End of the World Blues (14 page)

“What bigger stuff?”

“Neku,” it said, and Lady Neku realised this was the first time Schloss Omga had ever called her by name. “You’re sweet, but not very bright.”

“I’m more intelligent than my brothers,” Lady Neku said crossly.

“Yes,” said the castle, “there is always that.”

Later, when the aches had gone, Lady Neku dipped her head beneath the tiles and let Schloss Omga heal the scratches on her face. “Thank you,” she said, clambering out of a fleshy softness that returned itself to tile once she’d climbed free. “I need to find Nico now.”

“Neku…”

“Yes?” said Lady Neku, realising she hadn’t yet asked the castle for her clothes back. “What?”

“You know,” Schloss Omga said. “You need to think really hard about why you’re still wearing that body.”

“You know why,” said Lady Neku. “Someone stole my real one.”

“Were you wearing this body when you left just now?”

Lady Neku nodded.

“What about the time before?” prompted the castle. “What were you wearing then?”

She thought about it, she really did. And in thinking about this realised something else. She’d gone back to get her memory bracelet, because how could she function without it? Only, her wrist was still bare. Which meant…

“You should go back,” said the castle.

“To find my memories?”

“That too,” said Schloss Omga. “Though there are better reasons. Meanwhile, I want you to think really hard about why looking for Nico is a bad idea.”

“But I’ve lost…”

“Doesn’t matter,” said the castle. “All memories get filed twice, once in the bracelet and once in your head. Use the wetware,” it said. “And start now, while your mind is still imprinted on that body. Begin with something simple, something recent. What’s the very last thing you can remember?”

“Waking,” said Lady Neku.

“Where was this?”

“In my bedroom. Someone asked me a question.”

“Begin there,” said the castle. “Try to recall what happened next…”

She was asleep in her room at High Strange, a circular room at the top of a spire. In the old days the spires were called spindles and there was a lot of history attached to them, but Lady Neku did her best to ignore it.

Lady Neku had chosen her room because it looked towards the stars, what few remained within her light cone, rather than towards the earth, which a room at the other end of the spire would have done.

Her mother had an earth room as tradition demanded; so the head of the family could view the lands she protected. Although the Katchatka did little to protect anyone these days, now that the sails of
nawa-no-ukiyo
were ripped and the sun was free to lay waste to their segment.

How strange,
everyone said, when Lady Neku chose that room. Which was odd, because it seemed to make perfect sense for her to live as far from her family as possible.

Words woke her on the night she remembered. Unexpected, because she’d added a filter to her thoughts to keep her brothers away.

“Neku…Hey, you there?”

She recognised his voice instantly. Young, well spoken, and slightly arch.
I mean,
she thought,
how many boys—excluding brothers—were there in High Strange…

None.

And how many boys in the overworlds?

Thirty-eight, working to a tolerance of two years either way. Eleven of these were blood related within the last three generations. Of the remaining twenty-seven, just over half were habitually female. Not that Lady Neku had anything against that, obviously…that left thirteen spread across six segments. Two of those segments were hostile and Lady Neku knew of their five possibilities from records only. Which left eight boys, ranging in age from thirteen to seventeen. Who were, almost without exception, contemptible in their hunger to make friends with her. The exception was Perfect.

This wasn’t his real name. That was something so absurd he refused to use it when introducing himself. If segment titles had suffered from inflation, then names in the Menham Segment had suffered worse still. Lady Neku had her own suspicions about why this had happened.

“Neku?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m here.”

“Oh, right.” Per sounded puzzled. “You sound different.”

The fact they were even talking would be regarded as an outrage by Lady Neku’s mother. That Lady Neku and Per one day planned to meet, albeit at ground level…

“Take a guess why?”

“Don’t know,” Per said, sounding cross. “I’m rubbish at guessing games. Your throat’s sore?”

“Close,” said Lady Neku. “I cut it with Nico’s knife.”

“You…?”

“I want a new body. My dear Lady Mother won’t give me one.”

