Come to Harm (21 page)

In Keiko's future memories, this evening was the last innocent time. The sight of the small girl in the perfumed water, perfect little body and perfect unconcern when she opened her eyes and saw them looking down at her. The choreography of mother and daughter getting her out of the water and back on her feet, and the three of them in a row on the sofa later watching a movie together to make Viola feel grown-up, making Fancy and Keiko feel like little girls again. This remembered evening—even though the sick feeling had already arrived and even though there were times to come when briefly it left her—this warm, glowing evening was the last real moment before what was coming began.

twenty-six

Tuesday, 19 November

Dr. Bryant read slowly,
pulling on his nose. Keiko watched him, unsure whether she was tensed against discovery or tensed against a go-ahead, permission to do it, having to carry out her plan after all.

“These look competent,” he said. “Where did you get them?”

“They're original,” said Keiko. “A friend helped me.”

“An English speaker?” he said, looking up, ready to find incompetence after all. Keiko nodded. He rolled his fingers together, dealing whatever had come of pulling his nose, and then started flicking the pages over again. “Strange fillers,” he said. “Rather dramatic.” Keiko waited for something more like a veto, but nothing came.

“I sometimes think,” she said at last, “that filler questions are so bland and boring, it's too obvious what they are. These will be much better at distracting the subjects.” She felt sure he would argue with such a definite opinion. He wouldn't be able not to.

“You could be right,” he said.

Keiko felt her shoulders slump down a little. “You don't think the fillers are
too
offensive? Or anything,” she asked.

“Good luck offending the first years,” he said, pulling at his nose again.

“I'm not using the first years,” said Keiko. “I'm using the members of the association who're sponsoring my accommodation.” She paused. “I'm experimenting on the people who're funding me.”

“Well, let me know how it goes,” Bryant said. This time he wiped his fingers on the underside of his desk.

Keiko took the papers from him, holding them by the opposite corner from where he had leafed through them with his nose-pulling hand. She kept them clear of her body until she came to a litter bin, then dropped them in it and went to get Viola.

It had been a first dress-rehearsal for the end-of-term show, and Viola came out overexcited and still in lavish feline make-up, with her hair sprayed dark and sticky into a little cake on top of her head. On the bus, she tucked herself under Keiko's arm and was drowsing before they slowed at the next stop.

“Your wee one's knackered,” said a woman opposite with a comfortable smile, when Viola's arm flopped out of her lap and swung loose as they rounded a corner. Keiko looked down at the elongated sweep of her closed eyelids, the black sheen of her sprayed hair, then smiled at the woman, tucked Vi's arm back into her lap, and held her a little more tightly.

_____

Fancy lay on the waxing table in the back room of Janette's salon, waiting out the pain before young Yvonne applied the next strip to her leg.

“How about your bikini line, Fance?”

“Bog off and die,” said Fancy. “Who gets their bikini line waxed in November?”

“Wouldn't you like to know?” said Yvonne. “Loads of people'll get it done next month for parties.”

“Yeah, well I don't get invited to that kind of party,” Fancy said. Craig McKendrick's face popped into her head, but a surge of pain saw him off again. She breathed in a gasp so sharp that the cold air hurt her teeth.

“You're so polite,” said Yvonne, blowing onto the red area. “The first and last time I did Mrs. McLuskie—when she was off on that golf exchange with all the other old trollops—guess what she said?”

“‘Dearie me, how painful'?”

“She said ‘Ayabastard.' Dead loud. She's never been back since.”

_____

Etta McLuskie, sitting in her car in the darkest corner of the multi-storey, was using all the wiles that had deserted her on the waxing table that day.

“No one's going to put two and two together and build a scaffold,” she said, speaking loud enough for her voice to carry through the open window of her car and into the open window of the car pulled up beside her. “Your … problem was years ago. I wasn't the Painchton provost, you weren't the minister. Everyone has remarried, moved house, retired, or all three. We have no connection and there's no paper trail.”

“I hope you're right,” the voice came back from the other car.

“We just need till the new year,” said Etta.

“And you're sure it's not going to leak? Painchton's not what it was, I heard. Incomers, folk with no loyalty. Troublemakers.”

