Tuvalu (22 page)

‘I think I understand.'

‘Maybe you do. Maybe that's why you're in Japan. Maybe you're not ready to compete in your world so you're holidaying for a while. I don't know. I don't actually care. All I know is, you know nothing about my world. That, and you can't keep anything from me. Two things which make you perfect.'

‘For what?'

‘For telling the truth to.' Mami, clearly tired of talking, peered down at her beer and suddenly frowned. ‘Why am I drinking beer?'

I thought about my world in Australia, while Mami gave her beer to a Spanish-looking man and battled to order another vodka. There was nothing about this world of mine that Mami would not have understood. It occurred to me that the worlds she referred to were not staked out by borders, but by money. She had only used countries as an analogy to make herself understood without being cruel. And if I was a poverty-stricken pet project, a convenience, then presumably at some point she intended to cut me free.

She returned and, determined not to be angry with her, I struggled to convince myself I was a friend—a unique confidant and respite from her pressured life.

‘I shouldn't have explained it,' she said, inspecting my face and handing me a drink. She looked over the dance floor. ‘I want to leave.'

‘You want to go home?'

‘No, I just want to leave.'

We walked to a Family Mart convenience store. As we stepped inside two store clerks chimed their usual welcome. One was straightening magazines, the other standing behind the register intently filling out a docket. Evenly spaced fluorescent lighting had chased out all shadow, bathing the store in the sort of light more commonly encountered midway through a sunny morning.

‘What are we doing here?' I asked.

‘Getting supplies. Drinks.'

‘To drink where?'

‘Out in the street.'

‘Classy.'

‘Classier than that club you took me to.' She pulled off one ruby-red shoe and inspected its base.

‘Are you drunk?' I asked.

‘A little, I think. I get very drunk very easily. But that's not why I'm holding my shoe up in the air. It's got a stone in it. I'm sure of it.'

Mami turned the shoe upside down and flapped it but nothing fell out. With a sharp, satisfied nod she slipped it back on and dragged me across to the brightly labelled drinks fridge, filled with the usual Japanese beers and liquors.

She pointed to a pre-mixed gin and tonic. ‘Tell me, Noah, have you ever stolen anything? Even something cheap?'

‘No.'

‘And why not?'

‘It's wrong.'

‘At least you're consistently dull. That's what you said about the train ticket.'

‘So why ask me now?'

‘Why?' Slightly unsteady, Mami looked at me, her eyes glazed. ‘Because you're going to steal this gin and tonic. In fact, now that you ask, you're going to steal seven things from this store.' She held up seven fingers. ‘Seven exactly.'

‘I am not.'

‘You are. You can ask why again if you want.'

‘Why?'

‘Because if you don't, I'm going to.'

‘You're drunk.'

‘What a rude thing to say. Shall I get started selecting my seven things? She slurred her words slightly. She was far more drunk than I had realised.

‘Let's go, Mami. I'm sure they both heard everything.'

‘Who? The store clerks? If their English was that good, they wouldn't be working here at … what time is it?'

‘Well past midnight.' I started towards the door. Mami did not follow, but I went ahead and left anyway.

I sat outside on the pavement and tried not to think about her. If she got herself arrested, that was her problem. I could not be involved. I was not, after all, Japanese, and my father did not own a string of expensive hotels. He was struggling just to keep a car. There would be no fancy lawyers for me, no golden get-out-of-jail-free card.

When she failed to exit I stood and casually peered into the store. Mami had taken a basket and now floated down the aisles, occasionally placing things into it. But mostly she seemed interested in chatting with the sales clerks. One nodded and disappeared out back. Then the other followed, hurrying to meet the first. Without paying any attention to either, Mami rounded the end of an aisle and kept on walking. She passed straight through the front doors and out onto the footpath with the basket clasped in both hands.

It was the most brazen act of thievery I had ever witnessed.

‘Now,' she said calmly, ‘we run until we're completely lost.'

I felt angry and elated all at once, running. Delinquency had never been a strong point of mine, but I took to it well enough. I wrenched the basket from Mami's arm and followed her blindly. She pelted along on her high heels with amazing poise, especially for a drunk woman.

We finally slowed at a fish tank full of ghostly grey albino carp and stopped to rest on a metal staircase. Rusted out and with a heavy chain hanging across it, this staircase— like the building it belonged to—appeared unused. We slipped under it and sat sucking up the humid night air. My throat was gluey and my chest hurt. Mami glanced sideways and suppressed a smile. Then, without speaking, we both began to laugh, the sound echoing hollowly in the narrow, built-up street.

‘I'm crazy?' Mami asked incredulously. ‘You enjoyed it far more than me.'

‘Tell me,' I said, trying to calm myself in order to articulate the question, ‘when you jumped in that moat did it feel like this?'

‘No.'

‘No?' Still grinning, I shook my head. ‘If you ask me, that's a bad deal. You jump in a moat to feel better and when you climb out,
maybe
you do. I'd want to be sure.'

Mami's smile faltered. ‘You didn't ask me that. You asked if I felt like this. This is nothing. After the moat I felt invincible.'

‘So it did work?'

‘For a while. Until it was bad again and I needed another ending. That's how it is. Sometimes you get given an ending, other times you have to make one.'

‘By jumping in a moat?'

‘I don't expect you to understand. You only ever get to see me like this. But I'm incredibly good at ending things.'

