The Last of Her Kind

Her hands lie still, outside the warmth of the duvet, palms down on the cool surface of the cotton cover.  Her eyes are closed.  A nerve flickers on her left eyelid, making the thin skin jump.  Her arms are covered by the sleeves of her gown, almost as far as the wrists, but not quite.  He can see the nub of bone on the outside of each wrist.  He can see a small scar above the nub on her right wrist.  Her skin is pale.

She breathes evenly.  He watches her and wonders what happened.

A nurse enters the room, barely acknowledging his existence.  She walks over to the bed and checks the chart, which hangs on the bottom rail.  She carries out clichéd, nursely tasks, checking monitors, writing notes.  She moves with practised fluidity.

He sits on the plastic chair and occasionally looks out through the window, across the car park, beyond the small, grassed area where patients sit and smoke on a bench beneath a wooden trellis.  The trellis is bare, devoid of vegetation.  He looks towards the other hospital buildings that sprawl across this hillside site.  The window does not open.  It is double, maybe triple-glazed, and he cannot hear any noise from the outside world.

She lies motionless in the bed, and he wonders what happened.

He is security.  His purpose is to keep people away from her, but nobody has been near.  Only the hospital staff.  He knows nothing about her, only that his presence is required to ensure her safety.  He does not recognise her.  She isn’t what he would call famous.  She wears no jewellery, so he is unable to tell if she is wealthy, from moneyed stock.  All he knows is that his boss assigned him to this watching role.

For some reason, she is important.

He does not know that the scar on her right wrist was created when she cut herself, pruning roses.  He does not know that her pale skin is peppered with freckles in the summer, or that the freckles have faded.  He does not know that, behind her closed eyelids, her eyes are an indeterminate shade of blue, or green, or grey, a shade that changes with the quality of the light.

She lies there in the hospital bed, in a private room away from the other patients.  She drifts in and out of sleep, or is it in and out of consciousness?  She does not dream, or if she does, she does not remember.  Sometimes, she opens her eyes a crack and sees that he is still sitting in the plastic chair.  Sometimes he is watching her, and sometimes he is not.  She does not know who he is, but she has an idea about what he is doing there.

He does not know it, but she is the last of her kind.

She had hidden in plain view.  When the terror came, she had not panicked.  Her ability to assimilate had been the saving of her.  While others had gone to ground, hiding themselves away in underground colonies, she had carried on as though nothing in the world had changed.  She had looked people in the face, with those eyes of hers that changed colour with the light, and calmly lied about who she was.  Nobody had any evidence, and if they suspected then their suspicion was not a strong enough impulse to act upon.  She had been left alone, to continue her life.

It had helped that she was living alone by then.  Her adoptive parents were both gone.  The last to go was the old man who had treated her as a daughter.  He had been an early subscriber, and had gone so far as to donate some of his own DNA to modify hers.  She was more convincing as a result.  Her skin was warm to the touch, where the skin of others of her kind could seem clammy and unreal.  When she cut herself, as she had that summer, pruning the roses in the family garden, her skin healed like his.  Which is to say, badly, with scarring.  She had absorbed his ability to make freckles in the sun.

He had delighted in trialling improvements.  The nerve that was twitching now in her eyelid was something that he had approved.  Small human traits, to make her seem more like him.  More like his kind, and less like her own.

The man in the plastic chair who is paid to watch her knows nothing of this.  It has been so long since her kind had walked freely in the world.  He would not have been born when their acceptance began to change.

She had seen it happen.  The breakthroughs in medical research.  The slow but steady increase in live human births.  Babies being carried to full term.  Women delivering their offspring in re-opened maternity units.  Her kind no longer being seen as one of the family, but treated as an unpaid nanny, to help raise these children.  Her kind, formed because humans had chosen a prolonged adolescence, careers over family and, after the pandemic, ended up unable to create their own offspring biologically.  Her kind, now cast aside in favour of those who would grow up to become people like the man sitting in the plastic chair in this silent hospital room.

When she peers at him through her half-opened eyes, she knows that he is too young to even remember a time when her kind existed.  It is so long ago.

She wonders who it was who had realised.  Somebody must have remembered how things used to be.  Somebody must have realised what she was.

She cannot remember what happened.  She can only remember waking up and finding herself lying in this bed.  She had felt her vital processes slowing over the previous weeks and months.  Perhaps she had suffered a collapse.  Perhaps she had fainted in public and, when she failed to respond to the usual human treatments for a faint, perhaps someone had called an ambulance.

Her memory has somehow been fractured.  She searches for the information, but finds only blank spaces.

He watches her, waiting for time to pass.  He will be relieved of his watch soon.  He will be given 12 hours’ grace, time to sleep, to wash, to relax.  He carries the smell of the hospital home with him, and his wife asks whether there is any news about who the woman in the bed is.  Each time he has to tell her, no.  No news, no information.  He knows he is not supposed to ask.  He knows that his job is to watch without question.  He also knows that sometimes it is better not to be aware of the true nature of the person he is watching.  But this time he has not been able to help himself.  He has asked one of the nurses, the more approachable one, who smiles at him when she enters the room and sometimes asks him how he is.  He is still without answers, though.  The nurse was unable to tell him anything.  To her, the woman in the bed was just a patient.  No name, no details, just a person who collapsed and was brought in for treatment.  She has no ID and nobody has come forward to claim her as missing from their life.

He knows that there are people like that in the world.  People who have nobody.  When he told his wife what the nurse had said, she had grown sad.  How can people live like that, she had wondered.  How can they exist without a family?

He thinks about his own family, the son and the daughter that they have.  They are unusual among their friends, having children at such a young age.  He smiles when he thinks about his female colleagues, who cannot comprehend why his wife, at 25, has chosen to bear children now rather than have a career.  They shake their heads in disbelief.  To them, she seems anachronistic.  His wife laughs when he tells her, saying that she must have a recessive gene, something that makes her a throwback to centuries ago.  She says that there will be time for her to have a career when the children are grown and at school.  She has faith in a future that will allow such a thing to happen.

He wonders whether the woman in the bed has children.  She looks to be in her 40s, so maybe not yet.  He tries to imagine what career she has, but without clothes and make-up, it is hard for him to judge her social position.  A hospital gown makes everyone look the same.  Her skin looks good to him, so he imagines that she has a stress-free life.  He can go no further with this line of thinking, though, so he looks once more out through the window at the unchanging view.

He does not notice that her breathing has changed slightly, a sign that she is conscious.  Her senses awaken, and she can smell him across the room.  She has not noticed that about him before.  She wonders what it means.

Inside her body, she can feel her vital processes continuing.  There is nothing too badly wrong, she can tell.  She feels a lethargy, however.  This is unlike anything she has felt before.  She wonders how long her kind are meant to continue before this lethargy begins.  She has existed for 49 years.  For the last 31 of those years, she has had no updates or modifications to her systems.  For the last 31 years, she has been alone.

She thinks back to the past, to the time when her human father was alive.  She remembers his fascination with the emerging technologies that could make her more like him.  Not just the addition of his own DNA, not just the tweaks that permitted twitches beneath her skin, but the reprogramming of that living skin so that it aged as she aged, without needing replacement, and the smart fibres that made up the bones of her body, allowing them to gradually stretch until she had reached her optimum height.  She was an experiment, and she was grateful that those experiments were successful.  She would not have survived the past three decades without them.  His willingness to take chances on technological advances had rendered her more real.

She lies in this hospital bed now, and to everyone’s eye she is human.  But someone has seen beneath the surface.  Someone has realised that eyes can deceive.  She wonders what this will mean for her future.

She opens her eyes.  The man in the plastic chair is looking through the window.  She moves a hand against the cool cotton of the bedding.  The slight gasp of skin against fabric makes him turn his head.  He looks at her and sees that her eyes are open.  She sees him react.  He is surprised.

