Come to Harm

eighteen

Tuesday, 5 November

She woke at the first chirp of her alarm clock as usual, tried to reach out to stop the noise, and couldn’t. It bleeped on at her-ten, twenty times-until she managed to swing her arm out of bed and clump it down on the snooze button. She stretched out her legs and both calf muscles snapped into cramps, skewers of pain shooting down to her feet and drawing her toes up like bird claws.

“He’s killed me,” she said, and even her jaw ached as she whispered.

After ten minutes, she rolled onto her side, pushed herself upright with both hands and stood up in five slow cranking movements. Ignoring the tightness across the base of her spine and the stabbing pains deep in her buttocks, she lumbered a stilted, Frankenstein walk towards the bathroom, her breasts crooked in her elbows to stop them moving.

“You’re mad,” she told her reflection in the mirror. “Steak and kidney pudding wouldn’t have done this to you.”

Once the shop was open but well before she expected her first subjects, she went downstairs, two steps to each stair all the way, alternating which of her trembling calves she trusted with her weight. Murray was waiting behind the counter, laughing.

“I heard you coming,” he said. “How are you?”

“Greatly deceived in your character,” said Keiko. “You are not a kind person.”

Mrs. Poole emerged from the cold store, carrying a tray balanced on each hand. Murray stepped out of her way. “Son,” she said, and held one tray out towards him. He took it in his fingertips, looked at it briefly, and put it down beside the rest of the bacon behind the glass, slotting it deftly into its space. Mrs. Poole hefted the other tray, piled high with chops, into both hands and jostled it into place with a rattle, then slapped the chops back into a neat heap and tucked in a few trailing edges.

“Can I help you with anything, dear?” she said.

“Ah no, thank you so much,” said Keiko. “I just came to speak to Murray.” She smiled towards Murray, who said nothing. Mrs. Poole went along the corridor out of sight.

“The thing now,” Murray said, “is not to give in. Don’t give up. If you do a short workout tonight, you’ll be ten times better tomorrow. If you do nothing tonight, you’ll be like this for days.”

“Hmm,” said Keiko. “A great deal of information, suddenly. There was no talk yesterday evening of this pain or what to do about it.”

“Trust me,” said Murray. “You trust me, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Keiko said. “You strap me to tables and hurt me. Why wouldn’t I?” She heard the sound of Malcolm’s breathing coming towards them and turned to greet him. Malcolm, like his mother, was carrying two gleaming trays, his piled with sausages. He didn’t ask Murray to help but laid one tray down while he put the other into the window and turned back, puffing. There was a single space left in the display, right at the front of the case next to the glass, and Malcolm had to lean out over the counter to drop the tray into it. He seemed to roll slightly on his belly as he stretched, and Keiko, seeing Murray look down and raise his eyebrow, thought Malcolm’s feet must have lifted off the floor. A pale high cleavage had formed at the open neck of his shirt as he squashed himself against the marble. Keiko looked away towards his hands, but the pile of thick sausages and Malcolm’s greasy fingers clutching at either side of it seemed just as much something to avert her eyes from and so she looked back at Murray, who was studying the ceiling and moving his lower jaw from side to side with his lips slightly parted.

“What time tonight?” she asked him.

“About the same. Sevenish,” said Murray.

Malcolm, the tray fitted in as well as he could get it, backed himself upright again and wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“Murray tells me you don’t fancy steak and kidney after all,” he said. “You should just have told me yourself.” He swept his coils of fringe off his face and, although they fell back again, Keiko was startled to see a peak of hair just like Murray’s, briefly revealed by that Murray-like gesture. “Although,” he went on, “it seems a shame, when you haven’t even tried it. Seems a shame to come all this way round the world and not try the things you find there.”

“She didn’t come halfway round the world for your steak pie, Malcolm,” said Murray, rolling his eyes at Keiko.

“Pudding,” said Keiko and Malcolm at the same time, and they both smiled.

“You know, you’re right?” Keiko said. “You are right. I would scoff at someone who came to Tokyo and only wanted McDonald’s. I’d love to try it.”

“If you’re going to eat stodge, you won’t be able work out after,” said Murray.

“Even if I have it at lunchtime?” said Keiko. “Surely it’ll all be worn off?”

