Page 43 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

He nodded a little. ‘You’re half and half. Do you … have any of this?’

‘A bit. No one can say my name and people always worry I won’t have proper manners and I won’t know where to put my shoes if I visit.’ She looked wry about it, without even a trace of irritability. ‘But you’ll do better in Tokyo. People will assume you’re diplomatic staff. I mean, I expect you’ll have a few nutters yelling “fuck off gaijin” every so often, but sticks and stones.’

‘What does gaijin actually mean? The dictionary just says foreigner, but …’

‘I’d say it’s somewhere between “chink” and “mountain troll”.’

He laughed. ‘Thanks.’

She taught him more swearwords on the way back. He didn’t want to find any of it funny, but she was funny, and it would have been hard not to laugh with her. At Yoruji, she made the tea herself, and he started to see that he’d been jealously unfair to her before. The tea room – there was a whole room for tea – was a glass pagoda set on a little island in one of the bigger pools, warm despite the cool weather and riotously bright from silk rugs woven with chrysanthemum patterns. It was a gorgeous place to sit. He felt all his nerves unravelling after being wound up tight at the police station. Opposite him, Takiko cut an odd figure. She was wearing a man’s suit; it was a costume from the theatre, but the props people didn’t want it to look new on stage, and so she was stuck walking round in it looking like an idiot for two weeks while she persuaded some wear and creases into it. Kabuki, she explained, meant slantwise, queer; the entire idea was that it was weird, and so at the moment, they were casting all the women as men and all the men as women. She rolled her eyes when she said it, and he liked her suddenly for being embarrassed talking about art. He was exactly the same. He could barely say ‘semi-quaver’ to someone outside the orchestra without feeling like a pretentious twerp.

‘Why were you out in the first place?’ she asked at last.

‘Oh. I was just going to the post office.’

‘You know we’ve got a postbox here? They come at ten o’clock every morning.’

‘No, it was a parcel, it needed weighing.’

‘Presents home already?’ She smiled.

He felt his shoulders stiffen, and shifted the teacup in his hands to disguise it. Kuroda’s men rotated their posts at the sounding of those strange bells; and he had seen her putting up bells. And she must have agreed to have all the rest put up in the house, provided the servants with them, shown the soldiers the ways through the labyrinthine corridors. ‘No, no. Although I should. Mori wanted something posting. Moths in cocoons.’

‘Really?’

‘For some collector in Kyushu,’ he said, naming a random place that was not Aokigahara Forest.

‘Kyushu?’

‘I don’t know, I just do as I’m told. Usually for the best.’

‘I’d advise you not to do that,’ she said.

‘I know what you’d advise,’ he said, angling for cheery.

‘Did you ask him about Countess Kuroda?’

‘None of my business.’

‘Jesus Christ, you did and you don’t care.’ She shook her head once in a way that put Thaniel powerfully in mind his sister, when he was tiny and she could see he was about to fall out of a tree. ‘All right, fair enough. But aren’t you worried that that’s you? You’re ill. Have you asked yourself what your death might achieve, if he steered it into the right place at the right moment?’

Thaniel shrugged. ‘If it’s going to happen anyway then he’s welcome to find a use for it.’

Her expression opened. ‘How serious is it, at the moment?’

‘I don’t really know. The doctor said one thing, Mori said something else, but then he looks like he’s seen a ghost whenever he bumps into me, which can’t be very good. I don’t feel right.’ He hesitated, not sure why he was telling her of all people. But then, she was the only objective party he’d spoken to. He went into English, because he couldn’t concentrate enough for Japanese past the rock forming in his throat. ‘It’s not a shock. My dad had this. We’re pretty short-lived, the men in our family. I hope it’ll be all right, but …’ He had wanted to say something balanced and cheerful, but it wouldn’t come. ‘But I don’t feel right,’ he said again, too quiet.

‘There’s nothing Keita can do?’ she asked, in English too. The first time he’d spoken to her, her accent had been glassy, but it was less so now. She was copying him, in exactly the way he echoed the Japanese of whoever he was talking to.

‘What’s he going to do, cure tuberculosis? If we’re not in sight of a cure, he can’t do anything more than anyone else. If it’s not there in the close future for him to remember, he can’t know how to do it.’ He put the tea aside. ‘Like I say, it’s not a shock. I think my lungs were buggered by the time I was twenty, if I’m honest.’

She had been nodding slightly while he spoke. ‘Still bloody irritating though.’

He smiled. ‘It is. I mean I might be fine, it might be fuss over nothing.’

‘Well, I hope so.’

‘Thanks.’