Perfect Lord Menham was eighteen months older than Lady Neku. Whoever told him that girls liked their men
dissolute, damned,
and
dangerous
(and Lady Neku’s bet was on his sister), they should also have told him there was no point asking questions if he was going to be shocked at the answers.

“It’s healing,” she said. “Worst luck. Why did you call me?”

“The d’Alamberts,” said Per.

Information flowed from the web of beads around Lady Neku’s wrist, maps of d’Alambert influence and schematics showing their sections of the rope world, flicking across her mind until she told the information to stop.

“What about them?” demanded Lady Neku, more crossly than was polite.

“It’s just,” said Per. “I’ve heard…”

Whatever Perfect had heard was obviously so stupid he decided not to say it; because Lady Neku suddenly got a head full of static and then silence. When she was certain Per was gone, she tried to call Nico, Petro, and Antonio in turn, but apparently her brothers didn’t want to talk to her either.

Kit intended to leave Kate where she slept, he really did. The bench was large, Shinjuku Chuo Park was safe, not even the homeless would disturb a middle-aged woman snoring drunkenly in front of an artificial waterfall under the gaze of a lost Mandarin duck.

The last thing he needed was Kate O’Mally bringing her hangover to his meeting with Tetsuo, who really was going to help Kit with his problems in Roppongi…well, according to No Neck.

All Kit had to do was walk away. He could fold Mary’s letter back into its envelope and place the envelope inside Kate’s coat, and leave the woman to her sadness and a hangover that would do little to ruin a day already ruined from the moment she woke.

It was so tempting.

He owed her nothing. After all, Kate O’Mally was the person he’d once promised to destroy, in a fit of teenage bravado. But life had already done that for him. Her daughter was dead, Kate’s relationship with Patrick Robbe-Duras was ended, and the house above Middle Morton echoed with so much loneliness she could barely stand to live there.

Who knew Kate could be so poetic? So honest about the horror she was facing. It was that honesty which put its hook into Kit’s flesh. So that every time he stood up to walk away, sharp tugs of guilt sat him down again. It was her honesty, and one final admission.

“You know,” said Kate, when they first reached the bench. “There’s another possibility.”

“There is?”

“Pat originally thought Mary was running away.”

“From what?” asked Kit.

The face Kate turned to Kit was ravaged by alcohol, guilt, and a level of self-awareness more cruel than anything a teenage Kit could have wished on her. “From me,” she said. “And you know what Pat said?
Better late than never…
”

It took the duck an hour to realise the couple on the bench were useless as a source of food and get cross. By then, the sun had got stuck behind the government buildings to Kit’s right and the roads around the little park had become crowded with traffic. Carbon monoxide mixed with the sour smell of camp fires from a collection of blue plastic tents nearby. It was no longer early and the homeless were hanging out their blankets to air or washing shirts in the splash pool of the waterfall.

Mrs. Oniji had once explained to Kit that ducks divide into
ahiru
and
kamo,
those that are white and those that are not, but then Mrs. Oniji used different words for water, depending on whether it was hot, cold, or merely warm. Maybe she’d miss the lessons? Kit hoped so, at least he thought he did.

“Shoo,” Kit told the duck. One tiny eye peered at him from a slash of white like plate armour along the side of its head. After a moment, the duck decided to leave anyway.

When it came the ring tone was loud enough to make Kit jump. Tokyo was a city of video phones that doubled as DVDs, diaries, and e-mail organisers. The big problem for tourists was that only Japanese-registered phones seemed to work. One needed to rent a phone on arrival and top it up with credit.

It seemed that Kate O’Mally had.

The longer Kit ignored the phone, the louder the ring tone got and less likely it seemed that Kate would wake. In the end, Kit simply reached into her pocket and found the phone, flicking it to voice only.

“Hello…?” All Kit got was an echo of his own voice and the sense of distance which satellite lag imparts, technology making the world tiny and then guaranteeing it felt very large again.

“Hello,” repeated Kit.

Satellite distance, and a taste of something else.

“Katie?”

“No,” said Kit. “She’s sleeping.”

For a moment it sounded as if the man at the other end had broken the connection and then Kit heard his own name, the authorised version. “Christopher Newton?”

