As she straightened, slowly, carefully, both hands in the small of her back, she saw Janette Campbell, the hairdresser, who had just finished the last of the morning’s questionnaires, staring at her from the living room doorway. Keiko smiled and gave the radiator an absent-minded polish with the palm of her hand.
“I did a new workout last night, Mrs. Campbell, and I feel as if I’ve been pressed under a road-roller.”
“You want to be careful,” Mrs. Campbell said. “Even at your age. Although, you could always get Fancy to fix you. D’you know, she did my scalp three days ago, and I can still feel the benefit.”
“Did you enjoy it?” said Keiko.
Mrs. Campbell pursed her mouth slightly and leaned closer. “It was hardly decent, it felt so good,” she whispered. “She’s got a talent.”
“And was she…” Keiko stopped. She wanted to ask if Fancy had been sickened. “Does she talk to you, or is it quiet?”
“She chatted away quite the thing before and after,” said Mrs. Campbell. So maybe Fancy was getting better? Or perhaps there simply wasn’t anything upsetting under a scalp? “But very professional during the actual treatment,” Mrs. Campbell went on, with a kind of defiant emphasis on the last word. Keiko felt sure, although she couldn’t see how, that it was Sandra Dessing who was being defied.
“I hope it’s a great success. I hope nothing or nobody spoils it for her,” Keiko said, her heart hammering as she dipped this first toe into unknown waters.
Mrs. Campbell nodded twice with mouth pursed and eyebrows raised. “I think we both know who we’re talking about, don’t we?” she said. “So we needn’t say any more.”
Keiko nodded back at her, pursing her own mouth just as tightly.
“So,” said Mrs. Campbell in a leave-taking voice, “you be careful with these aerobics.”
“Of course,” Keiko said. “But it was weight machines, actually.”
“Oh no!” said Mrs. Campbell. “No, I’m serious, Keiko. You shouldn’t go near anything like that without supervision.” She darted glances all around Keiko’s body as if, now that she knew, she expected to notice broken bones poking against her skin.
“I have supervision,” said Keiko and decided to repay Mrs. Campbell with a gift of new gossip. “Murray was showing me what to do. He’s got a gym set up over in the building, at the back.” She waved her hand as best she could towards it.
“Oh,” said Mrs. Campbell, the single syllable dropping cold into the air between them, unmarked by any swoop of interest. “I see.”
Keiko ran over her words again in her mind, wondering if she had made some mistake, if she had caused some offence with her bad English, like when she had said I don’t care instead of I don’t mind to a visitor in high school and made the teacher angry. She couldn’t think of anything and smiled uncertainly at Mrs. Campbell.
The woman’s face had turned blank. Like Mrs. Poole’s face. Like Craig’s face when he’d been overheard. Like Malcolm’s face in the van that day and Mrs. Watson’s face through the window. Keiko had never seen so many blank looks in her life before. The inscrutable Scots, she thought to herself. Why did nobody warn me?
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“What for?”
“I’ve obviously said something-”
“Away,” said Mrs. Campbell, but she still was not smiling. “I’d better be going, anyway. I only had twenty minutes between ladies.”
What am I doing? Keiko longed to shout after her. What is it that I keep doing? If I should stay away from all the friendly people, and I offend all the others without even trying, soon there won’t be anyone left for me to talk to.
And suddenly not having to talk to anyone seemed like a treat she could afford. There were forty completed papers now and, even with the confounding effects of Mr. McKendrick, that was surely enough. So she perched at her word processor and typed. The pilot study is now complete, thanks to the most generous help of those who participated. The timing of the next exercise will be announced in due course. She centred the text, clicked it to bold, set the font size to sixteen, and clicked the print icon. When the warm sheet had curled out of the printer, she signed her name at the bottom, took it downstairs, removed the old sign, and pressed the new one firmly to the blobs of Blu-Tack on the door. Only then did she see that she had written her name in a neat block of kanji characters and not the string of English letters they would be expecting.
Tough, she thought. Hard cheese.
But cancelling the afternoon’s slots meant she didn’t get the chance to trickle away any more of her bad mood on casual meetings before Murray arrived in the evening. She was still irritable when she saw him jogging towards her, his breath pluming. Not only was it a colder evening than the one before, but it seemed darker, as though the season had lurched forward in just a day.
“How cold does it get here?” she asked.
“Not much worse than this,” said Murray, lifting his head and looking around himself. “It gets wetter, and the wind makes it seem colder than it is, but the dark’s the thing that bothers people if they’re the sort to get bothered.”
She waited for him to undo the padlock, peering up past the yellow blear of the street lamps at what seemed to her like already perfected blackness.
“How dark does it get?” she asked.
Murray laughed. “It doesn’t get darker,” he said, shaking his head in small movements but keeping his eyes on her face. “It just gets darker earlier and earlier and stays dark later and later. In December it gets dark at four and isn’t light again until eight.”
“No worse than Tokyo.”
“And people moan like you wouldn’t believe.”
“But we have lights,” said Keiko, frowning. “What’s their problem?”
“Exactly,” said Murray, and he held the door open for her to pass into the workshop. Just like that her crossness was gone. Two peremptory questions about her precious host country, one gratuitous mention of Tokyo (They don’t care, Keko-chan), some out-and-out criticism of the locals… and Murray didn’t mind any of it.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Depends what,” said Murray.
“What do you think of Janette Campbell?”
Murray blinked, but he thought about it before he answered, took it seriously. “Don’t know her all that well,” he said in the end. “Don’t have any plans to know her any better.”
Keiko nodded. “That’s an admirable attitude,” she said. “I should be more like that. Not let people nibble at me.”
“Yeah,” said Murray. “The world would be a better place if everyone was a bit more like you and me.” Keiko laughed. “Painchton would anyway.” He stretched and turned, smiling, towards the machines and the mirrors. “So…”
“I can’t remember much,” she warned him, smiling back.
“You’re not doing the same tonight anyway,” he said. “Tonight you’re just going to stretch your muscles to loosen them off.”
“But that’s exactly what you said last night,” said Keiko. “You said I was going to stretch out my muscles because I had been sitting all day.”
Murray ignored her, folding covers and stowing them away in a space on one of the metal shelves. “Come here,” he said when he had finished. They stood side by side in front of the mirrored wall and Murray told her to watch while he rolled his head and shoulders, flexed his arms, rolled his back up and down, and squatted deeply on one leg and then the other.
“Now copy me,” he said, and Keiko began, letting her head loll backwards.