“Hello,” she says.

He does not speak for a moment, and then, “Hello,” he replies.

“I wonder, could you tell me, how long have I been here?” she asks him.

He scratches his head and looks at his watch.  He is so human that it makes her want to smile.

“Um, about three days, I think,” he says.

He looks confused, as though this should not be happening.

“Do you know what happened to me?” she asks.

He shakes his head.

“I can’t remember,” she tells him.  “My memory is a blank.”

There is silence in the room.  He is still looking at her.  She looks back at him.  She tries a smile.  He watches as her mouth turns up at each corner and her lips stretch smoothly across her teeth.  He does not smile back.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Whitcombe,” he says.  “Terry.”

“I’m Allegra,” she smiles.  “I’m pleased to meet you.”

She closes her eyes again.  If she is to get out of here, she will need his help.  She needs to be able to persuade him to let her leave the room for some reason, without calling for a nurse.  She has watched him through her half-opened eyes and thinks that she can trust him, enlist him to her cause.  They have exchanged names.  For now, it is enough.  She allows her vital processes to slow just enough to make it seem that she is asleep.

Behind her closed eyes, she tries to remember.  The most recent moment that she recalls is an unknown time ago.  She remembers that she was in a department store, looking at clothes, when the world seemed to slow and erase itself, pixel by pixel, from her sight.  What happened in the moments before that, she cannot recall.  There is nothing flickering at the edges of her memory, no trace remains, but she knows that something did happen.  Something that triggered her decline.

She wonders what she looked like, as she was collapsing in that department store.  She has only seen one person collapse, and remembers being surprised that it would be so angular.  From reading books written centuries ago, in which women stayed at home and fainted at regular intervals, she had gained the notion that it would be like watching solidity turn to liquid.  Instead it had been a stiffening and then a crumpling, but without any fluidity of motion.  Limbs and joints, bones and muscle, all were too interlinked to allow fluidity in the collapse of that body.  She had been alone in the house with him.  They had always been alone in those days.  After she had stood and looked at his motionless body for a while, fully expecting him to recover and stand up, she had realised that she was looking at her first corpse.

His is still the only corpse she has ever seen.

She wonders if she looked like a corpse, as she lay at the end of her collapse, in a dimly remembered department store.

She remembers the stiffening of his body and the change in the colour of his skin.  He seemed to grey as the minutes passed by.  She remembers that his socks were grey, and woollen.  His slippers met his socks at the ankle.  His trouser legs had ridden up slightly in the fall to the floor.  His socks were wrinkled and grey, his feet pointing downwards in his slippers, his legs at awkward angles to each other.  His hands were clutching at his chest, claws of greying flesh.  Beneath the growing greyness of his face, blood had gathered at his forehead, leaving it a strange shade of maroon.

She had not known that this was how a human life could end.

Afterwards, the men from the Coroner’s office had taken him away on a collapsible trolley-bed.  They had sent her into another room, and she remembers listening to the sound of the trolley-bed crashing into walls and doors as they manoeuvred his body out of the house.

Since that day, she has been alone.  No upgrades.  No replacements.  Just her body as it is, processing existence, and convincing those around her that she is just like them.

She thinks about the terrors, the backlash against her kind.  As soon as women were able to create and carry a child to term in their biologically aged bodies, children became a sacred commodity.  More so than the children created outside of bodies and transplanted into wombs.  Far more sacred than the children who were created in laboratories and shipped out to the families of women who could not gestate an implanted embryo.  She had been such a child, in a time when natural conception was a thing of the past.  She was an adolescent when natural births became possible again, and a woman by the time her kind were little more than servants used to raise the children of women who wanted to return to their careers.

And then, her kind were rounded up as abominations, travesties, things that mocked the perfection of humanity.  Human society seemed unable to accept that they had created her kind for a reason.  Human society wanted to forget that they had once been dependent on the creation of her kind if they had wanted a family.  Her kind were first made to live in their own communities, housed away from human society, but still free to move around and carry out work for humans.  Children of her kind were not allowed to remain in their homes as part of the family unit, but were sent to training centres where they learned new skills and new ways of thinking.  Adults of her kind were given apartments in the new communities.  She had avoided that, because she was already alone and living in her human father’s house.  She was not part of a family, and her modifications meant that her neighbours were never really certain that she was of her kind, and not one of them.  Memory plays tricks on people, and any who thought they remembered her as a child of that human-childless couple soon convinced themselves that someone who looked like her human father, with skin so human in appearance, could not possibly be one of her kind.

Later, the communities were broken up and her kind were forced to flee or accept destruction.  Those who fled lived desolate lives in tunnels and disused transport facilities beneath the earth until someone in human society found them out, or informed the authorities of a suspected colony.  Those who accepted destruction realised that living as a fugitive without real purpose was probably not worth the effort.

And so it was that eventually, all of her kind had been destroyed, or had failed, and she was the only one remaining.

She hears a sound.  He is standing, no longer seated in his plastic chair.  She needs to act.  She opens her eyes.

“Terry?”

He seems startled, but answers, “Yes?”

“Are you leaving?”

“Yes.  It’s the end of my watch.  I’ll be relieved in a few minutes.”

“I see.”

She pauses to take this in.

“And when you go, there will be someone else watching over me?”

He nods, uncertain of whether he should be talking to her, as it is not part of his brief.  He suspects that he should inform a nurse that the woman is awake and talking as though nothing is wrong with her.

“Before you go, I wonder – would you do a favour for me?”

He looks across the room to the door, as though expecting someone to enter the room and question him.

“It’s just that I have been lying here for days – three days, I think you said?”

He nods.  Three days, yes.  That is how long she has been in this hospital room, kept away from everyone else, a secret to be guarded.

“I wonder, would you help me along the corridor to the bathroom?  I would like to wash my face.”

“I, I’m not, I mean,” he stumbles over his words.  “A nurse.”

“I’ll be very quick,” she says.  “I don’t need you to trouble a nurse.”

She is calm as she speaks to him, and it seems to steady his nerve.  He decides that she has a right to some freedom, as limited as a walk along the corridor is.  After all, nobody has been near her since she has been in the hospital.

“Okay,” he says, and steps towards the bed.

He reaches out and helps her up and to her feet.  She is slight, but surprisingly heavy.  She grips his arms firmly as she finds her balance, and then she looks up at him and smiles.

“Okay,” she agrees.  “Shall we?”

She leans on one arm and they make their way out of the room and along the corridor.  This part of the hospital seems very quiet, compared to the other parts he has visited.  Nobody passes them on the short walk, and she is moving surprisingly quickly for someone who has been bed-ridden for three days.

“Will you be okay?” he asks, as they stop outside the bathroom.

She nods.  “Yes, thank you,” she says, as she pushes open the door.

He looks around as she enters the bathroom, searching for a place to sit down while he waits.

The door closes behind her, and she is alone in the clinical quiet of the tiled room.  She steps over to the sink and looks at herself in the mirror.  She presses down on one of the taps and catches water in her cupped hand.  She splashes it onto her face.  Its coolness refreshes her.  An important modification, that one.  Her human father had been adamant that she deserved to associate physical sensations with emotional responses.

She looks at herself in the mirror again.  Water glistens on her face.

A nurse passes by in the corridor.  She stops in front of the guard.

“Why aren’t you in her room?” she asks.

He blushes.

“She woke up,” he says.  “She wanted to wash her face, stretch her legs.  I didn’t think it was important.”

The nurse folds her arms and frowns.

“You should have called someone,” she says.  She turns her head towards the bathroom door.  “Is she in there?” she asks.

“Yes,” he replies, feeling despondent and ashamed.  He knows that he will be reprimanded for this slip.

