I fumbled out the money and counted it. My hands were trembling and it took me two goes to get it right, and even then I thought I must be wrong. I stood for a moment, staring down at what was in my hands. It wasn’t the week’s wages I’d expected. Strawberry had given me three hundred thousand yen, five times what she owed me. I looked up fifty floors through the swirling snow, to the club, to where Marilyn swung. I wondered about Strawberry, in her replica Monroe dresses, spending her life among young waiters and gangsters. I realized that I knew absolutely nothing about her. She had a dead mother and a dead husband, but apart from that she could have been all alone in the world, for all I knew. I had done nothing to make her like me. Maybe you’re never really aware of the ones who are looking out for you until they’re gone.
At the crossroads a car went by cautiously, catching the snow in its headlights, making it appear to swirl faster. I shrank back against the wall, pulling up my collar, wrapping the thin coat tightly round me, shivering. What had Strawberry meant, don’t leave in the glass lift? Did she really think Fuyuki’s men were prowling the streets? The car disappeared behind the buildings and the street was quiet again. I peered out. It was important to think slowly. To think in stages. My passport, all my books and notes were in the alley next to the house. I couldn’t call Jason on the phone – the Nurse had ripped out the wires. I had to go back to the house. Just once.
I hurriedly counted out Strawberry’s money, divided it between my two coat pockets, a hundred and fifty thousand yen in both rolls. Then I pushed my hands into my pockets, and began to walk. I ducked into back-streets to keep from the main routes and found myself moving through a magical world – the snow falling silently on the air-conditioner units, piling on the lacquered bento boxes stacked outside back doors waiting to be collected by the takeaway drivers. I wasn’t dressed properly: my coat was too thin and my stilettos left funny exclamation-mark tracks behind me. I’d never walked in the snow in high heels before.
I went quietly, cutting over the crossing near the Hanazono shrine, with its ghostly red lanterns, and back into the alleys again. I passed lighted windows, steaming heating vents. I heard television sets and conversations, but in all the time I walked I only saw one or two other people. Tokyo seemed to have shut down its doors. Someone in this city, I thought, someone behind one of these doors, had the thing I was searching for. Something not very big. Small enough to fit into a glass tank. Flesh. But not an entire body. So, a piece of a body, maybe? Where would someone hide a piece of flesh? And why? Why would someone steal it? A line from a long-ago book came back to me, Robert Louis Stevenson maybe: ‘The body-snatcher, far from being repelled by natural respect, was attracted by the ease and safety of the task…’
I traced an arc across Takadanobaba so that I arrived back at the house via a small passageway between two apartment buildings. I stopped, half hidden behind a Calpis drinks machine, its blue light flickering spectrally, and cautiously put my head round the corner. The alley was deserted. The snow fell silently, lit by the lanterns outside the ramen restaurant. On my left rose the house, dark and cold, blotting out the sky. I’d never seen it from this angle – it seemed even bigger than I remembered, monolithic, its curved, pantiled roof almost monstrous. I saw I had left the curtains open in my bedroom and I thought of my futon all laid out in the silence, my painting of Tokyo on the wall, the silent image of Jason and me standing under the bead galaxies.
I dug in my pocket for the keys. I checked once over my shoulder, then slipped silently into the alley, staying close to the buildings. I stopped at the cleft between the two houses and peered over the air-conditioner. My holdall was still there, tucked in the dark, snow piling on it. I continued along the edge of the house, under my window. Ten yards away from the corner, something made me stop. I looked down at my feet.
I was standing in a gap in the snow, a long black groove of wet Tarmac. I blinked at it. Why had instinct halted me here? Then I saw, of course, it was a tyre track. I was standing in the greyed-out shadow left by a car, recently parked. Adrenaline bolted through my veins. The print stretched out all round me. The car must have sat there for a long time because the outline was clear, and there was a pile of soggy cigarette ends exactly where the driver’s window would have been, as if they’d been waiting for something. I backed hastily into the shadows of the house, my blood pressure spiking. The tyre tracks led straight ahead, all the way to Waseda Street, where I could make out one or two cars passing as usual, silent, muffled by the snow. The rest of the alley was deserted. I let out a nervy breath, and glanced up at the windows in the tumbledown old shacks, some lit yellow, shapes moving in them. Everything was as normal. This doesn’t mean anything… I told myself, licking my sore lips, and staring at the car print. It means nothing. People were always parking in alleys, privacy was so difficult to find in Tokyo.
I moved on cautiously, avoiding the car shadow, as if it might be a trick trap-door, and keeping close to the house, my shoulders brushing the snow from the security grilles on the ground floor. At the corner I leaned round and peered at the front door. It was closed, as if it hadn’t moved since I’d left, a snowdrift already piled up against it, perfect and downy. I glanced once more up the alley. Although it was deserted I was trembling as I stepped forward and hastily fumbled my key into the lock.
Jason’s TV was on. A flickering blue light was coming from under his door, but the bulb on the landing had been shattered by the Nurse and the house was unusually dark. I climbed the steps slowly, jumpily, all the time imagining something shadowy and rapid hurtling down the corridor towards me. At the top I stood in the dim light, breathing hard, the memories of last night like shadows racing away from me along the walls. The house was silent. Not a creak of floor or a breath. Even the usual sound of the trees rustling in the garden was muffled by the snow.
My teeth chattering now, I went to Jason’s room. I could hear him breathing inside the wardrobe, a congested, bloody sound that quickened when I pulled back the door. ‘Jason?’ I whispered. The room was freezing and there was an unpleasant organic smell in the air, like animal dung. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Yeah.’ I could hear him shifting painfully in the wardrobe. ‘Did you speak to someone?’
‘They’re on their way,’ I hissed, scrambling over the dressing-table and dropping silently to the floor. ‘But you can’t wait, Jason, you’ve got to get out now. The Nurse is coming back.’ I stood next to the wardrobe, put my hand on the door. ‘Come on, I’m going to help you downstairs and-’
‘ What’re you doing? What the fu- Stay back! Stay away from the wardrobe.’
‘ Jason! You’ve got to get out now -’
‘ You think I didn’t hear you? I HEARD. Now get away from the fucking door.’
‘I won’t go anywhere if you shout. I’m trying to help.’
He made an irritated sound, and I heard him sink back in the wardrobe, breathing fast. After a moment, when he had calmed a little, he put his mouth to the wardrobe door. ‘Listen to me. Listen carefully-’