I had made the money I needed for rent and there was no need for me to go back to the club, but something odd had happened. Those customers listening to me had made a tiny part of me open like a flower. ‘I can always tell when a woman’s enjoyed herself,’ Jason said wryly, at the end of the night when we all stood in the lift together. ‘It’s all about blood.’ He held the back of his hand to my face, making me shrink against the glass wall. ‘The way the blood flows to the skin. Fascinating.’ He dropped his hand and gave me a sly wink. ‘You’ll be back tomorrow.’
And he was right. The next day my instinct was to go to Shi Chongming, but how could I approach him after yesterday’s angry scene? I knew I’d have to be patient and wait out the week. But instead of waiting at the house among my books and notes, I went to Omotesando and got the first dress that wasn’t above my knee and didn’t show my cleavage. A tunic in a kind of stiff black bombazine, with three-quarter sleeves. It was smart and didn’t say anything much except ‘I am a dress’. That night Mama Strawberry gave it one cursory look, and nodded. She wetted her finger and pasted aside a strand of my hair, then tapped my arm, pointed to a table of customers and sent me straight out into service, into a whirl of lighted cigarettes, drinks poured and countless ice cubes tonged into glasses.
I can still picture myself that first week, sitting in the club and staring out over the city, wondering which of the lights was Shi Chongming’s. Tokyo was in the grip of a heatwave and the air-conditioner was kept on high, so the hostesses all sat in cool pools of light, their shoulders in their evening dresses bare and silvery like moonlight. In my memory I see myself from outside the building and it’s as if I’m suspended in nothingness, my silhouette bright and blurred behind the plate-glass window, my expressionless white face obscured every few moments by Marilyn swinging past, no one suspecting the thoughts that flit crazily across my mind.
Strawberry seemed to like me, and that was a surprise because her standards were legendary. She spent thousands and thousands of dollars a month on flowers: crab-orange protea flown in refrigerated cartons from South Africa, amaryllis, great ginger lilies and orchids from mountain peaks in Thailand. Sometimes I’d stare at her openly because she held herself up so straight and seemed to love being sexy. She was sexy and she knew it. And that was that. I envied her confidence. She loved her outfits so much: every night it was something different: pink satin, white crêpe-de-Chine, a dress in magenta, roped with sequined straps ‘From How to Marry a Millionaire,’ she said, dropping her arm, pushing out her hip and turning to pout over her square shoulder at the customers. ‘It’s “charmeuse”, you know,’ as if it was a name everyone should recognize. ‘Strawberry can’t walk nice if she not dressed like Marilyn.’ And she’d waggle her mother-of-pearl cigarette-holder at anyone who’d listen. ‘Marilyn and Strawberry same build. Only Strawberry more petite.’ She was short-tempered, always snapping at people, but I didn’t see her really upset until the fifth night I was there. Then something happened that revealed an entirely different side of Mama Strawberry.
It was a hot night, so hot that steam seemed to be coming off the city, a kind of condensation that rose above the top of the buildings and blurred the red sunset. Everyone moved languidly, even Strawberry, drifting round the dance floor, gleaming in her full-length, sequined ‘Happy birthday, Mr President’ gown. She would stop occasionally to murmur something to the pianist, or to place her hand on the back of a chair and throw back her head at a customer’s joke. It was about ten p.m., and she had retreated to the bar where she was sipping champagne, when something made her put down her glass with a terrible clatter. She sat up straight on her stool, and stared stonily at the entrance lobby, her face white.
Six enormous heavies in sharp suits and punch perms had come through the aluminium doors and were looking round the club, snapping cuffs over the wrists, running fingers between collars and thick necks. In the centre of the gang was a slim man in a black polo-neck, his hair tied in a ponytail. He was pushing a wheelchair, in which sat a diminutive insectile man, fragile as an ageing iguana. His head was small, his skin as dry and crenulated as a walnut, and his nose was just a tiny isosceles, nothing more than two shady dabs for nostrils – like a skull’s. The wizened hands that poked out from his suit cuffs were long and brown and dry as dead leaves.
‘ Dame! Konaide yo! ’ Mama Strawberry slipped off the stool, pushed herself up to full height, raising the champagne to her mouth and swallowing it in one, her eyes locked on the group. She put the glass down, snapped a cigarette into her holder, smoothed her dress over her hips, swivelled on her heels and clicked away across the club, her elbow locked against her ribs, the cigarette out at an angle. The piano-player, leaning back on his bench to see what the fuss was, faltered on the keys.
A few feet from the head table, next to the east-facing window with all the best views of Tokyo, Strawberry stopped. Her chin was up, her solid little shoulders pushed back. She put her feet very smartly together and turned boldly to face the group. You could tell she was struggling to control her feelings. She put one hand on a chair, and raised the other stiffly, beckoning to them, using that peculiarly Japanese downward hand movement.
As other customers became aware of the new arrivals, the roar of conversation slowly diminished and every eye swivelled to watch the group make its slow progress across the club. But something else had caught my eye. A small alcove was cut into the wall behind the reception desk, a rectangular area with a table and chairs. Although there was no door, it was at such an angle that anyone inside could be seated out of sight of the other customers and sometimes Mama Strawberry had private meetings in there, or chauffeurs would use it to drink their tea and wait for their clients. As the group moved from the reception area, one figure detached itself, made its way to the alcove and slipped silently inside. The movement was so swift, the shadows on that side of the club so patchy, that I got little more than a glimpse, but what I saw made me sit forward a little, fascinated, uneasy.
The figure was dressed as a woman, in a neat black wool jacket and pencil skirt, but if she was a woman, she was incredibly tall. I had an impression of wide, masculine shoulders, long arms, sinewy legs crammed into large, highly polished black stilettos. But what really struck me was her hair: cut in a long, fringed bob, and so glossy it must have been a wig, worn hanging down in such a way that her face was almost totally obscured. Although the wig was extremely long, its ends only reached her shoulders, as if her head and neck were strangely attenuated.
As I watched her, my mouth hanging open a little, the group had reached the table. The waiters were setting it in a flurry of activity, and the invalid was wheeled to the head position, where he sat, crabbed and black as a scarab beetle, while the ponytailed man fussed around, getting him comfortable, directing the waiters where to place the glasses, the carafes of water. From the dark corners of the club twenty hostesses turned nervous eyes to Strawberry, who was moving among the tables, whispering names, calling them up to sit with the group. In her face there was a strange, bloodless look of something like anger. For a moment I couldn’t place that expression, but when she threw back her head and clipped across the floor to me, I saw it. All the small muscles in her face were twitching. Strawberry was nervous.
‘Grey san,’ she said, leaning over to me and speaking in a low voice. ‘Mr Fuyuki. You go now and sit with him.’
I reached for my bag, but she stalled me with a finger to her lip.
‘Be careful,’ she whispered. ‘Be very careful. Don’t say nothing about nothing. There are good reason people afraid of him. And…’ She hesitated and looked at me very carefully. Her eyes had narrowed and the tiniest rim of brown iris showed behind the blue contact lenses. ‘Most important of all is her.’ She raised her chin to indicate the alcove. ‘Ogawa. His Nurse. You must never try to speak to her, or look her in the eye. Do you understand?’