End of the World Blues Read online

  The man looked blank.

  “You know fan boys,” said Neku.

  He looked blanker still.

  “They love manga, video games, fighting beauty…” He was muddled, Neku could tell by his strange green eyes. “Fan boys,” she said. “People think they want to fuck fighting beauty, anime gun-wielding girls. No, otaku want to be fighting beauty. Bishoujo, cute teenage girls, they want to be fighting beauty too. So everyone liked this book, even old people…”

  “You wrote this?”

  Neku nodded, watching him check her date of birth and work out her age.

  “Right,” he said, “I see.”

  Quite what he saw went unsaid, but it probably didn’t matter. He stamped her passport with an inky square and handed it back to her. No one stopped her in customs, which was probably just as well because Neku had lined the bottom of her shoulder bag with $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills, three bundles at a time wrapped in dust covers stolen from hardback books.

  Having debated what to do with the rest of her haul, given that she could only leave her bag in a locker for three days at a time, Neku had come up with a solution that was either extremely clever or unbelievably stupid, only time would tell. She took the bag to Mrs. Oniji, along with the bowl dug from the ruins of Pirate Mary’s.

  She told the woman how she found the bowl, then suggested by implication that the bag belonged to Kit Nouveau. The bowl was to be a present for Mr. Oniji, a man famous for collecting ceramics…Neku would let her know what to do with the bag.

  After Mrs. Oniji got over her initial surprise, which divided into three parts:

  1) That Neku knew where she lived

  2) That Neku knew about her friendship with the Englishman

  3) That Neku thought it might be a good idea to give Mr. Oniji the bowl

  She invited Neku inside and offered the girl tea.

  A metro ran from Heathrow airport to one of the most famous underground stations in London. She knew this because it was in a magazine stuck into the back of the seat in front of her on the plane. The magazine said using the London metro system was very easy, which turned out to be a lie. By the time the third train was ready to leave, Neku had planned her route, bought a ticket, found a seat, and settled herself in for the journey.

  If the train was dirty the stations through which it passed were worse. As for Piccadilly Circus…this was one of the world’s greatest tourist areas, London’s equivalent of Ginza, or so it said in the magazine. Neku wasn’t sure what she expected, but English people came somewhere near the top of her list.

  A dozen people jostled Neku as she left the station. One man even moved her aside on the escalator, as if shifting some inanimate object out of his way. The steps up streamed with all races and colours and no one seemed to notice the mix of languages or the wild and wide variety of clothes. Identifying groups was impossible, because everyone seemed to be a group of their own. And yet how could all these people know who they were without a framework to define them?

  “You might want to move.”

  “I might…?”

  “Come on,” said the boy in a black suit. “Let me get you out of here.” He led Neku away from the steps and around a fat metal rail that existed to stop people stepping into the road. It didn’t work, because men kept jumping over it.

  “Japanese?” asked the boy.

  Neku nodded, which seemed easier than trying to explain why he was both right and wrong.

  “Thought so,” he said. “You look Japanese.”

  When Neku touched her face, he smiled. “No,” he said. “Your clothes.”

  “My…?” Neku glanced at herself in a shop window, catching glimpses of herself in the occasional gap between other people’s reflections. He was right, she did look very foreign. Too mote, much too soft and cutesy for this city.

  “I’m Neku,” she said, making a decision.

  “Charlie…” He shook her hand, and grinned as Neku gave a bow. “Let me buy you a latte,” he said, then stopped, seeing her smile. “What?” Charlie demanded.

  “Just wondering,” Neku said, as she linked her arm through his. “What it is about strange men and coffee.”

  “I’ll just be late,” said Charlie, putting a tray down on the table. “God knows, they owe me.”

  Neku looked puzzled.

  “I work at the Virgin Megastore,” he said. “Weekends only.”

  On the café table next to the tray was a Time Out, an Elle, and a GQ…Those had been the magazines Neku recognised. Also on the table was a Mirror, Mail, and Times, plus a free paper and a magazine she’d bought from a homeless man with a dog on her way to the café in Oxford Street.

