Tokyo (7 page)

Irina took a step back in amazement. ‘What? You don’t wanna look sexy?’

I grabbed a tissue and wiped the lipstick off my face. I was trembling. ‘I look weird. I just look weird.’

‘It only old Japanese men. Old squinters. They not gonna touch you.’

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

Svetlana raised an eyebrow. ‘We don’t understand? Hey, Irina, baby, we don’t understand.’

‘No, really,’ I said. ‘You really don’t understand.’

You don’t have to understand sex to want to do it. So say the bees and the birds. I was the worst combination you could imagine ignorant of the nuts and bolts and as fascinated as the day is long. Maybe it’s no wonder I got into trouble.

At first the doctors tried to get me to say that it had been a rape. Why else would a girl of thirteen allow five teenage boys to do something like that to her, if it hadn’t been rape? Unless she was crazy, of course. I listened to this with a sort of dreamy puzzlement. Why were they focusing on that part of what happened? Was that part wrong too? In the end I’d have saved myself a lot of problems if I’d agreed with them and said it had

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been rape. Maybe then they wouldn’t have gone on and on about how my sexual behaviour alone was evidence that something was very wrong with me. But it would have been a lie. I’d let them do it to me. I’d wanted it maybe even more than the boys did. I’d welcomed them into that van, parked down the country lane.

It had been one of those misty summer evenings where the night sky stays an intense blue in the west, and you can imagine all sorts of astonishing pagan dances happening just over the horizon where the sun has gone. There was new grass and a breeze and the sound of traffic in the distance, and when they stopped the van I looked down into the valley and saw the ghostly white smudges of the Stonehenge monument.

In the back was an old tartan blanket that smelt of grass seed and engine oil. I took all my clothes off and lay down on it and opened my legs, which were very white, even though it was summer. One by one they got inside and took their turns, making the van creak on its rusty axle. It was the fourth boy - sandy haired with a lovely face and the beginnings of stubble - who spoke to me. He pulled the van doors closed behind him so that there was no light, and the others sitting out on the verge smoking cigarettes couldn’t see us.

‘Hi,’ he said.

I put my hands on my knees and opened my legs wider. He didn’t move towards me. He knelt there in front of me, looking between my legs, with an odd, uncomfortable expression on his face.

‘You know you don’t have to do this, don’t you? You know nobody’s forcing you?’

I was silent for a while, looking at him with a puzzled frown. ‘I know.’

‘And you still want to do it?’

‘Of course,’ I said, holding out my arms. ‘Why not?’

‘Didn’t anyone talk about protection?’ The nurse who didn’t like me said that this just went to show how diseases like herpes and gonorrhoea and syphilis were spreading round the world, through the lack of control of disgusting people like me. ‘Don’t tell me that

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out of all those five boys not one of them even suggested using a contraceptive.’ I lay in my bed in silence, my eyes closed. I wasn’t going to tell her the truth, that I didn’t really know what a contraceptive was, that I hadn’t known it was wrong, that my mother would have died rather than talk to me about these things. I wasn’t going to let her go on and on about my stupid ignorance. ‘And as for you! Not even trying to stop them.’ She’d lick her lips then, a sound like legs slapping together in the dark. ‘If you want my opinion, you’re the sickest person I’ve ever met.’

The doctors said it was all about control. ‘We all have impulses, everyone has urges. They are what make us human. The key to a happy and balanced life is learning to control them.’

But by that time, of course, there wasn’t much I could do to put things right. You can’t mend something without practising, and you only had to take one look at my hospital notes, or see me naked, to know that there wasn’t going to be much of a sex life for me in the future.

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7

In the end the Russians and I reached a compromise. I let them leave the staples in the skirt, they let me flatten down my hair and wipe off the iridescent eyeshadow. Instead I drew very careful black lines above my eyelashes, because when I sat and thought hard about makeup the only thing that came to my mind were the pictures I’d seen in a book of Audrey Hepburn. I thought I’d have liked Audrey Hepburn if I’d met her. She always looked kind. I rubbed off the blusher and painted my lips in a plain, matt red. The twins stood back to look at the result.

‘Not bad,’ Irina admitted, with a sour look. ‘You still look like widow, but this time not-bad widow.’

