End of the World Blues Read online

  The bath was large enough for two adults to sit upright, and so deep when filled that the level would reach their necks. Made from cast iron, it had been dragged to the third floor years earlier and sunk so far through the floor that it protruded into the area below, which was the bar these days. Above the bath was a shower that took water from a rain tank on the roof. The spray was warm in summer and cold in winter, which was the way Yoshi liked it.

  The house had belonged to a grandfather on her mother’s side, and when Kit put up the money it had been to buy the wreck of a building from Yoshi’s cousin, the old man’s heir. The price had still been low enough to make the rest of Yoshi’s family mutter.

  It was her grandfather who originally dragged the metal bath to the third floor, before the walls had even been put in place. The bath was destined for the top floor, but her grandfather settled on the floor below, having decided that getting it that far was a miracle.

  Such a bath would never now get planning permission. Partly this was because its weight made the cast-iron bath unsuitable for a wooden-framed house and partly because electric cabling ran close to one side. But mostly it was because the bath was heated by a gas burner bolted directly to its rim.

  Naked flame played on metal and this heated the water. The only time Yoshi slipped as a child she had burned herself so badly the scar on her hip was still there, although growing had shrunk it to the size of a flower.

  As always, Yoshi showered before taking a bath. Her other grandfather had squatted naked at an outside tap and rinsed himself with a cloth, but most of the old man’s children and grandchildren had grown up with showers. Kit was the first person Yoshi met who actually washed in the bath and he stopped the moment he understood how much this upset her.

  She was no fool. Yoshi knew Kit didn’t love her. At least, not any longer. He was fond of her and put up with her moods and bound her tightly when she demanded it, but that wasn’t love. He admired her work, the way she had of throwing pots so fine they looked too fragile to exist. And he admired her body, which was lean and spare and his whenever he wanted. But he didn’t love her. Which was fine, because she’d always been honest about not loving him.

  Discarding her dressing gown once the water was hot, Yoshi sank beneath its surface, letting the heat make her sleepy. And as she sat, with the water up to her neck, barely half awake and trying not to get the pages of her paperback wet, the frivolous flickering of a billion stars fought the city’s sodium glare for the right to the night sky beyond her window. Silent backdrop to the street noise of Roppongi.

  Drunken tourists leaving a club. A motorbike at the lights, something large. The dying howl of a cop car and an amplified order to behave properly. A woman in a house opposite having sex, more noisily than was strictly necessary. Yoshi knew her city and its sounds. Kit might insist he belonged here. So he’d told her, right at the beginning, the summer he arrived at Narita with one suit, three battered Murakami paperbacks, and a Berlitz phrase book. She’d been right not to believe him.

  She heard a cat first, then a bin going over.

  “Kit…?”

  Yoshi listened in vain for his answer.

  “You want to check that?”

  The cat was expected, round here there was always a cat; but the bin was heavy, too large she’d have thought to be knocked over by an animal that small. Sighing, Yoshi climbed out of the bath and reached for her dressing gown, without bothering to dry herself first. She shuffled on some slippers and climbed the single flight of stairs to their bedroom to fetch her husband.

  The sheet was thrown back and his yukata was missing from its hook on the door. Since it was hardly worth going back in her bath, Yoshi collected her book of poems, relit the gas to heat the water for Kit, and returned to the bedroom, climbing wearily into bed.

  Outside, a car started up and a cat yowled, wooden walls creaked, as they often did, and a metallic clang at ground level told Yoshi that Kit had opened the grill which covered Pirate Mary’s rear door. She fell asleep to thoughts of Yuko, her sister’s new baby, and how she’d telephone in the morning to apologise.

  CHAPTER 10 — Saturday, 9 June

  Kit wore a jacket over his yukata, though he’d forgotten to put on shoes. The baseball bat in his hand came from a stall in Asakusa and was so old it had a facsimile of Babe Ruth’s signature, the words 1948 Memorial Edition and Produced in Occupied Japan stamped into the handle.

  Flicking on the overhead lights, Kit said, “I know you’re in here.”

