I began to buy things – I bought taffeta and velvet dresses, little shrug-on skirts in silk. And shoes, so many shoes: kitten heels, stilettos, court shoes, black-ribboned sandals. In a place called the Sweet Girls Emporium and Relax Centre, I bought a box of Stoppy hold-up stockings. I’d never worn stockings in my life. I dragged home piles of bags, weighed down like an ant.
But, of course, I didn’t have the courage to wear any of it. Everything stayed packed away in the wardrobe, day after day, all the dresses with red tissue paper taped round them. I thought about them, though, I thought about them a lot. Some nights I had a little ceremony that I kept absolutely secret. When the others were in bed, I would open the wardrobe and take out all the things I’d bought. I’d pour a glass of chilled plum liquor and drag the little dressing-table to a place under the light so that the mirror was properly illuminated. Then I’d go to the wardrobe and take a dress from its hanger.
It was horrible and exciting. Every time I saw myself in the mirror and reached automatically for the zip, ready to rip off the dress, I would think about Fuyuki sitting in his wheelchair, saying, ‘Are they all so pretty in England?’ Then I would stop, take a deep breath, slowly rezip the dress, and force myself to turn back and look, to study the white tops of my breasts, my legs in silk, dark, like inky water. I put on very high heels and painted my lips in a deep red, pure like heart-blood. I crayoned in eyebrows, and for a long time I practised lighting and smoking a cigarette. I tried to imagine myself, sitting formally in Fuyuki’s home, leaning towards him, cigarette smoke trailing across my painted lips. In my mind’s eye one of my hands was resting on a locked chest, the other was extended elegantly, palm up, to receive a large key that Fuyuki was passing to me.
After a long time I would open my eyes, go to the wardrobe and take everything out of its tissue paper, then arrange it in a ring round me. There were velvet strappy sandals, négligés in tangerine and cream, a crimson Ravage bra in the shape of a butterfly, still in its Cellophane. Things and things and more things, stretching out across the shadows. I’d lie down then, stretching out my bare arms, and roll over, mingling with my belongings, smelling the newness, letting them brush my skin. Sometimes I’d group them according to different rules: according to material, for example, black piqué crushing peach silk noil, or according to colour, saffron with copper, silver with teal, lilac and electric pink and grey. I held them up to my face and breathed in their expensive smells. And, because I must be a bit funny like that, the ritual always seemed to lead to one thing: my hands in my knickers.
The Takadanobaba house was big, but sound spread like water along the timbers and through the flimsy rice-paper screens. I had to be quiet. I thought I’d been careful until very late one night, when it was over, I slid back the door to go to the bathroom and found Jason a few feet away in the moonlit corridor, leaning out of the window, a cigarette between his fingers.
When he heard the door open he turned to me. He didn’t say anything. He looked lazily down at my bare feet, then up to the short yukata, to the flushed skin on my chest. He let the smoke curl up out of his mouth and smiled, raising an eyebrow, as if I was a huge and pleasant surprise to him.
‘Hello,’ he said.
I didn’t answer. I slid the door closed with a bang and locked it, sinking down with my back against it. Dressing like a sexy person – that was one thing. But Jason – well, Jason made me think things about sex that were much, much more frightening.
21
Nanking, 13 December 1937, nightfall
They are here. They are here. It is real.
I left the house at midday, and the streets seemed silent. I didn’t see another soul, only shuttered houses, the shops boarded – some with notices pasted on the doors giving details of the rural district where the owners could be found. I turned right on to Zhongyang Road and followed it past the railway where I took a short-cut through an alley to meet up with Zhongshan Road. There I saw three men running towards me as fast as they could. They were dressed as peasants and were blackened all over, as if from an explosion. When I looked up, in the distance over the houses in the area of the Shuixi gate, a pall of smoke was rising grey against the sky. The men continued away from me in the direction I’d come, running in silence, only the sound of their straw shoes slapping on the pavement. I stood on the street, staring after them, listening to the city around me. Now that I wasn’t moving I could hear the distant sound of car horns, mingling horribly with faint human cries. My heart sank. I continued south, expecting the worst as I crept through the streets, keeping close to the houses, ready to dash inside at any moment or prostrate myself and cry, ‘ Dongyang Xiansheng! Eastern Masters!’
On the streets nearer the refugee centre one or two businesses had found the courage to open, the owners standing anxiously in the doorway, staring off down the street in the direction of the eastern gates.
I skipped between buildings, running low to the ground, switching and doubling back through the familiar streets, my heart racing. I could hear the low murmur of a crowd somewhere ahead, and at last I came to a side-street that led up to Zhongshan Road and there, at its head, a huge tide of people crushed against each other, straining in the direction of the Yijiang gate – the great ‘water’ gate that opens out of the city and on to the Yangtze – grim expressions on their faces. They all pulled handcarts loaded down with possessions. One or two glanced at me, curious to see someone making no attempt to flee, others ignored me, putting their heads down and leaning their weight into the handcart. Children watched me silently from their perches on top of the carts, bundled up against the cold in quilted jackets, their hands blunt in wool mittens. A wild dog ran among them, hoping to steal food.
‘Are they in the city?’ I asked a woman who had broken free of the crowd and was racing away down the alley I stood in. I stepped in front of her and stopped her in her tracks, my hands on her shoulders. ‘Have the Japanese taken the walls?’
‘Run!’ Her face was wild. The charcoal she’d used to cover her face was smeared with tears. ‘Run!’
She struggled out of my grasp and headed away, screaming something at the top of her voice. I watched her disappear as, behind me, the shouts of the crowd grew to a crescendo, running footsteps scattering into the alleys around me. Then slowly, slowly the footsteps died away, the crush on the road dwindled. At length I crept forward and peered out on to the main road. To my right, in the west, I could see the tail end of the crowd shuffling on towards the river, one or two stragglers, the elderly and sick, hurrying to catch up. The road to my left was empty, the ground churned into mud by hundreds of pairs of feet.
I stepped out cautiously and, my heart in my throat, turned in the direction they’d come. I walked in near silence. Outside the ruined Ming Palace, where yesterday I had chatted to the history professor, a few Nationalist tanks rumbled past, kicking up sprays of dirt, the soldiers shouting and waving at me to get off the streets. Then, slowly, silence came back to the city and I was alone, walking very quietly in the centre of the empty Zhongshan Road.
At last I came to a halt. Around me nothing was moving. Even the birds seemed to have been silenced on their perches. The pollarded trees on either side led the eye into the distance, straight down the churned-up road, absolutely still and empty and clear as far as the eye could see to where, about half a mile away, the winter sun shone down on the triple arches of the Zhongshan gate. I stood in the centre of the road, took a deep breath and slowly opened my hands, holding them up to the sky. My heart was thumping so loudly it seemed to be almost inside my head.