Tokyo Cancelled

‘That’s the definition of the future!’ Thomas’s voice betrayed frustration. ‘The past has happened. It is recorded. We all remember what happened yesterday. The future has not happened. It is not recorded anywhere and we cannot know it.’

‘Isn’t that tautology? Remembering is the recollection of the past. The past is that which can be recollected. Well let me tell you that I am unusual among people in being able to remember what has not happened yet. And the distinction between past and future seems less important than you might imagine.’

Thomas stared at her. He assumed madness.

‘For you, the present is easy to discern because it is simply where memory stops. Memories hurtle out of the past and come to a halt in the now. The present is the rockface at the end of the tunnel where you gouge away at the future.’

There was still no one else in the library. They talked naturally, loudly.

‘I, on the other hand, was born with all my memories, rather as a woman is born with all her eggs. I often forget where the present is because it is not, as it is for you, the gateway to the future. My future is already here.’

‘So tell me, if I am to believe you, what I am going to do tonight, when I leave this library.’

‘You make a common mistake. I didn’t say that I know everything that will ever happen. I said only that I already possess all my memories. (And they run out in so short a time! I have lived through nearly all of them, and now there remain just a few crumbs in the bottom of the bag.) Still, I do have more memories of you.

You will spend your life in the realm of the past You will fail entirely to keep up with the times But your wealth will make your father seem poor A mountain of jewels dug from mysterious mines.’

Thomas thought over the words.

‘What does all that mean? Can you explain?’

The old woman gave a flabby chuckle.

‘Surely you can’t expect me to tell you more than that? Isn’t it already encouraging enough?’

She put the lid on her lunch box.

‘Anyway. It is time for me to take my leave.’ Her possessions found their way back into her bag and she stood up, slowly and uncertainly. ‘But I have just remembered what will happen to you tonight. My mind is more blurred than it once was. You are going to have an encounter with Death. Don’t worry–you will survive.’ She smiled at him–almost affectionately–and departed.

Thomas could not return to his books. He sat for a long time reciting the woman’s words to himself and wondering about his future. He left the library in a daydream and wandered home. Full of his thoughts he rang at the wrong bell. A hooded figure answered the door, black robes billowing around its knees and only shadows where its face should have been. The figure carried a scythe. Made of plastic. Thomas remembered it was Halloween.

Not long afterwards, Thomas’s father received a big promotion. He worked for a small but thriving investment firm in the City that had made a name for itself in private financial services. He had joined the firm twelve years ago from Goldman Sachs and had from the outset consistently delivered better returns to his clients than any of his peers. Tall and attractive, with an entirely unselfconscious sense of humour, he also had a talent for entertaining the high net-worth individuals that were the firm’s clients. Now the board had asked him to take the place of the retiring managing director. He had agreed unhesitatingly.

In celebration of this advancement, Thomas’s father took the entire family to the Oxo Tower for dinner. They drove down from Islington in the car, crossing over Blackfriars Bridge from where the floodlights on St Paul’s Cathedral made it look like a magnificent dead effigy of itself. The restaurant was a floating cocoon of leather and stainless steel with lighting like caresses, and their table looked down over the row of corporate palaces that lined the other side of the Thames. Thomas thought his father looked somehow more imposing even than before. His mother had put on a new sequined dress and talked about the differences in the dream lives of modern and ancient Man as described in the book she was reading about Australian Aborigines. Champagne was poured. They all clinked glasses.

‘So here’s to the new boss,’ proclaimed Thomas’s father.

‘I’m so proud of you, darling,’ said his wife, kissing him on the cheek.

‘I can tell you boys: investing is a great business. A great discipline. It forces you to become exceptional. Most people are just interested with what’s going on now. Getting a little more, perhaps. But basically turning the wheels. When you’re in investment you have to be completely sceptical about the present, aware that there is nothing that cannot change, no future scenario that can be discounted. You exist on a different plane, predicting the future, making your living by working out how other people will be making their living tomorrow. And not only that, but making that future materialize by investing in it. There’s no sphere of knowledge that’s not relevant to this job. It might be water, it might be toys; it could be guns or new kinds of gene. The whole universe is there.’

His wife looked lovingly at him through mascara-thick lashes. Sculpted starters were brought that sat in the middle of expansive plates and seemed inadequate to the three brothers.

‘So tell me, boys–you’re all becoming men now–what is it you’d like to do with your lives? What is your ambition?’

The eldest spoke first.

‘Father, I have been thinking about this a lot recently. I think after I’ve finished at the LSE I’d like to get a couple of years’ experience in one of the big management consulting firms. I think that would give me a broad exposure to a lot of different industries. Then I can do an MBA–maybe in the US. At that point I’d be in a really good position to know what direction to move in. But what I’d really like to do–I say this now without much experience–is to run my own business.’

