nervous tricklets of sweats down our back, hoisting, lowering, raising, all technical stuff, that’s it there, Godzilla changes his mind again, roots dig in harder, boughs thrash back and forth, her fingers grasp, her toes find leverage, swimming in the blue, the sheets of blue, billowing and grunty and lethargic, she gasps for air, she dives, winces, and yes is this all there is no and surface and yes and under and no and surface and yes and under and surface and under coming and coming if coming you – don’t – wake – up – before – you – hit – the – ground – you
I wake up in a round bed, alone as a chucked-away toy. This love hotel room is a temple of pink. Not flower pink – offal pink. The curtains are soiled with morning. I hear jackhammers, traffic crossings and crows. Husky sunflowers bend in their vase. My head is corkscrewed from temple to temple. My tongue has been salted and sun-dried and shat on by desert weasels. My throat has been attacked by geologists’ hammers. My elbows and knees have been friction-burned raw. My groin smells of prawn. The bedsheets are twisted, and the undersheet is dashed with crusty blood. So, two virgins defrocked one another. That groin sneeze was sex? That was no Golden Gate bridge to a promised land. It was a wobbly plank across a soggy bog. Nobody even gives you a badge to sew on. This room is a public tissue – love hotels must have the highest sex-per-cubic-metre ratios this side of . . . where? Paris. I grope for a cigarette – empty. Still. All things considered, I got off lightly. The telephone riiiiiiiiings. Daimon calling from the room next door, I bet.
‘Good morning, sir, this is reception.’ A man, brisk and breezy.
‘Uh, g’morning.’
‘This is just to remind you that your suite is booked until seven . . .’
My watch is on the bedside: 6:45. ‘Okay.’
‘After seven, hourly charges reapply.’
‘Okay, I’ll be right out.’
‘Will you be paying cash or credit, sir?’
‘What?’
‘When your lady friends left just now they didn’t know if you were paying cash or credit. Two rooms for all night comes to fifty-five thousand yen, provided nothing is taken from the minibar, and that you vacate the room in the next fifteen minutes.’
Cold shock squeezes down my colon.
Still brisk, less breezy. ‘So I’m calling up to ensure there has been no kind of unpleasant misunderstanding.’
Would vomiting help?
‘No kind of problem, is there, sir?’ Veiled menace.
‘No, none at all. Uh, I’ll pay cash, I think. I’ll be right down.’
‘We’ll be waiting for you in the entrance lobby, sir.’
I get dressed in my gummy clothes and dart into Daimon’s room. Nobody. Identical to mine, only on the mirror, scrawled in some sort of jelly, are the characters – ‘ONLY A VIDEO GAME’. Daimon, you primetime bastard. Miyake, you idiot. I turn out my jeans pockets and find 630 yen, in small change. This isn’t happening. I try to wake up. I fail. This is definitely happening. I am 54,370 yen short. I need a fantastic plan in the next nine minutes. I sit on the toilet and shit as I run through my alternatives. One: ‘You see, the guy I was with, he promised he would pay for everything on his, uh, father’s expense account.’ The Yakuza king places his fingertips together. ‘Eiji Miyake, employed in a lost property office? A position of trust. How fascinated your employers would be to learn how you spend your weekends. I feel it is my civic duty to report this matter unless you are willing to compensate us with certain duties, not all of which, I must warn you, could be described as pleasant.’ Two: ‘Buntaro! Help! I need you to bring me fifty-five thousand yen to a love hotel right now or you’ll have to find another tenant.’ Not a choice that poses him much difficulty. Three: ‘The Yakuza king licks his razor blade. So, this is the thief who attempted to escape from my hotel without paying for services consumed.’ I raise my bloodied head and swollen eyelids. My tongue lies in his shaving bowl.
If only crises could be flushed away down toilet bowls too.
In movies people escape along rooftops. I try to open the window, but it isn’t designed to open, and anyway, I can’t crawl down the sides of buildings. I see people in the littered streets and envy every single one of them. Could I start