Number9Dream (34 page)

I had a dream about Anju last night. Anju, a Siberian tiger running past me in a subway (I knew it was Siberian because the yellow stripes were white), and a game where you had to hide a bone-egg in a library. Anju won’t leave me alone. I paid a priest a fortune to perform pacifying rites but I should have spent the money on French wine for all the good it did. I never dream about you – in fact I never remember any of my dreams, except the Anju ones. Why is that? Dr Suzuki seemed to think . . . ah, who cares. Just burn the letter, please.

Bats streamed beyond bracken-matted dusk. Goatwriter mulled at his writing bureau, watching the forest of moss until shadows danced. ‘I declare, I could swear . . .’ Goatwriter began. Mrs Comb was clog-polishing there on the stair. ‘Not like that sewer-mouthed ScatRat, I hope, sir.’ Goatwriter stroked the fountain pen of Sei Shonagon. ‘I could swear that in the arboreal soul of this forest . . . far and deep . . . I glean gleams of a truly untold tale . . .’ Whether Goatwriter was thinking in words or talking in silence was unclear. ‘The venerable coach penetrated this forest as far as the track permitted, and has not moved on for seven days . . . quite unprecedented . . . I do believe it is trying to tell me something . . .’

The evening cooled and Mrs Comb shivered. ‘Foxtrot pudding for supper, sir. You give your eyes a rest and play a nice round of Blind Man’s Scrabble.’ She hoped the venerable coach would move on that night, but doubted it would.

The following morning, Pithecanthropus was digging through deep creaking coal seams in search of diamonds. Mrs Comb’s birthday was coming up, and several nights ago the venerable coach had been overtaken by a convertible with a radio playing a song about how diamonds are a girl’s best friend. Mrs Comb was no girl, it was true, but Pithecanthropus hoped that the friend part might rub off in his favour. Past tasty pockets of earthworms, truffles and larvae dug the early ancestor, past droll trolls, moles, addled adders and bothered badgers, down where Pithecanthropus could hear the earth furnace boom to a rhythm all its own. Hours cannot dig so far, and Pithecanthropus lost all track of time. ‘You hulking great lout,’ an impossibly distant voice found him, much later. ‘Where are you the one time I need you?’ Mrs Comb! Pithecanthropus swam upward with a mighty breaststroke, up through the loosened earth, and within a minute resurfaced. Mrs Comb was flapping in circles like a headless chicken, waving a note. ‘Here you are last! Muck-grubbing around in a crisis!’ Pithecanthropus grunted. ‘Sir has upped and offed! I knew he wasn’t himself last night, and this morning I find this note on his writing bureau!’ She thrust it at Pithecanthropus, who groaned – all those squiggles skidding over their paper. Mrs Comb sighed. ‘Three million years you’ve had to learn how to read! The letter says Sir has gone into this mucky forest! All on his own! He said he didn’t want to drag us into nowt dangerous! Dangerous? What if he meets a mild cannibal much less a wild animal? What if the venerable coach drives off tonight? We’d never see Sir again! And he forgot his asthma inhaler!’ Mrs Comb began sobbing into her apron, which wrung Pithecanthropus’s giant heart. ‘First his story, then his pen, and now he’s lost himself!’ Pithecanthropus grunted imploringly.

‘Are . . . are you sure? You can track Sir in this thick-as-thieves forest?’

Pithecanthropus grunted reassuringly.

I hear Buntaro let himself in downstairs. ‘Hang on,’ I yell, ‘I’ll be right down!’ Two o’clock already – today is the last day of my exile. I feel tired again – it rained last night, and fat fingers kept prising me awake. I kept thinking somebody was trying to force a window somewhere. I arrange the pages of the manuscript how they were on the writing bureau, and pick my way between the books to the trapdoor. I shout down – ‘Sorry, Buntaro! I lost track of time!’ Goodbye, study of tales. I go down to the living room where a dark figure closes the door behind me. My heart rams itself up my throat. She is a middle-aged woman, unafraid, curious, reading me. Her hair is short, severe and as grey as a feared headmistress’s. She is dressed in forgettable clothes, anonymous as a shot in a mail-order catalogue. You would pass her a hundred times and never notice her. Unless she suddenly appeared in your living room. How owlish and scarred she is. Her stare goes on and on, as if she has every right to be here, and is waiting for the intruder – me – to explain himself. ‘Who, uh, are you?’ I eventually manage. ‘You invited me, Eiji Miyake.’ Her voice you would not forget. Cracked as cane, dry as drought. ‘So I came.’

