2006

SHORT STORY COMPETITION

Mr Takahashi slowly got off his bike, and walked to the steps that led down to his basement apartment. A sheet of pink paper fluttered on the telephone pole outside his block. Another missing pet: a two-year old Labrador. It was strange, he thought. There had been five different notices pinned to trees and poles in the last three streets alone. As with the others, he read the details carefully and tore off the contact strip at the bottom of the sheet.

He bumped his bike down the steps and into the hallway. He lived in an old five-story tenement block in the dockside area of San Francisco. The apartment wasn’t big, but it was sufficient for an old single man, and the kitchen overlooked a small private yard. On the kitchen table there was yesterday’s Gazette. Mr Takahashi read it most days. Curious, he flicked through the pages to the classified adverts and notices. The lost pet notices normally took up no more than a column. Today, they stretched for two pages. Mr Takahashi realised he was uneasy. He wondered whether it was him, whether he was ill. He was more tired than usual, certainly, and hadn’t slept well for a week. He hadn’t been sick, but there was a certain tightness in his stomach. He shook his head gently, as though trying to clear water from his ears.

He went to feed his fish. The yard was Mr Takahashi’s favourite place. He had a tiny pond in which he kept three plump golden carp, and he grew chrysanthemums and marrows in soil boxes arranged along either side of a neatly raked patch of gravel. He dropped a handful of breadcrumbs onto the water. But the koi refused to rise and instead darted and skittered at the bottom of the pool. He had never known them not to feed before. As he puzzled at the water, he became aware of a memory trying to take shape. But the vision was ill-formed. It dissolved every time he reached for it.

He went inside and started to make a cup of tea. While he waited for the water to boil, he examined the mouse-traps he had set next to the fridge and cupboards. The dockside was one of the oldest areas of the city, and the nooks and crannies of its buildings were home to countless mice. Unusually, all four traps were empty. He listened; in the quiet of the kitchen, you could often hear faint scurrying in the walls. And then he wondered whether he had heard them at all in the last few days. Lying in bed, he could normally hear them running in the gaps between his ceiling and the flat above. He realised that the silence had been bothering him for almost a week.

Back in the yard, he stirred his tea and gazed at the pond. The bread still eddied upon the surface, untouched. The memory was ascending now, taking shape and colour. He had seen fish behave like this before. Where? In Japan. A pond, larger than this one; red and black fish nosing among lily pads and water hyacinths. Yes; when he was a young boy, back on Honshu. Before the war.

He had been tending the carp in his family’s pond, behind his grandfather’s house. They were not feeding. They thrashed nervously, hugging the bottom of the pool, just like his fish were doing now. Puzzled, he told his grandfather. The old man looked at him carefully, and stalked to the water’s edge. Poised like a heron, his grandfather studied the fish for a long time, and then suddenly turned and walked out onto the street, to the local councillor’s house. He was left outside, staring at the councillor’s bright blue door. After half an hour, the door opened and servants came out. They hurried to the police station, to the fire station, to the houses of the oldest people in the district. Within the hour carriages started to arrive at the councillor’s house, and stories began to filter out to the crowd waiting in the street. A dove keeper had lost half his birds. Lizards and snakes had appeared in record numbers for a day, and then vanished. Huge swarms of bees had been reported throughout the district.

That afternoon, his whole family walked, with many others, along the railway track that ran from the town. It wasn’t a big town- a few thousand people- but, at the age of eight, it seemed as if the whole of mankind was moving. He remembered the novelty of walking along the rails; the warm smoothness of the iron beneath his bare feet- he must have taken off his shoes- and the calluses of his father’s hand, gripping too tight. They stayed in tents in fields far from the outskirts. Two days later, at supper time, a loose, hollow sensation began in his chest, and the tents started to shake, beating like sails in the wind.

When the people returned, they found a randomness to the destruction. The remains of a building could sit in the shadow of one untouched. In some areas, houses leaned against each other across the narrow streets, as if confiding secrets. Their frames had been pulled apart, forced through walls, the split wood pale and raw. In other areas, where the buildings were of brick or stone, the walls had burst and choked the road with rubble. Knots of people stood in the street and stared at their homes. His grandfather’s house still stood. Its wooden walls gleamed white and whole. Only the door lintel, a great slab of brown stone, was broken. Behind the house, the pond was untouched. A scum of dust obscured the fish beneath.