“You’ve obviously never had steak and kidney pudding,” said Murray, half under his breath. He gestured at Malcolm. “And you can see for yourself, it doesn’t ‘wear off.’”

Keiko blinked, but Malcolm either hadn’t heard or didn’t mind. “Well, what’s the first day there’s no workout?” she asked.

“Sunday,” Murray said, not meeting her eye.

“Sunday,” said Malcolm, with a wide smile. “Traditional.”

“And I’ll ask Fancy and to come and join us.” She glanced at her watch, wincing as she twisted her wrist-time to get to work.

The ache in her legs eased over the course of the morning as she trotted back and forth to the front door, but the less-used muscles sat bunched and stiff, ready to catch her out. A spasm at the side of her jaw when she reached across to fill the kettle, and when she started to squat to tie her shoelace before going out at lunchtime, the stab came back as fierce as ever to her buttock. She tried bending from the waist instead, but her stomach muscles sang as she crunched them. When she tried to stand straight and bring her foot up to her hands, a ripping sensation spread through her thigh, brought her foot down hard to the floor, and kept her crouched there for a moment until the shaking stopped. In the end she put first one foot then the other up against the radiator and hunched over them with her other leg half-bent beneath her. This gave her a feeling like twisted candy wrappers crinkling in the back of her neck, but no real pain.

As she straightened, slowly, carefully, both hands in the small of her back, she saw Janette Campbell, the hairdresser, who had just finished the last of the morning’s questionnaires, staring at her from the living room doorway. Keiko smiled and gave the radiator an absent-minded polish with the palm of her hand.

“I did a new workout last night, Mrs. Campbell, and I feel as if I’ve been pressed under a road-roller.”

“You want to be careful,” Mrs. Campbell said. “Even at your age. Although, you could always get Fancy to fix you. D’you know, she did my scalp three days ago, and I can still feel the benefit.”

“Did you enjoy it?” said Keiko.

Mrs. Campbell pursed her mouth slightly and leaned closer. “It was hardly decent, it felt so good,” she whispered. “She’s got a talent.”

“And was she…” Keiko stopped. She wanted to ask if Fancy had been sickened. “Does she talk to you, or is it quiet?”

“She chatted away quite the thing before and after,” said Mrs. Campbell. So maybe Fancy was getting better? Or perhaps there simply wasn’t anything upsetting under a scalp? “But very professional during the actual treatment,” Mrs. Campbell went on, with a kind of defiant emphasis on the last word. Keiko felt sure, although she couldn’t see how, that it was Sandra Dessing who was being defied.

“I hope it’s a great success. I hope nothing or nobody spoils it for her,” Keiko said, her heart hammering as she dipped this first toe into unknown waters.

Mrs. Campbell nodded twice with mouth pursed and eyebrows raised. “I think we both know who we’re talking about, don’t we?” she said. “So we needn’t say any more.”

Keiko nodded back at her, pursing her own mouth just as tightly.

“So,” said Mrs. Campbell in a leave-taking voice, “you be careful with these aerobics.”

“Of course,” Keiko said. “But it was weight machines, actually.”

“Oh no!” said Mrs. Campbell. “No, I’m serious, Keiko. You shouldn’t go near anything like that without supervision.” She darted glances all around Keiko’s body as if, now that she knew, she expected to notice broken bones poking against her skin.

“I have supervision,” said Keiko and decided to repay Mrs. Campbell with a gift of new gossip. “Murray was showing me what to do. He’s got a gym set up over in the building, at the back.” She waved her hand as best she could towards it.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Campbell, the single syllable dropping cold into the air between them, unmarked by any swoop of interest. “I see.”

Keiko ran over her words again in her mind, wondering if she had made some mistake, if she had caused some offence with her bad English, like when she had said I don’t care instead of I don’t mind to a visitor in high school and made the teacher angry. She couldn’t think of anything and smiled uncertainly at Mrs. Campbell.

The woman’s face had turned blank. Like Mrs. Poole’s face. Like Craig’s face when he’d been overheard. Like Malcolm’s face in the van that day and Mrs. Watson’s face through the window. Keiko had never seen so many blank looks in her life before. The inscrutable Scots, she thought to herself. Why did nobody warn me?

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“What for?”

