Canal Dreams

One of the men in the first circle must have felt it. He shouted something in Korean, screamed, tried desperately to get up, almost dragging part of the circle with him while the others looked round bewildered. Sucre skipped to the second circle and dropped the grenade into the middle of it, repeated the action at the last circle of men, then ran for the door. The saloon filled with screams. Sucre ducked behind a couch with the soldier who'd tied up the men. The soldier holding Hisako stepped back so that he was shielded by the door; the man behind the bar disappeared behind it.

The noise was more muffled than it had been earlier, when Orrick had attacked. She watched. Her eyes closed for the instant of the detonation, but she saw the circle of men rise up, saw the red cloud burst from one part, on the far side. The second circle of men had almost managed to stand; some had been hit by shrapnel from the first blast, but somehow they were almost on their feet. She saw Lekkas then, yelling at the others and trying to kick behind him, where the grenade had to be. The ringing blast of the first grenade was just giving way to the screams and moans of the injured in the first group when the second detonated, throwing men across the room, flaying legs, smacking blood and flesh off the ceiling. Something whined past her left ear. The men in the third group were almost on their feet; the grenade blasted their legs out from under them.

The machine-gun opened up; Sucre and the soldier who'd tied the men up scrambled to the side of the room and started firing too. The man holding her shoved her forward and started firing with a small Uzi, making a cracking, drilling noise by her head.

Philippe, Broekman, Endo and Bleveans were struggling to their feet. Marie Boulard and Mrs Bleveans knelt, shivering as though the noise itself shook them. Mrs Bleveans was trying to look back, to where her husband was. Hisako couldn't see Mandamus. The saloon was filling with smoke like a thick sea fog.

Sucre saw the officers standing, and turned his fire on them. She saw Broekman whipped back as though pulled by a hawser fastened to his back, and Philippe hit in the belly, doubling up: she closed her eyes.

She opened them again when she heard Mrs Bleveans scream, over the noise of the firing. The woman crashed through the barrier of stools towards her husband, who lay on his side on the floor, shirt covered with blood. His wife fell towards him, over him. Sucre kept on firing; Mrs Bleveans's blouse kicked out in four or five places. Marie Boulard had risen at the same time, and threw herself at Sucre; the soldier holding Hisako flicked the Uzi to one side, bringing the woman down in a cloud of smoke and noise.

They finished all the men off. Mr Mandamus was, miraculously, uninjured, and protested to the last, before being silenced with a single shot from Sucre's pistol. The soldiers decided both the other women were indeed dead. They threw Hisako to the floor and tore the yukata off.

They were going to rape her there, but instead dragged her by the feet, out, across the corridor and into the ship's television lounge, because the air in the saloon was so thick with choking, acrid smoke.

FORCE MAJEURE

force majeure (fors mahzher') n. Irresistible compulsion or coercion, unforeseeable course of events excusing from fulfilment of contract. [F, = superior strength]

9: Aguaceros

Her fingers ached whenever she touched the cello.

After the demonstration they regrouped before dispersing, to see who had been arrested or injured. One of the students volunteered to go with the group of people who would follow the police buses back into the city and find out what had happened to those who were missing. The rest of them returned by cars and hired minibuses.

She found it easy to be quiet; her shock passed u

They went back to the same bar she'd met them in earlier that week. She went to the toilets and threw up.

The television showed the news; the clash outside the airport was the lead story, with the murdered riot policeman providing the headline. The students were divided; some had bruises from the batons, or knew people who'd had arms broken by the riot police, at the University, the airport or in the streets on Vietnam demos, and muttered that the man probably deserved it, or that another policeman might have done it, settling some old score in the heat of the battle… while the rest went as quiet as Hisako.

She left as soon as she could, coughing and complaining of a headache. In the flat she sat in darkness, staring at the patterns of light the city cast on to the ceiling and walls through the window blinds. She was still staring at the white and orange barred wedges of light when they gradually faded under the pervasive grey of a new day.

She didn't know what to do; to confess, to run away, to pretend nothing had happened…

She didn't know what had made her do it. Anger and pain, perhaps, but so what? There must have been hundreds of people there who'd been more angry, and been hurt worse than she. They hadn't killed anybody.

What was in her that could do such a thing? She wasn't normally violent; she'd been accused of attacking the music sometimes, of being too aggressive with the bow and her fingers, but (as she put her hands into her armpits, staring at the grey day dawning) that wasn't murder.

She still could hardly believe she'd done it, but the memory was there, livid and raw, like the taste and sting of the gas. And the memory resided not just in her brain, behind her eyes, but in her bones; in her fingers. She could feel again the crumpling and cracking as they lanced into the man's neck; they hurt again as she thought of her bones and his, buckling, compressing.

She hugged herself tighter and put her head down on to her knees, sobbing into the jeans and forcing her arms into her sides as though trying to crush her hands.

It was impossible to sleep the next night too, so she walked through the city until dawn, through the Soapland sleaze and past the quiet parks and down the side streets where the pachinko parlours sounded like a million tiny nails being rattled in a drum and the karaoke bars echoed with drunk businessmen singing badly, down the streets where the plaster European models stood in bright windows, hung with million-yen dresses, and electronics companies displayed the latest crop of gadgets like glittering jewellery, and through suburbs, where the small houses sat crammed and dark and the only sound was the distant city grumble and faraway trains screeching through points.

That day she slept, fitfully, always waking with the feeling of shock, convinced that some incredibly violent noise had just stopped echoing, that a titanic explosion had caused her to wake and the air had barely finished ringing with the aftershock. Once a small earthquake did wake her, but it was only enough to rattle the flat a little; nothing remarkable. She'd never been bothered by quakes before, but now she lay awake, worrying that it was just a prelude to a big one; a shock that would bring all Tokyo down, crushing her in her flat, squashing her under tons of rubble suffocating her on the bed like a pi

She got up, took to the streets again.

And when she did try to play the cello, her fingers ached. The left hand, the one that had been stepped on, hurt a little, but the right, which had to hold the bow, filled her with agony. It was as though all the bones had been recently. broken, and the act of trying to move the bow across the strings fractured them once more. She kept dropping the bow. Eventually she gave up. She walked, she sat in the flat, she ate next to nothing, she tried to sleep but couldn't, then fell suddenly asleep and had to claw her way out of dreams of cruelty and pain, and she waited for the police to come. They never did.