The nurse turns fully to face the bathroom.  She steps forward, her right arm extending, ready to make contact with the door, ready to push it open.  He hears a click, but the nurse doesn’t.  Her hand makes contact with the door.  She pushes through.  As the door opens, he can see that the room is empty.  The nurse goes into the bathroom and the door closes behind her.

Minutes pass, and the nurse eventually emerges.  She is alone.  She is wearing a puzzled look on her face.

“Are you sure she went in there?” she asks.

“Yes, of course.  Where else would she go?”

The nurse does not say anything.

“Why?” he asks.  “Why did you ask me that?”

“She’s not in there,” the nurse says.

They stare at each other, unable to comprehend, then together they enter the bathroom to look for her.

The nurse is right.  There is no sign of the woman.

They stand side by side for a few minutes, each of them gazing around the room, trying to work out where the woman could have gone.  The door to the toilet cubicle is open.  The bath is empty.  There are no cupboards, no hiding spaces.  He looks up at the ceiling, to check if there is a vent, mindful of the films he has seen, remembering that people who want to escape sometimes hide in ventilation systems.  There is no ceiling vent.

He looks at the window.  He sees that this is a window that will open.  He sees more, sees that the locking mechanism is tilted.  The window is closed, but it is not locked.  He thinks.  The nurse has not seen it, he knows.  She would have said something if she had.  He decides to say nothing.

In the days that follow, he is unable to determine whether he kept his silence in order to allow the woman to escape, or whether it was to save his own skin.  He knows that, if it became clear that he had accompanied her to the bathroom without calling a nurse and she had escaped through an unlocked window, then the blame would fall mainly on him.  As it is, without the knowledge that the window was unlocked, the woman has simply and mysteriously disappeared.

When he talks to his wife about it, though, there is something in the way that he tells the story that makes his wife think that he wanted the woman to escape.

For escaped she has.  It is to her advantage that the part of the hospital where she has been kept is built entirely on a single level.  No upper floors exist.  As she slips through the window, pushing it closed again behind her, she is unaware that this part of the hospital is for the more psychologically damaged patients.  More than one storey would be inviting leaps to be made.  She is equally unaware that the man who greets her cheerfully with “Nice day for a stroll, love!” is a patient in this part of the hospital, and this is why he does not challenge her, clothed as she is in a hospital gown.

She decides to hold her head high and walk confidently.  She has been living as though nothing is wrong since the terrors began, since her kind ceased to be, and it is no real effort for her to walk through the hospital grounds in her hospital gown as though it is the most natural thing in the world.  She passes people and, if they notice her at all, nobody says a word.  She walks through the small, grassed area where patients sit and smoke on a bench beneath a wooden trellis.  She notices that the trellis is bare, devoid of vegetation.  She wonders briefly what its purpose is, if not to support plants.  She does not know that, if she looks back, she will see in the distance the window to the room in which she was lying just a short time ago.  She does not know that, standing at that window and watching her go, is the doctor who examined her and realised what she is.

She does not need to know any of this.  She is the last of her kind, and as unlike her kind as it is possible to be.

She reaches the main road and turns towards home.

© J R Hargreaves 2011

The Send Off

Standing in the late winter sunshine, with the last vestiges of snow at their feet, the mourners waited. The sorrowful hearse stood with the rear door open, a down-turned mouth like half a scream, the coffin its raised brown tongue. The bearers took their positions, shoulders ready. All people who had never known him.

The family arrived, their car pulling up silently behind the hearse. Black overcoats, black suits, black shoes, their heads bowed, emerging from the car, unsure of where to look. They took their positions among the other mourners, scanning faces but not taking in the details, unwilling to look at the coffin that held the mortal remains of a husband and father.

The minister appeared, like the shop keeper in Mr. Ben, and said a few words to the widow. The children, of whom I was one, stood awkwardly waiting. There is a logic to a funeral, which is understood until you find yourself in the midst of it. All logic disappears in that moment of grief, when you are left abandoned and unmoored.

The mourners began to converge, falling into line behind the small figure of the woman, their friend, who had lost her husband. She was saying something to the minister. Suddenly, a crystal bright burst of big band swing made them all jump. The opening bars of Glenn Miller’s “In The Mood” called them all to attention, some of them now half out of their skins with the loudness of it.

They filed into the crematorium, to pay their last respects.

It surprised me, how much an urn of ashes weighs, and how big it is. My father was an average-sized man. 5 foot 10 for most of my life, but shrinking as he entered his seventies, until he stood almost a head shorter than me. He was a giant, of course, when I was a child, and I would stand on his shiny shoes as he walked me around the room, my cheek pressed hard against the buttons on his shirt. Other times, he would hold my hands tightly as I walked myself up his legs to flip backwards through the circle made by our arms. I wonder if he groaned at the weight of me pulling on his arm sockets, the way I do when my son performs the same trick. I don’t remember if he did.

Surprising, then, that chocolate brown plastic jar filled with ground up bone and burnt up wood. I stared at it in its bag – a fancy bag, made to look as though you had been to a florist and come home with a houseplant. I looked down at it, noting how tall it was, and how wide, and registering a detached kind of surprise. I did not dare to acknowledge that its contents were all that remained, physically, of my father.

Not all that remained. My mother had placed some of his ashes in the bottom of a large plant pot, mixed in with soil, and bought herself a shrub to remember him by. It stood in the back garden, in full view of the kitchen window, where she could gaze on it and remember.

All bar a handful, then. Ashes and ground up bone. My brother knew a man who serviced the machinery at the crematorium. The Cremulator, they called it. A machine designed to crunch up bones and grind them into dust. I lifted the jar by its screw top lid, pulling it out of the bag. His name, in corporate Arial 11 point, printed on a sticky label, affixed to the side of the jar. I let the jar drop back into the bag. Too much, to see his name written there in such an anonymous typeface.

This sunny Sunday, a little over a month since the funeral, we were taking him to a mountainside, behind the fishing village where he and Mum had honeymooned half a century and more ago.

“He liked it there,” Mum said. “Even if he didn’t like it when we went to see Peter Ustinov at the Assembly Rooms. He stormed out in the middle of the performance, your dad. I didn’t know what the matter was.” She paused, remembering her 19 year old self, newly married, innocent of the world. “I thought Peter Ustinov was hilarious, but your dad said he was a blasphemer.”

She touched the edge of the bag, which was sitting on the kitchen table. I placed my hand on her elbow.

“Shall we go, Mum?”

We stood at the side of the car, staring in through the open door. I wondered what we were waiting for.

“Where shall we put your dad?” Mum asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “How about the boot? He won’t fall over there.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t want him in the boot.”

“Well, how about the foot well, behind the passenger seat?”

We stared into the foot well.

“The bag might get squashed,” Mum said, “when we push the seat back. I’ll have him next to me, on the back seat.”

“Okay,” I replied. “If you’re sure.”

“Yes,” she said. “I am.”

I waited, holding the car door for want of something to do. Since Dad had died, time had taken on a new elasticity, and the seconds sort of hung in the air observing us. Waiting, I think, for us to make our next move; waiting for something new to record. There is only so far that you can test the elasticity of time, though, and then it snaps back into shape, propelling you on to the next pause in your existence.

Mum climbed into the back of the car and arranged the jar of ashes in its pseudo florist’s bag beside her. I dropped my car seat back into position and sat down in it. My wife finished her cigarette and climbed into the passenger seat. Seat belts clicked into place. I started the engine and drove.

As the funeral service ended, more Glenn Miller was played over the AV system. People began to stand.

The minister spoke: “If you would like to make your way to the garden of remembrance, the side door to the chapel is now open.”

The mourners were ushered out of the side door and into the winter crisp grounds of the crematorium.