“I’ve obviously said something-”

“Away,” said Mrs. Campbell, but she still was not smiling. “I’d better be going, anyway. I only had twenty minutes between ladies.”

What am I doing? Keiko longed to shout after her. What is it that I keep doing? If I should stay away from all the friendly people, and I offend all the others without even trying, soon there won’t be anyone left for me to talk to.

And suddenly not having to talk to anyone seemed like a treat she could afford. There were forty completed papers now and, even with the confounding effects of Mr. McKendrick, that was surely enough. So she perched at her word processor and typed. The pilot study is now complete, thanks to the most generous help of those who participated. The timing of the next exercise will be announced in due course. She centred the text, clicked it to bold, set the font size to sixteen, and clicked the print icon. When the warm sheet had curled out of the printer, she signed her name at the bottom, took it downstairs, removed the old sign, and pressed the new one firmly to the blobs of Blu-Tack on the door. Only then did she see that she had written her name in a neat block of kanji characters and not the string of English letters they would be expecting.

Tough, she thought. Hard cheese.

But cancelling the afternoon’s slots meant she didn’t get the chance to trickle away any more of her bad mood on casual meetings before Murray arrived in the evening. She was still irritable when she saw him jogging towards her, his breath pluming. Not only was it a colder evening than the one before, but it seemed darker, as though the season had lurched forward in just a day.

“How cold does it get here?” she asked.

“Not much worse than this,” said Murray, lifting his head and looking around himself. “It gets wetter, and the wind makes it seem colder than it is, but the dark’s the thing that bothers people if they’re the sort to get bothered.”

She waited for him to undo the padlock, peering up past the yellow blear of the street lamps at what seemed to her like already perfected blackness.

“How dark does it get?” she asked.

Murray laughed. “It doesn’t get darker,” he said, shaking his head in small movements but keeping his eyes on her face. “It just gets darker earlier and earlier and stays dark later and later. In December it gets dark at four and isn’t light again until eight.”

“No worse than Tokyo.”

“And people moan like you wouldn’t believe.”

“But we have lights,” said Keiko, frowning. “What’s their problem?”

“Exactly,” said Murray, and he held the door open for her to pass into the workshop. Just like that her crossness was gone. Two peremptory questions about her precious host country, one gratuitous mention of Tokyo (They don’t care, Keko-chan), some out-and-out criticism of the locals… and Murray didn’t mind any of it.

“Can I ask you something?” she said.

“Depends what,” said Murray.

“What do you think of Janette Campbell?”

Murray blinked, but he thought about it before he answered, took it seriously. “Don’t know her all that well,” he said in the end. “Don’t have any plans to know her any better.”

Keiko nodded. “That’s an admirable attitude,” she said. “I should be more like that. Not let people nibble at me.”

“Yeah,” said Murray. “The world would be a better place if everyone was a bit more like you and me.” Keiko laughed. “Painchton would anyway.” He stretched and turned, smiling, towards the machines and the mirrors. “So…”

“I can’t remember much,” she warned him, smiling back.

“You’re not doing the same tonight anyway,” he said. “Tonight you’re just going to stretch your muscles to loosen them off.”

“But that’s exactly what you said last night,” said Keiko. “You said I was going to stretch out my muscles because I had been sitting all day.”

Murray ignored her, folding covers and stowing them away in a space on one of the metal shelves. “Come here,” he said when he had finished. They stood side by side in front of the mirrored wall and Murray told her to watch while he rolled his head and shoulders, flexed his arms, rolled his back up and down, and squatted deeply on one leg and then the other.

“Now copy me,” he said, and Keiko began, letting her head loll backwards.

“Oh,” she said, looking up. “What happened to the mobiles?” The hanging shapes above the roof beams were gone, just an empty dim space above the lights now.

“I took them down,” said Murray. “Chucked them out.”

“No!” said Keiko. “You threw them away? But you must have worked so hard on them.”

“They were falling to bits,” Murray said, “when I got them down and had a good look.”

Keiko shook her head and smiled at him. “If I could make anything so beautiful, I would keep them forever,” she said.

Murray smiled back at her. “Speaking of making something beautiful,” he said and rolled his shoulders again.

Keiko flushed and his eyes flashed wide.