‘It certainly seems—' I paused. A random thought had struck me. ‘Fuck.'

‘Fuck?'

‘Cameras! The store would've had cameras. They would've been everywhere.'

‘So?'

All pleasure at having committed a successful crime now turned on me. My stomach felt as if it were full of putrid milk. I stared at the basket. ‘Throw all this crap away.'

‘Calm down,' Mami said.

‘They'll identify you, Mami. They'll fucking identify you, and then they'll identify me. Maybe you'll be okay, being Japanese, rich and clearly fucked in the head, but I'll be put away. They can hold me without a charge here. Do you understand what I'm telling you? We're in real trouble.'

Mami only grinned. ‘I stole this basket full of nothing. It's mine. I'm not throwing anything away.'

I started at the concrete surrounding my feet, furious.

‘Stop snorting and listen,' Mami said abruptly. ‘Forget the cameras. They're nothing to worry about. If anyone ever asks you—which they won't—we met just before we walked in. You hit on me and I said no. Perfectly believable. Then you left and after that you don't know what happened. Noah, you're in the clear. And for what it's worth, so am I. Look at me. Look at this make-up. There were only two cameras in that store and I know where they both were. I never went near them and I certainly didn't look at them. I've been doing this for a long time.'

She bent to withdraw two cans of gin and tonic from the basket, gave me one, then upended the rest of her booty onto the footpath. Drinks in hand, the aluminium still cool beneath our fingers, we stared at a splashing of potato chips, chocolate and beef jerky. I edged a few items around with one sneaker.

‘To you,' she said, opening her can, then mine.

‘To me?'

‘For being funny.'

I took a grumpy swig.

Without drinking herself, Mami pulled out her mobile phone and pressed a button. She gave detailed instructions to the cab company in Japanese and, putting her arm under mine, hoisted me up. I took another quick swig.

‘I organised a rendezvous with a cab driver I know,' she said seriously. ‘Don't worry, we can trust him. But you're right, we'll need to lie low until all this blows over. There's a safe house I know. Well, a hotel really. It's perfect for—'

‘I can't, Ma—'

‘No names,' she said, gently putting a finger to my lips and then slipping it into my mouth. I was too confused to resist. To mask my discomfort I tried to look fed up, but in the end only went cross-eyed. Having felt the backs of my teeth, and ignoring my grunts of protest, Mami left the finger in place until at last we spotted the cab.

The First Breakfast
of the Summer

T
he sun rose slowly. We both sat cross-legged, drunk, toes against the floor-to-ceiling window. Below us Tokyo was already in full swing. Faint car horns reached us. People marched. It felt like another world connected to me only by the loosest of threads, and my earlier panic, my fear at this world, at its omnipotence had—thanks to crime and alcohol—been replaced with a soft contempt for the supposed strength of societies, which sooner or later fell and were forgotten. I had snuck past the hotel front desk into a new world high above it all, a world entirely without rules.

‘I have whisky,' Mami said, standing and stretching. ‘I don't normally drink whisky but I feel like it. I'm not at all tired and I'll get a hangover if I stop drinking without going to bed. Did you know today's the very first day of summer? At least, I think it is. I'll change out of this and we'll have whisky for breakfast.'

Mami showered while I flicked through her heavily scratched CD collection, selecting something classical and sliding it into the machine. When she heard this she stuck her head out the bathroom door and, drying her face with a hand towel, frowned.

‘Can you get the whisky?' she asked. ‘Everything's right above the bar. Choose whichever one you think is best. There's ice in the fridge.'

‘Do they restock that bar every day?' I asked, thinking about my last visit.

‘Every week, I think. Why?'

‘Just wondering.'

Mami started to close the bathroom door, turning back towards the mirror.

‘One other thing,' I said. ‘Why do you cram everything into this one room?'

‘So I know where it is,' she called, eyes following my reflection. ‘I don't have time to search the whole place.'

‘But why not have it—'

‘Just get the whisky.' She shut the door, voice suddenly muffled. ‘I'll be out in a minute.'

I crossed to the bar, stepping behind it. I slid out the bottom section of the refrigerator and found ice in a plastic tray. Not knowing the first thing about whisky, I dropped the cubes into a metal bucket on a stand. Next I ran a finger across the bottles. The second to last was a single malt, which I seemed to recall was a good thing, so I set the bottle on the ice in the bucket.

It occurred to me to call room service. I had no idea what went with whisky, and chose strawberries, potato chips and cheese sticks.

‘Certainly,' said the man on the other end of the line in crisp Japanese. I hung up, walked back to the bar and poured myself a frothy beer.

A moment later there was a knock at the door. I stared at it, amazed.

‘Room service?' I called, but there was no answer. Hurriedly carrying the bucketed whisky over to the window, I shouted, ‘Just a minute.'

Mami stepped from the bathroom, now dressed in baggy pyjamas. There was another loud knock.

‘Who's at the door?' she asked.

‘Room service.'

‘What did you order?'

‘Chips and cheese.'

‘What a truly strange breakfast. And you've put the whisky on ice, I see. A lovely touch. I'll get the door in case it's that maid.'

She put on a long, white dressing-gown, did it up at the waist and walked to the door. I collected a pair of tumblers from the bar and, with nothing left to organise, flopped down at the window. Mami clicked back the lock.

‘You must be Matilda,' she said after a pause. ‘Please, come in. He's over at the window.'