Dark Water

‘It’s hot out there. Climb in,’ Aso said, apparently not having yet had his fill of conversation. Kensuke got in and closed the door, and Aso turned on the air-condi-tioning and began his story. It was a detailed account of why he’d dumped Yukari, on Battery No. 6…

Yukari was pregnant with his child. But the cult she belonged to forbade abortion. She had pressed Aso to marry her—a common enough scenario. Cult or no, this was the kind of story that Kensuke often heard from Aso.

‘Is that why you dumped her?’ intervened Kensuke, nudging Aso to get to the end sooner than later. If Aso was left to recount the story at his own pace, the whole joke would begin to sound too real.

‘The stupid bitch showed me this picture.’

Aso opened the glove compartment and took out a piece of paper folded into four. It bore a color illustration. Kensuke stared at the juvenile thing. It showed green trees growing luxuriantly under a sun painted in gold. Under the trees sprawled grown men and women surrounded by children at play. Dogs, cats, and even lions strutted contentedly among the trees. A closer look at the picture revealed that this earthly paradise was surrounded by the sea. Perhaps it was in the tropics; the trees were laden with coconuts. Kensuke guessed the author at once.

‘Yukari drew this?’

‘Yeah, this is apparently what you get when the stuff she believes in is put on paper. Peace, tranquility, no disease or old age, just life eternal. What do you make of it?’

Yukari was not much of a talker, and Kensuke could see how it must have been much easier for her to express her cherished ideal of paradise on earth as a picture rather than in words.

Kensuke just stared at the picture without answering Aso’s question. After all, it wasn’t the kind of question you could answer on the spot.

‘Why don’t we build our own paradise?’ His hands clasped to his chest, Aso trilled grotesquely, mimicking Yukari. Then, dramatically jerking his face closer to Kensuke: ‘Nothing pissed me off worse in all my twenty-three years. That idiot just doesn’t have a clue about how utterly miserable her notion of living on and on for all eternity is.’

Kensuke sided with Yukari. ‘You’re being too harsh. We’re all different in how we look at things.’

‘Don’t call me harsh! She tried to force her idealistic crap on me.’

‘So you went and dumped her on Battery No. 6, right?’

‘Right. Banished her to a desert island, I did. I think I made the punishment fit the crime. If she wants to build a paradise, then she can damn well build it herself.’

‘But that island is off limits, isn’t it?’

‘Took a rubber dinghy over there in the middle of the night.’

Yukari didn’t know that Battery No. 6 was legally closed to the general public and so had no qualms at all about their nocturnal adventure. They took the dinghy in the car, but it mostly fell to Yukari to inflate and to row the thing to their destination. Yukari would have followed Aso to the end of the earth without the slightest suspicion. Once they had landed on the battery island, Aso used chloroform to knock her out, leaving her unconscious while he made his getaway. The way he described abandoning Yukari on Battery No. 6, he made it all sound so simple.

Kensuke remained unconvinced. After all, a mere three hundred yards separated Battery No. 6 from the Marine Park. It was not too far a distance to swim. Even if you couldn’t swim, many pleasure boats cruised by the island. All you had to do was stand on an embankment and shout to make yourself heard. Surely, he pointed out to Aso, Battery No. 6 was as easy to get off as it was to get to.

‘No problem, I took all her clothes.’

‘You mean you left her there naked?’

‘Look, I know her pretty well. She’d rather die than be seen naked in public. She’s that sort of woman.’

Kensuke was left speechless. He didn’t know the whole story between Aso and Yukari, but he did know that they were in a relationship, and Aso must have felt something for her during that time. He didn’t feel it was right, even as a joke, for Aso to be saying that he’d stripped someone naked and left her for dead. Whether or not Aso was telling the truth, describing such an act to a third party was brutal enough.

The atmosphere was oppressive and Kensuke remained silent. Glancing furtively sideways, he noticed that Aso seemed to be on the verge of saying something but swallowing the words each time.

‘I’d better be off then,’ he said. He shifted from Park to Drive mode and lowered his hand to disengage the hand brake.

It was as Kensuke opened the car door that he put his final question to Aso. ‘When did you do it? When did you leave Yukari there?’

‘It must have been around the time of the Obon festival. The city was deserted, everyone gone home to the country.’

Obon, when the ancestors returned…That made it about ten days ago.

Kensuke got out of the car and went round towards the driver’s seat. Aso had the car window open, and his arm was dangling outside, his hand tapping the side of the car. He thrust this hand out in Kensuke’s direction.