Nagasaki by Emily Boyce Éric Faye Read Free Book Online Page A

Where did it go? No one knows for sure, which worries everyone. An air of lethargy reigns. In the sandpit where children played at capitalism, the rules of the game have gone missing.
    ‘Damn it, what have you done with them? You had them a minute ago!’
    ‘What! It was you who had them just now …’
    Because the system is ailing, we are all becoming wobbly and helpless, like little children. Rumours escape from the prevailing silence like plaster crumbling from a wall. They contain words like ‘restructure’ and ‘consultation exercise’. Even here in the weather department there’s talk of cutbacks, as if there were less going on with the climate, or they could close the seas, which would be fair enough really since some of them are empty. In the space of three months, this crisishas almost made me forget that a woman bit the dust well before the rest of us and, having been homeless, is now in ‘sheltered accommodation’ care of the municipal prison. But now her trial is about to begin. I got my court summons yesterday. Tonight, it’s not the rain that’s stopping me sleeping but something else entirely – perhaps the fear of having to meet the eyes of my stowaway. Or perhaps her absence has made my life feel more incomplete than ever.
    I have never liked successful people.
    Not for being successful per se, but because they become defined by their success and are nothing but one big blinkered ego. Unfettered egos spell the end for all of us.
    The Crisis is making everyone feel a little more alone. What do people mean when they harp on about what ‘we’ are going through? There is no ‘we’. Instead of huddling together round a fire, all the individual ‘me’s are slinking off alone, eyeing one another with suspicion. Everyone thinks he’s doing better than the next man, and that too probably spells the end for all of us.
    Trial or no trial, crisis or no crisis, I haven’tmanaged to forget the stowaway. I know that according to Article 130 she is facing three years inside and a 500,000-yen fine, a fortune for a woman who probably doesn’t have 10,000 to her name. Should I feel bad, and if so, about what exactly? I keep on asking myself this question, though no one else is putting it to me. My mother, when she was alive, accused me of being too sentimental. Justice must be done, she would say now, as indeed it will, but for the last few nights, yes, I’ve had terrible trouble sleeping.

 
     
    A strange noise woke me. Something falling? Not in here – the other two are asleep and nothing has fallen over. Must have come from another cell.
    Or maybe it was the rats.
    I can read the time by the nightlight: almost 4 a.m. No stars in the sky, it’s overcast. The only star we see in here is the spy hole. When it doesn’t shine, it means a screw’s watching us from the corridor. I freeze when that happens, stop thinking. Put my life on hold until the eclipse is over. The snitch … It was something similar that got me arrested, the lawyer told me. They put eyes everywhere. And there I was, going about the house without a care in the world until late afternoon … Without the camera that exposed me it would all have gone on much longer. I really liked it there. The bedroomgot the sun from 1 p.m. and I used to settle down on the mats and leaf through a magazine or do nothing but top up my tan, opening the window a crack to let the air in: his tatami mats had seen better days and smelled musty. Yes, it could have gone on and on and that would have been fine by me. I always stayed on my toes, of course. When it came to my bathroom, for example, I only used it in the mornings so that everything would be dry by the time he got home. After I’d finished, I would put everything back where I had found it, just as I did in the kitchen. That meant memorising exactly where an object was before moving it out of place.
    The more at home I felt there, the more wary I had to be; the temptation to let my guard down was