Jason said nothing when he saw me. He looked thoughtfully at my legs and gave a short, dry laugh, as if he knew a rude joke about me. ‘C’mon,’ he said, lighting a cigarette. ‘Let’s go.’

We walked in a line, strung out across the pavement. The sun was low in the sky, lighting up the sides of the buildings. In the little streets they were preparing the lanterns for the O-Bon festival later that week - the stalls and the banners were going up in Toyama park, and a cemetery that we passed was dotted with vegetables, fruit and rice wine for the spirits. I looked at it all in silence, every now and then stopping to check my footing. Irina had given me black high heels to wear, they were too big so I’d stuffed paper into the toes and I had to concentrate hard on walking.

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You wouldn’t need a street map to get to the club: the building was visible for miles around, the gargoyles choking their red flames into the night. We reached the building as darkness came. I stood and stared up at it until the others got bored waiting, and took my arm and guided me into a glass lift that went up the outside of the skyscraper, all the way to the top where the Marilyn Monroe sign was swinging to and fro among the stars. The ‘crystal lift’, they told me it was called, because it was like a crystal catching and scattering all the lights of Tokyo. I stood with my nose pressed to the glass as it soared up outside the building, amazed by how quickly the greasy street dropped away beneath us.

‘Wait here,’ said Jason, when the lift stopped. We were in a marble-floored reception area, separated from the club by doors of industrial aluminium. A giant model of a red rose, five foot tall, stood in a huge vase in one corner. Till send Mama-san out.’ He indicated a plush velvet chaise-longue, and disappeared with the Russians through the doors. I caught a glimpse of a club as big as a skating rink - occupying the entire top of the building, skyscrapers reflected in the polished floor - a constellation of lights. Then the door swung closed and I was left, sitting on the chaise longue, with only the top of the hat-check girl’s head visible over the counter for company.

I crossed my legs, then uncrossed them. I looked at my vague reflection in the aluminium doors. Stencilled in black on the doors were the words Some Like It Hot.

The club’s Mama-san, Strawberry Nakatani, was an old hand, according to Jason. She had been a call girl in the seventies, famous for turning up to clubs naked under her white fur coat, and when her husband, a show-business impresario and minor hoodlum, died, he had given her the club. ‘Don’t look surprised when you see her,’ Jason warned. Her life was devoted to Marilyn Monroe, he said. She’d had her nose reconstructed, and had got unethical surgeons in Waikiki to put western lines into her eyelids. ‘Just act like you think she looks fabulous.’

I put my hands on my skirt, pressing it down against my thighs. You have to be very brave or desperate to stick things out, and I

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was about to give up, stand and turn for the lift when the aluminium doors opened and out she stalked: a small, bleached woman dressed in a gold lame Marilyn Monroe dress, carrying an ornate cigarette-holder and a fur stole. She was boxy and muscular, like a Chinese war-horse, and her Asian hair had been peroxided, ferociously backcombed into a Marilyn bob. She clipped across to me on her stilettos, flinging back her fur stole, licking her fingers and smoothing her haircut into shape. She stopped a few inches in front of me, saying nothing, letting her eyes flick over my face. That is it, I thought, she’s going to throw me out.

‘Stand up.’

I stood.

‘Where you from? Hnimm?’ She prowled in a circle, looking at the wrinkled black tights, Irina’s stilettos crammed with paper. ‘Where you come from?’

‘England.’

‘England?’ She stood back and plugged a cigarette into the holder, narrowing her eyes. ‘Yes. You look like English girl. What you want to work here for? Eh?’

‘The same reason everyone wants to work here.’

‘What that, then, hmm? You like Japanese man?’

‘No. I need the money.’

Her mouth curled then, as if she was amused. She lit the cigarette. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Peachy.’ She tilted her head and blew the smoke in a stream over her shoulder. ‘You try tonight. You nice to customer I give you three thousand yen an hour. Three thousand. Okay?’ ‘Does that mean you want me to work?’

‘Why you surprised? You want something else? Three thousand. Take it or fly away, lady. I can’t give you no more.’

