last Friday, he said he had heard from a contact that there might be a job going there, and would I be interested? You bet, I said. Before I knew it I had an interview with Mrs Sasaki. She is a stern old bird, a Tokyo version of my grandmother, but after talking for about half an hour she offered me the job. I spend the mornings cataloguing – writing date/time/train labels on the items collected by conductors and cleaners when the trains terminate, and housing them on the right metal rack. Mrs Sasaki runs the lost property office and deals with the high-value items in the side office – wallets, cash cards, jewellery – which have to be registered with the police. Suga trains me to do the low-value ones, stored in the back office. ‘Not much natural light in here, right?’ says Suga. ‘But you can tell the month from what gets handed in. November to February, skis and snowboards. March – diplomas. June is all wedding gifts. Swimsuits pile up in July. A decent rain will bring hundreds of umbrellas. Not the most inspiring job, but it beats leaping around a garage forecourt or delivering pizzas, imho.’ Afternoons I spend on the counter, waiting for claimants, or answering the phone. Rush hours are busiest, of course, but during mid-afternoon my job is almost relaxing. My memory is the most regular visitor.
The leaves are so green they are blue. Me and Anju play our staring game: we stare at one another and the first one to make the other smile and look away wins. I pull stupid faces but they bounce off her. Her Cleopatra eyes are sparked with bronze. She wins – she always does – by bringing her eyes close to mine and opening wide. Anju returns to her higher branch and looks at the sun through a leaf. Then she hides the sun with her hand. The webby bit between her thumb and forefinger glows ruby. She looks out to sea. ‘The tide is coming in.’
‘Going out.’
‘Coming in. Your whalestone is diving.’
My mind is on miraculous soccer exploits.
‘I really used to believe what you told me about the whalestone.’
Bicycle kicks and diving headers.
‘You spouted such rubbish.’
‘Uh?’
‘About it being magic.’
‘What being magic?’
‘The whalestone, deaf-aid!’
‘I never said it was magic.’
‘You did. You said it was a real whale that the thunder god had turned into stone, and that one day when we were older we would swim out to it, and once we set foot on it the spell would be broken, and it would be so grateful that it would take us anywhere we wanted to go, even to Mother and Father. I used to imagine it happening so hard that I could see it sometimes, like down a telescope. Mother putting on her pearls, and Father washing his car.’
‘I never said all of that.’
‘Did, too. One of these days I’ll swim out to it.’
‘No way could you ever swim that far. Girls can’t swim as well as boys.’
Anju aims a lazy kick at my head. ‘I could swim there, easy!’
‘In your dreams. Way too far.’
‘In your dreams.’ Waves break at the foot of the grey humpback.
‘Maybe it really is a whalestone,’ I suggest. ‘A fossil one.’
Anju snorts. ‘It’s just a stupid rock. It doesn’t even look like a whale. And next time we go to the secret beach I’m going to show you and swim out there, me, and stand on it and laugh at you.’
The Kagoshima ferry crawls across the horizon.
‘This time tomorrow—’ I begin.
‘Yeah, yeah, this time tomorrow you’ll be in Kagoshima. You’ll get up really early to catch the ferry, arrive at Kagoshima junior high school at ten o’clock. The third years, the second years, then your match. Then you go to the restaurant of a hotel with nine floors and eat while you listen to Mr Ikeda tell you why you lost. Then you come back on Sunday morning. You already told me a zillion times, Eiji.’
‘I can’t help it if you’re jealous.’
‘Jealous? Eleven smelly boys kicking a bag of air on a pitch of muck?’
‘You used to like soccer.’
‘You used to wet our futon.’
Ouch. ‘You’re jealous because I’m going to Kagoshima and you’re not.’
Anju stays aloof.
The tree creaks. I didn’t expect Anju to lose interest in our argument so soon. ‘Watch,’ she says. She stands up, feet apart, steadies herself, takes her hands away—