HAMMER

They came at night, driven close by shame. Of admitting, of losing, of parental failure. It’s only natural, most people should sleep then. Had always been that way in their world. Meant less hiding, outwardly at least. But their world holds nothing but memories. Creaking planks in nightingale floors. A Kyoto excursion for second year history class. Fittings warning of danger, of strangers slipping through. Beware the enemy from outside. No sense of the danger within. Floors that warn of intruders betray escapers too. For me, escape does not mean leaving. Freedom begins with decisions, and I made mine. Open fields are a bedroom in their apartment. I soar on wings only to the ceiling. One room, four walls and a roof. Doesn’t seem too much for one man.

I did not sleep like a warrior. No nerve endings honed to the slightest signal. The books can keep their tension, the movies their climaxes. Their thoughts succumbed while they ate dinner. The conspiracy was brief. The surrender was unconditional. Mother’s idea for Father’s brawn. Smash through the door. There was nothing after that. Restore the sight-lines, restore the contact. Open the door, find the boy. Without the door there is just a boy. Storm the barricades before the sake wears off.

Their mistake: thinking it was still a door. It did not open any more. Did not swing to and fro as ordered. Was no longer a slave to the numbers. Now it has a new identity. A wall reducing their world by a room. My room. Walls are built for a reason. They don’t turn over secrets with the handle. They scratched at the door like rats. Too unfit middle-aged rats armed with kitchen utensils. Cheap metal teeth gnawed at the wood. Scarred it but snapped themselves. Father grunted. Mother was urging him on. Not the man he wanted me to be. Not anymore. I could hear them breathing, whispering, grunting. They had not had their evening baths.

I slid off my futon in practiced silence. A son rising not from rest but repose. Spreading my weight so very carefully. The dry tatami fibres did not even rustle. I watched myself creep towards the opening. Imagined watching, remembered loathing. Not for them. They couldn’t help it. That was the only way they knew. But I knew more, knew better. The hammer still cocked in my shaking fist. Knowing that I shouldn’t couldn’t wouldn’t do it. The last chance to stop the deluge. No higher ground in sight. And so the floodgates opened. They never stood a chance.

So much noise as they fought the door. The nails refusing to abandon the wooden frame. If only they had stopped for a second. They must have heard me. But madness swallows and occupies every thought. They were trapped in the frenzy. Panicked that they had to act quickly. Before anyone else heard. Not so much me but the neighbours. Nocturnal sounds make the walls seem even thinner. Every noise plants a seed in someone’s mind. Time will only nourish it.

The finest wood a silver coin could buy. Ten inches topped by an imperfect metal form. The nails had pocked the hammer’s ball. Light in my hand but heavy enough. Made by Lee Chen Zhu. Unskilled worker at anonymous factory in Western China. Made one Tuesday morning some time before. One of hundreds he made that day. Thousands made in his lifetime. It had travelled further than I ever have. Just a couple of feet left. Honourable Lee Chen, I salute your handiwork.

I kept low, flexing my fingers. The knuckles could not crack when I descended. I ghosted through the vicious, viscous blackness. Towards the spray of light stealing through the slot. The remnants of a sixty-watt intruder not enough. Began in the kitchen at the hall’s end. A lighthouse warning of the domestic prison within. It should have been a pilot light. But the keepers were blinded by their desires. So my secret stayed safe for then.

I could see their feet. Five-starred passengers in tan leather house slippers. Father’s were bigger, polished, as new. (Only used in the scarce non-work hours.) They pass from room to room to room. Just as he does. Mother’s were smaller; streaked and creased. (The demands of cleaning had extracted their toll.) There were contours around the toes. The leather sank and clung to the crevices. As if imitating the dust.

Father was closer. That’s how I decided, nothing more. No psychological preference or stored resentment. Not at him, just at them. His grunts and the dull clunking of metal. The echoing wood speaking louder than any words. I was not afraid. Fifty-nine steel sentinels were prepared to die for me. I revelled in his frustration. He dug a spike into the gaps. His torment racing around the frame. Hampered by the need for quiet, driven by fear. Not of me but of his reflection. The mirrored image in other’s eyes. Upside-down, back to front, naked and exposed. Nails screaming through the silence and wood. He was winning for a while.

My soldiers fell, sacrificing themselves for me. Slow metal rain diving on the divine wind. Bouncing like empty shell-casings on the matting floor. His attempts at subterfuge were futile. The wood protested every attack. Splinters bemoaning their separation from security. Condemning their assailant as they died. Enough.