“But none of them know,” said Etta. “There's only five of us, Painchton-born and -bred, who know what's happening. Of course, there's newcomers in the town—there's a vegetarian numpty in the Cat's Whiskers, for one—but we keep them where we want them. Outside.”

_____

Pamela Shand was in the Cat's Whiskers with the shutters down, busy pricing stock. Marking down sale stock, actually. Putting half-price stickers on her rack of vegetarian cookbooks, to be more precise than she felt like being. She had got them in when the horse meat scandal took off (which was how she put it to herself, although she was careful to say
struck
to others). But the stream of neighbours seeking advice on mung beans had never started, and the Pooles were busier than ever. She heard the bell clank again and again every morning as she stood in the queue at the post office. Just once she had asked Mrs. Watson:

“How
can
you? You're surrounded by all that bounty and yet you eat the flesh of the dead?”

“The Flesh of The Dead?” said Mrs. Watson. “It sounds like a movie. Dina always loved a zombie, and she left her DVDs for me. Anyway, Malcolm gets all his meat from Malone's, what he doesn't prepare for himself.”

“And where do
they
get it?” said Pamela.

“Och, who cares?” said Mrs. Watson. “That boy could season a scabby rat and you'd not say no. Rosa Imperiolo tells me some of his special mixture—it's a shame to put it in a curry.”

_____

In his little study under the stairs, Kenny Imperiolo cocked his head and listened to the sounds of Rosa moving about the house, so familiar after all these years; the creak of a board in the smallest spare bedroom, a faint hiss, the clunk of plastic on metal, and then the creak again. She was ironing. Kenny screwed up his face trying to remember what the level had been in the plastic basket on top of the dryer that morning when he'd gone to the freezer to get his good fresh coffee beans. Surely it was piled high? Didn't she always leave it until there was a mountain and then groan to herself as she carried it upstairs? She would be busy for hours, wouldn't come anywhere near him. All the same, he moved a heavy box against the door of his little hidey-hole before he turned his computer on. There were no locks anywhere in this house, never had been—not even on the bathrooms, since that time Michael shut himself in in a tantrum when he was four and Kenny had put his foot through the garage roof climbing to the rescue. He pulled the door hard and the box didn't budge. And anyway, Rosa never came checking up on him; it wasn't her way. She was a good, trusting, loving wife who'd never done anything except make him proud to stand beside her, and she deserved no less than the same back from him. Kenny imagined those warm brown eyes of hers narrowed and hard, staring at him, asking him why. Then he shook the picture out of his head and started working.

_____

Sandra Dessing followed Carmen and Melisande into the wood and put the little black bag with the integrated scoop away in her anorak pocket. She always carried it out for everyone to see while she was on the street, but she was damned if she was going to use one on the bark paths at £3.99 for ten. Ahead of her she could hear faint tuneless whistling and she pinched her cheeks and tucked her hair behind he ears. Iain Ballantyne came around the corner with Tig on his lead.

“Hello, hello,” he said. “I was just on my way home, but I'll maybe turn back and have another wee stroll.”

“Why not?” said Mrs. Dessing. “Nice to see them having a good run and play together.”

“If you're sure,” said Mr. Ballantyne, and something in his voice made Sandra look away from the dogs and glance at his face instead, right into his eyes.

“Why?” she said. “What's wrong?”

“We need to talk,” said Iain. “We really need to talk today.” He bent to unhook Tig's lead from his collar and all three dogs, well used to one another by now, bounded into the trees with their owners following after.

_____

As Keiko held Viola in the warmth of the swaying bus, as Fancy and Yvonne egged one another on in the fug of the salon, as Etta McLuskie stood her ground in the parked car, as Pamela Shand whacked the books with the pricing gun, as Kenny clicked and dragged and deleted, as Iain and Sandra's dogs raced on into the darkest part of the woods—no one thought of the letters.

Some, reduced to ash with the rest of the clearings from the grate, were tipped into carriers, tied in binbags, burned again in the council incinerator, tipped out of the back of the truck eighteen miles away and scraped flat by men with masks and heavy gloves against the dust and grit they were spreading.