A passing lunatic? ‘But I never invited anyone.’

‘But you did. Two days ago you sent an invitation to my letter-drop.’

Her? ‘Morino’s detective?’

She nods. ‘My name is Yamaya.’ She disarms me with a smile as friendly as a dagger thrust. ‘Yes, I am a woman, not a man in drag. Invisibility is a major asset in my line of work. However, discussing my modus operandi is not why I am here, is it? Won’t you offer me a chair?’ All too weird. ‘Sure. Please sit down.’ Mrs Yamaya takes the sofa, so I take the floor by the window. She has the eye of a meticulous reader, which makes me the book. She looks behind me. ‘Nice garden. Nice property. Nice neighbourhood. Nice hidey-hole.’

Over to me, it seems. I offer her a Marlboro from Daimon’s final box, but she shakes her head. I light mine. ‘How did you, uh, trace me?’

‘I obtained your address from the
Tokyo Evening Mail
.’

‘They gave you my address?’

‘No, I said I
obtained
it. Then I trailed Mr Ogiso here yesterday evening.’

‘With respect, Mrs Yamaya, I asked for a file, not a visit.’

‘With respect, Mr Miyake, get real. I receive a note from a mysterious nobody asking for the selfsame file I compiled for the late Ryutaro Morino three days before the night of the long knives. How coincidental. I earn a living by unpicking coincidences. Your note was a bleeding lamb tossed into a swimming pool of sharks. I had three theories – you were a potential client testing my professionality; someone with a potentially lucrative personal interest in Eiji Miyake; or the father of Eiji Miyake himself. All three were worth a follow-up. I do so, and I discover you are the son of the father.’

From the garden I hear a crow craw-crawing. I wonder what happened to Mrs Yamaya to make her so sad but so steel-willed. ‘You know my father?’

‘Only socially.’

Only socially. ‘Mrs Yamaya, I would like to ask you more cleverly and indirectly, but, uh, will you please give me the file on my father?’

Mrs Yamaya forms a cage with her long, strong fingers. ‘Now we have got to why I am here. To consider this very question.’

‘How much?’

‘Please, Mr Miyake. We are both perfectly aware of your financial non-position.’

‘Then what are you here to consider? Whether or not I deserve it?’

The crow hops over to the balcony and peers in. It is as big as an eagle. Mrs Yamaya’s murmur could hush a stadium. ‘No, people in my line of walk must never allow “deserve” to enter the equation.’

‘What does enter the equation?’

‘The consequences.’

The doorbell rings and I twitch – hot ash falls on my legs. The doorbell rings again. What an invasion! A specially rigged light strobes on and off several times, for Mrs Sasaki’s sister’s deafness, I guess. I stub out my cigarette. It lies there, stubbed. The doorbell rings again – I hear a slight laugh. Mrs Yamaya doesn’t move. ‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’

‘Excuse me,’ I say, and she nods.

Stupidly, I am too fazed to put the chain on the door, and the two young men seem so pleased to see me that for a moment I panic – this is a set-up organized with Mrs Yamaya, and I walked straight into it. ‘Hi there!’ they beam. Which one spoke? Immaculate white shirts, conservative ties, sheeny, computer-generated hair – hardly regular Yakuza garb. They irradiate health and positive vibes. ‘Hey, feller! Is this a bad time? Because we have
great
news!’ They are either going to produce guns or tell me about a spectacular discount kimono service.

‘You, uh, do?’ I glance behind me.

‘You bet I do! You see, Lord Jesus Christ is waiting outside the door of
your heart
at this
very
moment – he wants to know if you have a few minutes to spare so he can tell you about the joy that will be yours – if you unlock your heart and let in His Love.’ I breathe sheer relief – they take this as a ‘yes’ and turn up their zeal volume even higher. ‘Your heart seems no stranger to trouble, my friend. We are here with the Church of the Latter Day Saints – perhaps you’ve heard of our missionary work?’

‘No, no. I haven’t actually.’ Another stupid thing to say. When I finally close the door – these Mormons’ smiles are ironed on – and get back to the living room nobody is there. I open the balcony doors, surprised. Did I imagine my grim visitor? ‘Mrs Yamaya?’ The crow is gone too. Nothing but the layered buzzes and summer creaks and hisses. A butterfly with gold-digger eyes mistakes me for a bush. I watch it, and moments telescope into minutes. When I go back in I notice what I missed at first – a brown envelope, lying on the sofa where Mrs Yamaya had sat. Any brief hope that she left me the document wallet on my father is snuffed out right away – the envelope is labelled ‘Tokyo Evening Mail – Correspondence Box 333’. Inside is a letter, addressed to me in the spidery hand of a very old person. I sit down and slit it open.