“I’m terribly sorry to rush you out,” the undertaker said to the family as they left, “but there’s another funeral after this one, and the staff need to prepare the chapel.”

Outside, the family stood in a row by the doorway, unsure for a moment about what to do next. The tranquil winter sun shone whitely in the sky. The eldest children moved away from the door. The youngest had no mind to stand anywhere other than where he was currently rooted. People came up to speak to him, faces he recognised. Few asked how he was feeling; all concentrated on the finer points of the ceremony and how well the minister had spoken. An elder from his mother’s church approached, a woman without social skills or compassion.

“That went well, I thought,” she said. When the youngest child made no response, she continued. “Was it very sudden?”

Perhaps she thought she was being supportive. Perhaps she thought this line of questioning would help.

“How did your father die?” she asked, seemingly determined to raise a reaction from the grieving son she barely knew.

“Suddenly,” came the reply. “At home.”

“Well,” she said. “It must be a relief, in a way.”

Strange the things that people say, the questions that they ask, hoping to build a dossier of facts to fill the spaces in their curiosity. I remembered the fury that gripped me when the woman asked me how my father died. I remembered the whiteness of my rage, and the calmness of it. It was a feeling both startling and joyous. A change from the gnawing sadness in the pit of my stomach. I had promised my mother, though, to be polite. Specifically to be polite to this woman. I must have known. To have had a conversation with my mother about what I would say to this woman if she turned up at the funeral, I must have known that she would be there, and that she would speak to me.

It was windy, when we arrived at the fishing village. The wind was blowing out from the mountains, out over the harbour, out over the sea. We stood in the car park, debating how much time to put on the ticket and counting change for the machine.

“Shall we have some lunch?” Mum asked.

We all looked at the bag on the back seat of the car.

“He’ll be okay there, while we go and have something to eat,” she said. “We can come back for him later.”

The day was developing an unreal quality. As we sat inside a small café, at a table in the window, eating paninis and drinking coffee, we tried to discuss how we were going to execute the thing we had come to do, without really mentioning it. The sun was beating on my back, and my eyes kept flicking to a well-thumbed copy of OK! Magazine, as though one of its cover stars would know the answer to our dilemma.

We had still reached no conclusions by the time we had finished lunch and returned to the car to collect the ashes. Mum was behaving as though we were on a secret mission.

“This bag doesn’t look like it’s come from a crematorium, does it?” she stage-whispered, standing beside the car and looking down at the brown plastic jar in the glossy black and white bag.

We agreed that it didn’t, and set off towards the back of the village, and the steep path up the side of the mountain. The potential guilt of doing something illegal hung heavy in the air. I didn’t think we were doing anything wrong, but I didn’t know for sure. My wife recalled how the undertaker had told us, “Who’s going to know?” I carried the bag with its heavy cargo, the stiffened string handles cutting into the soft flesh of my hand.

As we walked up a narrow pathway, alongside a row of pebble-dashed cottages, a boy of around ten years old came hurtling down towards us, muttering to himself. He was heavy set, and pink in the face from the heat and his exertion. I saw my wife look at him from the corner of her eye as he rushed past, like a ball bearing sent careening by a pinball machine. She caught me looking at her, and tried to stop the smile that was forming on her lips. I smiled back at her. I wanted her to know that it was okay to smile, that this day could not be any stranger than a small boy hurtling down a steep path, pursued by nothing but his own sense of urgency, but the feeling that we were about to do something that we shouldn’t was affecting us all and she looked away from me.

We reached our target destination: an old bandstand on a promontory that looked west over the sea and north over the railway line. We sat on the circular bench inside the bandstand, in a row opposite the bag containing Dad’s ashes, staring at it and summoning the courage to open its lid and scatter him to the wind.

As we sat there, catching our breath and trying to decide on our next move, Mum looked out over the sea.

“Which way is the wind blowing?” she asked.

My wife jumped up from the bench. “I’ll see if I can work it out,” she said, stepping out through the gap in the wall of the bandstand. She walked out, further along the promontory. The seagulls that nested just below its edge rose into the air, screeching at her. She held her ground and pulled a tissue from her pocket. The gulls dived away, and the tissue fluttered away from my wife’s fingers and north over the railway line. She turned to walk back to the bandstand.

Mum stood up and began to pull the urn from the bag, getting ready to take off the lid.

“We need to – “ my wife began to say, pointing in the direction of the mountains rising up behind us. She stopped because she had seen something.

A young couple appeared over the rise of the promontory. The woman was licking an ice cream. Mum sat down, and I stepped over to the jar, putting it back into the bag before either of our new companions could see it.

A look of disappointment came over the woman’s face as she realised that we were not planning to move from the bandstand straight away. Her boyfriend steered her to the front of the promontory, where he stood with his arm around her waist. Irritation emanated from the girl’s hunched shoulders and folded arms.

“I want to sit down,” we heard her say.

My wife joined us inside the bandstand, and we sat like a bunch of assassins, keeping each other in our sights, watching for one of the others to make a move. My eyes flicked from my wife’s face to my mother’s, trying to read what each of them was thinking. I knew that all we had to do was sit it out, wait for the couple to get bored of waiting for us to leave, but I didn’t know how long that would take.

I could see my mother trying to see where the young couple was without moving her head. They stood behind her, so I shook my head. The bag containing the urn was next to me. I put my arm across it, partly to hide it from the view of the young couple, should they turn and look our way, partly to reassure myself that it was still there. The wind blew into the bandstand, sending my wife’s hair across her face.

“They’re not going to leave,” Mum hissed.

I looked at my wife, who shrugged.

“Should I go and have a word?” I muttered to her. “Explain what we’re trying to do? Ask if they’d mind stepping away for a moment?”

“We need to do it,” Mum said. “Ask them.”

I could see that the young man could half hear that we were talking, and had probably sensed that things were not quite as they should have been. Perhaps he thought we were having a family row. He said something to his girlfriend, and her shoulders hunched even more. She turned her head to the side, away from her boyfriend, licking her ice cream defiantly.

I counted to ten. My mother was staring at me, her eyes wide and hard, boring into mine like lasers. I tried to remember how much time I had put on the ticket for the car park, and how long we had been up here. I looked at my watch. It had only been fifteen minutes, and yet it felt like a lifetime had already passed.

The young woman had moved away from her boyfriend and had turned to face him, so that she could look at us over his shoulder. I stood up and smiled at her, then started to make my way out of the bandstand and towards them. Her eyes widened, and she looked away from me. Her boyfriend turned his head to see what she had been looking at.

I held my hands out towards them as I approached, as though to reassure them that I wasn’t armed and meant them no harm.

“Hi,” I said, and opened my mouth to continue, but there was no need. The woman turned on her heel and started walking back down the hill. Her boyfriend smiled at me, nervous and apologetic, then followed her. We could hear the row receding as they made their way back down to the village.

I turned back to the bandstand.

“Now!” said my mother, leaping up from her place on the bench and taking the jar from its bag.

She looked at it, gripped between her hands, then looked up at me. She handed the jar to me.

“Will you?” she said.

I took the jar from her and unscrewed the lid.

“You’re sure about the wind direction?” I asked my wife. She nodded.

I carried the jar to the north side of the promontory, where it overlooked a disused footpath and the railway line. I paused, looking down into the jar, at the grey dust that it contained, then calmly began to shake the ashes out.

They flew away from me, towards the sand dunes that ran alongside the railway line. They fell on the gorse and on the grass at my feet. They blew up in puffs of grey cloud, riding on gusts of wind, before falling back to earth. I watched my father blow away across the mountainside, hoping that nobody was watching and, if they were, that they wouldn’t guess what the puffs of grey up by the bandstand were.

My mother walked over to me.

“Can I?” she asked, putting her hand on my arm.

