sprout from wrinkled tarmac. A yakiniku restaurant smokes the evening with meat and charcoal. A garage band rehearse a song called ‘Sonic Genocide’. A taxi driver stands in a corner of the quay, rehearsing his golf swing, watching imaginary holes-in-one land in the calm evening. A window-grilled pawnshop, a bright curry shop, a laundromat, a liquor store, a gateball ground, and Miriam’s apartment building. It is an old three-storey affair. I smoke a Seven Star in a record few drags. The first floor has already been abandoned. The metal stairs jangle as I climb up. One decent typhoon and the whole structure would be blown clean across Hokkaido. Here it is: 303.
Her face appears in the gloom above the door chain.
She slams the door.
I hammer, embarrassed. I crouch down to speak through the letterbox. ‘I brought your library book. You dropped it in the park. This is nothing to do with Daimon. Miriam, I don’t even know him! Please.’ No reply. A dog with its head in a lampshade walks past. Its overweight owner is several paces behind, panting. He scowls, daring me to laugh. ‘Bob had his bollocks lopped off. The restraint is to stop him licking where he shouldn’t.’ He unlocks the apartment next to Miriam’s and disappears. Miriam’s door opens. She is smoking. I am still crouched down. The door chain is still on. ‘Here is your book.’
She takes it. Then she silently judges me.
‘You gave Daimon my message?’
‘I tried to tell you, I don’t know Daimon.’
She shakes her head in frustration. ‘Why do you keep saying that? If Daimon didn’t send you, how did you know where to come?’
‘I got your address from the library.’
She accepts this without me needing to explain the illegal part. ‘And so you returned my book from the kindness of your heart?’
‘No.’
‘So what do you want now?’
She shifts, and reflected amber light catches the side of her face. I understand why Daimon fell in love with her. I don’t understand anything else. ‘Do you really know who my father is?’
‘What?’
‘In Ueno park, you talked about my father as if you know him.’
‘He’s a regular at the club! Of course I know him.’
I swallow. ‘What is his name?’
She is half irritated, half confused. ‘Your father is Yuzu Daimon’s father.’
Plan C buckles right down its crumple zone. ‘He told you that?’ Oh, it all falls into place now. ‘Plan’ was a fat name for a skinny little lie.
‘He signed you into Queen of Spades as his stepbrother. His father – your father – keeps a couple of mistresses at any one time, so you aren’t the first one.’
I look away, hardly able to believe this. No, this is all too easy to believe.
Miriam probes. ‘Was that all Daimon bullshit?’ My father rejoins the unknown millions. I don’t answer her. She sort of yowls. ‘That selfish, stupid jerk. Just to get back at me . . . Listen, Eiji Miyake. Look at me!’ She stubs out her cigarette. ‘Queen of Spades is not . . . an ordinary place. If you ever go back there, bad things could happen to you. Oh, hell. This could be very bad. By admitting you, Daimon . . . well, he broke a pretty major rule. Normally, male guests are blood relatives only. Listen to me. Do not go back there, and do not come back here, ever. Steer clear of Shibuya, in fact. This is fair warning. Understand?’
No, I don’t really understand, but she closes the door anyway. It is the last moment of the day. The sunset would be beautiful, if I were in the mood. A dying SF movie sun sits on a Warner Cinema multiplex. I wonder what metro line takes you to that sort of sunset, and what station you need to get off at. I amble back the way I came and find a games centre. Inside are a whole row of full-sized 2084 machines, doing brisk business with schoolkids. Today has been a bad day. I change a thousand-yen note into hundred-yen coins.
Photon fire bursts around me, and my final comrade falls. I get the prison guard in my sights and fricassé him. The last echo dies. Eerie silence. Is the shooting finally over? Eight stages since the red door. The metal walkway clanks as I walk over the pile of guards and fallen rebels. It is down to me. Here is the prison door. ‘Prisoner Ned Ludd. Crime: Cyber-Terrorism. Sentence: Life Incarceration. Security Access: Orange.’ Inside is my father, the