‘I just thought

Mama Strawberry held up her hand to silence me. ‘And if it goes peachy tonight, then tomorrow you come back and you wear nice dress. Okay? You no wear nice dress and you pay ten thousand yen penalty. Penalty. You get it, lady? This very high class club.’

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The club seemed to me the most magical place I’d ever seen - the floor like a starlit pool floating fifty storeys above the world, surrounded on all sides by panoramic views of the Tokyo skyline, the video screens on neighbouring buildings showing newsreels and music videos. I moved through it in a kind of nervous awe, looking at the ikebana flower arrangements, the muted down lighting. One or two customers were already there, small men in business suits, at tables dotted around, some in banquettes, some in deep leather armchairs, pools of smoke hanging above the tables. On a raised platform a thin-faced piano-player in his bow tie warmed up with tinkling arpeggios. The only place the view of the city was interrupted was where Marilyn - the blank reverse of her, girdered, engineered and supported with metal struts creaked and rattled back and forth through the night, blocking our view completely every ten seconds or so.

Mama Strawberry was sitting at a reproduction Louis Quatorze gilded desk just in front of the Marilyn swing, smoking from her elaborate cigarette-holder and punching numbers into a calculator. Not far from her was a table where the hostesses sat, waiting to be assigned to a customer, smoking and chattering - twenty of us, all Japanese with the exception of me and the twins. Irina had given me a handful of Sobranie ‘Pinks’ cigarettes and I sat in silence, smoking intently, looking warily across the club at the aluminium doors where the customers would arrive.

Eventually the lift bell pinged and a large party of suited men came through the aluminium doors. ‘She’s going to put you with them,’ Irina whispered, sliding up to me, her hand held to the side of her mouth. ‘These ones, they always leave the tip. For their favourite girls. Mama gonna watch and see if you get tip. This is your test, bay-beee!’

I was summoned, discreetly, along with the Russians and three Japanese hostesses, and sent to a table next to the panoramic window, where we stood formally with our hands resting lightly on the chair backs waiting for the men to cross the polished parquet floor. I copied the others, stepping agitatedly from foot to

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foot, wishing I could tug my skirt down. A string of waiters appeared from nowhere, hurriedly setting the table with piles of snowy white linen, a silver candlestick, gleaming glasses, finishing just as the men arrived and seated themselves, pulling back chairs and unbuttoning jackets.

‘Irasshaimase,’ said the Japanese girls, bowing, and sliding into the chairs, taking hot towels from the bamboo dish that appeared on the table.

‘Welcome,’ I mumbled, taking my cue from the others.

A bottle of champagne and some Scotch appeared. I shuffled my chair forward and sat, glancing at everyone, waiting to see what to do next. The girls were slitting the hot towels from their wrappers, unfolding them into the men’s waiting hands, so I quickly copied, dropping one into the hands of the man on my left. He didn’t acknowledge me. He took the towel, wiped his hands, dropped it carelessly on the table in front of me, and turned away to speak to the hostess on his other side. The rules were clear: my job was to light cigarettes, pour whisky, feed the men finger food and entertain them. No sex. Just conversation and flattery. It was all printed out for the new girls to read on a laminated card. ‘Better you say something funny,’ Mama Strawberry had whispered to me. ‘Strawberry’s customers want to relax.’

‘Hallo,’ Svetlana said boldly, settling her bottom into one of the seats, dwarfing the men, moving from side to side like a broody hen so that everyone had to make room. She picked up a glass from the centre of the table and chimed it against the bottle. ‘Shampansky, darlink. So nice!’ She unloaded the entire bottle into four glasses then waggled the empty bottle above her head to summon the waiter for more.

The men seemed to like the twins, they kept singing tunes to them that must have been from TV or radio because I didn’t recognize them: ‘“Double the pleasure, double the fun … Give me that little lift. Come and get you some!’” Everyone would laugh and applaud and the conversation, in a mixture of Japanese and broken English, would take off again. The twins got drunk very quickly. Svetlana’s eye makeup was smudged and Irina kept

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jumping up to light the men’s cigarettes with a disposable Thai Air lighter, leaning across the table, knocking over the little bowls of seaweed and dried cuttlefish. ‘Don’t make me laugh,’ she squealed, when someone told a joke. She was flushed and slurring. ‘Make me laugh some more and I explode*.’