Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [101]
The ingredient at the heart of the simmering mix: an unacknowledged need to be part of something. To belong.
When he found himself on the train (once again, the sound of wheels on tracks, the locomotive smell of coal fumes, old songs and echoes of his father’s journey from disengagement to commitment), he was wryly aware that he was leaving one camp for another, one form of discipline for another, one label for another: student, enemy alien, evacuee, internee, soldier . . . She had it right, the hostile girl who snipped off his hair: he made a habit of categorising people. He was certainly categorising himself.
He had mentioned the haircut episode to Ichir at the time.
‘She was incredibly bad tempered.’
‘Oh.’ Ichir looked amused. ‘That means she likes you.’
‘So what does she do if she doesn’t like you?’
‘She ignores you, of course.’
Joey said sarcastically, ‘I guess that’s the Japanese way.’
‘It’s certainly Yasuko’s way. She’s picky. There are guys all over camp still feel the pain of Yasuko’s freeze.’
Yasuko. Now he knew her name.
Before leaving he had searched for her all over the camp, and catching sight of a slim figure in the distance with shiny, square-cut hair, he had called out, ‘Hey, wait!’ and turning, Iris had smiled at him, surprised.
He stopped. ‘Oh! I thought you were – someone else. Your hair . . .’
‘I stopped curling it.’
‘Yes.’
‘Who did you think I was?’
‘Someone.’ Oddly reluctant to spill the name, he shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
He moved off, then turned and called, ‘The hair. It’s nice, suits you.’
The train rattled on, the wheels and the track creating their own music, laying down the beat: Oh the Rock Island Line is a mighty fine line, escaping slaves sang the words, and in its own way the army, too, was a slave master. The army gave orders and insisted on obedience, punished those who went AWOL, but he had volunteered, hadn’t he? No one was making him do this. Surely that made a difference.
46
She sat at her table by the window, a brilliant square of ice-blue winter sky like a blank canvas. Around her, walls of fine reeds embedded in dried pulp conveyed a sense of a room wrapped in grass. Skilled decorators had achieved artful simplicity here, though the marks of time and use had darkened the once pale walls.
Long ago, Suzuki had been impatient with Cho-Cho, urging her to move to something more spacious, a bigger house, set in a garden, at the better end of town.
‘You could be closer to us.’
Cho-Cho had the money then; the restaurant was flourishing. But she stayed where she was, like a sea creature safe inside the shell of her little house overlooking the harbour. Later, when the bad times came, when the customers could no longer afford the restaurant and she could no longer afford the staff, and then when the long, drawn-out war was no longer a Chinese affair, but suddenly became World War Two, the little house was once again appropriate. In the fat years she had mocked Henry for his love of tradition – ‘Why don’t you put in modern heating?’ – and he had given his slow, infuriating smile. Now she appreciated the irony of her own situation as she warmed her feet on an old charcoal heater tucked under her desk.
On the desk was a typewriter, and curling out of it a page half covered with neat black marks. She typed a few words, and paused to look out at the sea, a darker blue beneath the sky. She had been writing these letters for years, all the fleeting thoughts that she might have put into words; love visible. As the page clicked slowly up from the platen, she tapped on. One day, she told herself, he will read this, will perhaps reply.
Kanashimi, Trouble meaning its opposite –
He was never any trouble of course, that was their tender joke. He was Sachio, her joy;