  “This city smells,” she told Charlie.

  He looked offended.

  “All cities smell,” Neku said hastily.

  “Of what?” he asked, sliding a chip into the mobile they’d picked up three doors before Caffé Nero, after Neku suddenly stopped dead in front of Vids4U and nearly caused a pile up of pedestrians.

  “It varies,” she said, adding, “I’m serious,” when Charlie glanced up. “London smells of coffee and cars and women’s perfume. Also sweat.”

  “And Tokyo?”

  “Noodles,” she said, “and sewage.”

  Charlie looked mollified. “Your battery needs a charge,” he said. “But you’ve got enough to last until then. Plug the phone in overnight, okay?”

  “And I can just buy more credit?”

  “Sure,” said Charlie, “that’s not a problem…” He glanced round the busy café and then looked at his watch. “I should move,” he said, sounding reluctant. “Maybe we could get coffee again sometime…”

  When Charlie left it was with Neku’s new phone number and a promise they’d meet soon. “All those magazines,” he said, as he hovered on the edge of going. “Are you trying to catch up on our culture?”

  “On your world,” said Neku, glad that he smiled.

  She started with the Times, because that looked the most serious and she believed in getting the difficult jobs over first, then she read the Mail and the Mirror and all the magazines.

  Black was back, Cartagena was the new Bogotá, Rome still believed it might win the Olympic bid, and bikers had rioted in Tokyo. The M25 corpse was currently unidentified and fifteen men had been arrested in Leeds. The police were refusing to say on what charge…

  At the end of it all, having read every single sentence of every single paragraph, Neku wasn’t sure she was all that much wiser, but at least the film posters she’d seen on London bus shelters and the pictures on other people’s tee-shirts had finally begun to make sense.

  The laptop Neku bought from a second-hand shop in Tottenham Court Road came with Web access, obviously enough. The small Indian woman behind the counter even threw in six months’ free connection when she realised Neku intended to pay cash, albeit in dollars rather than local currency. After that, Neku went clothes shopping, had her hair cut, and dropped her piercings in a bin. Well, the facial ones anyway.

  A man in a taxi looked put out when Neku asked to be taken to Hogarth Mews. At first, Neku thought this was because of how she dressed, although there were many girls out shopping dressed far more strangely, and in some cases barely dressed at all. And then Neku decided it was because she was Japanese, but couldn’t see why that would worry him, since he looked African.

  It was only when he turned down one street, turned up another, and stopped outside an arch that Neku realised she’d been less than two minutes’ walk from where she needed to be.

  “Thank you,” she said, giving the man twenty dollars. When it looked as if he was about to complain, she handed him another twenty.

  He drove off without saying goodbye.

  CHAPTER 28 — Saturday, 23 June

  Hogarth Mews came to a halt at a red door in a white wall, shortly after the little courtyard turned abruptly right. Four other houses made up the mews, three to the left of the entrance, one almost directly on the right.
The house with the red door was around the corner and invisible from the street.

  This house had six windows. One of them was at ground level and this had iron bars covering a rotting window frame. On the plus side, all the other windows to number 5 Hogarth Mews had flower boxes and the front door had been painted recently enough to still be sticky.

  Putting down her shopping bags, Neku examined the buzzers. Not a name or a number between the lot of them. Choosing one at random, she pushed hard and when no one answered, she pushed it again. On her third try someone shouted from inside. At Neku’s fifth attempt, footsteps were heard and a woman with paint in her hair yanked open the door. Whatever she expected to see it obviously wasn’t a smartly dressed young Japanese girl in black jeans, white sneakers, and black Banana Yoshimoto tee-shirt, all from RetroMetro in Covent Garden.

  Bowing deeply, Neku smiled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Could you repeat that?”

  “The buzzers,” said the woman, then stopped. “It doesn’t matter…”

  “What about them?”

