. I dropped into a clumsy squat, scrambled on to my stomach, dangling my legs out into the darkness, the wind whipping my pyjamas around me. I pushed away and dropped straight to the ground with a soft thud, rocking forward a little so that my face slammed against the plastic weatherboarding on the neighbouring house with a painful thuck.
Another splintering sound came from above – the noise of something metallic – a screw or a hinge, maybe, ricocheting round the room. I hauled in a breath, sprang to my feet and flew out into the alley, diving into a gap between two buildings opposite where I crouched, the blood thundering in my veins. After a moment or two I dared to shuffle forward, my hands on the two buildings, and peer up at the house in mute horror.
The chimpira was in my room. Light coming from the corridor behind amplified every detail of him, as if through a magnifying-glass: individual hairs, the light shade swaying above his head. I pulled the collar of my pyjama jacket over my mouth, holding it there with both clenched fists, my teeth chattering, staring at him with eyes as hard and round as if I’d had adrenaline dropped into them. Would he guess how I’d escaped? Would he see me?
He hesitated, then his head appeared. I shrank back into the gap. He took long, patient minutes to study the drop from the window. When at last he pulled his head inside, his shadow wavered for a moment, then he disappeared from view, almost in slow motion, leaving the room blank save for the swinging lightbulb. I started to breathe again.
You can be as brave and confident as you like, you can convince yourself that you’re invulnerable, that you know what you’re dealing with. You think that it won’t ever really get too serious – that there’ll be some kind of a warning before it goes that far, danger music, maybe, playing offstage, the way you get in films. But it seems to me that disasters aren’t like that. Disasters are life’s great ambushers: they have a way of jumping on you when your eyes are fixed on something else.
The Nurse and the chimpira stayed in our house for over an hour. I watched them roaming through the corridors, slamming into rooms, throwing the shutters off their hinges. Glass smashed and doors were ripped away. They overturned furniture and ripped the telephone out of the wall. And all the time I sat squashed and frozen between the buildings, my pyjama top pulled up over my mouth, all I could think was: Shi Chongming. You shouldn’t have let me get into this. You shouldn’t have let me get into things so dangerous. Because this was more, much more, than I had ever bargained for.