Come to Harm

two

Tuesday, 8 October

Keiko flinched and her eyes snapped open onto brightness. Had there been a sound? She turned her head towards the window, where daylight was pouring in, and felt the air move against dampness on her neck. Why was it so hot in there? Then the radiator, a monstrous thing five feet long and made of thick iron loops, newly painted in the same cream as the window frame, clanked again-the sound that had woken her-and Keiko laughed as she swung herself out of bed and went over to it. It was pulsing with heat, making the air above it shimmer.

“Good morning to you too,” she said. “I’ll ask the people downstairs how to tame you.” Then she stepped to the window to take a look out at this most auspicious day.

Directly under her, a striped cotton awning hid the street from view, but across the road, below the grey slate roofs and grey stone chimneys, below the apartment windows, also grey from the net curtains that covered them, the shops had come alive.

There was an official-looking place on the corner that might be a bank or post office. Next door, a banner between the shop windows and the apartment above said, Scotsman D.W. Glendinning, Newsagents and Tobacconists Evening News-Keiko rolled the words around, savouring them. And then was a shop whose sign was written in such looped and elaborate gold script that she couldn’t read it at all beyond a name that started with Mc.

“Newsagents and Tobacconists,” she said to herself as she padded through to the kitchen. It was even hotter, with its own hulking radiator clanking away under the window and the fridge humming desperately back at it.

Looking inside the fridge, Keiko could not help her mouth dropping open. It was packed, every shelf stacked high, dark from the way the food was piled up in front of the little light in there. There were boxes of juice and smoothies, cartons of milk, trays of eggs, blocks of butter and cheese, packets of cured meats whose names Keiko had never heard, mounds of grapes and paper bags of mushrooms (four kinds), little plastic baskets of tomatoes and plums, tubes of meat spread and tubs of cottage cheese, pots of yoghurt and pudding and cream, and balanced on top of it all, two stuffed-crust, deep-pan, four-cheese pizzas.

She closed the fridge again, feeling a shudder pass through her, and opened a cabinet door. Cans of soup, bags of pasta, glass jars of jam and jelly and Frank Cooper’s Vintage Oxford Marmalade. Plastic jars of salted almonds and cellophane packets of flavoured corn snacks, spicy salsa no artificial colourings or preservatives, boxes of double chocolate dipped choc chip chocolate shorties may contain nuts.

Jet lag, Keiko told herself, swallowing hard. And it was so hot. And the smell of all the new paint and something else, very faint, coming from the sink drain. She poured herself a glass of water and went over to the back window, determined to undo the unfamiliar catches and get some air in there.

Outside was a concrete yard, with green plastic dumpsters and grey metal garbage cans ranged up and down it on both sides, a small brick building at the far end. Someone had just been cleaning down there-there were still wet brush marks on the concrete and traces of soap suds around the wheels of the dumpsters.

Keiko jumped and almost dropped down out of sight when a door in the outbuilding opened and a woman appeared. She was carrying two metal pails with a mop handle sticking up out of each but she managed to keep the door half-closed as she came around it and nudged it shut again, manoeuvring herself with the ease of long habit. Her head was down, showing pale, pearly-grey hair that would have looked white except that she was dressed in such stark white clothes: an overall and apron and short rubber boots. Keiko, determined to be as outgoing as all the books had advised, knocked on the glass and waved.

The woman looked up so quickly, at just the right window in the row, that she must surely have known Keiko was standing there. She gave a single nod, then put her head down again and started walking, disappearing out of view under the windowsill, leaving Keiko with her hand raised and the smile fading on her face.

What a peculiar person, she thought, putting her chin in the air. She wouldn’t mention this woman when she wrote to her mother and described the friendliness of everyone she was meeting, but even as she thought that, she could hear her mother’s voice: First impressions are thinner than new frost on a lake. Do not step there. Her mother, who had never stepped on a frozen lake in her life. But she was right. Perhaps that woman-she must be the cleaner-was having a bad day.

Even still, when Keiko went out an hour later, she turned to the right, away from the shop windows beneath her own, not wanting to meet the woman again.

She had planned to use her first morning in Edinburgh learning the neighbourhood, its bus routes and backways, its budget supermarkets and student haunts. Here she was, however, in Painchton, which didn’t have neighbourhoods, as far as she could see; which had-as far as she could see-one street with five shops on each side. Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. The rest of the town must be… She looked downwards towards a field, which might be a park, a road, a grass bank with railings along the top and some distant trees. So the rest of the town must be… She turned and looked up the street, then set off at a stride.

She didn’t get very far. As she passed the shop next door, a small woman with sandy white hair shot out and stood in front of her, clapping her hands and making a series of little curtseys that were almost a dance.

