Come to Harm

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?”