The driver reached over and slammed the door. I put my hands on the window and started to speak, but he’d already taken the handbrake off. The gears squealed, the indicator came on, the van rolled away. I was left on the roadside, watching its lights dwindle, then disappear. Overhead the clouds rolled and rolled until they’d entirely obscured the moon, and the little part of England that I stood in was completely dark.
And so I had to agree with the doctors – the immediate result of sex hadn’t been what I’d expected. And with the way my body was now, there probably wasn’t ever going to be a chance to find out if it could be different in the future. I didn’t dare tell the doctors this, I didn’t dare say how much I wished I could have a boyfriend, someone to go to bed with: I knew if I said anything they’d tell me my outrageous impulses were the root of a greater evil, that I was walking around with a wolf living inside me. I listened to the lessons about personal dignity and about self-respect, all the complex stuff about consent and self-control, and it didn’t take long to decide that sex was dangerous and unpredictable, like Shi Chongming’s magic crane of the past, phosphorous on a cloudy day. I came to the conclusion that I’d be better off just pretending it didn’t exist.
In the end it was the girl in the bed next to me, the one who taught me how to smoke, who gave me a kind of solution. She used to masturbate every night. ‘Jigging’, she called it. ‘I’ll stay in here for ever, me. Don’t care. Long as I’ve got me fags and a good jigging I’m sound.’ She’d do it under the covers when the lights went out. She wasn’t ashamed. I’d lie in the next bed with my sheets up to my chin, staring with wide eyes at the covers going up and down. She made it seem so gleeful, as if there was nothing wrong at all.
As soon as I got out of hospital, and wasn’t being watched every five minutes, I began my own guilty experiments. I soon knew how to make myself come, and although I never actually squatted over a mirror (the jigging girl promised me there were people who did) I was sure no other girl on earth had got to know the dark tract between her legs the way I knew mine. Sometimes I’d wonder about the wolf. I was afraid that one day I’d reach down there and my fingers would brush over its wet nose.
Now in the bathroom in Takadanobaba, I rinsed out the flannel and looked thoughtfully at my reflection, a thin-limbed spectre squatting on the little rubber stool. The girl who might go to the grave with only five boys in the back of a Ford Transit to reckon as her life’s loves. I filled up the little plastic bowl, swirling the hot and the cold water together, and tipped it down my body, letting the water lift and furl in the hollows of my collar-bone, filter down into the scars on my stomach. I put down the bowl and slowly, dreamily, spanned my hands across my abdomen, linking my thumbs and fanning my fingers into a frame, staring vacantly at the way the water gathered in the hatched gouges, silvery, reflecting the light like mercury.
No one, only the doctors and a man who came from the police to take photographs of them, had ever seen my scars. In my daydreams I imagined there was someone who would understand – someone who would look at them and not recoil, who would hear the story and instead of burying their face, averting their eyes, would say something sweet and sad and sympathetic. But of course I knew it would never happen, because I’d never ever get that far. Never. If I imagined taking off my clothes, if I pictured myself revealing the truth to someone, I’d get a sickening, rushing sensation in my inner ear that would weaken my knees and have me tugging frantically at whatever I happened to be wearing, wrapping it tightly round my stomach as if I could hide what was there.
I suppose there are some things you just have to be grown-up about. Sometimes you have to take a deep breath and say: ‘This is not something I can expect in my life.’ And if you say it enough times, it’s surprising – after a while it doesn’t even feel that horrible any more.
While I was in the bathroom, thinking about Fuyuki, the Russians had got dressed and now they were going down to the garden. They must have seen me out there and decided that if I could venture out so could they. Svetlana was dressed in only a tiny lime green bikini and a straw sun-hat, which she held on to her head with her free hand. When I was dried and dressed I stood in the upstairs gallery and watched her make her way through the undergrowth, her tanned limbs flashing through the leaves. Irina came behind in a bikini top, pink shorts, sweetheart sunglasses and a bright pink baseball hat, worn backwards so her neck was shaded. She’d shoved a packet of cigarettes into the strap of her bikini top. They both picked their way out through the undergrowth, squealing and bickering, and lifting their feet in their high heels like odd wading birds, coming blinking out into the sunshine. ‘Sun, sun!’ they chorused, adjusting their glasses and staring up at the sky.
I put my nose silently to the window and watched them rubbing on sun lotion, undoing packets of cherry KissMint chewing-gum and drinking beer out of frozen cans they’d bought from the machines on the street. Svetlana had fire-engine-red polish on her toes. I stared down at my white feet, wondering whether I had the courage to paint my nails. All of a sudden I had a hot, overwhelming feeling that made me shiver and rub my arms – it was something about wasted time and how lucky they were to be so comfortable in their skin. To move and stretch and be at home in the sun, nobody accusing them of madness.
And right there and then I made up my mind. As long as I was dressed, as long as my stomach was covered, there was nothing, no physical mark, that gave it away. If you didn’t know, and no one here in Tokyo did, you’d look at me and say I was normal. I could be as ‘sexy’ as anyone else.
20
I couldn’t stop thinking about Fuyuki. Every time the lift bell rang and the hostesses swivelled round to yell in unison across the club, ‘ Irasshaimase! Welcome!’ I’d sit forward on the edge of my seat, my pulse leaping, thinking I might see his wheelchair gliding across the floor. But he didn’t come into the club that night, or the next.
Over the days that followed, I would take out his card and look at it several times a day. Sometimes I went into a kind of trance holding it, turning it over and over in my fingers. His name meant Winter Tree and something in the combination of the calligraphy and the nature of the characters was so powerful that I only had to glance at the black on white to visualize, in astonishing clarity, a forest deep in snow. I would retrace the kanji with my calligraphy brushes, picturing a mountainside, a pine forest, snowdrifts and icicles in the trees.
Now that I knew what would make Shi Chongming relent and give me the film, now that I was going to make the leap, I had become a serious student of the erotic. I started to watch the Japanese girls on the streets in their Victorian petticoats and lacy pumps, their ‘loose socks’ and short kilts. In traditional Japan, eroticism was something slender and pale like a flower stalk – the erotic was the tiny patch of bare skin on the back of a geisha’s neck. It’s something different the world over. I stared for hours at the Russians in their big high heels and orange suntans.
I had a lot of wage packets backed up, just sitting in a bag in the wardrobe doing nothing except making me jittery. Eventually I got up my courage and started shopping. I went to astonishing places in Ginza and Omotesando, caves crammed with sequined slippers, pink négligés, hats trimmed in purple marabou and rose pink velvet. There were cherry pink platform boots, and turquoise bags covered in hundreds of stick-on Elvis Presleys. The salesgirls with their bunches and ballerina skirts had no idea how to deal with me. They chewed their nails and watched me with their heads on one side as I trailed up and down the aisles in amazement, getting to know how people made themselves look sexy.