For Mr Takahashi, the worry was starting to take a more definite shape. He stepped outside his front door and up the stairs and stared along the street. He wondered what he was looking for. Cars and SUVs hummed past. A work crew poured tarmac. Mr Takahashi stared at the tar, thick like molasses, oozing over the road. There was flash of black and white in the corner of his eye. A cat was walking quickly along the sidewalk, carrying a kitten in its mouth. It walked in front of Mr Takahashi, ignoring him, and crossed the road, passing the workmen. It made it to the other side, vanished up an alleyway and then reappeared a moment later, its mouth empty. One of the workmen saw the cat and squatted, reaching out to pet it; but it flicked a paw at him and hissed, and the man was left sucking the back of his hand. The cat loped past Mr Takahashi and back along the street. It padded down the steps of a house three doors down. It re-emerged, another kitten in its mouth.

The feeling in his stomach was fear. He wondered what he should do. He went back into his home. Who could he call? He pulled out the phone directory, and looked up some numbers. His hand hesitated over the phone. He had lived in America for thirty years, and in San Francisco for twenty. He had experienced countless small earthquakes. In that time, he had never felt like this, had never seen animals behave in this way. He wondered whether he could trust a memory from so long ago. Mr Takahashi was a proud man, and although he didn’t watch TV or listen to the radio often, he feared he knew what his story would sound like.

He called the Geological Survey. He called the local newspaper, radio and TV stations. The city’s universities. Young people answered. They were polite and attentive, and asked him whether he was an expert. They asked his job, his profession, carefully noting his story, his name, his age. They spelt his name. They assured him they would get back to him, but, they explained, they couldn’t do anything about it right now.
He rang the doorbells on his street, moving quickly from door to door. Most didn’t answer. Those that did opened their doors warily. Twenty years ago, when Mr Takahashi had first moved here, he knew most of the people on the street. Now the warehouses and tenements were being renovated, their interiors gutted and walls knocked through. Loft living, it was called. Mr Takahashi didn’t know who lived here any more. One person, a young white woman, did listen. She asked him: What can I do? But then a man, her boyfriend he supposed, came to the door, and listened to Mr Takahashi with barely concealed hostility. Thanks, but we’ll take our chances. The girl smiled apologetically as the man shut the door.

As darkness fell, Mr Takahashi, exhausted by his efforts and the reactions, gave up and went home. He could no longer tell whether the discomfort in his stomach was fear or humiliation. What if he was wrong? This wasn’t Japan sixty years ago. They had systems in place nowadays. Experts with sensitive instruments and computers. He forced himself to go to bed. You had to trust them.

His fists clenched as he remembered the reactions of the people he had told. This guy says an earthquake’s coming. His fish told him. He closed his eyes and listened for the mice in the walls.

* * *

He was still tired when he awoke. He tried to ignore the tightness in his body, tried to forget the events of the previous day. He switched on the radio, and turned the volume right up. Red-eyed, he made himself a coffee, although he knew it would give him a headache later. He stepped outside into his tiny backyard, holding the soda bottle he used to water the garden boxes. It was a beautiful Californian morning with a dazzling sun and cool, perfectly still, air. But the flowers and leaves of his marrow plants were moving. Their bright heads skipped and jittered. Mr Takahashi shook his head disbelieving. He licked his finger, tried to feel for a wind that wasn’t there. He ran his hand over the concrete and brick of the house wall. Nothing moved, except for the flowers that danced in the strong morning light and threw skittering shadows on the pale hardness of the wall. And then he remembered something else from his childhood; in the hours before the earthquake struck, the plants of the countryside had started to sway with no wind or hand to move them.

Calm swept over him. He went inside, quickly packed a rucksack with food, water, money, sleeping bag and torch. He called a cab firm, and turned off the gas, unplugged the kettle and radio. Before he walked out of the door, he sprinkled the remainder of the bread on the water and covered the pond with netting. Waiting on the pavement outside his block he looked up at the dark windows of his neighbours’ apartments. Leaving his heavy rucksack on the pavement, he climbed the stairs of his block and knocked on the doors. No-one answered, although he was sure he could hear voices from one and music from another.

* * *

Mr Takahashi saw the driver’s eyes glance at him in the rear-view mirror. The cab driver had seemed surprised to be taking an elderly man to the boundaries of the city. What you doing out here? You doing some hiking or something? Meeting some friends? He caught the driver’s eyes and smiled. An earthquake’s coming. But people don’t believe me. The taxi driver grinned and laughed, There’s always an earthquake coming. He dropped him off at a rise of hills covered with scrub and small trees.

He started to climb the slope, using the low sinewy branches to pull himself upwards. The rucksack was heavy but he felt strong. The air smelled of pine and grass. He halted at the brow of the hill, and leaned against the trunk of a tree. The taxi was still in the valley, parked on a strip of dirt beside the road. As he watched from under a shading hand, the taxi started and pulled onto the tarmac, heading back towards the city.