He searched the box, the bed, the floor, but it wasn’t there. He could barely believe the disappointment and depression that overtook him. The piece’s absence seemed to be telling him something, that he had no place here, that he didn’t belong, that he barely existed, that his existence was a blank. This sleazy, crummy place and situation he inhabited was just a hole in the map. Then he realized that the significance must be quite other. The piece’s absence surely could not be accidental.
He was tempted to throw the whole puzzle up in the air, to reduce London to fragments, then put it back in its box. But instead he held himself in check and sat silently and patiently and more than a little dispiritedly, waiting for what he knew would come. Her timing wasn’t bad. He’d only been sitting there for three-quarters of an hour. He had worked more quickly than she’d expected.
And then the knock; cautious, feminine (half-Japanese?), and he opened the door, knowing it would be her, and she stood smiling at him and held out her closed hand. She unfurled her fingers to reveal the jigsaw piece cupped in her pale, flat palm.
“I thought you might need this,” she said.
“Yeah. I’d be lost without it. What if I’d decided not to do the jigsaw?”
“Then you might still be pleased to see me.”
He reached out to take the piece of jigsaw but she closed her hand and withdrew it. She entered the room and he was so surprised and pleased by her arrival that he didn’t think to be apologetic for his surroundings. She glanced around, interested but uncritical, and then he did feel the need to apologize, or at least explain.
“You were right,” she said. “It is a slum.”
“Yeah, well, if I’d known you were coming I’d have had the decorators in.”
“You’re just passing through,” she said, quoting him back to himself.
“That’s right,” he said.
“Working away from home.”
“Yeah.”
“And what kind of work do you do exactly, Mick?”
It was a difficult question, one he didn’t welcome, but if she was so determined to know how he lived, Mick had no intention of deceiving her. Patiently and not untruthfully he said, “I do security, protection, debt-collecting, bouncer work. It’s not that exciting.”
“You’re a bad guy?”
“Not that bad.”
“You’re a crook?”
“Well, the judge said I was a petty criminal, which I thought was a bit unnecessary. Obviously I was a criminal otherwise I wouldn’t have been in court, but petty, I mean, there was no need to be hurtful, was there?”
She smiled, sure that there was at least some truth in what he was saying, but sure too that his way of telling it hid more than it revealed.
“And how are your reunions going?” she asked.
“OK,” he said.
“I thought maybe you’d be out celebrating with your old friends.”
“No, you didn’t,” he said.
“You’re right,” she agreed. “I didn’t. I thought you’d be home.”
“This isn’t home,” he insisted. “This is how I live in London, but it’s not my real life.”
“I know. Your real life’s in Sheffield,” she said. “You probably have a mansion there, and a doting wife and two lovely children and a dog and a pony.”
“Got it in one,” he said.
She smiled. “Married?” she asked.
“No. I’ve got a girlfriend.”
“Is it serious?”
“What is this?”
“Just a question.”
“Yes, it’s serious. I take these things seriously.”
“And are you faithful to her?”
There was no simple answer to that question and in the time it took him to come up with a complex one she drew her own conclusions.
“Tell me, Mick, have you ever slept with a foreign woman?”
“No,” he said. “Have you ever slept with a Sheffielder?”
“No,” she said.
“I don’t blame you. They’re overrated.”
She liked that. She liked self-deprecation, especially in someone who looked like a bad guy.
Mick asked, “Which half of you is Japanese?”
Playing it straight she replied, “My father. My mother comes from Streatham. Like me. My father’s an artist. He teaches art. He was a sort of performance artist. He was famous for about three months in the seventies. He’ll tell you he’s a footnote in art history. The bigger the history, the bigger the footnote.”
“Yeah?” said Mick. The idea of having a father who was an artist seemed at least as strange as having a father who was Japanese.
“His best-known work,” Judy continued, “was sending three hundred anonymous love letters to women all over London, women he’d never met, complete strangers whose names he’d got out of the telephone directory, telling them that he was their secret admirer and too shy to speak to them. But if they’d meet him under the clock at Waterloo Station at seven PM on a specified Friday he’d reveal himself. When the women got to Waterloo on the appointed day they found a dozen Japanese men, heads shaved, their bodies painted grey, naked except for loin-cloths, singing, ‘I’m in the mood for love’.”
“How many women turned up?”
“A lot. There were several arrests.”
“Yeah?” said Mick.
“The newspapers said it was a piece of art commemorating the bombing of Hiroshima, but that was only partly true. My father was born in August 1945, the same month the allies dropped the bomb, but he was a long way from Hiroshima. His parents were in a transit camp in California. That’s where he was born.”
“So he’s really a Califomian.”
“No, he’s really, really Japanese. Like I’m really a Londoner.”
“Why did you send me the jigsaw?”
“Because I wanted you to have something to do in the evenings.”
“Why did you bring the missing piece? Why are you here now?”
“Because I wanted you to have something else to do in the evenings. I came because I wanted to sleep with you.”
“That’s nice,” he said thoughtfully. “But I don’t think I can.”
“Because of your serious girlfriend?”
He thought about explaining the whole damn thing, the rape, the nature of his reunions, how difficult it was to think about having sex with anybody while ever his head was full of imaginary pictures of Gabby being gang-banged by six chinless wonders. But he couldn’t. He said, “The landlady doesn’t allow strange women in the rooms.”
She said, “That’s the worst excuse I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s the best I’ve got.”
She sprang up, angry and insulted, and started to leave.
“Fine,” she spat. “We’ll do lunch some time.”
“That’d be nice,” he said as she slammed the door behind her, and she found herself standing in the corridor, unsure of whether he’d really meant it.
After she’d gone he looked at the jigsaw and saw that it still had a hole in it. She’d taken the missing piece away with her. He turned on the radio and found himself again listening to the phone-in programme where Londoners discussed prurient details of their love lives and sex lives. The tone of the programme was different from the last time he’d heard it. It was now more serious, mostly anxieties and complaints. There were men and women who didn’t like oral sex, but whose partners did, or they liked to give but not receive or they would like to give but weren’t sure of the correct method. Girls of fifteen called in, worried because they were still virgins, men of a much greater age called in with exactly the same problem. There were men whose penises were too small or too large, women whose breasts ditto. There were people who fancied their boss, or their same-sex best friend, or their doctors, or who fancied group sex. Women called in who’d lost their husbands, their sex drives, their G spots. Men called who’d lost potency, erections and hope.