Tuvalu Read Free Page A

jaw. ‘Okay. For how long then? Exactly?’
    â€˜How long what?’
    â€˜How long will I be a thief?’
    I shrugged. ‘Until the end of this trip?’
    Mami swivelled to look out the window, thinking. ‘I can live with that,’ she said finally.
    We sat in silence after this. Mami pulled a rubber band from somewhere, stretched it, then curled it on her fingers. Around us, commuters typed messages into phones, did make-up with hand mirrors, slept, drank and exchanged furtive sexual glances. People’s lives spilling into trains uninterrupted. The train as bathroom, bedroom and bar.

    We somehow changed climates in the space of this fifteen-minute train trip, because when we stepped onto the platform in Odaiba it was snowing big, cumbersome flakes. I had never seen it snow in Tokyo. I watched as Mami held out her hands, trying to catch whatever flakes she could, but they swirled around her open palms and down onto wet concrete.
    â€˜To hell with snow,’ she mumbled, wrapping her arms around her body, hunching her head and marching me on. Outside the station two young girls in bright pink parkas jumped excitedly, hands up as if snatching fruit from an unseen tree.
    â€˜Which way?’ I asked.
    â€˜No idea,’ said Mami. ‘Actually, no, that’s another lie. This way.’ She started off without the slightest regard for a man about to photograph his smiling wife. I watched him frown, pull his phone back to let her pass, then hold it out again as Mami started to talk about what she called ‘matters of much significance’.
    â€˜You see, Noah, I don’t accept rules like most people. That’s what you’ve got to understand about me. I think it’s so strange the way people just accept rules. We’re supposedly free to do whatever we want, but then there are all these rules—things we can’t do.’
    â€˜Like stealing a ticket?’
    â€˜Exactly. Only I can hear from your voice you think I learnt something from that, something that’ll make me less inclined to steal in future.’
    â€˜Do you often steal?’
    â€˜That’s not the point. Keep up. The point is, I don’t think it’s entirely wrong.’
    â€˜And what if everyone did it?’
    â€˜That’s not the point either. I’m taking a completely different angle here, a far more personal one.’
    Mami paused to think. We were nearing a slight bottleneck, unusual in Odaiba. There was a pair of schoolgirls vying to peer at the one mobile phone, a yakuza-looking type with a toothpick, children, mopey husbands and more than a few plump, middle-aged women with fixed fuck-the-world glares. I felt I was trying to follow a string of pebbles while ahead Mami weaved a dexterous, devil-may-care line through it all. As we stepped clear, a red feather, riding the bay breeze, whipped back past me and was lost.
    â€˜Let me try and be clear,’ she said, twisting her upper body to face me but maintaining the same almost belligerent pace. ‘The government says we are free to do whatever—’
    â€˜I’ve heard that but—’
    â€˜Let me finish.’ Mami halted. Two people collided into and bounced off her.
    â€˜I’m saying,’ she said, elongating the words, ‘a truly free society would be a society without rules—not so much as one rule. Nothing written down.’ She made a gesture (possibly tossing out the Japanese constitution).
    â€˜That would be chaos.’
    â€˜You would think.’ She frowned and started walking again. ‘But things have a funny way of working themselves out. Criminals live outside the law and therefore have a code. This code is just as effective as any government law. If you don’t follow the code, you have to be prepared for the consequences. Why can’t everything be like that? Why can’t all society be left to sort itself out? Imagine what a different place it’d