  Halogen strips stuttered into life overhead, revealing three microwaves, a Zanussi deep fat fryer, an industrial-size dishwasher, and a butcher’s block that had been there when he and Yoshi bought the building.

  Other than this his kitchen was empty.

  Bat in hand, Kit returned to the bar, realising too late that he’d just provided a perfect target for anybody now hidden behind the door.

  “I’m armed,” he added.

  Kit recognised the snort before he saw the girl. She was over by a window, wrapped in the folds of her cloak. It would have made more sense to Kit to discard the thing before she broke in, but then he wasn’t fifteen or a cos-play-zoku and who knew what rules they worked to?

  “Found it,” she said, holding up her knife. “That’s all I wanted.” Neku did something clever with her fingers and the blade disappeared, only to pop back into being when she reversed the movement.

  “See,” she said. “Not hard.”

  Another twist of the wrist and it was gone again.

  “I’m leaving now.”

  Kit nodded.

  “I won’t be back.”

  “That works for me,” he said.

  “Okay, I’m off…” Neku hesitated on the edge of leaving. “Can I ask you something?”

  “You can ask…”

  “How did you know I was down here?”

  “That bin lid,” Kit said. “You shouldn’t have knocked it over.”

  Neku looked puzzled. “I haven’t been near the bins,” she said, before shifting to her next question. “And why did you buy me coffee?”

  “You looked cold,” said Kit.

  She sighed. “You know,” said Neku, “I’m not sure I’m ever going to understand this world.”

  “I’ll see you out,” he said.

  Stepping onto cinder block, Neku flicked open her cloak and twisted one hand, summoning the knife she’d taken from the bar. A flick of her other wrist and she had the second knife. With a twirl, she cut one blade through the air and then cut again with the other, folding them out of sight with a simple twist of her fingers.

  And then—and this is where it became impossible—Neku forced her fingers into the cut in the air and began to prise it apart, the tips of her fingers vanishing from sight.

  “Wait,” Kit demanded.

  Neku shook her head.

  “Please,” said Kit.

  “You’re drunk,” she told him. “And the drugs are eating what little you have left inside. Go to bed, get some sleep…I’m going home.” Neku didn’t sound very happy about this.

  “No,” he said, “not yet…”

  Kit shouldn’t have touched her. That was his first mistake. He reached out and tried to grab her arm, his fingers closing on her wrist, and then Neku was behind him, beside him, and in front, a blur of movement that ended with Kit sitting in the dirt holding Neku’s broken bracelet, a wicked knife gash disfiguring the palm of his left hand.

  …Incredible heat.

  Bone splintering as a child flipped backwards, his ancient Lee-Enfield tracing a parabola before it hit desert behind him, Kit’s cross-hairs already hunting their next target…

  …Silver night and no stars. A wedding dress in the dirt, the body within it also discarded. A web of ropes holding the sky in place.

  A girl on her bed, knees pulled up to her chin and her arms wrapped tight around her legs, in tears and naked…

  “Shit,” said Neku, shaking her head. “I so didn’t need to know tha
t.”

  As the air around her began to shimmer, Neku rammed her hands into the haze and began to drag it apart, one arm disappearing as she began to squeeze through the gap.

  “Come back,” Kit demanded. “I need…”

  And then what he needed stopped mattering. Because glass exploded from the upper windows behind them and the front of Pirate Mary’s peeled away, fragments of broken boards splintering across the street. The broken ceiling of the bar, now open to view, curled billows of smoke into a downward roll.

  Made almost entirely of wood, the old building did what wooden buildings do best, it began to burn. Dark and oily from seven decades of paint, the smoke billowed above the fire. Kit didn’t remember climbing to his feet or charging towards the stairs. And he barely registered the flames that forced his retreat into the grip of Mr. Ito.

  “Who has the keys?”

  Kit looked blank.

  “That van,” said Mr. Ito. “It will block the fire engine. We must move it.” He shook Kit’s shoulder. “Come on, who has the keys?”

