Piercing Read Free

You forgive your mother?” I nodded without even thinking, but then something in me snapped and I slapped her face, hard. It was the only time I ever hit her.’
    Kawashima hadn’t opposed Yoko’s decision to quit her job. He’d made up his mind right from the beginning to support her in anything she chose to do. Nor did he express any reservations when she said she wanted to have a baby. The other guys in the office often teased him about how much he’d changed since his marriage, how much more cheerful he was. ‘What exactly is Yoko-chan putting in that bread of hers?’ - that sort of thing. He himself wasn’t really sure if he’d changed or not. But ever since he’d met Yoko, and especially since the day they’d decided, at her suggestion, to marry, his bouts of self-loathing had all but ceased. Not once had he been overwhelmed by the old panic and terror, not even when Rie was born and he first held her in his arms. Not, in fact, until ten nights ago.
    The mental and emotional torment of the old cycle of anxiety - unable to bear being alone, wanting someone always near but growing anxious when someone does get close, fearing that if they get any closer there’s no telling what might happen, until the fear itself becomes unbearable and solitude seems the only solution - had seemed to be fast becoming a thing of the past.
    Until ten nights ago , Kawashima muttered to himself, flicking the switch on the lightbox atop his desk. On its glass lid he arranged several of the thirty-five-millimetre slides he’d taken from the company archives. They were photos he was considering for a poster advertising the Yokohama Jazz Festival, though none of them had anything to do with jazz. Choosing graphics that had no direct connection to the product was something of a speciality of his. When the first indoor ski-slopes were about to open in Kyushu, his presentation - with copy that read THERE’S A FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING splashed across a photo of a little Caucasian boy and girl kissing - had won out over all the other agencies and made him a minor hero at the office. The photos he’d assembled for the jazz festival were black-and-whites of fashion models from the 1940s. The girls were all healthy specimens with generous smiles, lying on sandy beaches or about to dive into pools or strolling beneath parasols or drinking cocktails on a terrace . . .
    But it was impossible to care about any of this right now.
    Ten nights ago. He was in the bathtub with the baby, having just finished washing her. He handed her over to Yoko, who was waiting with a fluffy bath towel, and then he leaned back in the tub, leaving the pebbled-glass shower door partially open. Yoko was murmuring to the baby as she dried her, and he was aware of himself smiling at them. And then, with no prelude or warning, a thought came percolating up into his brain and he felt the muscles of his cheeks twitch and freeze.
    I wouldn’t ever stab that baby with an ice pick, would I?
    For a moment, he wasn’t certain who was sitting there in that steam-filled tub. Yoko opened the bathroom door to leave, then looked back and said something to him, but it wasn’t registering. Masayuki? Masayuki, what’s wrong? What’s the matter? She called to him several times before he snapped out of it.
    ‘Oh, still there? Guess I was daydreaming,’ he said, and by the time his eyes were refocused on her and the baby, his skin - in spite of the very warm water - had turned to gooseflesh.
    The sharp, gleaming point of an ice-pick: from that moment on, he couldn’t get the image out of his head. You wouldn’t do something like that, you would never stab the baby, he told himself hundreds of times, but the voice inside him never stopped replying: I just might . And each night from then on he’d found himself unable to go to bed until he stood over the crib, ice pick in hand, to confirm to himself that it was all right, he wasn’t going to stab her.
    Kawashima turned off the