Ten Journeys Read online

  And then…

  A ghostly wailing. A single cry.

  No signal needed, we stood and ran. We dashed across the garden, through nettles, round brambles, across and over to the trees and between fence wires into the paddock – run, run, run, scramble, scramble, scramble – along the ditch to where our bikes were jumbled together.

  We stopped, we breathed, we held the stitch in our sides. We looked back, we waited.

  We waited.

  And Tad laughed first.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he said, and laughed some more as he crossed himself. His eyes were bright and his face was glowing. “Holy shit, someone lives there!”

  “No, they don’t,” panted Kaz. “No-one lives there. Unless a tramp or a dero or someone’s moved in.”

  We crouched in the safety of distance – forty metres or so – and watched some more. Finding our breath, our laughter tinged with hysteria, but quiet laughs that wouldn’t carry.

  “Definitely a dero,” Kaz said.

  “Whoever it was must’ve fallen over, hurt himself. Or had a fight with another dero. A drunken fight.”

  “Or fell through the ceiling.”

  “Perhaps the Cat Woman got him.”

  “He sounded well-pissed off, whatever.”

  We were dragging our bikes upright, ready to make a move towards home, when Kaz grabbed the cloth of our T-shirts, Tad’s and mine, and nodded back in the direction of the house.

  What we saw was the back door being shoved open and the figure of a man staggering out. He was clutching a black and yellow sports bag, and he struggled to force the door shut again behind him; had to kick it twice to close it. It was obvious he’d been hurt, because of the way he hung his head and held one arm, and he seemed dazed or frightened – it was hard to tell which.

  “He’s been sleeping rough,” Kaz whispered. “He’s just a dero. A tramp.”

  “The Cat Woman almost got him,” Tad said.

  But we’d stopped laughing. Like all well-nourished creations, our ghost story had outgrown us at that point.

  A moment later, we heard a car start close by and listened to it tear off down the Old Hinchley Road.

  “Funny he’s got a car,” Kaz observed; “a dero-on-wheels.” But a piece of timber fell away from one of the windows just then, dropping onto the verandah, and we practically cacked our pants.

  I’d never cycled home as fast as I did then. I reckon we three broke the land speed record that night. Faster than Greased Lightning.

  Night is one world, day is another. We slip through from one to the other like passengers on a train, and the way we see ourselves changes as the landscape beyond our reflection in the window changes. As an adult, attempting to articulate the roots and routes of my endless travelling – my too many goalless journeys – this is how I sometimes see my life.

  By the time we met up next morning, each of us had rationalised the previous evening’s events and we were ready to laugh at one another’s foolishness in seeing ghosts and demons behind the harmless antics of a dero, or whatever he was. Probably some traveller looking for a place more comfortable than the back of his car to kip down overnight, or a prospective buyer wanting a quick look-over; fell through the stairs and broke a bone or two, perhaps. We should’ve helped him, not run and hidden like little kids. Our curiosity had found its courage again, and we were eager to see what the place looked like inside. Maybe we’d discover how he’d hurt himself. It was midmorning and no ghost worth its salt would be stirring.

  We tugged at the back door and then we all three shouted together: “HELLO, IS THERE ANYBODY HOME?”

  It wasn’t so bad once we were inside.

  The first room was bare, except for the laundry trough and several shelves. It smelt damp and the entire corner of one wall was blackened with mildew. Beyond this was the kitchen; with its lime green fitted-cupboards and the kitchen sink still in place, although there was a gap where an oven had stood and a mess of glass on the floor where a windowpane had smashed.

  The hallway was littered with newspapers and we had to step over an old-fashioned hall stand that had been thrown over, and I began to wonder why we’d never ventured this far before. What babies we’d been. Nonetheless, we stayed together as we moved from room to room, while trying to appear bravely, independently adventurous.

  When Tad opened the bathroom door, we were met by the stink of shit and piss, and Kaz quickly slammed it again.

  “Shit,” Tad said and held his nose.

  “Hmm,” said Kaz, “you think so?”

  The rooms downstairs were empty, and even the carpets had been pulled up. Only the carpet grips remained, nailed round the edge of the floor. Then we moved to the stairs, where we might’ve hesitated a moment.