  “I don’t know.” Pulling free, Kit screamed, “Yoshi.”

  A wall of flames roared back.

  “My wife,” said Kit.

  Hands dragged him away and when Kit looked again there was no doorway from which to be dragged. The fury had swallowed every detail within its flames.

  A fire officer was demanding answers. Try as he might, Kit couldn’t remember having been asked a question. After a second, he understood.

  “Hai,” he said. The two Iwatani burners in the kitchen used butane. Yes, there were spare bottles stacked near the grill. Four, maybe five. But what he really needed to do was find…

  “Yoshi,” he yelled.

  The next time he tried to break free, a girl in a white coat appeared at a nod from the officer and snapped open her leather bag. The jab took less than five seconds to disconnect Kit from the chaos around him.

  CHAPTER 11 — Nawa-no-ukiyo (Floating Rope World)

  Stumbling through the door, Lady Neku, otherwise known as Baroness Nawa-no-ukiyo, Countess High Strange, and Chatelaine of Schloss Omga, fell to her knees and threw up all over mother-of-pearl floor tiles. What she’d seen inside his head clung to her like static, and he’d taken memories from her. Lady Neku could still feel the holes.

  “Fuck.”

  Polyglot, polygoyle…

  Polyandrous?

  Double fuck. She wasn’t allowed to forget what shape those tiles were, remembering stuff like that was her job.

  Lady Neku was also Duchesse de Temps Perdu. Sometime around the start of the last millennium there had been a bout of title inflation. Hyperinflation, her grandfather said sniffily, guards became captains, captains became generals, and the fugees got rights. Although, to be honest, they were no more free than before.

  When Lady Neku looked again the tiles were triangular.

  “Stop it,” she told Schloss Omga, her family’s castle.

  Maybe the castle was listening, or maybe it just got bored and decided to stop the architectural equivalent of twiddling its hair. Whatever, next time Lady Neku looked, the tiles in her bedroom had changed back to polygons and that was the last change of the day.

  Dragging herself to her feet, Lady Neku stared around her. The vomit was already gone, swallowed by the floor and fed back to the castle. Schloss Omga was good at telling the difference between living organics and waste. It hardly ever got this wrong.

  “Shit.”

  She felt sick. Hell, she’d been sick. The damage to her shadow must be worse than she thought. Lady Neku turned the cloak over in her hands until she found a small tear. He shouldn’t have grabbed her like that, she’d almost let the rip close around her. And then where would she have been?

  Dead, obviously.

  So cross was Lady Neku at having damaged the red cloak that it took her five minutes to notice her memory bracelet was missing, and another five to realise her real body wasn’t in the room waiting for her. No back-up beads and no original from which to burn more. This was serious. Actually, it was beyond serious.

  She’d left her body on a chair beside the door. At first she imagined her bedroom had just tidied it away, but all her wardrobes were empty. So she checked the room she’d used as a child, just in case household gods were being more forgetful than usual, only her body wasn’t there either.

  “Castle,” Neku demanded.

  All she got by way of answer was an echoing emptiness in her head.

  “Come on,” she said.

  Again silence.

  This was not unusual. The Katchatka family castle could sulk for decades if really pushed, and everyone but Neku regarded Schloss Omga as irretrievably senile and did their best to ignore it. Work arounds, her Lady Mother called them.

  Work arounds involved cutting new doors rather than waiting for them to grow and quarrying storage space out of the bloody flesh beneath the council chamber rather than asking the living core of the castle to withdraw.

  Just to be certain she hadn’t overlooked her body, Lady Neku checked the first bedroom again, walking along each wall in turn and opening every wardrobe. The castle knew she was looking because wardrobes started to appear that she’d never even seen before. Needless to say, all were empty.

  The castle could imitate marble and manage a very good approximation of granite—which seemed to be constructed from the glue it used to stick itself to the slopes of their mountain—but what Schloss Omga really liked was mother of pearl. Neku imagined this was because it had originally been a snail. Although, obviously enough, it had only been a snail in the sense that her ancestors had been human.