“Keiko, my darling,” she said. “Welcome, welcome. Oh, I’m that glad to see you, you’ve no idea! I was vexed to have missed you yesterday. I’m Mrs. Watson, darling. Mabel Watson, call me Mabel.”

“I am very pleased to meet you,” Keiko said.

“Oh, listen to you!” said Mrs. Watson. “What a beautiful speaker you are. And how long have you been learning English? Because I got a CD of Japanese from the library two months ago. Two months. And played it every night without fail while I was getting off to sleep and it’s still double Dutch. Now.” She gave Keiko a piercing look from out of her small, rather watery, blue eyes. “Have you got everything you need? Did you find your pak choi? Did you find your shiitake mushrooms? Am I saying that right?”

“Did you fill up my refrigerator?” said Keiko. “Was it you? You are very kind.”

Mrs. Watson laid a firm old hand, like a claw, on Keiko’s arm and spoke urgently to her.

“I can get anything at all at the market,” she said, gesturing towards her shop window, where trays of fruit and vegetables were propped up to show their contents to the passersby. “Anything,” she said again. “You’ve no need to go anywhere else. Kumquats, mooli, you name it. I could even have got seaweed-no word of a lie-but I thought you’d be glad of a break from that. And I told them it was a nice lot of fruit and veg you’d be after, not all them sausages and nasty packets of God knows what, but they’d never listen to me.”

“They?” said Keiko, struggling to follow.

Mrs. Watson clapped a hand over her mouth and opened her eyes very wide.

“See now, that’s me,” she said. “But I know you’re all watching your figures. My niece Dina used to eat like a pig in a pie contest until snap!” The little woman clicked her fingers in Keiko’s face. “One day she was eating my profits, sitting there in her wee frilly dress, and the next she was dressed in black and couldn’t manage a grape.”

“I see,” Keiko said, lying.

“Mind you…” Mrs. Watson had been squeezing Keiko’s arm as she spoke and now she pinched her cheek between two cold, dry fingers. “Maybe a sausage or two wouldn’t go wrong. You’re no size at all, are you? You’ll need a wee bit round your ribs to do well here. Come away in now and I’ll give you a banana, keep you going. It’s a cold day.”

Keiko managed to stop her peeling one and standing over her while she ate it up, got away with taking it to go and promising if it wasn’t finished by the end of her walk, she would mash it onto a sandwich with brown sugar and do herself a power of good.

At the shop next door-A &H McLuskie, Master Baker-the windows were steamed up but, where the condensation had begun to run, there were clear ribbons of glass and Keiko could see two girls in caps and aprons waving at her. One of them held up a pastry and raised her eyebrows. Keiko waved back, lifted her banana, and kept walking, past a closed restaurant called The Dragon Pearl, past a hotel called The Bridge, with baskets of flowers hanging between the downstairs and upstairs windows, and then stopped dead at the end of the row.

Streets led off in three directions, it was true, but the one ahead of her threaded between a meandering string of small houses, in blocks of two together, cars parked outside the garden fences turning the road into a slalom course; there could not be anything very much down there. And the cross street curved back on itself and must lead down to meet the road along the bottom again. She turned left and kept walking.

The houses were larger here, set well back in gardens with trees and lawns. The gates were open onto their drives and the outer doors of the houses themselves were open onto… not porches exactly, but proper little rooms with wallpaper and lampshades and narrow tables with vases on them. Keiko was enchanted and hurried on to look at the next one and the next, and then she was at the end and was, as she had guessed, looking across the broad main road, at the grassy bank and the railings and the trees.

What were those railings fencing off? She crossed the road and began to pick her way up the bank. Halfway she thought she could hear water and when she got to the top, sure enough, she was looking down at a river, slow and brownish, small shrubs on the far side clinging to the dirt slope with their knuckles exposed and wisps of plastic caught around them. Beyond was the startling green of a golf course, a pair of bright figures marching up an artificial hill. Keiko watched them until they disappeared over the brow and then she leaned against the railings, looking down into the water.

Off to her right, a vehicle stopped and sat with its motor running for a moment or two before moving off again, but Keiko ignored it and went on gazing down at the loops and ripples in the brown water, enjoying the breeze, letting the slow drift of the river mesmerise her.

Then something caught her eye. Something was floating downstream towards her, a kind of raft, thick in the middle and sloughing off at the edges. She squinted, trying to make sense of it. Lily pads? It couldn’t be. Was it a coat of some kind? A bundle of clothing? She blinked and then there were eyes, dozens of them, and teeth too and scraps of fur, all held together with a scum of blood, and Keiko spun away, gasping, and someone was running towards her across the road, dressed in white, hands stained red and dripping, reaching out for her.