The Journey Prize Stories 25 (13 page)

“And I can put my books in the basket, just like a European,” she had said, wrapping her arms around him. But she never did ride it to school. It just sat in the corner behind the couch
gathering dust. When people would come over to the apartment, she would show it to them, brag about Lucas’s amazing yard sale find, and wasn’t it so cool and vintage? Like it was a decoration, Lucas thought.

“What are you doing?” Casey came up behind him, startling him so much he almost dropped his milk.

“Why are you always around?” he asked.

Casey, preoccupied with a Fudgsicle, ignored him. “Is that your bike?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “It belongs to a friend of mine.”

She walked over to the bike and prodded it with chocolate-sticky fingers. “It’s cool,” she said. “Kind of useless, though. There’s not even any speeds.”

Lucas leaned against the wall. “Yeah. I guess she thought so, too.”

Casey slid the end of her Fudgsicle off of the stick with her teeth and threw the stick on the ground. “Can I try it?” she asked.

“I guess,” said Lucas. “The key’s upstairs, I can …” But Casey had already pulled a bobby pin out of her hair and was jamming it in the lock, and within a couple of seconds it popped open. “Nice work,” said Lucas.

“Thanks,” said Casey. “You know, Dylan was a professional bike thief. She used to take me on runs with her some nights in Kingston, until one night she stole the bike of the son of the leader of the Russian mafia and they put a hit out on her …”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Lucas.

Casey jumped on the bike and started pedalling around the parking lot. “…  In the middle of the night,” she called back over her shoulder, “we had to fleeeeeeeeeeee …” Her face was
still covered in chocolate, and she had something green stuck in her teeth, but she was smiling. Lucas found himself wishing he was twelve again, that he had the time to do it all over again. The thought surprised and scared him. Up until that moment, he hadn’t thought he
had
anything to do all over.

Casey brought the bike to a stop in front of him. “Yeah,” she said. “This bike sucks.”

“Sorry,” said Lucas. “Maybe some other little brat will come steal it.”

They walked the bike back over to the rack together. Lucas picked up Casey’s Fudgsicle stick and handed it to her. “Put this in the garbage,” he said.

“Okay,” Casey said, taking it from him. “So, what was her name?”

Lucas looped the lock back around the front wheel of the bike. “Who?” he asked.

“Your friend. The bike chick.”

“Oh.” Lucas stood up. “Laure. Her name was Laure.”

“Weird.” Casey popped the end of the dirty stick in her mouth. Lucas cringed. “Where is she?”

Lucas leaned against the bike rack and brushed his hands against his jeans. “Well,” he said. He looked at Casey. “We had been living together for two years, and I thought we were madly in love. She was a cellist. She had been recording herself playing and posting it on the internet. One day, this guy, a famous underground DJ from Ibiza named Isoceles Jones, found her site. Apparently he liked her stuff and wanted to sample it. So they started emailing each other, and talking on the phone, and then one day she just up and went to Spain to be with him.” He paused, rubbing his hands over his face.
“Since then, they’ve recorded a single together that went to number 17 on the U.K. dance charts, and they’re going on tour opening for a German digital hardcore group called STV Suicide. All of which I found out from her Wikipedia page.” He grabbed one of the bike handles. “So I guess she doesn’t really need this.” He gave the bike a shake, then pushed it over. It clanged against the rack, but the lock kept it from falling.

“Holy crap.” Casey took the stick out of her mouth, staring at him. “Dude, I am sorry I said you had no imagination. That was the best story
I ever heard!
”

“Yeah,” said Lucas. “It’s a pretty good one.” He started walking toward the door.

Casey trotted behind him. “Seriously,” she said, waving the stick through the air. “That could be a movie or something. Can I use that one sometime? About Dylan, I mean?”

“Yup. Sure.” Lucas ran up the stairs, Casey at his heels.

“I’d have to change all that love stuff …”

“Whatever you want.” Lucas stopped at his apartment. “Milk’s getting warm,” he said. Casey opened her mouth again, but Lucas closed the door before she could get anything out.

She had left him a note.

A note. Even the insignificant roommates, the ones whose names he
didn’t
have plastered across his fucking heart, had managed better than that.