  “There’s no-one here,” Tad said, assuring Kaz and me, and himself too, and he shouted up the stairs: “IS THERE?”

  “Keep to the side of the stairs,” Kaz whispered. “They might be rotten. Maybe that’s how the guy hurt himself.”

  All the same, the stairs looked and felt solid enough and our wooden movements, step by step, resounded through the hollowness of the house. It was then I thought of Mrs Rawlings climbing these stairs with a softer tread and what a waste it was to have such a home standing empty, year after year.

  There were two rooms upstairs, and in the first were scraps of furniture – two chairs, a bookshelf, a disgusting mattress, half a carpet and strips of crumbling underlay – and a built-in cupboard. I tried to imagine being a dero and sleeping on such a mattress, but it was beyond me. The other room was bare. Cleaner, but bare.

  Kaz returned to the first room, and I followed, while Tad lingered on the small landing.

  I don’t know why she hesitated in front of the cupboard – I never asked her – but she did and, because she did, it was me who pulled open the door.

  I didn’t recognise it as a person at first, only saw it as part of the rubbish of shiny black bin bags and loops of old carpet that had been dumped hurriedly on top, but I turned at Tad’s footsteps, then felt Kaz gasp and stiffen.

  None of us screamed, not like they do in films. We might’ve done, all three of us, but I didn’t hear. I froze. Every pore of my skin froze. Then the axis of my world shifted: turned upside down, inside out. Struggled not to buckle at the knees. A black hole sucking me down.

  All this for mere seconds, perhaps.

  “Oh,” Tad groaned, deep and long, and rushed to a corner and threw up, while Kaz and I remained frozen against time and all new sensibility. I wanted it to be an optical illusion, a trick of light, and tried to see how it might be something else, but the more I saw – not a matter of looking or looking away – the more I understood what I was seeing.

  Her eyes were open and staring right at me, through me. Picking each bone bare. In seeing nothing, they saw everything.

  It was the missing girl, the one in all the photos. Recognisably a once-person to that extent. She had brown eyes, but her skin was such a cold, pale colour that I remember it as grey, and her lips were blue. But what I saw most – and can never un-see – was the look of surprise and sadness on her face.

  It took three years for the police to catch the filth that did that to Alison Honiton.

  More than our childhood games ended that morning. Our friendship fell apart because there was something too terrible propped up in the middle of it. It was only a small town, but there were enough reasons – excuses – to avoid calling at each other’s house, to steer clear of one another if we were down the street and, anyway, I think I missed a fair whack of school that term. I spent a lot of time at home, sleeping, reading comics, watching TV and ‘staring into thin air’, as my mother too frequently declared.

  Being part of the end of someone’s life like that – hearing the ugly commotion of her death – and wondering if we could’ve prevented it is enough of a ghost for anyone to carry around with them, through childhood into adulthood. It’s enough of a coming of age.

  It
wasn’t long afterwards that Mum told me that Kaz had been given a scholarship to a boarding school a couple of hundred kilometres away. As if I needed to know. As if it ought to make a difference. And then, that Tad’s family had abruptly moved to another town, interstate, where his dad would be the new branch manager.

  Except for those bleak days when we were brought together at the trial, I never saw Tad or Kaz again.

  Things must’ve been bad at home. I must’ve made them bad with the sourness that clung to me, from which I couldn’t let go. Else Mum and Dad wouldn’t have packed me off to live with my eldest sister in the city. And I don’t mind admitting that I had ulterior motives, several years later, in encouraging my dad to sell up and move four hundred kilometres closer to my sister and me soon after Mum died. Anything to avoid coming back to this place, from which I’ve never properly taken my leave.

  Until today.

  Although I now know that the ghosts which haunt us don’t belong to a place as such, but live within us, maybe it would’ve been good, after all, to have been here and to see the fire when they burnt the old place down. To watch it burn. If we fail to bury our ghosts where they belong, then we end up dragging them with us through life.

  I don’t often think about Tad these days, but sometimes I imagine Kaz with a couple of young children and a husband who adores her, with an uncluttered house and a neat city garden. Picnics under the swing.

