‘ Just shut up and switch the fucking lights off! ’
My trance cleared. A sweat broke across the back of my neck. I pulled the roll of money from my right pocket and threw it into Jason’s room. It broke and notes floated down in the semi-darkness. ‘There,’ I said. ‘Strawberry sent you some money. And, Jason-’
‘ What? ’
‘Good luck.’
54
One morning, a few days before the Nurse had come to the house, I’d woken, pulled back the window and there, standing in the alley below, dressed in a hard hat and a suit, clipboard in hand, had been a surveyor, or an engineer, looking up at the house. It had made me so sad to think of the house, after war and earthquake and famine, after everything, giving in to the property developers. Its paper-slim walls and wooden structure were designed to fall in a quake, to fall like matchsticks so that the occupants had a chance to escape. When the men came to pull it down, when they wrapped a thin blue cover round it and took their demolition ball to it, it would go without a whisper, taking with it all its memories and trapped secrets.
The surveyor and I had regarded each other for a long time – he in the cold, me standing warm and wrapped in my duvet – until eventually my hands grew cold, my cheeks red, and I closed the window. At the time I had thought vaguely that his presence meant the end of our lives in the house was near. It hadn’t occurred to me that the end might come in a different, totally unexpected way.
I grabbed a torch from the kitchen and went silently down the corridor, switching off all the lights as I went. One or two doors were open and there were no shutters or curtains at most of the windows – from the street the Mickey Rourke light illuminated everything that happened in those soft, silent rooms. Someone watching from outside would see everything, so I moved swiftly, bent into a crouch. In my room I crept to the side window and leaned out as far as I dared, until I could crane my neck round and see through the gap into the alleyway. It was deserted, the snow falling silently, no sounds of cars or voices. The tyre tracks and my footprints had already disappeared under the new snow. I grabbed the money from my coat pocket and threw it on top of the bag. It landed with a silent flutter and a puff of snow. I turned and changed hurriedly, fumbling in the dark, throwing off my club dress and pulling on trousers, flat shoes, a sweater, a jacket zipped up to the neck.
Where did you put it, Jason? Where? Where am I supposed to start?
I crouched in the doorway, clutching the torch, my teeth chattering. From his room I could hear a series of muffled thumps – I didn’t want to imagine the secret, painful manoeuvre he was going through. But no. It’s not in your room – Jason, that would be too easy. The torchbeam played over the other silent doors. I let it rest on the store room next to mine. Even when you haven’t got a map, when you haven’t got a clue, you have to start somewhere. Stooped awkwardly, I crept to the door, sliding it back in fractions, careful not to make a noise. I peered inside. The room was in chaos. The Nurse and the chimpira had gone into everything, into all the decomposing futons, the fragmenting piles of ageing, insect-chewed silks, a case of framed photos, posed black-and-white portraits of an elderly woman in a formal kimono under splintered glass. I squatted in the middle of the room and began to tear at things, a rice-cooker, a box of yellowing paperbacks, here was a silk obi, once silver and blue, now stained brown in places and riddled with moth holes. When I touched it, it crumbled in my hand and iridescent flakes of silk, like butterfly scales, moved in a cloud, upwards through the cold air.
I went through everything, my panic building, sweat dampening my clothes. I had almost worked across the entire room when something made me stop and raise my eyes. Headlights were sweeping across the ceiling.
Fear lit up across my skin. I clicked off the torch and put it into my pocket, resting my fingers on the floor in a runner’s crouch, every muscle twitching. My ears crawled out of the room, out into the alley, trying to guess what was happening out there. The beams ran down the wall, then moved quickly in a straight line, sideways like lights from a spaceship. From the alleyway came a long silence. Then, just as I thought I would stop breathing, I heard the car change gear and move off. Brake lights appeared, reflected in the window, an orange indicator flashed. The car had stopped in the snow, waiting to turn left on to Waseda. I closed my eyes and sank to my haunches against the wall. ‘My God, Jason,’ I murmured, my fingers to my forehead. ‘This is going to kill me.’
It was pointless searching blindly like this. The Nurse had been through these rooms and hadn’t found anything. Why would I be able to do any better? But I was clever and I was determined. I was going to think my way through the walls, the ceilings and the fabric of the house. I was going to look where she hadn’t. Try, I thought, putting my fingers to my eyelids, try to picture this house through different eyes. Picture it through Jason’s eyes last night. Picture its skeleton. What had he been thinking? What had been the first thing he looked at when he came home last night?
The image of the house rotated in my mind. I saw through its skin, I saw beams and joinery, a timber frame laced with wires. I saw the windows. The windows. The windows in the gallery were saying something important. They were saying – think carefully now – they were saying: Remember Jason last night. Remember him outside your room. We are having an argument. Then what? He walks away. He’s furious and he’s still drunk, and he’s banging on all the shutters. He stops for a while looking out at the garden – one of the windows had been open when I came out of my room – he stands there, smoking a cigarette. Then he turns and he’s going to his room and starting to pack…
I opened my eyes. Through the opened shutter, snow was blizzarding in the garden, frosting and glittering as far as I could see, making a white topiary of the haphazard shapes. The plastic bag hanging in the branches was frosted almost solid. I backed up a little in my thoughts and came at it again. Jason had stood at the window, holding what he’d stolen and…
I saw him clearly now – opening the window, reaching his hand back and throwing a plastic bag into the stormy night. It flew out above the branches, spinning and pirouetting in the wind, and landed where it hung now, twisted and frozen. Oh, Jason, I thought, tipping forward on to my knees, staring up at the bag. Of course. I know where it is. It’s in that bag.
I got to my feet and stepped to the window, putting my numb hands against the pane, my skin pricking up in wonder, just as, from the staircase, came the discreet but distinctive popping sound of the front door being forced open.
55
Nanking, 21 December 1937 (the nineteenth day of the eleventh month)
In Nanking nothing is moving except the snowclouds – everything, every stream, every mountain, every tree, is exhausted by this Japanese winter and lies limp and uncomprehending. Even the coiled dragon Yangtze river is stalled, stagnant and motionless, clogged behind a hundred thousand bodies. And yet here it is, the entry I thought I would never make. Made on a bright afternoon in the peace of my house, when everything is over. Really it is a miracle to see it being made, my hand brown and strong, the thin line of paling ink flowing from the ends of my fingers. It is a miracle to put my hand inside my jacket and find that my heart is still beating.
In our cargo Shujin included a folded cloth that she had packed with cutlery: chopsticks, a few spoons, one or two knives. She placed it in a small sandalwood money chest and added a black baby’s bracelet, with an image of Buddha dangling on it. I had to dissuade her from putting in the red-painted eggs. ‘Shujin,’ I told her, trying to be gentle, ‘there won’t be zuoyuezi or man yue.’