  “Fucking broken,” said the woman. “Doesn’t matter which one you choose, they all ring.” She flicked ash from her cigarette, dragged a last gasp from its stub, and dropped the filter onto cobbles, crushing it with a bare heel. “Someone’s going to have to mend it, probably me…”

  Neku decided not to explain that she had, in fact, been ringing all of them.

  “Which flat were you after?”

  “The top one,” said Neku. “I’m looking for Kit Nouveau.”

  The English woman was blonde, with long curling hair and jeans far tighter than those Neku wore. She had on a man’s shirt, with the tails untucked and enough buttons undone at the neck for Neku to see her breasts, which were very small. Vermillion paint smudged her cheek. Her teeth when she smiled were slightly yellow.

  “Are you sure you’ve got the right flat?”

  Pulling No Neck’s note from her pocket, Neku checked the address. Flat 7, 5 Hogarth Mews, Fitzrovia, London, WC1…as an afterthought, she handed over the note.

  “Right,” said the woman, “I guess this means Mary sold the place.”

  “No,” said Neku. “Mary committed suicide.”

  Over gin in a courtyard that had been glassed over to make a small studio, Neku told Mary’s story as No Neck had told it to her, complete with the holes and contradictions he’d appeared not to see. But first Sophie Van Allen, artist and bell mender, introduced herself, having finally remembered that she didn’t know Neku’s name.

  “Really…Lady Neku?” said Sophie, sounding impressed. “I didn’t know the Japanese went in for that stuff.”

  The gin, when Sophie fetched it, came in tooth mugs, and the chips were still in their packet rather than a bowl, but she listened attentively as Neku relayed all the things No Neck had told her, about Mary stepping off the side of a ferry and about how Mary hadn’t seen Kit for fifteen years but had still left him everything she owned.

  “That’s love, I guess,” said Neku.

  Sophie’s face twisted.

  “You don’t agree?”

  “Can’t have pleased the cokehead.”

  Neku waited politely for Sophie to realise she had absolutely no idea who that might be…“Mary’s boyfriend,” explained Sophie. “Too pretty for his own good. You know how it is. Looks get to be a problem in the end, because you end up relying on them just around the time they begin to fade.”

  It sounded to Neku as if the woman might be talking about herself.

  “I thought,” said Sophie, “you know, that Mary and Ben had just moved in together. Happens all the time in London. Couples share, but keep their own flats just in case the shit starts flying. Common sense really.”

  “Didn’t you notice the police?” Neku said, then wondered if that was too rude. “I mean, when they searched the flat?”

  “They might have come by,” she admitted. “You know, collect a sample of Mary’s writing, that kind of stuff. When did you say this happened?” Sophie Van Allen counted back on her fingers to reach an answer. “I was in Italy,” she said, nodding to herself. “Christmas in Florence.”

  “Really,” said Neku. “When did you get back?”

  “About five weeks ago.”

  Taking a sip of almost-neat gin, Neku grimaced. Nothing would surprise her, and the English woman’s natural habitat seemed to be squalor, to judge from the empty cups and the unwashed plates that stacked a dozen deep, with forks still protruding between each plate. Pizza boxes covered the floor like tiles. How anyone could eat that much take-out and remain thin was beyond Neku.

  A row of five canvasses stood drying against one wall, all showing a variation of the same picture. The subject was topless, had wild blonde hair and nipples so dark they were almost black. So far as Neku could tell, that woman was currently drinking gin opposite her.

  “Self portraits,” said Sophie, catching Neku’s gaze. “For an exhibition in Amsterdam. 33/33 @ Thirty-three…That’s my age,” she added. “Thirty-three oils showing me aged thirty-three, to be exhibited at Gallery 3+30.”

  “Where are the others?” asked Neku.

  “I haven’t painted them yet.”

  Putting her cup down among the others, Neku stood. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should let you get on with your work.”

  “Guess so,” said Sophie. “Who did you say you were meeting?”

  “Kit Nouveau.”

  “And he owns the flat now?”

  Neku nodded.

  “Okay,” said Sophie, “I don’t mean to be nosy—but you’re a friend of his, right?” It was hard to tell from the way Sophie said friend if the word meant to carry more than its obvious meaning.