Silently I tilted the jar back upright and handed it to her. I walked away and stood looking out to sea, with my back to my mother, giving her some privacy in her last moments with my dad.

Despite the sea, despite the traffic on the harbour road, despite the people walking on the beach, the silence in that moment was immense. For a brief time, I could not even hear the shooshing noise of the ashes leaving the jar. Time was stretching out again, like a thin piece of rubber, then suddenly it pinged back and the sound of the gulls, the sea, the traffic and people’s voices rushed back in around me.

My mother was asking my wife if she wanted to scatter any of the ashes. My wife was saying no. I listened to the wind blowing around me and the familiar sounds of the world continuing about its business, and I knew that my father was gone.


© J R Hargreaves 2010

Former Local Beauty Queen

She is old now, and past her prime. A faded beauty, skin drawn tighter across her bones, thinning and translucent with age. A former local beauty queen who has lost the fire in her eyes.

We drove last night. We were aimless, our trajectory unplanned. She sat beside me in the aching interior of my ancient Audi. We listened to Leonard Cohen and I drove us along back lanes in the blackness of this winter night. In the distance I could see a red glow. There was no other light in the sky, the moon was too new and the stars were obscured. I drove towards that red glow and as we rounded a corner we saw that it was a building, set ablaze by accident or design, with a crowd of people around it.

“Too close,” she said, her chin buried in the neck of her jumper.

“You what?” I asked.

“They’re standing too close to that fire. When it goes, they’re going to get hit.”

She is old and she is wise, this faded beauty. Turning into her mother.

I paused the car at a t-junction, yards from where the house was burning to the ground, consuming itself from the inside out. We watched the flames lick around the edges of the building for a while, sparks occasionally puncturing the sky. She stared dispassionately ahead. I turned to look at her, the red glow of the fire adding colour to her monochrome face there in the darkness. I thought about the things she must have seen on her mad dance through life. How many fires and how many survivors? Her arms were folded across her stomach, her left hand resting lightly on her right hand. The silver of her wedding band glinted in the light from the fire, the ring loose against her slender finger, only seven months since it was placed there. Time can pass quickly or it can drag on in what feels like years. In next to no time, though, she seemed to have lost who she was.

“Are we going to sit here all night?” she asked.

I put the car into gear again and set off, turning left, down another lane, away from the fire. As we drove past, some of the watching heads turned to see who had come to this place and not stopped or offered to help. One head in particular turned and followed the passage of the car, his eyes boring into the side of my head as I drove slowly past. Even from the corner of my eye, I recognised him. I knew, even as I drove away, I knew exactly what was going to happen.

She is not precisely a former local beauty queen. She has a notoriety, more like. People have an idea of her, an idea which she fed for a time. I have seen her take the pills. I have seen her fly. I have seen the blankness of death in her eyes and the sparks of mania too. I have watched as the flesh on her bones has come and gone and come again.

I drove on, away from civilisation, out into the wilds to where fir trees surrounded water, to the place where bombs were bounced in a long distant past which is almost beyond living memory, these days. She said nothing as she sat there beside me, shuffled down in the seat, chin tucked in jumper and eyes fixed on the passing scenery outside the window.

The glow in the sky behind us began to fade as we moved further from the burning building. I crossed a bridge and took another left turn, putting houses and people even further behind us. She unfolded her arms and instead clasped her hands loosely in her lap. She sighed once and pushed a stray tendril of hair back behind her ear. The cd stopped playing and I allowed the silence to drift on.

She has seen some things in her life, in the brief portion when she would say that she was truly living. Lines chopped with the edge of a cd, snorted through a fiver on a dining room table in a rented house in Chorlton. Fish and chips eaten in a basement flat, high as a kite, and suffering carpet burns as a result. Frisked too many times, and too intimately, by butch female bouncers at dodgy clubs where drink was cheap but air was not. Sitting and waiting for the party to start at aftershows the length and breadth of the country. She has seen some things that turned out not to be very much after all, in the wider scheme of things.

And now she has settled. Which made it all the more unusual that we should be driving in the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter on a moonless night. She had rung to tell me that she had been to a seminar that day. The seminar had been held in the building where she had got married. She was thrown by this, but she didn’t know why.

“Every room that we used,” she said, “they used them too.” She paused, and I listened to the tiny sounds that told me she was alive. “It cheapens it a bit, really. Seeing the place you got married used for an event like that.”

It was the shabbiness that she had noticed. Bound up in the excitement of her big day, she had not noticed the peeling paintwork, or the chips in the wood. She had not seen the damp stains on the wall paper, had failed to notice the fraying edges of the upholstery. But more than that, it was the idea that people she worked with, people she shared a profession with, people with whom work was the only connection she had, were walking around in a building she associated with something else entirely.

It had jolted her.

When I picked her up, she looked gaunt. An over-reaction, I thought, to a simple fact of life. She was wordless as she stepped into the car, closing the door behind her and fastening her seat belt.

“Anywhere in particular?” I asked.

“Just drive,” she said.

I can see that the skin on the back of her hands is no longer as smooth as it used to be. The veins stand out more prominently, the blue of their walls iridescent beneath the pallor of her skin. She has grown into her face, though. The leanness of age suits her bone structure better than the fleshiness of youth. Her profile is particularly fine these days. She wears only silver jewellery. Her wedding and engagement rings on her left hand, a chunky banded ring on her right, and three bangles on her right wrist which clink and jingle each time she moves her arm. Her earrings are silver and also the simple pendant at her throat. Her eyes are level and a greenish grey. They look black in the dark, as the pupils widen to let more light in.

I saw him first, standing at the side of the road, beneath a solitary light. I don’t know how he got there so quickly. He probably knew a different route. He probably took different back roads to the ones I had been driving along in the dark. She saw him too. She couldn’t miss him, he was on her side of the road, and she had to stare at him as I drove past, her eyes fixed on the passing scenery outside the window, of which he now formed a part. She remained silent, and I didn’t want to broach the subject.

He was just standing there, beneath the light. I didn’t see a car, or any other kind of vehicle. It was as though he had teleported himself there.

“Did you see that?” I asked, wanting to check that my eyes hadn’t deceived me.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing.” I left it.

I took a right turn, up the narrow road that runs alongside the double reservoir. There were no lights here, and I turned on the full beam of my headlights. Nocturnal creatures used to their privacy jumped back startled from the glare of the lights, taking refuge deeper in the woods on either side of the road. We reached the larger car park, with its spaces for coaches and its cafeteria, but I didn’t stop. I knew where I was headed.

I thought about him standing there, a solitary figure under a solitary, displaced light. I thought about how he had watched as we drove past the burning house earlier, his head almost swivelling on his neck like an owl’s to keep me in his sights. I remembered in a flash the way he always manipulated a room, and I remembered a story she had once told me, of sitting on her doorstep watching flying ants in the back garden, waiting for him to come home. Long before she married, back when she was young. I remembered how she said he had held a cold bottle of beer to the back of her neck, and as I remembered, I shivered. As though someone had held a cold bottle of beer to the back of my neck.

I remembered what she had said about meeting him in a pub one night, a night with a full moon and rain on the pavement. How she had known, but chosen to ignore her instincts, preferring instead to be swept away into infatuation. This still long ago, before she married, before her youthful beauty began to fade into something more refined.

I began to wonder if I had imagined him, standing at the burning house and then again, standing beneath that out of context street light. I began to wonder if she was a figment of my imagination, sitting there so silently in the passenger seat. I started to develop the idea in my mind’s eye that if I reached across and pulled her hair back from her face, I would see nothing more than a skull. Like I said, time can sometimes drag on and feel like years are passing, but sometimes things seem to happen in a flash.

“Are you asleep?” I asked. Instead of moving her hair, instead of taking her pulse, instead of touching her cold lifeless skin.

“No,” she replied. “I’m not asleep.”

