‘Tra-la-la!’ A leopardskinned woman pads up to the counter.
‘Mummy!’ Yuki Chiyo waves.
‘Dearest, you know it upsets Mummy when you go off like this! Have you been making trouble for this handsome young stripling?’ She nudges Aoyama aside and deposits her designer bags on the counter. A perky vixen smile. ‘I am so frightfully sorry, young man. What can I say? Yuki plays this little game whenever we go shopping, don’t you, dearest? My husband says it’s just a stage she’s going through. Do I have to sign anywhere?’
‘No, madam.’
Aoyama smoulders.
‘Let me give you a little something for your trouble.’
‘Really, madam, no need.’
‘You are a darling.’ She turns to Aoyama. ‘Jolly good! A porter!’
I kill my snicker a fraction too late. Aoyama radiates nuclear fury. ‘No, madam, I am the assistant station-master.’
‘Oh. Well, you look like a porter in that get-up. Come on, Yuki.’
Yuki turns to me as her mother leads her away. ‘Sorry I got you bollocked.’
Aoyama is too furious to bollock me further. ‘You, Miyake, you, Iam not going to forget this! I am going to file a report about this outrage to the disciplinary committee this very afternoon!’ Off he storms. I wonder if I still have a job. Suga steps out from the back office. ‘Quite a talent you have there for annoying people, Miyake.’
‘You were there all along?’
‘You seemed in control of the situation.’
I want to kill Suga so I say nothing.
I am on the ferry! So many times Anju and I have watched it; now I am actually on it! The deck slopes side to side, and the wind is strong enough to lean back into. Yakushima, the enormous country I live in, is slowly but surely growing smaller. Mr Ikeda is scanning the shoreline with his army binoculars. Seabirds follow the boat, just hanging there. The second-graders are arguing about what will happen when the ferry sinks and we have to fight for the lifeboats. Others are watching the TV, or being chucked out of places you’re not allowed. One kid is vomming in the toilets. The engine booms. I smell engine fumes. I watch the hull slice through the spray-chopped waves. If I hadn’t already decided on being a soccer star I would become a sailor. I look for the shrine of the thunder god, but it is already hidden in the morning haze. I wish Anju were here. I wonder what she’ll do today. I try to remember the last day we weren’t together. I go back as far as I can, but no such day ever was. Yakushima is now the size of a barn. I watch new islands rise ahead and fall behind. I can fit Yakushima inside the ‘O’ of my thumb and first finger. A tooth is wobbling loose. Mr Ikeda is on the deck too. ‘Sakurajima,’ he shouts at me above the wind and the engine, pointing ahead. I watch the volcano grow and take up a third of the sky. The torn crater belches graceful solid clouds of smoke over another third. ‘You can taste the ash,’ shouts Mr Ikeda, ‘on your tongue! And over there, that’s Kagoshima!’ Already? The voyage is supposed to take three hours. I consult my Zax Omega watch and find that nearly three hours have passed. Here comes Kagoshima. Huge! You could fit the whole of Anbo, our village, between two jetties in the harbour. Enormous buildings, vast cranes, huge freighters marked with place names I mostly haven’t heard of. I guess when I was here last my memory was switched off. Or maybe it was night? This is the where the world starts. Wait until I tell Anju. She’ll be amazed. Amazed.
According to Fujifilm, four o’clock slipped by fifteen minutes ago. The best I can hope for now is a couple of hours of sleep, so I can be dead at work instead of buried. Yesterday was the last day of Suga, so I’ll be on my own all afternoon. I can still see the body falling. Cockroach is quiet. Has he escaped? Is he plotting revenge? Is he asleep, dreaming of nubile cockroach thighs and stewing garbage? They say that for every single cockroach you see, there are ninety relatives out of sight. Under the floor, in cavities, behind cupboards. Under futons. ‘Poor Mum,’ she is hoping I’ll think. ‘Okay, she dumped us at our uncle’s when we were three, but let bygones be bygones. I’ll phone her this very morning.’ No