  “He used to buy me coffee.”

  Sophie smiled. “I’ll get you a spare key.”

  None of the lights in the flat worked because the electricity was off, as was the gas. Water still ran from the taps in its tiny kitchen and even smaller bathroom. Obviously enough, it ran cold. So Neku took a cold shower and then used the lavatory, which was incredibly primitive but still flushed and refilled on demand.

  It was the lavatory that told Neku the police had been there, because they’d removed its lid and left the thing propped against a shower cubicle. Also, the bed was on its side, the under sink cupboard was open and someone had turned out most of Mary’s drawers, without bothering to repack any of the clothes.

  That was the flat—a bedroom, a kitchen, and a shower room. Neku had expected something bigger. A frosted-glass door across the landing had bolts above and below its glass, with an old key sticking from a battered lock. Since the note asking people to keep this door shut was signed Mary, and that meant its secrets had to belong to flat 7, Neku yanked back the bolts, twisted the key, and found herself on a small roof garden.

  Roof ex-garden, really. Dead lavender spiked from a terra-cotta pot. An old ceramic sink had been filled with peat and planted with…“Mint,” Neku decided, dropping crumbled leaves to the floor.

  It was pretty, the garden; walled and elegant and not really overlooked, unless you included an office block three streets away and the Post Office Tower. What was more, it had a tiny wooden shed built against the far wall. She could sleep there, Neku decided. In the meantime she might as well clear up.

  CHAPTER 29 — Saturday, 23 June

  “Look,” said Patrick Robbe-Duras. “Have you any idea how badly you hurt Mary?” Liver spots covered the backs of his hands, which were so thin that his fingers looked like twigs wrapped in wet paper. Never the less, Pat shook off Kit’s attempt to take the tray with an abrupt shake of his head.

  “Well?”

  There were those who said Pat was the brains behind the move to unite half a dozen areas of London into one rigidly controlled fiefdom. They were usually people who’d never actually met his ex-partner.

  “Yes,” said Kit. “I have. It was unforgivable.”

  He waited while Pat put a tray on the table, and waited some more for Pat to remove t
wo cups and place them on slate coasters. Kit was having trouble reconciling this cardigan-wearing old man with the dapper, tweed-coated figure he remembered from his childhood.

  “I’m glad you know that,” said Pat. “If you’d denied it, I was planning to get very cross.” They sat at a pine table in a long kitchen, with low ceilings and leaded windows that stared out across sloping lawns towards the stump of an old cherry tree and a silver twist of river beyond.

  For all that he’d been born in Dublin and shared most of his adult life with Kate O’Mally, the man quietly sipping tea had obviously become a Londoner at heart, with a Londoner’s dreams of retiring to a little cottage in the country.

  “You don’t approve?”

  “A little too pretty for me.”

  “You and Mary both,” said Pat. “She hated this place. Too chi-chi, too neat, too everything really.”

  “Still, you like it. That’s what matters.”

  “Actually,” said the man, “it leaves me cold. That was what made Mary so cross.”

  “So why buy it?”

  Pat sighed. “You visited Seven Chimneys,” he said. “Damn it, that was probably where…No,” he said, “let’s not even go there. You visited the house. So you must know why I bought this.”

  “Because it couldn’t be more different?”

  “Story of my life,” said Pat. “You should have seen my first wife.”

  “Quiet, discreet, understated?”

  Pat Robbe-Duras nodded. “It was a disaster. She took my surname, so Katie wouldn’t…my family hated that. Not that Katie could have children, as it turned out.”

  Kit looked at him.

  “Mary was adopted,” said Pat. “Surely she told you?”

  “No,” Kit said. “Never. You don’t regret not…”

  “I adored Mary,” said Pat. “And Katie is the love of my life.” He looked at Kit, and shook his head, almost gently. “We separated only because I insisted,” said Pat. “I’m dying. I’d have thought that was obvious to anyone. Come on, let me show you the garden.”