We had reached the point I was aiming for. The destination I had chosen those moments ago as I turned the car into this dark and narrow lane. Without the moon, the water could not glisten. Only as the road had turned had my headlights caught the surface of the reservoir and played with the waves that moved across its surface.

I parked.

“We’re here,” I said.

She stirred in her seat, then unfastened her seat belt and opened the car door. I did the same, and we stood beside the car together, looking out between the trees across the water, our eyes following the path of the headlights’ beam that reached into the darkness.

“Why here?” she asked.

I started to answer, but she had already moved away from the car, walking towards the edge of the water. The shore of the reservoir at this point was sandy, like a beach. She stood on that tiny bay of sand and looked at the water. It was as black as the sky. I walked over to join her, and we stood there together as though nothing was wrong.

After a while, I went back to the car. It was cold, and there wasn’t much to see. I put Leonard Cohen back on the cd player, started the engine and turned up the heater. I watched her standing there for a while, but gradually my eyes grew heavy and eventually they closed.

I didn’t see her die, although I knew he was coming, and I knew what he would do. He must have taken my soul as I drove past him, as he stood beneath that Lewisian street light. Not so gentle as Tumnus the faun, but just as much a devil. How else does a man move so swiftly from place to place. How else does he place a cold bottle of beer against the back of your neck without you even noticing.

She is cold now. I have brought her back into the car. Her colourless skin is tight against her bones, her beauty changed. I can see her skull beneath her skin, beneath her hair, and I remember a time in a toilet somewhere, looking into a mirror together. She was laughing, and moving her head from side to side, looking at her face.

“I wonder what my skull looks like, underneath all this skin,” she said.

© J R Hargreaves 2009

Together

The geisha on the giant electronic billboard gazes off into the near distance, a discreet smile playing on her lips. Kanji spell out her message to the commuters, but I cannot make sense of them. The white background on the advertisement is backlit and surreal. It makes the geisha look as though she has been painted onto enamel.

A train rushes towards the station. The warning jingle plays over the tannoy, letting commuters know that their ride is almost here. The train rushes and then slows, gliding to a stop, precisely lined up with the door markings on the platform. The guard is hanging out of his window, signalling to the driver somehow, letting him know when he is close to the markings. The train stops. The guard is opposite me, in his tiny room in between the ordinary and green cars. He looks at me and smiles. To him, I am a tourist, mesmerised by the precision of Japanese train travel. He must have seen the same expression on countless faces. That he smiles at me humanises him.

This is not my train, though, so I will never find out if he enters and leaves each carriage with the same humanity on show. I sit on the cold metal bench and admire the gleaming white of the train. Shinkansen Nozomi, barred to me with my tourist’s JR Pass, the same shape as the Hikari on which I plan to ride, stopping at fewer stops on its way to the same destination. I have not paid the premium, and so I cannot ride.

Almost imperceptably, the train begins to move. The doors have closed, the electronic clock registers the time shown on the timetable, and this mechanical bullet begins to gather speed. Even before the end carriages have passed me, the train is blurred with the speed of its movement and suddenly gone, leaving the geisha before me again.

School children in their immaculate black uniforms have gathered on the opposite platform. They stand beneath the giant geisha, oblivious to her existence. They pay no attention to her message. It isn’t a message aimed at them. The boys are all dressed in suits, their jackets with Chinese collars. The girls are in pleated skirts, the sailor collars of their blouses lying flat against the backs of their jackets. Hair is cut into different styles, but all is black and gleaming. They stand in groups. Their teacher is nowhere to be seen.

The warning jingle plays again. A man in khaki trousers and a blue windcheater rushes along the platform towards the school children. A woman follows behind him. I grab my camera as another bullet train rushes towards me, from the opposite direction this time. I snap and capture the sense of movement, the speed of the thing appearing cartoonlike in the image. People are sleeping in their seats, their faces at the small aeroplane-style windows. I see the children getting on the train, finding their seats in the green car. School trips must cost a fortune. I wonder how far they are going. Is it a trip to the gilded splendour of Osaka castle, or are they travelling further? To Hiroshima or Miyajima, perhaps?

The train pulls out and once more I face the geisha. The opposite platform is empty again. My platform is filling up once more, and I check my watch, look at the electronic clock, the overhead dot matrix noticeboard. The Hikari which will carry me to Tokyo appears on the noticeboard, first in kanji and then in romaji. I join the queue at the markings for the door to my ordinary car and the warning jingle begins to play. I wonder where he is. He went over to the smoking area further down the platform to sate his desire for nicotine.

The train approaches, snub nosed and brilliantly white, and he runs over carrying a Kiosk bag. He comes to a halt beside me and half pulls a tube of ChipStar from the bag, waggling it at me by way of explanation. He is slightly breathless.

“I wondered where you had got to,” I say.

“I thought I’d get some snacks for the journey,” he replies.

I look into the bag and see rice balls with their nori wrappers next to the ChipStar. There are two Soy Joy bars as well, and bottles of green tea and CC Lemon. I smile into the bag, and he closes it.

The train doors have opened. We get on and find our seats, arranging our bags around us, stretching out our legs and reclining the seat backs. It is still early, although not that early. We will reach Tokyo in the early afternoon.

Announcements begin to play over the in-train message system. The recorded woman’s voice tells us in careful English where we are now and where we will be next, then repeats it all again in Japanese. Messages scroll across the display panel above the door, a mixture of kanji and kana with a sprinkling of English. The internal door slides open and the guard appears. He bows, enters the car, bows again and walks along the aisle towards the rear of the train.

We begin to move. The buildings seem to bend slightly as the train gathers speed. I turn my face to the window and watch the city whizz past, skyscrapers being exchanged for houses and apartment blocks as we move from city to suburb. The suburbs eventually give way to fields, with only a few blue, green and orange roofed houses dotted here and there.

I hear a voice behind me. The guard has returned. He will have bowed twice and now is welcoming us to the train, explaining that he will check our tickets. He makes his way through the car, clipping tickets. He reaches us and does the same, checking our JR Passes too. With each action, he performs a minute bow. His hands are gloved in white cotton. His uniform is dark. He wears a peaked cap.

As he leaves the car, he turns to face us and bows once more. He says something in Japanese, bows again and reverses out through the door. In the connecting passage, he will turn round and then repeat the ritual at the next car.

There is something calming about all this ceremony, even though it seems meaningless to me. A woman pushing a refreshment cart enters the car. Like the guard, she bows and speaks to us, then bows again, before slowly moving her cart along the aisle. The woman is dressed in sugar pink gingham, with a bow in her hair. People buy drinks and snacks from her. Someone buys a bento box. She demonstrates the three different kinds available, and he chooses the long slim one. We let the cart go by. We have enough in our Kiosk bag. I gaze, intrigued, at the bento boxes as the cart makes its way past, wishing I was brave enough to try one out.

Beside me, my companion has begun to doze already. Despite the speed, the movement of the train is minimal. Not too much swaying. Travellers here are quiet, unlike at home. There is no tinny hiss from someone’s mp3 player. There are no loud conversations, no screeching children. He looks tired. We were up late into the night, neither of us able to sleep.

I had suggested that we go to the jazz club round the corner from the apartment, but he thought it too risky. Neither of us speaks Japanese very well, and he was wary of drawing somebody’s, anybody’s, attention. Instead, he had lounged on the bed, reading through the documents again, and I had stood out on the balcony, looking down on the shrine in the walled garden across the street. During the day I had gone down and tried to go in, but a barrier was across the entrance and the gate was locked. I had gone back to the apartment and watched a man arrive on a bicycle, who then swept the steps at the entrance. It looked different at night, lit as it was by the street lights and a few lanterns strung up in the trees. The twin foxes that guarded the shrine itself looked larger in the half light.