  They were talking a very long time back. Certainly pre-Cenoarchean, if not actually pre-Cenoproterozoic.

  All of the wardrobes that appeared out of her walls were made from mother of pearl, many extruded into intricate rococo shapes that Lady Neku recognised from the library. Either the castle had remembered how to do this stuff, or she was being shown work that no one had seen for generations.

  Art had been the topic of the only real conversation she and the castle ever had, though that talk had been rather one-sided. Mostly because few of the castle’s thoughts seemed to make sense. Half a million years glitched between humanity’s first flint blade and its first image, on a cave wall. Before pictures had been beads and before beads, pigments to make colour. This indicated a conceptual lag between technology and art that reflected a slowness in the species to understand the importance of symbolic thought. Which was, apparently, the basis for all sentient behavioural organisation.

  At this point the castle had paused. Which was Lady Neku’s cue to think of something intelligent to say. So she’d wondered, What’s flint? And the conversation had been over. Personally, she thought it impressive she’d known what a human was…Humans were fugees, unless it was the other way round.

  “These are wild,” said Lady Neku, running her fingers across a pair of flying babies holding a heart pierced by an arrow. Not to mention, kitsch and hyper-clichéd. Although Lady Neku refrained from saying this. The castle could be sensitive about such comments.

  Having examined all the alcoves, cupboards, and wardrobes, Lady Neku climbed inside the largest, so the castle could impress her with its false back and spiral stairs up to an entire floor that waited empty and anxious. Lady Neku knew this, having been shown the wardrobe before. Its style and the winding stairs had an organic smoothness that spoke of her family’s very earliest years at the end of the world.

  It wasn’t really the end of the world, of course…That would be when the planet turned to cinder and the last wisps of atmosphere burned off, as the seas would do first, given time. Meanwhile, six over-worlds kept the sun at bay and protected the planet as best they could.

  Six families owned the off-world habitats, the biggest of which was High Strange, belonging to her family, the Katchatka. And a mesh of sky ropes held a mantle of silver gauze in place exactly a hundred kilometers above the world’s surface
.

  Her brother Petro, who was oldest, said the ropes were alien and no one knew what the mantle around the planet was meant to do. Antonio disagreed, because Antonio always disagreed with Petro. It was Nico, the youngest of her brothers, who took Lady Neku’s question seriously. He said the gossamer ate charged particles and the ropes created a magnetic field, which was why it was bad that their bit of sky had ripped.

  Lady Neku had a theory about this. Mind you, she had a theory about everything and she was aware her body was still missing. She was merely avoiding panic and trying to approach the matter in a grown-up fashion. Lady Neku’s theory said the earliest styles of furniture were fluid and organic because this reflected confidence in the future.

  Her family were explorers, new to the end of the world and owners of what remained of human time, which could still be counted in tens of millennia. Not much, maybe, for a planet that had already existed for countless billions of years, but it was enough.

  When the sky tore, doubts set in. As the fugees stopped coming, the need for reassurance became stronger, hence the regression into fussier styles, an explosion in pointless titles, and an endless recycling of cultures long gone. Of course, fugee was a misnomer. They were temporal exiles, removed from their own cultures. Although it had taken Lady Neku’s family more centuries than was sensible to realise that they themselves were also exiles, as much imprisoned as the fugees they ruled.

  If the cupboard was warm and the stairs warmer, the suite of rooms into which Lady Neku made herself venture was claustrophobic beyond description.

  “Hot,” she said.

  Inside her head Lady Neku felt the castle agree and instantly felt guilty. She wasn’t the one endlessly crawling up a slope, trying to get away from the shrinking lakes, methane pockets, and somatolite mats of the dead lands. No one lived in the castle these days, all her family preferred High Strange.

  “Need to go home,” said Lady Neku, and felt the castle signal its understanding. She had more of Schloss Omga’s attention than she remembered having been given before. “My body,” she added, trying to keep the hope out of her thoughts. “Don’t suppose you remember where you put it?”