“Nouveau,” said Kit, without even thinking. “And it’s Kit.” Only then did he realise who was on the other end of the line.

“Oh fuck,” said Patrick Robbe-Duras. “Katie found you.”

“Yes,” said Kit. “That she did.”

“She’s been looking for months. You know, I told her you’d probably moved. For all we knew you were in Australia or back in England.”

“Mr. Duras…”

“Patrick,” said the man. “Call me Patrick.” He hesitated. “Katie’s already told you what this is about?”

“Of course,” Kit said. “You believe Mary’s still alive and you want me to find her.”

There was a silence. “That’s what she said?”

“Yes,” said Kit. “Did I get it wrong?”

“You could say that…” Patrick Robbe-Duras said. His voice was ghostly, made distant by more than the five thousand nautical miles and fifteen bitter years between them. “My daughter killed herself. She booked a ferry, left her shoes by the railings, and stepped into the sea. Katie is the one who believes Mary is alive. She’s the one who has spent the last six months of her life trying to find you. And you know why?”

Only, Kit had stopped listening.

Water tumbled from the long lip of the artificial fall onto carefully placed rocks below, watched only by a duck, Kit, and a homeless couple, both of whom had stripped to the waist before washing themselves in its pool. At Kit’s side, Kate O’Mally slept off a hangover that would have felled a man half her age, while Kit gripped her phone in trembling fingers, already thumbing its
Off
button.

Six months. Late December.

“Oh fuck,” Kit said, vomiting udon noodles, green tea, and alcohol onto the paving at his feet. As Pat’s words finally managed what Yoshi’s death had been unable to achieve, make Kit face what had really happened.

I’m not sure if this is going to reach you. I hope so. There are some things I really should have told you at the time…
When she’d written that, the inhabitants of Middle Morton had already burned their famous bonfire. In Tokyo, the
kouyou
season was over, each day’s news no longer ending with an update on the autumn foliage. And Mary O’Mally, the only person he’d ever really loved, was preparing to kill herself.

Kit tried to remember the date of its postmark, thought about it some more and realised he could. He could also remember the day her card arrived. It was the day he fucked Namiko and the day he went to pray at the Meiji Jingu Shrine. Although it began as the day he woke to discover Yoshi had gone for a walk.

The dampness in Pirate Mary’s storeroom was made worse by a broken window, which let rain dribble down the inside of one wall. Yoshi said she liked the cold, that everyone from Hokkaido liked the cold.

Kit often wondered if that was true.

The sunken bath had been given a little room of its own near the stairs, but everything else on the third floor was stripped back to bare walls and rafters, so that any footsteps across the floor could be heard clearly in the bar below.

A long bench, an expensive black leather and steel punishment rack, and something that looked like medieval stocks comprised its only furniture. All three had arrived with Yoshi and never been used, at least not during the years that Kit had known her.

A hook in the ceiling, a coil of rope, carefully boiled to silk-like softness, and a twelve-foot length of bamboo, made up the three items that Yoshi still used. The bamboo pole was the most versatile, being utilised in more ways than Kit would have thought possible.

It had been five weeks since Yoshi had even looked at a potter’s wheel. She’d served behind the bar at Pirate Mary’s, talked ceramics to first year students at the Tokyo Design School, and cooked impossibly complicated dishes involving three kinds of eel and two types of noodle. She took to walking in the Meiji gardens to watch crimson leaves fall from the winter trees. When that failed, she tracked Kit down at the bar, where he was mending a beer pump, and told him she wanted tying.

That was the deal. She always asked, Kit wasn’t expected to volunteer. Like most such deals it was unspoken and possibly entirely unconscious.

“You know,” said Yoshi, as she stripped off her
yukata
. “All I want is an empty mind…” She looked for a second as if she was about to ask,
Is that so unreasonable?

She began to relax the moment the ropes began to constrict her body. Her eyes glazed and turned inwards and the tightness around her eyes smoothed away. Kit needed a hit to reach anything approaching that state. Even then, Kit doubted if what he extracted from the dragon came close to the utter serenity Yoshi seemed to find.