Eventually, I had tired of looking, waiting for something to happen. I had gone back into the bedroom to find my companion sleeping, papers scattered across the bed. I had pulled the documents together and put them back into order, scanning them briefly to make sure that I remembered what we were to do, then gone to the other bedroom and fallen asleep myself.

Since he is sleeping, I decide to look through the documents again, even though I am sure I know the sequence things will move in today. I check which subway line we need to take to get to Ginza. I double check which station and which exit we need to use. It will be busy, a working day, people moving around the city. I want to be sure that we will be inconspicuous, even though our very Western-ness makes us obtrusive. I have seen him panic before, when things haven’t gone quite to plan. I want to be ready, to keep him calm, to not screw things up.

We are dressed appropriately. I look every inch the affluent Western woman. He has the distracted look of an eccentric rich man. To all intents and purposes, we are married, and I am as cold and indifferent as any woman who has married for money. Ill-gotten or otherwise.

I am thirsty. I reach for the Kiosk bag. It rustles and he stirs in his sleep. He has combed his hair differently today, but resting his head against the seat has encouraged an attempt to regain its usual style. Dark hair sticks out at strange angles, pulled partly by static, partly by its natural bend. I will have to remind him to straighten it out in the train bathroom when he awakes.

I take a bottle of green tea from the bag. I sip, and it is bitter and not cold enough inside my mouth. It tastes better fresh from a chiller or a vending machine, but I am too thirsty for the fizz of the lemonade. I place the bottle on the window shelf and stare past it at the landscape we are passing through. We have moved towards the coast. Buildings litter the horizon, a higgle-piggle of heights and styles. Orange and white striped pylons poke out from hillsides, carrying electrical current through the wires they support. We cut in and out of tunnels, travelling through hillsides which are almost mountainsides. In the gaps between buildings and hills I catch glimpses of the sea. I would like to get off the train and wander through the streets to the shore, to see if it is like the seaside at home. I imagine something greyer, more granulated, less sandy. I don’t know why. I have never seen a picture of the Japanese south coast between Kyoto and Tokyo.

I remember the trip north we made on one of the days when we were playing tourist. We travelled on a single train, but somewhere along the way it switched allegiance and we had to pay for the last stage of the journey. We arrived at a small station, oddly out of step with the town, and were given a photocopied map showing the way to the shrines and temples that stood alongside the bay. One of the three most beautiful parts of Japan, the bay boasts crystal blue waters and white golden sands and a mile long spit of land that crosses it. We had enjoyed our day as tourists, walking through the pine trees, paddling in the sea. By accident, we had taken the chair lift up the mountain on the station side of the bay. By which I mean I had wanted to take the monorail but, before I knew it, a seat was scooping me off my feet and carrying me unsecured up the mountainside. I remember that I had gripped the pole by which the seat was suspended from the cable until my knuckles had whitened. Coming down again was different. It usually is.

And yet, even though I have seen a Japanese sea and Japanese sand, for some reason I imagine this coast differently. There is no way of knowing, without leaving the train, because the view never affords an actual glimpse of the shore. Just the petrol blue sea stretching away to the horizon.

I take another sip from the bottle of green tea, then turn to select a rice ball from the bag. As I turn I see that he has woken up and is watching me. He has been watching the back of my head, my exposed neck with the tendrils of hair escaping from my chignon. My skin warms at the thought. I say nothing and concentrate on the contents of the bag.

As I unwrap the nori and flip the pyramid of rice onto it, I tell him that he needs to straighten his hair. From the corner of my eye, I see his hand go to his head, trying to smooth the hair down again.

“No,” I say. “You’ll need to use the bathroom, look at yourself in the mirror.”

I still haven’t looked at him and I don’t know why. Something in his sleepy regard has chastened me. I try to tell myself, remind myself, that this is business, and that consequently we have no business turning it into something else. He leaves his seat, and I bite into the nori wrapped rice with its heap of crab meat cocooned in the centre. The nori crunches between my teeth, then the rice begins to disintegrate in my mouth and my tongue tastes the sweetness of the crab. I close my eyes and luxuriate in the flavours and the textures. I never feel healthier than when we are in Japan. I am always happy when we are here. As I chew, eyes still closed, I allow myself one small daydream. I dream that we no longer have to do this thing that we do. I dream that we are more than companions on a business trip, that we are the people we were born to be and not the people the world has made us. I dream that we live here.

He returns to his seat and I look at him at last. His hair is smoothed down, slicked into place. He is the same but different. Our eyes meet and I have to look away quickly before I begin to swim. Damn heart, damn emotions, damn everything. I am as cold and indifferent as I need to be. The more I tell myself that this is true, the truer it must surely become.

So why doesn’t it feel true?

We eat in silence. The man across the aisle, who bought the bento box, is wielding chopsticks, expertly moving sushi pieces from box to mouth. He has a can of beer in the cup rest on the flip-down table. I want to call across to him, ask him how his food is. I want to break the rules.

“What is it?” my companion asks.

I realise that I have been sitting with the remains of my rice ball halfway to my mouth for too long. I eat, and shake my head. It is nothing. I don’t know what it is. I have had enough of this life. I want to tell him that I have had enough of this life, but we have a job to do, and if we don’t do it then this life will be over. So what choice do I have but to shake my head at this man that means nothing more to me than money on the table and a roof over my head?

Of all the places to have a change of perspective, after all these years. On a speeding bullet train in the Japanese countryside. I am no Holly Golightly. He is no Paul Varjak. This is no low-level kleptomaniac romp and we will not kiss in the rain.

I pull out the documents, look through them again.

“Memorising them?” he asks.

“Making sure I have everything fixed in my mind,” I reply.

He looks at his watch. “Only an hour before we get there,” he says.

He pulls a box from his pocket. “Here,” he says, “you might as well have this now.”

I don’t open the box, which is small and dark. I know what it contains. I know what I must do with it, in just over an hour’s time. I am not nervous. I have done it before, will probably do it again. A wave of tiredness washes over me, and I know that I never want to do this again.

“Enough,” I whisper to myself.

“I’m sorry?” he says, leaning his head towards mine.

“I’ve had enough,” I whisper into his ear, turning my head just enough to do so.

He moves his head so that he can look at me. His eyes are flinty like the petrol blue sea I glimpsed earlier between buildings. Flecks of hazel in each iris dance around the pupils like flecks of cruelty.

“Pull yourself together,” he says.

I look away. I look out of the window. All romantic notions of giving this up, of having a normal life, dissipate, disappear, dissolve. I close my eyes and sleep.

When I awake, we are pulling into Tokyo station. I turn to face him and find him looking at me, cold and hard.

“You okay?” he asks abruptly.

I nod. He raises an eyebrow, so I nod again.

“Yes,” I say. “It was nothing.”

We leave the train. The small box is safely in my handbag. We have left behind the Kiosk bag for the cleaning staff to remove. I put on my sunglasses and tighten the belt on my coat. We walk side by side, barely touching, just like the married couple we purport to be.

We find the subway line we need to take, buy our tickets and hop onto a train. He has found a tie from somewhere and put it on. His hair is straining against its new restraints, aching to return to normal. I reach across and smooth down a strand that is beginning to snake.

“Thank you, dear,” he says, getting into character.

“You’re welcome, darling,” I reply.

We are the only people speaking on this subway train. Everyone else reads, or stares at the floor, or plays on a handheld computer console. I fold my hands around the strap of my handbag, hold my knees together and stare straight ahead. He has his legs splayed out and his knee keeps threatening to bang into me, but somehow he avoids physical contact and I am at once grateful for it and frustrated.

Another disembodied female voice intones the name of our station. The LCD display tells us on which side of the carriage the doors will be opening. We rise and move towards the doors and wait for the train to stop.