“Sorry!” he said. “Christ, I didn’t mean you’re not. I didn’t mean…”

She felt her flush deepen even further. “I’m not offended, “ she said. “I’m flattered. I’m…”

“Right,” he said. “Good, then. Let’s crack on.”

In the mirror, as he moved, it looked more like ink falling in water than a person’s body. Keiko wanted to gaze but kept being distracted by her own little figure beside him as it jerked and wobbled, her hair falling forward in hanks and then back again to reveal the grimace of concentration on her face.

“Should I hear things crunching?” she panted, but Murray only frowned and kept his eyes shut, the flick of lashes on his cheek mirroring the arcs of his black brows. He dropped his head and started to roll down again, until the backs of his fingers rested against the mat. Keiko dropped forward too, catching her breath as her knuckles banged on the floor. He turned and squinted at her then, his head hard against his braced knees, smiling; a strange smile since his face was upside down, with an unfamiliar line underscoring each eye as some slight swell of flesh, usually invisible, moved out of place.

“You should be rolling forward trying to feel each vertebra moving separately,” he said. “There shouldn’t be any clunking.” Keiko giggled. “Feel me,” he said, and taking her hand as he straightened, he reached up and placed her fingertips against the nape of his neck. “Press harder,” he said. “Feel the bones.” He closed his eyes and bent his head forward again. Keiko rubbed her fingers over the bones in his neck. When his chin was completely tucked into his chest, he let his shoulders sag and more knots sprang up between his shoulder blades. She traced down each one as it rose out of the muscles around it, feeling the curve of his back rising and the bones of his spine pass one by one under her fingers until finally he was drooped right over and she stood with her palm on the highest point of his body, digging the heel of her hand in gently between pads of muscle to find the last one.

She hoped it didn’t feel too different when he did the same with his hand on her, but she couldn’t ignore her sudden lurches forward, and she knew when she stopped that she wouldn’t look drooped like a lily on a broken stem; she was straining to keep the position, with juddering legs and a line of sweat forming between her buttocks. Murray pinched each vertebra hard between thumb and forefinger knuckle and tutted softly.

“Okay,” he said and caught her under her arms as her legs gave way. “That’s as good as it’s going to get tonight. Let’s get started.”

Throughout the rest of the week, Keiko came to feel as though she were living two lives side by side.

Her silent life was all day up in her room, in the bay window. She read, wrote, checked and rechecked her writing, and might have been alone in a capsule on the moon. From time to time she would turn and look across the street at the clouded windows, showing her nothing. And every night when it was dark she stood beside Murray in even deeper silence, and his face-his dark eyes-showed even less.

Then there was her other life.

Wednesday evening tea at the Sangsters, slices of the noted roast glazed ham and a basin of potato salad as big as a washing-up bowl, the potatoes floury and still warm when they were dressed so that the mayonnaise clung to every fragment as they crumbled.

Friday was supper with Mr. McLuskie while Etta was at a meeting. A proper fry-up, he told her, a good old mixed grill. Bacon and chops and liver and sausage squares with eggs and bread fried off in the grease. She tried her best, even though Mr. McLuskie entertained her by telling her all the recipes he knew by heart: hot water lard crust, rough puff, flaky, short and choux until her head as well as her stomach was rolling.

He talked almost as much as Fancy. Fancy, endlessly inventive, tirelessly imaginative, popping round, emailing, texting, phoning, filling Keiko’s head with characters, places, puzzles, jokes and punchlines until, as well as twenty-five careful, probing stimuli there were twenty-five decoys straight from Planet Fancy. The study would be what it was, as thorough as she could make it, and perhaps she would graduate, but the filler questions-those would go down in history.

By Saturday the work was finished, and when she stood beside Murray she could see a difference, feel it too. She smiled at him, wondering if he was pleased with her.

“Rest tomorrow,” he said.

“Are you sure you won’t join us?” Murray said nothing. “Fancy and Craig are.” Craig had not hesitated for a second when she had asked him. Creep across the road or no.

“News to me that there is a ‘Fancy and Craig’,” he said. Already he had withdrawn his gaze from her shoulder angles and the set of her knees and begun to look at his own body in the mirror instead.

“Well, Fancy’s coming and Craig’s coming-I asked them separately-but who knows what might happen.”

“Over a suet pudding,” he said. “If I can’t talk you out of it, at least I’ll stop in later on, check that you’re okay.”