Where mossy drapes hung so thick that Goatwriter could no longer push onward, he sploshed in a babbling brook. The stream jaggered clattery underhoof not with rolling stones, but with dinner plates. The water was the colour of tea. Goatwriter sipped a mouthful – high-quality, cool tea. He drank his fill and his head cleared. ‘A stream of consciousness!’ he rejoyced. ‘I must be in the Darjeeling foothills.’ Goatwriter paddled upstream. Lantern orchids bloomed the noon gloom beneath spinster aspidistra. Opal-wingtipped hummingbirds probed syrup-bleeding figs. Far above the forest canopy was chalk-dusted with daylight. It seemed to Goatwriter that these random dabs of light formed words. ‘All my life, I searched for the truly untold tale in the arcane, in the profound. Could my quixotic quest be a quite quotidian query? Does profundity hide in the obvious?’

Goatwriter paddled into a glade misty with sunlight. A girl with flaxen hair swing-swung, singing a melody with no beginning and no name. Goatwriter reached the foot of her tree. Her voice was that of the whisperings, heard by the old goat nightly since midsummer. ‘You are in search of the truly untold tale.’ She swung up, and Antarctica drifted unmeasured miles.

‘Yes,’ replied Goatwriter.

She swung down. Ursa Minor rose. ‘Untold tales are in the highlands.’

‘How m-might I find these highlands?’

‘Go around the bend to the sacred pool, up the wall, and over the waterfall.’

‘Over the waterfall . . .’

The girl with the flaxen hair swung up. ‘Are you prepared to pay?’

‘I’ve paid all my life.’

‘Ah, but Goatwriter. You haven’t paid everything yet.’

‘What can be left to pay, pray?’

The swing fell to earth, quite empty.

When Goatwriter came to the sacred pool he removed his glasses to wipe away the waterfall spray, but to his surprise he found he could see better without them. So he left them on the marble rock and pondered the pool. Peculiar. Firstly, the waterfall was soundless. Secondly, the water did not fall from the precipice far above, but rose upward in a giddied, lurching, foaming – and silent – torrent. Goatwriter could see no path up the rock face. He spoke to himself, but no sound came out. ‘I’m not a kid any more. I’m getting too old for symbolic quests.’ He considered turning back, even at this eleventh hour. Mrs Comb would be distraught when he failed to return – but she had Pithecanthropus to care for, and to care for her. The writer within the animal sighed. And he thought of his truly untold tale, and he jumped from the marble rock. The pool was as cold and sudden as death itself.

Wednesday 20th September

Tokyo

Dear Eiji Miyake,

I hope you will forgive the sudden, unusual and possibly intrusive nature of this letter. Quite possibly, moreover, you and its intended recipient are not the same person, which would cause considerable embarrassment. Nonetheless, I feel it is a risk worth taking. Permit me to explain.

I am writing in response to an advertisement which appeared in the personal column of
Tokyo Evening Mail
on 14 September. The advertisement was brought to my attention only this morning by a visiting acquaintance. I should perhaps explain I am recovering from an operation to the valves in my heart. You appealed for any relatives of Eiji Miyake to respond. I believe I may be your paternal grandfather.

Two decades ago my son sired a pair of illegimate twins – a boy and a girl. He broke relations with their mother, a woman of lowly occupation, and, as far as I know, never saw his twins again. I do not know where the children were brought up, nor by whom – the mother’s people, one presumes. The girl apparently drowned in her eleventh year, but the boy would now be twenty. I never knew their mother’s name, nor did I see a picture of my illegimate grandchildren. Relations with my son have never been as cordial as one would wish, and since his marriage we have corresponded ever less. I did, however, discover the names of the twins he fathered: hence this letter. The girl’s name was Anju, and the boy’s name is Eiji, written not in the commonplace manner (the kanjis for ‘intelligent’ plus ‘two’ or ‘govern’), but with highly unusual kanjis for ‘incant’ and ‘world’. As in your case.

I would like to keep this letter short for the reason that the ‘evidence’ of the kanji remains inconclusive. A face-to-face meeting, I believe, will clarify this ambiguity: if we are related, I feel certain we will find points of physical resemblance. I shall be at Amadeus Tea Room, on the ninth floor of the Righa Royal Hotel (opposite Harajuku station), on Monday 25th of September, at a table reserved in my name. Please present yourself at 10 a. m., with any concrete evidence of your parentage which you may have in your possession.