Neku sighed.
Beyond the bridge a path split, one direction heading to the Meiji Jingu Shrine. It was here a family had gathered, fifteen and a half years earlier, for the marriage of a son to an Italian girl he’d met in New York. A union strange enough to bring the Kitagawa clan together for the first time in five years.
It had been brief, this marriage; and there’d been only one child, a daughter, nobody important. It had not even been his first marriage, so the girl was sent to live with her half brothers, part of the family but never quite equal. She had her gender, her foreign looks, and her mixed blood to thank for this.
Neku was glad that girl was dead.
Around her, winter-bare maples dripped with drizzle and swayed slowly in the chill wind as gravel shifted wetly underfoot. A stream beneath a tiny bridge had swollen, where rotted leaves created a natural dam, and a black man with an old-fashioned twig broom was busy trying to brush the leaves away.
At the turning to a café, Neku made herself turn back. The black man had been staring at her anyway, as if to say someone dressed like her did not belong on the gravel paths beneath the trees leading to the Meiji Shrine, and he was right. She belonged on the bridge with the other girls, that gaggle of giggles and spite.
A couple of cos-play glanced up and Neku looked right through them, rolling her shoulders and letting her arms hang loose. These were ijime-ko, suburban kids with unconvincing sneers, the kind of people who regarded pulling each other’s hair as a fight bad enough to talk about for days.
Neku had seen real fights.
“Careful where you walk.”
When Neku stepped too close to a line of carefully arranged cosmetics their owner didn’t even bother to be polite. Just barked his order and went back to choosing a lipstick from a line of seven laid out in a row. Shu Uemura, Chanel, Dior, Shiseido, and Bourjois…
Neku wondered if he’d even checked the colours or just bought by label.
“You hear me?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “I hear you.”
Kicking over his lipsticks, Neku stamped on the boy’s wrist before he had time to scramble away. Bones broke and Neku tried not to smile as a gaggle of girls parted to let her through. That was all it ever took, according to the Kitagawa brothers. One punch, one bullet, one kick…precedent was everything. Only, the Kitagawa were dead and no amount of precedent was going to change that.
In front of Meiji-jingumae Station two uniformed officers were questioning the foreign couple who’d obviously only just finished unpacking their consignment of fake Rolex. When Neku paused to watch, the eldest of the two police officers waved her away.
Go, his look said.
It didn’t say, We’ve been looking for you. And it didn’t say, Stop right there, while I call base to see if you’re a runaway. It just said, Who cares if you’re upset? Go away. We’re too busy to bother with stupidly dressed children.
Neku did as the look said.
PART I
CHAPTER 1 — Friday, 15 August 2003
Later, Kit Nouveau was to realise that his world unravelled in Tokyo, six months after a cos-play stuffed large amounts of money into a locker that could be opened with a cheap screwdriver, had anyone known what it contained. Until then, he’d thought it ended fifteen years earlier, at 10.38 pm, on Friday, 15 August 2003, behind an old barn on the chalk hills above Middle Morton, a small town in Hampshire.
Who knew? Certainly not the nineteen-year-old squaddie leaning against the barn’s wooden wall. He’d come to the party with his latest girlfriend, a high-breasted Welsh girl called Amy who had a filthy laugh and, he hoped, filthy habits. Only she was inside sulking and the girl whose bandeau top he’d just undone was going out with someone else.
“Hey,” said Kit. “It’s okay.”
Pushing him away, the girl re-tied a ribbon. “No,” she said. “It’s not.” Mary O’Mally wore lipstick, black eyeliner, and bare legs under a frayed white miniskirt…Both makeup and attitude put on in a bus shelter roughly half way between her parents’ house and the barn. She’d cut her hair since Kit last saw her and had red highlights put in.
Under his own waxed jacket Kit wore a Switchblade Lies tee-shirt, with jeans and biker boots. His fair hair had been cropped and the faintest trace of a blond, very non-regulation goatee ghosted his chin.
Inside the hut someone took off Original Pirate Material and slung on Tight Smile, jacking up the volume.
“Wait,” said Kit, when Mary tried to say something. And they both listened to the bass line, as Vita Brevis thumbed a Vintage five-string. Then came Art Nouveau, splintering Vita’s bass line with a three-chord crash, and Kit found himself fingering fret shapes onto empty air.
Mary grinned.
“I’ll walk you home,” he said.
“Kit…”
Undoing her top had been stupid but old habits died hard. Josh was a nice guy, in a rich-boy kind of way, but Mary was Kit’s ex-girlfriend and he still occasionally dreamed about her. Reassuring dreams, at least reassuring to someone who’d puked his way through an Iraqi firefight, put his sniper training into practise, and was on compassionate leave while his Colonel worked out what to do about an incident no one really wanted to make the papers.
“I’d better go back.”
“Okay,” said Kit.
“You coming with me?”
Shaking his head, Kit said, “Better not. Can you get Josh to give Amy a lift home? And, you know…” Kit stopped, wondering how to put his thoughts into words.
“What?” said Mary.
“You know. If you and Josh ever…”
“If we…?”
“If you split up,” said Kit, “then maybe we could try again?” His voice trailed off as he realised Mary wanted to slap him, which wouldn’t be the first time. “I know,” he said, holding up his hands.
“No you don’t,” she said, dirty blonde hair brushing bare shoulders as she shook her head, each shake fiercer than the one before. “You have no fucking idea.”
Mary and Kit went out for five months, right up to the start of last year’s exams. She’d just about convinced her mother that Kit and band practise weren’t about to ruin her grades when Kit broke up Switchblade Lies, dumped Mary, and talked himself into a thirteen-week Army Preparation Course, all in the same afternoon.
Josh was the one who picked up the pieces and walked Mary to her exams and convinced her life could still be good. Josh was the one Mary’s mother liked, though she’d probably have liked him more if his mother hadn’t been Korean.
“It was just a thought,” said Kit.
“Yeah,” said Mary. “A shit one.” And there it might have rested, except the moon chose that moment to slip between clouds, and Mary caught tears in the eyes of the boy opposite.
“You broke it off,” she said crossly.
“It’s not that.”
“What then?”
“I don’t know,” said Kit. “Life, I guess…You’d better go back inside. Josh will be wondering where you’ve gone.”
“He doesn’t own me.”
“Hey,” said Kit. “No one owns you, I know that. No one owns me. No one owns anyone. We just get to borrow each other for a while.”
She glared at him. “Did you make that up?”
“Yeah, I think so.” Kit thought about it. “At least, I don’t think it’s stolen from anybody else.”
Kit and Mary ended up pushing his Kawasaki between them, while the moon stretched an elongated couple and bike onto Blackboy Lane and night winds whispered through fields on the far side of the hedge.
The barn was stained black and had been built before any of them had been born, the pub to which the hut belonged and the three farm cottages that made up Wintersprint were half a mile behind. Two of the cottages had been knocked together to make a house. It was his mother’s idea.