The Master Key

PART FOUR Four months before the building was moved

At about two am, two contrasting black shadows confronted each other in the deserted kitchen of the third floor. One was large, the other small. The large shadow kept hissing at the small one, which reared its tail, mewed grumpily and leaped up onto the windowsill. The larger shadow squatted down and foraged in the oil drum that did service as a trash-can under the sink and, finding a few fishbones, scooped them into an earthenware casserole in her lap and beat a silent retreat.

As she emerged into the dim light in the corridor, a watcher would have recognised Noriko Ishiyama, an old woman with lank dry hair and the gait of a crazy beggar-woman. She was known to the other inhabitants of the building as ‘Miss Bladderwrack’—after the worn and ragged edges of the trailing skirts she always affected. Until her mid-forties, she had been an art teacher at a primary school, but had spent the last three years living on Public Assistance.

She always wore an old pair of canvas shoes with rubber soles. She found it easier to walk in them, and they had the additional advantage of silence.

Her objective on these midnight foraging trips was always the same—fishbones. She went from floor to floor, hunting down the bones and heads discarded by the other residents after their evening meals. The reason for this lay in the advice given to her by a doctor six years before. ‘You must take lots of calcium,’ he had said. ‘For instance, eat fish heads and bones—it’ll be good for you.’

This was after she had slipped and fallen on the apartment stairway while wearing Wellington boots. She had damaged her hip-bone, and had gone to see the doctor. His advice to her then had remained the guiding principle of her life. In fact, the diagnosis was erroneous, but nonetheless as a result of it Noriko had given up everything else which lent meaning to her existence, obsessively concentrating instead on the search for, the boiling and the slow mastication of, heads and bones, which she ate completely, leaving no waste.

She returned to her room just by the landing and glanced swiftly around before slipping inside. As she had learned to match her actions to those of an alley cat, she had acquired the same instincts and no longer had to spend much time in reassuring herself that she was unobserved.

The name card on her door was stained by years of dirt, but one who examined it closely could just make out the lettering against the once-white background: ‘305 Ishiyama Noriko’. The lettering was done by hand in an elegant italic script denoting the fact that the writer was someone with a gift for such things. In fact, until she had suffered her fall her room had been full of dainty little book-containers, dolls and paintings all reflecting in their pure lines and bright colours the childish hands that had made them; there had hardly been any space left on the walls, the shelves and the table-tops. Nowadays, however, the whole room had an unpleasant fishy smell such as no normal person could stand for more than a minute or so.

After his first diagnosis of a cracked bone, the original doctor had diagnosed nervous pains, and indeed within a year Noriko was laid up with all sorts of aches; the balance between her nerves and her resistance was soon destroyed. Her imaginary pains became real, and every day she felt them in some place or other. They became the central feature of her life, and she spent her energies trying to diagnose them for herself, looking up the names in medical books.

She visited one doctor after another, but none of them was good enough to name her illness. Instead, they would laugh and say, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s all in the mind.’

Finally, she had had to give up her job, and with it went the necessary income to visit doctors. Thenceforth she could only discuss her ailments with her neighbours in the apartment block. She would waylay in turn anyone she could and chronicle her various aches and pains. At first, they used to listen sympathetically, but they soon found her a bore—and, worse still, began to treat her as a madwoman.

When her audience had finally vanished, Noriko Ishiyama set about creating her own little world in her room. She began to live like a mouse. After all, a mouse can’t complain of its pains to human beings; a mouse makes its nest in a cupboard and only emerges at night. Indeed, on her midnight foragings she would sometimes imagine herself to be a mouse.

Her first steps on the path to a rodent’s existence were to divorce herself from the everyday conveniences of human life. She switched off her gas supply at the main. She would have done the same to the electricity, removing the fuses, but she needed some light for her nocturnal existence and so changed her light bulb for the smallest she could buy, a dim light such as normal people leave on all night in the toilet.

By this cheese-paring, Noriko was able to reduce her gas and light bills, normally the smallest item in the budgets of her neighbours, to almost nothing. Also, she did her best to make do with what other people had thrown away. There was plenty for her to glean amongst the trash discarded in this large block of flats.

After five or six years of this existence, her floor was covered with other people’s rubbish so that she had to pick her steps with care. In just the same way, mice too pull together all that they can find… Her storage cupboard was emptied and became her bed; all the rest of the floor space was littered and piled high with junk.

By night, the weird silhouettes of piles of cardboard boxes, newspapers and worn rags heaped in old wicker baskets were projected strangely against the walls and ceiling by the tiny low-watt lamp.

She entered the room and, picking her way with accustomed skill between the empty cans and bottles that littered the floor, made her way to a pot-bellied stove with a chimney that stood by the windowsill. She put down the earthenware casserole on top of it. The fire within glimmered faintly, fed as it was by finely shredded cardboard, newspaper balls and odd scraps of wood. She stoked it up, and a faint haze of white steam rose above the casserole which begun to bubble as the stove got hotter. There was a scratching at the door; the smell of the boiling fish scraps had reached the corridor.

‘Beastly cat! Who said there’d be any for you?’ she said, turning where she stood by the stove and glancing in the direction of the door. The malice in her voice was very real.

She poured a little soy-sauce into the casserole and, picking up a fish by its tail, used it to stir the brew. The silence of the room was broken by the bubbling of the pot and the sound of her sucking the fish scraps and slowly munching the bones.

The meal—if such it could be called, for it was to her more of a cure—lasted for about an hour. Then she rose from the pile of newspapers which served her as a chair and opened the sliding door of her storage cupboard. Picking up the lampstand with its trailing flex and tiny bulb, she carried it as if it was a candlestick and entered the cupboard.

Her bed made up the bottom half. The sides of the cupboard, and her bedding too, were covered with a fine white powder. It was DDT, which she sprinkled regularly, fearing that her unmade bed would otherwise become a breeding ground for insects. She wanted to keep her person, at least, clean. Her bed consisted of three under-mattresses, covered by a sheet which was so worn that the pattern of the cloth below showed through. A permanent hollow was worn in the centre, which fitted her body to her satisfaction. Above this were spread an ancient blanket with dirty edging and a heavy quilt, the stuffing of which had worked its way into the four corners, leaving nothing in the centre except the covering material. This deficiency was remedied by piling old newspapers on top of where the kapok should have been. The whole arrangement was a grubby chaos, but at least the bed was warm.

Noriko put the lamp on an old orange box by her pillow, closed the sliding door and sat on top of the bed. Now that two doors separated her from the outside world, she felt at peace—just like a mouse in its nest. She reached into the orange box and took out a tea-caddy which she up-ended, scattering its contents on the bed. An old brooch, a broken wrist watch, a magnet, a fragment of a mirror—the sort of rubbish a child would collect—such were her treasures. But amongst them was the master key with its wooden tally. She took it up, discarding the rest, and laid it on her pillow. Since finding it in the lock of her door a week before, she had taken it out and examined it every night, pondering on the reason for its having turned up there.

Just as a mouse will carefully examine the bait in a trap, occasionally touching it with its forepaws, so Noriko now inspected the key, picking it up from time to time and then replacing it on the pillow. One thing at least was clear to her: the loss of the master key having been announced on the noticeboard downstairs three days before, there was no possibility of her now returning it without incurring suspicion. But she could think of no way in which she could use the key for her own purposes.

Having adopted the life of an animal, her instincts were enough to convince her that this master key was something dangerous, boding ill-fortune for her.