acidic for colour to take root. A m-marginal duke once tried to station a daffodil plantation, but the yellow bleached away. Even evergreens never greened. No bird is heard, no low crows fly by.’
‘Aye, well, sir. Your kippers’ll be growing cold.’
Goatwriter frowned. ‘Strange to say, Mrs Comb, but of appetite I am bereft. Perhaps I might ask you to put the fish on a dish, and I shall eat them by and by. For now, a splash of tea would suffice—’ Goatwriter lost the tail of his sentence. ‘How vexatious! I wrote dozens of pages last night – but where are they now?’ He looked beneath, between, behind his table – but the pages were gone. ‘This is disastrous! I wrote fragments of a truly untold tale!’
Despite decades of service, Mrs Comb was cross about the kippers. ‘You had another writing dream, I dare say, sir. Remember when you dreamed you wrote Les Misérables? It took your editor a week to persuade you not to take Victor Hugo to court for flagellism.’ The door banged open and the wind sprang in. A fearsome prehistoric creature filled the frame with his hairy, mud-spattered torso. He grunted several times in the language of clay and blood. Mrs Comb glared fiercely. ‘Don’t you dare clomp your filthy mudluggers on my clean carpet!’
‘A jolly good m-morning to you, too, Pithecanthropus.’ Goatwriter forgot his missing pages. ‘What are you holding there, my dear fellow?’
Pithecanthropus opened his cupped hands towards Mrs Comb. A delicate white flower drooped from its clod of earth. ‘I say!’ exclaimed Goatwriter. ‘A Snowdonian snowdrop! In September! How exquisite! How rare!’
Mrs Comb was less impressed. ‘I’ll thank you for digging up your mucky weeds and carrying them elsewhere! Such a muckster I never beheld! And shut the door on your way out! Do you want me and Sir to catch our deaths?’
Pithecanthropus grunted dejectedly and closed the door.
‘Nowt but a hairy savage, that one.’ Mrs Comb scrubbed the kipper pan. ‘A savage!’ Goatwriter felt sorry for his friend, but he knew better than to come between Mrs Comb and her temper.
So I wake up staring at another unfamiliar ceiling, and slip into my amnesia game. I am numb and I want to stay numb. I used to play this after Anju went, when I began my nine-year round of uncles’ spare rooms and rice-cracker futons – ‘Eiji is visiting this month’ – and cousins who had the atomic warhead in any possible argument – ‘If you don’t like it here, go back to your grandmother’s house!’ Anyway, the object of the game is to hold on to this sensation of not knowing where I am for as long as possible. I count to ten but I am still clueless. I slept on a ballooning sofa in the middle of a living room, pale curtains covering a big bay window. I have a mouth ulcer the size of a hoofprint. Bang! goes the memory bomb. The heads in the bowling alley. I see Morino, cigar-lit. The Mongolian on the unfinished bridge. I flex my sore muscles. My nose and throat in the corked-up stage of a bad cold; my body sorts itself out despite its idiot brain. How long have I been asleep? Who fed Cat? A box of Lark cigarettes on the coffee table. Only three left, and I smoke one after another, lighting them with matches. My teeth feel clad in lagging. The room is warm. I slept in my clothes, my crotch and armpits are stewing. I should open the window, but I can’t be bothered to move quite yet. While I lie here nothing new can begin, and more distance opens up between me and the deaths of thirty, forty men. I groan. I cannot unsee what I saw. It will be national news, if not international news. Yakuza Wars, from now until the new year. I groan. Forensics men will be crawling over the battleground with tweezers. The Serious Crime Squad will be interviewing Xanadu shoppers. A girl employed at the already infamous pachinko parlour will have told reporters about an impostor claiming to be the manager’s son, moments before Mr Ozaki himself was thrown through the second-floor security window. Police artists will be making charcoal sketches. What do I do? What will the unseen Mr Tsuru want done to me? What has become of Mama-san and Queen of Spades? I have no plan. I have no cigarettes. I have no tissues to ungunge my nose. I listen