I gripped the handle tightly. I had to save my bastion. History teaches us this much. Matsumoto-jo, the white egret castle. Winged rooftops soaring above the low cast plains. Fragile flakes of snow settling on battlements. Melting and dying at the faintest touch. I swung my arm horizontally through the gap. Rolling the wrist as the elbow extended. Smash the hammer down. Coursing into the tan leather covering his foot. The metal had not been sharpened for days. My one neglect. No matter. Enough force to stab down and through. Shoe and skin both ruptured. Steel marauding through thin bones above the toes. Hammer withdrawn in an instant, with impunity. Father screamed, roaring with pain and rage. Stoppered only by Mother, mindful of inquisitive neighbours. Those dangerously curious neighbours. She gagged him with a kitchen towel. I don’t know where she found the strength. Fear makes animals of us all sometimes.

I hadn’t said a word. He had just exploded with angry noise. No syllables. None of us had said anything then. Speaking terms no longer. The hammer was still in my hand. Twin prongs sullen and glistening. I watched his feet recede down the passage. The soundtrack: muffled whimpers of agony. Right foot still warm inside its slipper. Left foot hot with streaming blood. The discarded slipper halfway to the kitchen door. Lying stunned two mat-lengths away. Resting where the wall meets the floor. A wounded corpse seeping vital fluids. The forgotten reminder of defeat.

Some things can be well-hidden deep within. Can burn brightly behind the private honne face. The emotionless tatemae is presented to the world. Open eyes devoid of all meaning.

Later, I lay on the floor. A pillow cradling my head. Watching her sideways. Seeing only half of her crouching. She scrubbed and cursed herself. The water carried the blood ever deeper. Into the crevices and fault lines that had resisted a thousand soles before her. Each crimson toe-print condemned her and Father. In my heart I cheered her failure. Linger long the reminders of her treachery. But no joy there, not in that victory. We were both prisoners in our own ways.

I saw her kneel before me. Mother before the son. The servant before the king of nothing. From my horizontal throne I can’t see her face, see only her thin calves and slender toes curling inwards after years of too-tight shoes. I want to see her eyes, the softness becoming sadness in dark brown pupils below immaculately plucked eyebrows. Her secret when I was a child was producing so much warmth from such a cold face. Back then I needed her smile, that bright arc of approval below her near-flat nose. High cheekbones and thin cheeks, she never abandoned her quiet self-starvation even after landing her trophy husband. She only ate for me when she was pregnant, and stopped as soon as I was born. Washing the dishes alone each night, whisking them away from the table as soon as Father finished. He never realised that it wasn’t done out of deference to him but rather to stop him seeing how little she had eaten. He wouldn’t notice something like that, not like I could before I grew taller than the table. I think she has shrunk as I have grown, millimetres planed from her face by time and worry and loneliness. Since I have withdrawn the first grey hairs have appeared in her shoulder-length hair, tucked away behind her ears with the black ones whenever she applies herself to something. The attrition is cutting deeper, biting through her flesh as thin lines of aging, snaking across her forehead no matter how much cream she applies every night. She doesn’t know that they are burrowing through her receptors, destroying them one by one, losing a little empathy with each. I forget how well she knows me.

She heard me smiling. Perhaps even smelt my scorn. Not all her receptors are gone, not yet. Her eyes kept flicking towards the slot. Seeking the morass of hair and grime. Around my eyes, my ears, my face. There was no way through that armour. Not for her. She looked back again and again. Hopelessly checking a letterbox no postman would visit. Unwilling to believe there was no hope left. It is not a Japanese idea. You must earn your hope here. The vultures circled above her. She scrubbed her fingers raw. Vultures of doubt waiting for the first sign. The postman never came again.

She did her best. At least with the stains. Five red toe-marks of each step. Blurred into an arc of pink. A melting triangle that was once a soleprint. Three hours and fourteen minutes. Sinking ever deeper into the fibres. Every fading hue encouraged her. She couldn’t understand that they would never disappear. Not from the mats, not from memory.

Six months on. The pink became brown became black. Spreading and fading but never leaving. A souvenir of that night. A footprint too big for Japan. She couldn’t replace the panels. Not in this city of a million eyes. Only one needs to half ask a question. Her shame will be revealed. Reminders of failure are better than public knowledge. I know she thinks this. So too I know our neighbours think nothing. Especially Hayashi-san, who never thinks about anything. Only short-skirted schoolgirls and other people’s songs. I know this because they wash every day. They are clean and defenceless. They make it easier for me to know.