  Other times, I imagine her travelling, always travelling and moving on, unable to settle, unwilling to commit, wary of getting too close to anyone, wary of trusting anything to ever remain the same.

  Sometimes, I imagine her life has qualities I’d like mine to have; other times, I imagine her life is what I fear mine has become. And sometimes, like now, I wonder whether either of them, Kaz or Tad, have ever returned to this place – to the Rawlings’ place – and stood where I’m standing now, in order to finally lay their ghosts and begin again. Or at least to try.

  6

  Ukini Nageni

  Ari O’Connell

  Author

  Ari O’Connell spent much of her mid 20s travelling, including a stint in the neon wilderness of Osaka, Japan. Her story, Ukini Nageni, explores Japan’s nocturnal world of hostessing, where appearances are deceptive and people are not always as they seem. Ari has worked as a journalist and in Communications and PR. She is currently completing a PhD and her first novel, a black comedy about renegade corporate soldiers, cubicle hell, anxiety and death. She lives in Perth, Western Australia with her family and her Labrador Coco, who has food and entitlement issues.

  There’s been talk that someone spotted Trick and Katherine Daniels in Cardboard Town by the Dotombori River. The rumour’s spread through the gaijin community like a mangy dog on heat. I head for my shift at Amber and even the customers know about it.

  The Mama-san pokes my belly and tells me I need to lose weight. Then she hooks me up at my usual table with Lucy, the goth girl from Canada. I call her Satellite because she’s always in orbit checking out what’s going on. When Trick introduced us a few months ago she said, “welcome to the family, darling,” and gave me a sake shot and a gap-toothed smile. I grinned hello but all I could see was her corpse-like beauty. The bluewhite skin with purple veins tracking so close to the surface I wondered if I should be frightened for her.

  Lucy calls everyone honey, sweetie or darling, even if she hates them. We don’t have much in common but we work the same table every night, so we’ve got eachother’s backs. There’s safety in numbers when you don’t belong. She’s younger than me but an old hand at Amber and she’s protected me from Mama’s maneuverings more than once. Lucy’s the club’s most valuable asset – partly because of her fractured charm but mostly because she understands the deal. Over here she’s known as the ‘number one hostess’. It means she earns a lot of money.

  Lucy has dark cropped hair, wears blood-red lipstick and diamond studs in her nose and tongue. Mama pairs us at tables because the contrast between her slender neck and deathly appeal, and my blonde curls and beach skin make for “very foreign beauty” , whatever that is. I think she means it’s good for business.

  Being a bargirl in Japan wasn’t something I planned. It grew up around a goodbye I couldn’t speak; the way flesh encircles an embedded splinter of glass. You feel it but it’s hidden.

  I was 23 when they rang and said, “Evie, it’s Hopey.” And I knew he was dead. Everybody loved him, but Hopey died smeared in vomit and alone. “A hotshot,” they told me, shaking their heads. “Stupid kid. The junk was too pure.”

  At the funeral they played REM’s Everybody Hurts and I stared at Hopey’s coffin and wondered if it was suicide. I realized we’d never sit in rocking chairs on the verandah when we were 60, or strap on backpacks and sturdy shoes and follow the sun.

  “Do you children know what you do to your mothers?” my Mum asked me, when she sat me down after the funeral for one of her talks.

  “Don’t start Mum,” I warned. She looked at me, red-eyed and hopeless, and tried to reach across the void. She said Australia was still the lucky country, especially for generations born after the Great Depression and Vietnam. This may be true, but a loss is a loss however you find it. Our tragedies are small scale and domestic: divorced parents, a casualised workforce, loved ones decimated by drugs or fast cars. We have no noble truths.

  Mum was holding me with her eyes, willing me to speak and all I could offer was that my happy, lazy country had left me illequipped to deal with grief. She talked about seeing the good in things and believing, but my temple throbbed and the whitenoise came up between me and the rest of the world. Then she gave me a quick, stiff hug and made me promise to have faith in my luck.

