although I do nearly get killed by an ambulance crossing Kita Street. The handful of traffic lights on Yakushima are just there for effect – here they are life and death. When I got off the coach yesterday I noticed that Tokyo air smells of the insides of pockets. I haven’t noticed today. I guess I smell of the insides of pockets too. I walk up the steps of the PanOpticon. It props up the sky. Over the last seven years I have imagined this moment so often I cannot believe it is actually here. But it is here. The revolving door creeps around slowly. The refrigerated air makes the hairs on my arm stand up – when it gets this cold in winter they put on the heating. The marble floor is the white of bleached bone. Palm trees sit in bronze urns. A one-legged man crutches across the polished floor. Rubber squeaks, metal clinks. Trombone-flowers loom, big enough to eat babies. My left baseball boot makes a stupid eeky sound. A row of nine interviewees wait in identical leather armchairs. They are my age, and may very well be clones. Drone clones. ‘What a stupid eeky sound,’ they are all thinking. I reach the elevators and look up and down the signboard for Osugi and Bosugi, Legal. Concentrate on the prize. I could be ringing the doorbell at my father’s house by suppertime today. ‘Where do you think you’re going, kiddo?’
I turn around.
The guard at the reception desk glowers. The drone clones’ eighteen eyes swivel this way. ‘Didn’t they teach you to read?’ He raps his knuckles on a sign. VISITORS MUST REPORT TO RECEPTION. I backtrack and bow apologetically. He folds his arms. ‘So?’
‘I have business with Osugi and Bosugi. The lawyers.’
PANOPTICON SECURITY is embroidered into his cap. ‘How swanky for you. And your appointment is with whom exactly?’
‘No, you look. This is not a supermarket. This is a private building where business of a sensitive nature is regularly transacted. You cannot just breeze in. Nobody enters those elevators unless they are employees of the companies housed in here or unless they have an appointment, or a valid reason for being here. See?’
Eighteen drone clone ears tune into my boondock accent.
‘Could I make an appointment through you, then?’
Way wrong. The guard gears up and one clone pours fuel on the fire by snickering. ‘You didn’t hear me. I am a security guard. I am not a receptionist. I am employed to keep time-wasters, salesmen and assorted scum out. Not to usher them in.’
Damage control. ‘I didn’t want to offend you, I just—’
Too late for damage control. ‘Listen, kiddo.’ The guard removes his glasses, and polishes the lenses. ‘Your accent tells me you aren’t from round here, so listen while I explain to you how we work in Tokyo. You scuttle away before I get really irritated. You get your appointment with Ms Kato. You come back on the right day five minutes before your time. You report to me and tell me your name. I confirm your appointment with the Osugi and Bosugi receptionist. Then, and only then, do I let you step into one of those elevators. Am I understood?’
I take a deep breath.
The guard opens his newspaper with a snap.
Post-rain sweat and grime regunge Tokyo. The puddles are steaming dry in the magnified heat. A busker sings so off key that passers-by have a moral responsibility to steal his change and smash his guitar on his head. I head back towards Shinjuku submarine station. The crowds march out of step, beaten senseless by the heat. My father’s doorbell is lost at an unknown grid reference in my Tokyo street guide. A tiny nugget of earwax deep inside my ear where I can’t dig it out is driving me crazy. I hate this city. I pass a kendo hall – bone-splintering bamboo-sword screams escape through the window grille. On the pavement is a pair of shoes – as if their owner suddenly turned to vapour and blew away. I feel a boiling frustration and a sort of tired guilt. I have broken some kind of unseen contract. Who with? Buses and trucks clog the arteries, pedestrians squeeze through the gaps. When I was going through my dinosaur phase I read a theory claiming that the great