Some, in shreds, had rotted to compost with clippings and peelings, until the narrow lines of ink were gone. And in the spring when the bin was emptied and barrowed over to the border, there would be no sign in the crumbling brown that any paper was ever there.

Some had been pressed between pages never to be parted again, not even when the executors put the house on the open market and the eaves were emptied after the place was sold. That whole year's worth of
Woman's Realm
would be bound up with brown string and taken away by the clearance companies, sold on to the recyclers, and entered in the bill under sundry other items as “non-confidential printed paper: three bales.”

Some grew pulpy on their way downstream, heavy and sloughing apart, turning to grey paste in the water, one piece tangling itself in a length of plastic twine and floating for miles before the line snagged on a jutting rock and the balls of sodden paper were washed away.

Only a single letter remained, resting again where it had rested for years, behind the radiator, by the door, under the shelf, above the genkan now, as secret as ever—except that Keiko knew.

_____

Murray knelt beside the Harley, waiting just the right amount of time for the WD-40 to loosen the nuts under the saddle but not long enough for it to drip down between the rear mudguard and the battery. Malcolm stood at his bench in the back room, boning and rolling, dividing his store of fat evenly amongst the joints, tying the skin snugly over the pink and white spirals and patting each one be
fore he laid them into the tray for the morning. Mrs. Poole could hear the regular slap of his palm on the skin as he finished another one, but she barely registered such a familiar sound as she snapped her ledger shut and pulled the first bundle of banknotes towards her.

twenty-seven

Wednesday, 20 November

Mrs. Poole was there
again the next evening, listening, her hands spread flat on the empty desktop, when Keiko's phone rang. She cocked her head to catch footsteps or talking, but nothing much came down through these stone floors. She of all people should know that by now.

“I can't,” Keiko was saying. “I've planned something with Murray.”

“Oh, yeah?” Fancy said.

“I'm making him a meal. A proper Japanese meal. The works.”

“Just Murray?”

“Just the two of us.”

“After all Malcolm's done, feeding you up like a Christmas goose too.”

She had made miso soup, stuffed fish, shaped dumplings. The first two batches, bland and heavy, she threw away but on the third attempt they came out as light as seed heads, as gold as sunshine. That would surely be enough, with the noodles and all the pickles, to make up for no sushi.

She laid two settings at the coffee table before the fire, put an extra pair of slippers on the genkan and put on her kimono, shaking out two months of folds and breathing in the scent of home. Murray arrived right on time, with flowers for her.

“Oops,” he said as she flung the door open and bowed. “Did I get you out the bath?” She smiled. “No really, you look great. And is it shoes off, then?” Keiko nodded and waited while he hopped around, unlacing his boots. “The total Tokyo experience, eh?”

“One night only,” said Keiko. “Starting tomorrow I'm going to have time for nothing except the experiments until Christmas.”

“Not even workouts?”

“I wouldn't give up the workouts. I can't tell you how grateful I am. And so tonight is like a thank-you. I want you to have a lovely evening.” She hesitated. “You deserve one.”

He held up his hand. “If we're going to have a lovely evening,” he said, “could we agree not to talk about … things?” Keiko nodded. “Good. So, tell me what to do then. If you've gone to a lot of trouble, I want to get my end of it right.”

“No, no, no,” she said. “No etiquette, it's too … I wanted to cook for you—just enjoy the food.”

Murray frowned, then smiled tightly. “Too complicated for me?”

“Well, if you're really interested,” she said, backtracking. “Most foreigners think it's silly.” She excused herself and went to the kitchen to set the noodle water on to boil. Murray had wriggled himself into a comfortable position on his cushion when she came back and folded herself down opposite him to pour sake.

“I was just thinking,” he said, “for anyone else, there's not enough furniture in here,” he said, “but I suppose it's fine for you, eh?”

Keiko looked around at the skinny sofa and chairs, the trolley with the television on it, the stretches of bare carpet.

“Was there much more furniture when you lived here?”

Murray folded his arms. “We weren't going to talk about things,” he said.

