sit up again. ‘Keep your hands on the table,’ she warns me severely, ‘I hate boys whose hands get everywhere.’ After a couple of attempts our mouths meet and we kiss for nine days and nine nights.
The fusuma to the balcony slides open. Velvet and I jump apart. Daimon stands in the moonlight, his torso stripped, with a sort of vampire Miffy the rabbit painted across his chest in lipstick. His nipples are Miffy’s greedy pupils. ‘Miyake! Stoned or boned? Want to swap yet?’ The shoji to the outer corridor slides open. Miriam stands in the entrance, holding a tray of sticky pearls and cubes of watermelon and naked lychees. I glimpse shock, anger and hatred before professional indifference regains control. ‘Miriam! Bearing nibblies! Caviare, no less? One of her assets, Miyake, is her sense of timing.’ She removes her slippers, steps up, and sets the tray on the table. ‘Pardon me.’ She withdraws. ‘Oh, Miriam, you don’t need me to pardon you, not with your powerful and influential patrons to take care of you.’ Pigletty Coffee appears, doing herself up, supporting the fusuma frame to stop it collapsing. She sees Miriam. She is used to ordering domestics. ‘Show us to the powder room!’
Daimon speaks to Eiji, but Eiji finds it hard to concentrate because his head keeps unscrewing itself and rolling into the corner. Coffee and Velvet have been in the ladies’ room since time began. ‘I use a quiet East Shinjuku love hotel near the park, attached to a four-star place so you can order up decent food from the kitchen.’ Eiji is somehow uneasy. Daimon peers in. ‘Not still worried about money?’ Eiji tries to shake his head but nods it by accident. ‘Money is only this stuff my father has too much of.’ ‘The girls,’ thinks Eiji, ‘is it all right, just to—’ Daimon hears his friend’s thoughts, buttons up his shirt and wags a finger. ‘These two are strictly a double act, Miyake. Either both get laid, or they both go home to their lavender-scented bedrooms. You back out on me now and I’ll be left with the most expensive wank on my hands since Michael Jackson last played at the Budokan. And yours has at least evolved problem-solving intelligence. Mine has a fashion sense where her brain should be.’ Eiji is about to say something but forgets what he was going to say the moment before he begins. ‘Girls are like video games, Miyake. You pay, you play, you leave.’ Eiji is all gratitude. He tries to express this, but his words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither wildly as they make their way across the universe, so he gives up. Another hostess brings the coffee. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ Daimon demands. The hostess bows. ‘Aya-chan, Mr Daimon. Miriam-san has come over unwell.’ Daimon begins to get angry. ‘Trot back to Mama-san and remind Daimon who my father is, and what a stroppy fuck I can be if I—’ But his sentence trails off. He pinches the head off the chrysanthemum, and pulls off the petals. ‘Forget I said that, Aya-chan. Give this to the ghost of Miriam, with my profoundest respects,’ and he hands her the flower-stump, which Eiji thinks is sort of cute. Eiji sits in the front of the taxi. Daimon sits in the back with his two concubines. The streets clear, they go over a wide bridge. Atlas holds up his globe in the foyer, Daimon gazes up at the screen showing rooms lit and unlit and prices and presses panels and gets keys. Another elevator ride. Daimon kisses Eiji on the lips and jump-shots him into the room behind. A ten-second shower and uncurious porn on Pay TV. Nine different types of condom. A pink ‘H’ flashes on and off outside. Heads on stalks, sunflower heads. Coffee comes in, a lemon towel around her lozenge honey skin, sort of numb somehow now, rather factually the legendary swimming pool of sex laps, she draws the curtain, close your eyes, she says, and slips into bed, her skin slides out, berries swell, yeah okay you can but you are not to touch me there, snagged on a twig, yeah okay, does he normally swap over like this? Your friend? Yuzu Daimon? What a name, Yuzu, like the fruit? I guess. Shush. Waxy chocolate, cheap and teeth biting midriff, mossy nooks, nervous push, no I said you are not to touch me there, Godzilla retreats,