Fire Flowers by Ben Byrne

Author:Ben Byrne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions UK
Published: 2014-12-21T16:00:00+00:00

The next day, I washed, dressed in my brightest clothes and painted my eyes in vivid colours. I took the Yamanote Line to Shimbashi and walked in the direction of Tokyo Bay, past the old, abandoned market, toward the dull steel arches of the Kachidoki Bridge. The sky was pale and blustery, and there was a reek of fish. I examined the card that the Blood Cherries had left.

The house was a big, broken-down mansion that must have belonged to some merchant at one point. A girl dressed in a short green skirt opened the door. She wore a sprig of clover in her hair and her eyelids were shaded with silvery-green powder, like the wings of some exotic butterfly.

I bowed meekly as she showed me through to a gutted hall. The place looked like an enormous, smashed-up doll’s house. Landings jutted out from the walls, splintered stairs and ladders led up through holes in the collapsed ceiling. Dozens of girls lounged about in their underclothes on the bare flag- stones with cigarettes in their mouths, playing flower cards and swigging from a large bottle they passed between them. Piles of clothes were scattered all around and a large mirror stained with verdigris was ratcheted to the split wooden panelling of one wall.

Underneath the staircase, a gaudy little shrine had been set up, decorated with star-shaped scraps of silver paper and burning candles. Torn-out pictures of angels had been pasted in a circle on the crumbling plaster, and in the centre, a carved statue of Jesus Christ was splayed upon a wooden cross. He was naked but for a loincloth, his head turned away, as if he couldn’t bear to look at the world.

The plump girl was kneeling before it, hands clasped, mumbling to herself. Junko stepped forward from a large, dark hole in the wall, steadying herself as she came toward me. Her face was smooth and white, framed by tight black curls, and she wore an enormous pair of round sunglasses. Little prickles, like bedbug bites, lined the white skin of her inner arms.

“Did you know that Maria-sama was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus Christ?” she rasped. She waved at the fat girl. “Yotchan over there believes that if she prays hard enough, Jesus Christ will make her a virgin again!”

She laughed, her neck wrinkled and sagging beneath thick powder.

“How old-fashioned!” she spat. “Relying on a man for everything.”

She smiled tightly and took off her sunglasses. Her eyes shrank as she looked at me.

“You’ve come to work for me now, is that it?”

I nodded.

“They always do.”

She held up bony fingers in front of my face, counting them off. “Eight yen a time. That’s the standard rate. Four goes to us. Two more for food and drink. You work out the rest.”

Two yen. It really wasn’t much. A packet of cigarettes alone cost twenty. But I bowed my head, feeling a painful itch between my thighs and a sharp desire for one of my little pills.

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