Later, she had called him, crying. “Just tell me you want me to come back,” she whispered through the phone. She sounded so far away. “Just tell me you can’t live without me, that I mean everything to you, that you’ll come to Ibiza to get me if you have to.”

But he couldn’t. “I’m keeping your sheets,” he said instead. “And your DVD.” He hung up, the phone shaking in his hand.

That night, Lucas woke up to the smell of something burning. His first thought was that he was having a seizure. “Dr. Penfield,” he remembered the thick-accented woman in the Historica minute saying. “I smell burnt toast.” When he woke up enough to realize he was okay, he turned the light on and saw smoke pouring in from outside through the open bedroom window. Holding his breath, he closed the window and then threw on a T-shirt and headed downstairs to check it out.

The bike was on fire. It seemed impossible, but it was true. Someone had taken stacks of paper – comic books, Lucas realized – and stuffed them around the bike rack and set them ablaze. Bright orange flames were licking the side of the building, illuminating the thick black plumes of smoke that were rising straight from the pile up to Lucas’s apartment. And off to the side, holding a can of WD-40, was Casey.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Lucas snatched the can from her hand. She just kept staring straight ahead, watching the flames. “Casey!” He grabbed her shoulders and shook her.

Slowly, she looked at him. “It was true, wasn’t it? Your story.”

He dropped his hands. In the distance, he could hear sirens. “Yeah. It was true.”

Casey kept staring at him. “I wish mine was,” she whispered.

Lucas looked around, then threw the empty can on the fire. It exploded in a bright burst of flame. “Come on,” he said.

Casey looked down at her hands. “People will find us,” she said.

“No, they won’t,” said Lucas, giving her a push. “You’re a ninja, remember? Be a ninja.”

They started walking. Behind them, they could hear voices, and the sirens getting closer, but they didn’t turn around. After about a block, Lucas realized Casey didn’t have any shoes on, so he bent down and let her climb on his back. He wasn’t sure where he was going, so he just kept walking, past Falucci’s, past the library, past the souvlaki place, into the unknown.

“Perfect Storm,”
he said after a while.

Casey, who had been nearly asleep against his shoulder, raised her head. “Huh?”

“
Perfect Storm
. It was the comic book I used to write. Well, tried to. I sent an issue to a publisher, but he said it was stupid.”

Casey put her head back against his shoulder and was quiet for so long he thought she had fallen back asleep. Finally, she whispered “What was it about?”

Lucas stopped. There was a small park ahead, and he bent over, sliding Casey off his back and onto a bench. The sun was just coming up. Across the street there was a Tim Hortons, and Lucas wished he had brought some change with him. He sat down on the bench next to Casey. “A super-intelligent tornado,” he said.

Casey yawned. “That
is
stupid,” she said. She leaned over and put her head down on the bench, curling up into a little ball. Lucas stretched his legs out in front of him and waited for the sun to rise.

Mrs. Fujimoto takes her powdered green tea on the balcony at three o’clock on Wednesday afternoons from April to October. She has a standing appointment at one for a rinse and set. Her hair, a delicate helmet of curls, has retained the softness and lustre of youth. On leaving the stylist, she strides to the florist’s, designer two-inch heels clicking, turquoise coat (a small, as always) swaying. Older men smile as she passes, younger ones open doors.

At the florist’s, she chooses the freshest flowers, yellow chrysanthemums perhaps. Back home, she arranges them asymmetrically in the two-headed porcelain vase and places the arrangement on the mahogany dining table. She boils water and opens the tin with the powder. She adds two jade-coloured scoops to a cup, stirs the mixture with a bamboo whisk, and brings the cup out to the balcony.

The balcony faces a box-like building populated by low-level salarymen and foreigners, a view that is usually uninteresting to Mrs. Fujimoto. Instead she cranes her neck to the
north, pinpointing the spot behind the NTT and Panasonic spires where she knows the temple garden lies. The honking of car horns and the yelling of schoolchildren below fade away as she imagines the winding pathway enclosed by azaleas, the spark of meeting a patch of irises in full bloom. Her face becomes slack. This slackening occurs only when no one else is present.