“I didn't mean to,” said Keiko. “I didn't know I was.” She smiled at him. “It
is
fine for me. It's a shame it was empty so long.” She wondered if this would count as talking again, but he only laughed.

“Hardly empty,” he said. “There was never a minute's peace.”

“Who was here?” said Keiko, trying not to sound too eager.

“The Traders,” Murray told her. He had finished his sake and Keiko poured him some more. “When Dad was chairman, they used the flat as their gang hut.” He laughed. “That's what Craig called it. Had the meetings up here and stored all the Christmas lights and Gala stuff and that.”

“The Traders,” said Keiko. “They used this place?”

“Not the whole squad of them. Just the committee.”

Everything,
Keiko thought,
leads back to the committee.

There was a fizzing noise from the kitchen as the noodle water boiled over, and she hurried away through there again.

“
Itadakimasu,
” she said ten minutes later, as she knelt again. “You say it too.” She repeated it until he could chant it smoothly after her, and then they said it once more to each other.

“Now, hold your chopsticks like something for eating and not for gardening,” she said. Murray made a passable attempt and she nodded at him. “Easy, see?” she said. “And remember not to put the same end into the big dish as the end you put in your mouth. Don't stick them in straight up and down but always tilted to the side. Don't pick up a dish in the same hand as you hold your chopsticks. Don't wave them over the food, don't point them at me—either end—and, most important, never
never
pass any food from one person to another in your chopsticks. But you can't get that wrong because I wouldn't take it anyway.”

“Makes sense,” said Murray. “So basically, don't spit in the food and don't poke your eyes in.”

He watched her as she made mosaics on the surface of her soup with tiny pieces of shredded spice, then took a piece of chicken from her bowl and bit into it. Next a tangle of noodles that she scooped up to her lips and sucked in with the proper sound. He drew back, his stare hardening, but she nodded and smiled. Then she lifted her bowl and took a slurping gulp of the broth. He looked away from her.

“This is how,” she insisted. “Bite, suck, slurp. Especially a good noisy slurp. That's the polite way to eat soup. And you say
ro-ro-ro
when you're eating your noodles.” Murray stared down into his bowl in disappointment. “I'll get the dumplings,” she said.

“Dumplings?” His voice sounded cold.

“Gyoza. Special lighter-than-air Japanese dumplings. I'll show you how to eat them.”

The dip, bite, dip, bite, dab of the gyoza seemed to please him more. He copied her movements, letting go of his chopsticks only once to shake a cramp out of his hand. When he had grasped a particularly neat piece and dipped it with two elegant swipes into the sauce, he held it out to her over the table, smiling, inviting her to take it. She pulled back, shaking her head but laughing.

“No, no, impossible,” she said. “I can't.” He kept his chopsticks out towards her, waving the steaming dumpling back and forth.

“Come on,” he said. “There's nobody watching.” She wanted to, and almost did, but she took too long and by the time she had steeled herself to raise her hand, he had begun to lower his and the smile had disappeared.

“Just enjoy the food,” said Murray, in a high piping voice, with his mouth turned down into a pout like a carp. “Don't worry about the etiquette.” Keiko flushed and had a sudden urge to upend the table into his lap. She could see the noodles sliding and spattering over his shirt, the soup, still hot enough to scald with any luck, spreading in a dark stain over his trousers. She blinked the image away.

“When a person dies,” she said, “their body is cremated and their bones are laid to rest.” Murray stared at her. “And during the ceremony,” she went on, “the bones are handled with special chopsticks and they are passed from person to person, and that is the only thing that's ever passed that way.”

“Christ,” he said, flicking the piece of dumpling right off his plate and then staring at it where it lay on the tabletop. Keiko picked it up in her hand and took it out of the room. When she came back he was composed again, and they ate in silence until they were done. Keiko laid her chopsticks down.

“
Gochisousama
,” she said. “
Goh chee soo sah mah
.”

“
Gochisousama
,” said Murray, and they stood. In the kitchen, Keiko tidied the bowls into the dishwasher and tidied the leftover dumplings into herself. Then she blushed and went back to Murray. He was sitting on the sofa reading a blank questionnaire.

“Are you still hungry?” she said.

