Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [30]
In Nagasaki he had swum in cold green sea, a small figure in a blue and white kimono watching him, seated on the rocks, waving when he looked back, the sun glittering on her silver bracelet.
At the far end of the market, in tiny roadside stalls he passed as he came and went, he had been offered intricate tortoiseshell work and fancy jewellery. In one shop he had noticed a bracelet, the metal surface inlaid with linked silver and gold butterflies and brilliantly coloured enamel. He bought it; he had learned by then that Cho-Cho meant butterfly.
When he got to the house he pulled the bracelet from his pocket and threw it across to her. ‘Here you go, Mrs Butterfly. Surprise. A little something for you.’
‘Ah! Cloisonné,’ she exclaimed, which meant nothing to Pinkerton, who thought it was a Japanese word to express thanks. She held out the bracelet and waited for him to fasten it round her small wrist. Then she led him to the futon.
He stared down at the street, at the pools of light, the shadows, the houses opposite, lined up side by side, identical. There were differences, of course. One had a swing-seat on the porch that creaked when it moved in the breeze like the sound of cicadas, another, a tree the neighbours considered too tall, liable to come down one day in a storm. The people next to them kept a dog, that barked; one household kept the dog, Ben commented testily, and everyone shared the barking. A little further down the street, new owners had painted the front door yellow. He couldn’t figure out why a man would want a yellow front door. It was an unsettling colour – thunderstorm, headache colour. He could feel a headache coming on now, and headed for the kitchen.
The wooden banister was smooth to his touch. From below, the rugs gave off a smell of warm wool, not unpleasant, though there was something stale about it, something heavy. Light came through the windows, slanting on to the walls. The darkness was soft; he felt it brush his skin and he walked through it almost like moving through water. If he raised his head, he would breathe in air from above the surface, though there was no surface here, the darkness filled the room to the ceiling, and he was a drowned man resting on the bottom.
The image shocked him; he loved water, always had, he was a swimmer, wasn’t he? No risk of drowning. He was as safe in water as he was here in his home.
And he was doing okay.
He lit a cigarette and watched the tip glow in the darkness; glow and then, resting between his fingers, dim into something grey as the heat died. When he inhaled, the brightness returned, casting a glow on his hand. That was the trick of it: keep up the heat; keep the brightness.
In the kitchen he filled a glass from the faucet and drank slowly, feeling the liquid slide down his throat. Then he made his way back through the house. Outside Joey’s door he paused, turned the handle and stepped into the room. The boy was asleep, bedclothes thrown off, a battered wooden spinning top beside him on the pillow. Hunched into an untidy ball, legs drawn up under him, he looked almost as though crouching, a pale frog ready to leap up and go.
Back in his own room, Pinkerton lowered himself carefully on to the bed and stretched out on the now cool sheet.
Turned away, eyes closed, her cheek deep in the pillow, Nancy listened as his breathing gradually deepened and he drifted into sleep.
13
‘My grandpa’s family lived in Nantucket and he worked on a whaling ship when he was young, and this is a whale’s tooth, a sperm whale’s tooth and it’s carved with a picture of trees and houses.’
The large, decorated whale-ivory tooth was passed around the class, the children less interested than the teacher, who looked pleased. ‘Janet’s grandfather was one of many sailors who made beautiful carvings like this. The work is called scrimshaw.’ She wrote the word on the blackboard in large letters,