One Wednesday in May 2005, two things attract her notice. The first is a white camellia petal which has blown onto the balcony and lies at her feet, waiting. She caresses the flower, its texture soft and vulnerable as wet paper, and inhales the aroma. The second is a flicker from the opposite balcony. A new foreigner, a young woman, is bending over a washing machine. She peers around the side, lifts up the top, and looks inside. She steps back and stares at the machine. From the way the foreign woman coils her copper hair behind her ear and stands with one leg slightly bent, Mrs. Fujimoto concludes that she is shyly aware of her good looks.

When the foreign woman goes inside, Mrs. Fujimoto appraises the machine. She has excellent eyesight and can see that the machine is dirty and the hose to connect machine and tap is missing. The foreign woman comes out with a pile of clothes and begins stuffing them in the washing machine. Surely she realizes … but she pours detergent on the clothes, replaces the top, and reaches for the tap. Water sloshes onto the floor, and a rogue jet shoots into her eye. She leaps back. The corners of Mrs. Fujimoto’s lips twitch.

The foreign woman grabs the clothes out of the machine. She stamps into the apartment and hurls the door shut, leaving Mrs. Fujimoto amused. What did she expect? Has she never
done laundry? Mrs. Fujimoto hasn’t noticed the washing machine before and, later, discreet inquiries will reveal that the apartment was recently rented by an English-language school, which supplied the furniture. It isn’t entirely the foreign woman’s fault, then. She probably expected to find electric lipstick here, and they leave her with this ancient contraption? What stories will she take home to her country about Japan?
I thought it would be so modern, but they don’t even have automatic washing machines
. Mrs. Fujimoto rubs the petal into shreds.

Sixty-four years earlier in a neighbouring prefecture, she plays on the beach with her friend Sakina after school on Wednesdays. Wednesday is Mayuko’s day off. The other days are spent helping her mother, perhaps by shaving the dried bonito and stirring the flakes into the stock her mother is cooking.

But Wednesdays she and Sakina race each other to the beach, down the alleys crowded with hawkers shouting to bargain seekers, past the stench emitting from the cartloads of freshly caught yellowtails. The beach has sand the texture of ash. Savage little waves snap against the shore, spitting their juice onto her bare feet. To Mayuko, it is paradise.

This Wednesday, the wind pulls at Mayuko’s hair and buffets the terns in their path across the grey autumn sky. Nearby, a group of boys are playing soldiers. The taller, more muscular boys are the Japanese army, while the younger, weaker ones are the Chinese resistance. Mayuko and Sakina do not want to play, despite being offered the role of Chinese girlfriends. They have rejected the Japanese army’s gift of shiny stones.

The girls prefer the oddly shaped shells they collected last week, the prizes for this round
of jankempo
. “One, two, three,” says Sakina. She points two outstretched fingers at Mayuko, who shows a flat open hand. “Ha!” Sakina exclaims as she snatches a shell. She looks at the boys, who are whooping and spearing each other with willow branches. “Soon we’ll have a war with the Americans. Because they won’t let us have oil.”

Mayuko considers. “My dad says war is bad. He says we should leave China and make peace with the United States. He says we should build things other countries want and sell those things. That’s how Japan will advance.” She emphasizes this last, new word, which leaves a glow in her mouth.

“Your dad’s stupid. He shouldn’t keep saying bad things about war. He’s going to get in trouble. That’s what my dad says.”

“My dad is not stupid.”

“Yes, he is.” Sakina turns to look at the boy soldiers.

“Can we play my game now?” Mayuko asks. A few days ago, she invented a game. She and Sakina would collect wildflowers and use them, with the shells and sand, to make ikebana on the beach. Mayuko has been thinking all week about the kinds of flowers she will use, how she will position them between the shells.

“Your game’s not a real game. Real games have winners and losers.”

Mayuko blinks away tears. “Race you to the big willow tree!” Sakina says. She leaps up and runs away, her foot crushing a small pink shell. Mayuko picks up the pieces and cradles them in her palm.

That night, Mayuko dreams of storms. The snapping waves become giant green monsters, thumping onto the beach,
swallowing everything in their circumference. Shells, branches, children. Thump. Thump. Thump. Mayuko is awake and the thumping is coming from inside the house. She slides open her bedroom screen and walks down the hallway, stopping at the living-room screen.

Through the glow of a lamp, two figures are silhouetted against the screen. One is crouched on the floor like a rock. The other bends over the rock like a tree twisted by the wind.