It is a short walk from the station exit to the Wako Department Store. Strange bubbles and metal waves are in the window, interspersed with telescopes. Inside the glass of each telescope is a small image of a person. The display is advertising Seiko watches. We pause and peer through the window at the display. I want to hang back, to delay this for as long as possible. For once it is me that is about to panic.

He takes me by the elbow.

“Come along, dear,” he says firmly, gripping the small bone tightly and digging his fingers into the thin skin at the joint. “Let’s have a look at a few trinkets.”

He walks me into the store and we make our way to the exclusive jewellery boutique that is our target. A lot is riding on this. A lot, but not enough for this to be the last time. Not for him, and not for me either.

He lets go of my elbow, confident that I am calmer now, that I am not going to be any trouble. He relaxes, assumes the air of a rich man out on a shopping trip with his wife. I fall into line and play my part too.

We approach the boutique. A member of staff greets us. We let it be known that we don’t speak Japanese, and he switches to perfect English. My supposed husband talks about wanting to buy his wife a little trifle. The word confuses our host.

“A gift,” my companion explains. “A small trinket, expensive enough to show that I love her, small enough not to shout it.”

The man understands. He busies himself with seeking out baubles and trinkets galore, laying them out on a cloth, stepping back as we inspect them. I affect boredom. It isn’t too difficult.

“I don’t know,” I say slowly, looking away, looking around the shop, casting my eyes this way and that. “Perhaps a necklace.”

“A necklace?” says my companion, a little too crisply.

I decide to play with him a little.

“Yes,” I say. “I think I would like a necklace.”

The item we have brought, hidden in its little box in the depths of my handbag, is not a necklace, could never be a necklace. My companion looks at me, as if to say “What are you playing at?” and I smile at him.

“Don’t you think a necklace would look pretty, Charlie?”

He flushes slightly. Although it isn’t his actual name, he doesn’t like it that I have used it. Not in the middle of a job.

“I don’t know,” he says slowly. “You have plenty of necklaces already. I was thinking more of a ring.”

“Oh, but rings are boring,” I say, moving to another display case and looking down at the diamond and platinum chokers, collars and garlands. “A necklace catches the light so much more pleasantly.” I drum my fingernails against the glass. “There are some real sparklers in here,” I say.

He moves across to stand beside me. Too slow, though. I move away before he has chance to catch hold of any part of me. I move to a third display case. I am aware that the attendant is watching us. Although he does not show it, he would never be so indiscreet, I can tell that he thinks us a little strange.

The third case contains charms to hang from a bracelet.

“Oh, how lovely!” I exclaim. “Charles, dear, come and look! So sweet, so pretty.” I look at him, allowing false tears to prick my eyes. “My mother gave me a charm bracelet when I was sixteen. One of these would look so pretty on it.”

“That old thing?” he says, deciding to play along. “You want to put something exquisite onto that piece of cheap gold plate?” He looks at me. “Darling, you’ve moved up in the world now.”

The attendant relaxes slightly. He has formed an understanding of the situation. Clearly, I am some piece of trash made good. I smile coldly at my companion.

“Don’t be so tacky, darling,” I say. “You are embarrassing the help.”

He crosses the floor and is beside me in seconds. He grips my hand, crushing my knuckles. I try to extricate myself, but he is too strong.

“Don’t make a scene,” he hisses.

“I’m not the one trying to break my wife’s hand,” I hiss back.

My game has gone awry. We are close to failure, and I find myself wondering what the consequences would be if we were to leave this place empty handed. For a split second I think it would be worth the risk. The salesperson is looking anxious, but trying to hide it. I look at my companion, and something in that look persuades him to release my hand. The knuckles are red and will later be purple, bruised by the pressure he has applied. The fingers are too swollen already for me to risk trying on rings. He sees what I see, looks where I am looking. I feel him stiffen as he realises that everything might soon be falling away from him.

But my other hand is fine. He takes a calculated risk that the finger on my left hand is the same size as the one on my right, the one that the ring is measured to.

“How long have we been married now?” he asks, and I think I see where he is going.

“Three years,” I adlib.

“Three years,” he says, putting his arm around me and steering me back to the attendant, who is looking more concerned than confused. Something about us isn’t right, but he can’t quite place it. “Has it really been that long?”

We stand in front of the assistant, and my alleged husband of three years says, “I think I’d like to get my wife a ring, to mark three years of marriage. What do you think?”

The man breathes out and says, “Very good, sir.”

He has put us back on track. He has found a way out of the disaster I almost wrought, and he fills with pride. I feel it puff him up from the inside out. My right hand is throbbing. I wouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t broken a few bones on my behalf.

Rings appear. None match the one hidden in the box inside my bag. The one the local jeweller, who is in the pay of someone in the pay of someone else who is in the pay of the man who has commissioned this job, made based on sketches stolen from the designer, copied and returned. That ring doesn’t appear, and I wonder whether it has already been sold.

My companion is murmuring something about a ring that is perhaps a little more unique than the ones we have been shown already. Our man disappears into the back. When he returns he has it. The ring we are here to acquire. My heart flips. I prepare to slip the box from my handbag and, through sleight of hand, while my companion talks cut and carat and exquisite craftsmanship, switch the ring in the box for the one I am handling, trying on, gazing at with awe and wonder.

I have the box in my hand. I slip the ring onto my finger. It is slightly too big. The fingers on my left hand are slimmer than those on my right, but it doesn’t matter. I look at the ring, nestling against my fake wedding and engagement rings. I show it to my supposed husband and the shop attendant. My companion draws the attendant to one side, to talk money, to effect payment. Now is the time for me to work my magic, to fool the cameras that are undoubtedly trained on us, and make the switch just in time to change my mind, remove the ring and leave the shop before cash is handed over. But I can’t do it. I put the ring back onto the baize. My companion looks over at me, to see whether I am done. I give my head the merest shake. He frowns, begins to sweat.

“You stupid bitch,” he says.

The salesperson looks at him, and then at me. I shrug.

“Bitch!” He says it louder this time. I smile, begin to laugh, catch the gleam of metal beneath his jacket and laugh harder.

I am still laughing as I slump against the display case. My outflung hand, grappling for support, pushes the baize askew, scattering rings and baubles and trinkets over the floor of the boutique. I laugh as I feel the searing heat of the bullet enter my body. I maintain consciousness for just long enough to see a security guard strong-arming my alleged husband out of the shop and into a back room.

I wake up in a hospital. I am bandaged around my midriff, and my side aches. A nurse sees that I am awake, and hurries off to find a doctor.

The doctor assures me as best she can that I will be fine, that I will be well enough to leave soon. I thank her, and tell her that I have a flight booked for the next day. She frowns. She doesn’t think I will be able to fly.

“Oh,” I say. “Do I need to recover some more?”

“No,” she says. “Police. They want to talk.”

I nod. Of course. Before I’m allowed to leave I must sing like the bird I suddenly feel I am.

And sing I do. Loud and clear. I turn stool pigeon, telling all. I give names, addresses, dates, events. I claim protection for sharing these secrets and bringing down the people who can hurt me most.

It is over a month before I am allowed to leave, clothed in a new identity, my appearance altered as best it can be without resort to surgery. I leave with the tainted blessing of various law enforcement agencies, and settle myself into the seat of an aeroplane that will take me to a new life and freedom from the old.

In my pocket is a small box. In the box is a small ring. Now that my right hand has healed, it will fit the ring finger well. If I don’t sell it, that is.

Before I boarded the flight, I made a phone call. He will be waiting for me when my plane lands in my future. Finally I will be able to discard cold indifference as my default emotion. Finally I will be free to be the person I was born to be. Too late for us to start a life together in Japan, perhaps, but soon enough for us still to have a life.

(c) J R Hargreaves August 2009