  I tried, but when the grey makes waves within you, luck is a four-letter word and faith doesn’t mean much. When people here ask me, I tell them Australia is mostly desert, with cities clinging to the coast gasping for breath. It’s all sand and sea and salt, with a never-ending blue-dome sky.

  My hometown is full of light and heat and room to breathe but I couldn’t find room for my grief. So I packed my life up tight. I moved fast, so it couldn’t keep up.

  Japan offered easy money and it kept me moving. It was something to do. Amber was a drag sometimes, but the boozy camaraderie and the chatter made my days slide more easily into night. Sometimes people questioned what I was doing there. I said I was saving to buy a camera to travel and take photographs; that I might map a course and follow the sun. If they asked me what I wanted to shoot, I’d tell them whatever catches my eye.

  Everything changed when Katherine Daniels disappeared.

  HOSTITUTE! screamed the headline on the front page of the Yomiuri Shimbun above a grainy photo of a plump, fair-haired girl holding a can of Kirin and laughing into the lens.

  There are fears for the safety of 22-year-old Briton Katherine Daniels who has been living in Osaka for the past six months but has not been seen since 11.30pm Friday 22 July.

  Ms Daniels, who entered the country on a tourist visa, had been working at the Sakura Club in Shinsaibashi’s entertainment district the night she disappeared. Ms Daniels went on dohan, an off-premises date with a customer, before bringing him to the club as her guest for the evening, and working her regular shift.

  Ms Daniels’ disappearance raises uncomfortable questions about the participation of foreign women in Japan’s mizu shobai, or water trade; a loose network of bars, clubs, nightclubs and restaurants, often bankrolled and controlled by the yakuza.

  Police are concerned Ms Daniels may have been pressured into prostitution, drug running, or assaulted by a client.

  Noriko Shimizu, the Sakura Club’s Mama-san, dismisses such claims as ludicrous.

  Katherine’s father, James Daniels, arrived in Osaka yesterday to meet with police. In a brief written statement he said: “The Daniels family is very concerned for Katherine’s safety, however we are convinced she is alive. We have found media reports linking Katherine with prostitut
ion and/or drugs particularly distressing and ask that the media and the public respect our feelings on this matter and refrain from what amounts to character assassination.”

  Later, I saw James Daniels on TV at a press conference full of Japanese and foreign journalists. Sweat patches spread across his shirt as he appealed for information, bug eyed and desperate. There was no trace of Katherine, at least not then.

  As we wait for the customers to arrive, Lucy shifts nervously in her seat and asks me if I’ve heard that Trick’s back in town. I nod and she pours me a shot of sake and we raise our glasses in a triumphant salute to the night ahead. “Kampai! Ganbatte ne!” The sharp sting of the liquor relieves me and the world loses its edge.

  The first couple of hours at Amber are always slow. The customers trickle in around 9.30 or 10.00pm but we have to punch in at 8.00pm, just in case. If we’re late, even five minutes, Mama docks our pay. This sucks, but being late for anything in Japan is one of the Seven Deadly Sins so after the first few times you get organized. If it’s something unavoidable, Takasan, the perma-tanned barman, might take pity and sneak the amount Mama’s docked back to you via the till. This means you owe him a favour though because Taka-san won’t do something for nothing.

  Amber’s pretty standard as far as hostess clubs go. It’s in a small, narrow room on the twentieth floor of a skyscraper near one of Osaka’s busiest subway stations, Umeda. On the wall outside, neon letters flash ‘The Amber Club’ and inside there’s a bar stacked with the customers’ bottles of whisky and sake, each identified with a neat name tag. Wooden tables with chairs are scattered around the room and three soft-leather booths are tucked against a wall. A small raised stage for karaoke and dance performances is opposite the bar and the place is decorated with mirrors, disco balls and an ugly fake chandelier.

  The club’s main attraction is its ‘global girls’ who serve drinks and light cigarettes while making small talk about nothing much. We’re from all over; Brazil, Thailand, Canada, Holland. But the Japanese call us gaijin, which means foreigner or outside one. This makes us sound unified, as if our difference earns us a place, but I know we’re just flotsam and jetsam drifting along. Gaijin. Ukini Nageni.