“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t you think about me when…?” The lump in my throat took over. Sadness engulfed me.
“What do you mean, Mitsuko?” He had the cheek to ask me what I meant. Did he want to push the knife in even deeper? I moved closer. We stood eye to eye. He opened his arms, laughed, and shouted: “How could I stay away? Crow always comes back! And when he does he’ll have a present with him, a present just for you from China, caw, caw!”
He flapped his arms wildly and laughed, laughed. A shadow flew over him; it was as if a giant crow had crashed down on him. I covered my head with my arms. A scream, swallowed in an instant by the wind.
He was already tiny, like a doll, when I leaned over the balustrade and watched him fall to the rocks below, his arms and legs flailing. The caw of a mocking crow filled my ears. I turned, could hardly believe my eyes. The Lord of Lies had tossed my only chance of love into the sea.
My father stared at me. His eyes absorbed the light.
32
“Are you the one who brought the patient in?”
The senior doctor at Funairi Hospital doesn’t speak the same standard of English as the young doctor who checked Beate in at the reception. He’s standing several meters behind his boss now. Beate nods. She’s cross. She and the girl called Yori brought the young Belgian in over an hour ago. He had been rambling and was unable to stand up without support. They had helped him out of the van and walked him into the hospital. His body was warm and feverish. Yori disappeared at the reception. She had muttered something, but Beate couldn’t remember what. She presumed she had gone to the toilet. Beate was angry because she was having a hard time explaining to the triage nurse that the boy was in a very bad way. She was so frustrated it took a while before she realised that Yori had cleared off. Luckily the triage nurse finally got the message and called a doctor who could speak English. The boy was in a wheelchair by this time and seemed to be only half conscious. The doctor checked his temperature and pulse. He asked Beate if he had taken drugs. She tried to make it clear that she didn’t know him, that she’d found him near the river, that there was a Japanese girl with them who did seem to know him, but that she had disappeared. It dawned on her as she spoke that her story didn’t add up and that she could be accused of having stolen the van with the demon painting: “The Japanese girl said he had been stung by a poisonous jellyfish. Funakondji, or something?”
“You mean Irukandji?”
Beate sighed. “Could be. A jellyfish. Poisonous. I didn’t believe him. I told you: there was a girl, a Japanese girl…”
Less than a minute later, the young Belgian was on a gurney being wheeled at top speed into emergency.
“You’re the one who brought the patient in,” the senior doctor repeats. Perhaps that’s the only English he can manage?
“Yes, anyone would have done the same,” says Beate. She’s aware that she sounds grumpy. “I told you… there was a girl with us who clearly knew the guy. It’s got nothing to do with me. I’m just a tourist. Can I go now?” The senior doctor and his assistant exchange a few words, seem nervous. The young doctor steps forward and makes a shallow bow. His English is much more acceptable: “The police have already been informed, madam. I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait for them.”
33
The clouds hung low and dark over my father’s boat. We were at sea, heading in the direction of Takahama from Hashima Island. It was June 13th 1994. I’ll never forget it. The rising sun was doing its best to tear holes in the clouds creating pools of dazzling white light. I was holding on to the rails and my knuckles were white too. That morning, the day after Crow fell over the balustrade, my father forced me to get into the boat. I hadn’t slept a wink that night, felt dizzy and lightheaded, as if a heavy weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Crow was like a long forgotten dream that returns to haunt you from time to time in fragments.
An elderly disciple was at the helm, his gaze fixed on the horizon. The waves seemed viscous and metallic. The morning sun etched swathes of Hashima black. The concrete wall surrounding the island varied in height. From this distance Hashima looked just like Gunkan, the giant warship with which the island is always compared. My father appeared from the cabin and pointed one of his unnaturally long fingers towards the island.
“What do you think? That I like living there?” He turned to look at me, a movement that always reminded me of a salamander twisting its supple neck. His black eyes were like glass. “Someone with my blood? My lineage? Locked up on an island everyone thinks is abandoned, a forgotten rubbish dump in the middle of the sea?”
When I was thirteen, my father became obsessed for a while with the discovery that the government had dumped nuclear waste in the deepest mineshafts under Hashima at the end of the 1970s, five years after the mines had been closed and the island evacuated. The shafts had then been filled with a thick layer of cement, but that hadn’t prevented him from wandering around the abandoned city for days on end, once the most densely populated place on the planet, now “the city of ghosts”, staring at his Geiger counter. I followed him like a puppy. Sometimes I heard the thing crackle like crazy. My father would shake his head. I did exactly the same and it felt good.
In my teens my father was my idol. I knew we were different. We were the New Humans, the future. We had to be careful, because the old human race was small-minded and vindictive. They would kill us if they found out about us. We had to multiply first before we could seize power.
In hindsight, my faith in this transparent and infantile lies makes me blush with shame. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. My father’s stories and the romantic teenage world I inhabited were a perfect match. I looked at photos of girls in magazines. I compared them with my image in the mirror. I couldn’t understand why a new human like myself could be uglier than an old human. Perhaps the future was going to be so harsh and rough that people would need to be thick-skinned, tanned and tall like me just to survive.
“And you,” my father continued. “It’s time you faced up to who you are.”
“I’m the victim of the way you live your life,” I said, surprised at my daring, but a chill had entered my bones that stirred me to hostility. “It’s time I…” I couldn’t finish my sentence. I had always thought that his rage would never touch me. I was his favourite, and in spite of his unbending character he had always indulged me.
My father was a creature of the night. I rarely saw him like this, in the light of day. After so many years I must have grown accustomed to his appearance and mine. But the sight of his long neck and his Adam’s apple jumping angrily up and down still filled me with fear and trembling. My father tried to swallow his rage. “You’ve nagged me for years to be able to live somewhere else, to have contact with other people. My answer was always the same: when the time is ripe. You’re not capable of living in the outside world. I am your protector and in exchange I demand obedience. And what do I get instead? A daughter who eavesdrops on her father to find out what he’s planning. Why didn’t you just ask?”
His reference to the mini-camera surprised me. I tried not to answer. He paid no attention to my answers when he was in this kind of mood. But I couldn’t let go of his remark: you’re not capable of living in the outside world. Resentment dug itself deeper and deeper inside me. My own father found me too ugly, too clumsy, too stupid to be allowed to mix with other people.