He looked up in surprise. “No. Is there more?”

“No, nothing. Only Japanese food—it can be fiddly.”

“Some people aren't happy unless they're face down in the stew,” he said. “Not me.”

She joined him on the sofa, reading the last questions over his shoulder.

“Well?” she said when he had finished and was smoothing the pages flat again.

“What will you be able to tell from all that?”

“I'll plot the subjects' positions on various continua of attitudes, allowing me to judge their responses to later stimuli against a normative scale.”

“Say no more,” said Murray. Then: “Sorry about that chopsticks thing.” She shrugged to show him it was nothing. “But how can you stand it?” he said. “Using the same things for food and dead bodies.”

“Not dead bodies,” she said. “Just bones, clean from the fire.”

“Bones are bodies,” he said. “How are bodies different from bones?”

“The same way that frames aren't bikes,” said Keiko. “Otherwise how could there be a Vincent—a bike without a frame? They're two different things.”

“Don't,” said Murray, and when Keiko turned to him in surprise she thought he was pale suddenly. “Don't talk like that about the bikes.”

“Like …?”

“Dead bodies,” Murray said. “It's completely different. Bikes last forever if you keep them oiled. Bodies rot. Even if you clean the bones, they crumble to bits in the end. Bikes … if something goes wrong, you can take them apart, fix it, and put them back together, good as new. Bodies … if you take bodies apart, it's just … meat.” He stood, gulping as though he were about to retch. “Sorry,” he said. “I need to get out. It's this place. I need some fresh air. Sorry.”

And then he was gone, picking up his boots as he passed, but fleeing downstairs in her spare slippers, leaving her gazing after him.

She breathed in deeply to steady herself and then groaned. That bloody smell! No wonder he needed fresh air. What was the point of trying to make everything pretty and dainty with that stink in the background? She gathered the last of the place settings—the napkins and placemats—and stamped into the kitchen. And another thing! Who knew what it would do to a load of results about eating if the subjects were halfway to nauseated because of her drains? What
was
that smell?

She threw down the napkins, opened her laptop, and when the browser started, she typed
why does my kitchen drain smell
?

She could dismiss all the answers saying it was dirty; she had poured a swimming pool's worth of bleach down there. And it wasn't tree roots outside because the bathroom drain was fine.

The cartoons on the plumbing DIY site made her shudder, little grey-green monsters hiding in the trap like trolls under a bridge.

“Bones or other solid objects may form a framework which collects debris,” she read. Murray had said bones crumble eventually, even if you clean them.
Not fast enough
, she thought, going to the kitchen drawer and taking out the flower-patterned wrench the Traders had put there for her.

She followed the instructions like the scholar she was, placing a bowl under the pipe joint and turning the water off just in case (of what, the website didn't say), and truth be told she was pleased at how easy she found it and yet how competent it made her feel.

But when the U-shaped piece of pipe came free, as she unthreaded the coupling, she could not help starting back at the sudden rolling outward of that same foul familiar smell, stronger than ever. She let the pipe fall into the bowl and then stood up, lifting it into the light, giving a grunt of satisfaction as she peered in one end. There
was
something in there; something criss-crossing the space that should have been clear, something furred with old grease and shreds of vegetable peelings. She could even see a strand of tonight's soup noodles caught on it and wound around.

She seized a chopstick from the pile of dirty dishes and poked it into the end of the pipe, waggling it around trying to dislodge the object. It didn't budge, so she poked harder, felt something give way with a snap. It sounded like a bone, small and thin, and deep inside her a tiny shrill of fear began as she turned the pipe over and banged one end hard with the heel of her hand.

When the thing fell out, she let her breath go in a rush.

It was only a chicken bone. A broken wishbone, nothing more. But then, as she turned to rip off a piece of kitchen paper, she saw something glint and turned back, bending to look more closely. There was more than peelings and noodles caught in the vee of the bone. What had made it into a cat's cradle was a chain, fine and gold-coloured, tangled there. She picked at a loose loop of it and slowly it came clear. It was a necklace of small gold links, and hanging from it was a pendant shaped like a letter
N
.

“Nicole,” she breathed. “Where are you?”