‘Sounds good, son. Make sure you don’t get too programmatic about things. Sometimes the biggest opportunities come at really inconvenient times. If you’ve planned your life out for the next twenty years you may not be able to make yourself available for them. Next!’

The second son spoke.

‘Father, I want to work for one of the big banks. The money industry is never going to be out of fashion. I can’t see the point of working in some shoe-string business for just enough to live on. The only respectable option to me seems to be to work damn hard and earn serious money–and retire when you’re forty.’

‘Well I’m forty-nine and I haven’t retired yet! Remember that it’s not enough simply to desire money very much. You have to be good at earning it. But I’m sure you will be. So finally to young Tom. What about you?’

Thomas looked around at his whole family, his eyes glinting with champagne.

‘I will surpass you all,’ he said. ‘I will make you all look like paupers.’

The paterfamilias smile vanished.

‘Oh really, Thomas. And how are you going to do that?’

‘You will see. One day you will see my mountain of jewels.’

His father’s voice became unpleasant.

‘Thomas, I’m just about sick of your stupid talk and your irresponsible, lazy behaviour. How dare you talk to me like that when you haven’t got the first idea of the world–especially on a night like this!’

His mother continued.

‘Your father and I never stop condoning what you do, tolerating your insolence and absent-mindedness. But sometimes I think we go too far. Do you realize who your father is? He is not just some average man who can be talked to like that. I don’t know how a member of your father’s and my family came to act like you. Think like you.’

Thomas’s brothers looked under the table. Waiters glided around in practised obliviousness. ‘Sometimes the future is not just an extension of the past according to rules we all know,’ said Thomas. ‘Look at revolutions, the collapse of empires. I think that something will happen to all of you that you have not even thought about. And you will not have devoted one minute of your lives to preparing yourselves for it. I don’t even know what it will be. But I know it will happen.’

The silence that followed was the silence of Thomas’s father’s rage. When he spoke it was with a self-restraint that burned white.

‘Thomas, when we go back home tonight I want you to pack your things and get out of our house. I will not have some mutant element in our home. Our family will not be abused by someone who is ungrateful, someone who likes thinking about the destruction of his brothers and parents. You will get out. Do you understand?’

Thomas nodded slowly, amazed and aghast that things had gone this far.

His father left the table and did not come back for half an hour. No one spoke as they drove home.

The family went to bed with raw feelings and empty stomachs. Thomas’s mother whispered to him that they would discuss all this in the morning. But Thomas could not bear the idea of waiting for such a discussion. He lay still until he could hear no movement and then silently got up, packed some clothes by torchlight into a school sports bag, and crept downstairs. He took two antique silver picture frames he had once helped his father choose for his mother’s birthday in a gallery on Ladbroke Grove, a gold pocket watch that was on display in the drawing room, and his father’s state-of-the-art SLR camera that had lain untouched in its wrappings for the last year. He disabled the burglar alarm, undid the locks on the heavy oak front door, eased it open, and stepped out.

The moon was so bright that the streets seemed to be bathed in an eerie kind of underexposed daylight that was even more pellucid for the absolute quiet. Insomniac houses and Range Rovers blinked at each other with red security eyes. Thomas wandered aimlessly, up to the point where gentility broke and the streets opened up around King’s Cross station. He bought a bag of greasy chips in an all-night kebab shop and sat in his coat on a bar stool at a narrow strip of tabletop looking out through his own reflection at the sparse traffic of taxis and night shelter regulars. He studied a much-faded poster of Istanbul hanging on the wall next to him, the skies above the Hagia Sofia unnaturally turquoise and the cars on the streets forty years old.

He left and wandered aimlessly around the station. It was late November, and morning came before the sun. Timetables took hold again as commuters arrived in waves and departed in buses and taxis. Eventually it grew light, and the shops opened.

Thomas went to a pawn shop. He removed the photographs from the frames and placed his items on the counter. The shop owner offered him £2,000. At the last minute he decided to keep the camera, and took £1,750.

Next to the pawn shop was an advertisement for a room for rent. Thomas called the number from a phone box; a woman came downstairs in her slippers and showed him up to a single room overlooking the station. He paid her £600 for the deposit and first month’s rent and closed the door behind her. He sat on the bed and looked at his photographs. One was of the wedding of his mother’s parents, both of whom had died before Thomas was born. The other was a studio portrait of the same couple with a baby–his mother–in a long white christening robe. Between the two photographs the man had developed a long scar on his right cheek that Thomas had never noticed when he had looked at them before.

For several days Thomas walked everywhere in the city taking photographs of his own. He went to the sparkling grove of banking towers that sat on the former dockyards among the eastern coils of the Thames and took pictures that were rather desolate. He took photographs of pre-Christmas sales in Covent Garden. He photographed Trafalgar Square at 4 a.m.

He called his mother to say ‘Hello’. She was frantic with fear and pleaded with him to come home. He said he would at some point.