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  ‘As far as he could see’ was to be taken literally: he simply never saw her face as she was always wearing a mask. But that was OK. He could see her eyes and ninety-five per cent of her body, and the main thing was that she was doing a very good job.

  What he remembered from that first cleaning session, then, was not so much his attraction to her as the fact that he accepted so calmly the idea of being pampered and the accompanying enticement of buying their range of inexpensive accessories, which included their simple, cheap toothbrushes (one a month) and their interdental brushes (a pack of four per month). The latter were a novelty for him and by far and away more tactile, invasive, and pleasurable than he could have imagined, as he stood in front of the mirror at home in the evening and in the morning inserting them into the gaps in his front and back teeth. He was wary of overusing them and forcing them where they surely could not go, though when he asked about overuse on his return he was gently disabused.

  On his second visit he began to notice the local area more, the antiquarian shops, the secondhand junk shops, the lively market on the edges of Ueno, the ramen shops of the kind you found anywhere in the country, steak houses, ‘family’ restaurants, and in fact the innumerable restaurants, generally. He began to wonder why so many businesses were concentrated around what was after all a very mundane overground train station. The more famous Akihabara and Ueno had a greater reason for existing, to his mind, and yet this place had been here just as long, probably, waiting for him. He knew it was an irrational feeling, but it was real.

  And alongside the usual shops and specialists such as a whole shop devoted to the paraphernalia of the idiotic sport of golf, he started to notice the occasional doorway or sign, usually advertising massage.

  It became clear as early as his second, maybe his third, visit to the dentist’s, however, that something else would keep him coming to the area for some time: the matter of cleaning the ‘pockets’ around his teeth. They called it deep pocket cleaning, and the expression had an appeal for him he could not quite explain. This was despite the fact that however many X-rays they showed him, he felt he would not ever quite understand what or where these pockets resided, exactly. He knew only that they were back there somewhere, minute, but significant enough to let his imagination picture small grooves that were being chipped away at to remove the tartar that was accumulating there and endangering the stability of his teeth. Occasionally, his mind conjured a castle whose walls were slowly being undermined by soldiers working away at its foundations underground.

  So on that second visit he became aware as one becomes aware of something that one has taken for granted for a length of time, that the hygienist, Mariko, was still wearing her mask. He was not even afforded the opportunity of seeing her face for even the brief few minutes when dentists and their assistants sometimes lowered their masks when they were not doing close work or when they appeared in the reception area. Consequently, he felt licensed to observe her eyes more attentively than might otherwise have been the case. Pleasingly, her eyes were the type that he preferred and many of his countrymen and women felt embarrassed by: single-lidded, with a pronounced epicanthic fold. He had lost count of the number of past girlfriends who had pouted with displeasure at such an unlucky throw of the evolutionary die, usually when he had complimented them.

  Naturally, he wondered if he would ever get the chance to do exactly that with Mariko. It was a long hill to climb, though, to go from being ministered to impersonally to going on a date, which would almost definitely result in his having to switch clinics afterwards. He had to put it from his mind, and for the time being that was fairly easy, given his propensity to drift off in the chair, a guilty pleasure, though he did not know why.

  ‘I’m just going to lower your chair now,’ she said, not for the first time. He never really tired of these accommodating punctuations to a procedure he would soon become very used to. In fact, he found it rather winning of her.

  Then, ‘I’m just going to do a little mouth irrigation now.’

  And so it would go. If it was a simple cleaning, he would feel that chiselling sensation to remove the tartar around and between his teeth, a sensation which he actually found pleasant, unless a nerve was touched. He would have been the first, however, to make it clear that he was no masochist. And he felt genuinely discomfited not being able to swallow with ease, but there was a sense of comfort in being entirely at the mercy of another person under such a regime, to be sure, not least when the hygienist’s small chest occasionally pressed up against the back of his head when she had to stand behind him.

  Most sessions proceeded in this way, with him making only the barest small talk with Mariko. Part of him resented the number of trips he would have to make to see this deep pocket cleaning through, yet another part was happy to see the process extended like this, for both the opportunity to see Mariko and to be lightly pinioned by the triangle made by her slim arms and hands.

  Added to all this, he was becoming more curious about the area around the station. A few times, as he walked from the station, he had seen the same young man, who had shoulder-length brown hair and a permanently startled look, standing by one of the exits in the lee of the raised train platform. Perhaps he had seen the same young women, too, hurrying determinedly into buildings where they worked.

  On perhaps his fifth visit now, he wondered about the furtive businesses being run in the area. In his mind, sometimes, he saw a narrow staircase with uninviting metal doors and cryptic signs and had the sensation of both being drawn in and repelled. Perhaps he would enquire nevertheless.

  ‘That’s you done for today, then.’ Mariko’s words dug him out of his reverie.

  When he exited the surgery, it was already dark and raining, but he did not feel like going home. There was something missing, something he hadn’t thought of that he felt to be on the edges of awareness. On the corner of the street the surgery was located in there was a handy shop that sold cheap cans of some of his favourite drinks and chocolates, so he headed there. Feeling vaguely satisfied at this little find, he started to walk to the station, but as it was a Friday evening and he hadn’t lined up anything, he walked across a busy main street into the very lively market that sheltered under the raised train tracks. It was a muddle of side streets, stalls, nooks, and cross-paths that reminded him of scenes from films set in North Africa. After some while trudging around and from his knowledge of previous forays, he knew that one edge of this market was bounded by clubs and what were probably hostess bars, in which he had never had any interest. Just a big scam for salary men. Plastic bag in hand, then, he stood there on the corner of one of the streets he had just come down, and for the first time he wondered if he was doing this in the absurd hope that he might bump into Mariko by chance. He surely would if he did it often enough, of course, but the odds could just as easily be that he could walk though a wall, which he had read could happen, except that it would probably take longer than the eventual history of the universe to come about. Or it could happen with his next step.

  In the meantime, he spotted what he had probably not wanted to admit to himself all along: an advertisement on the ground floor for a relaxing massage on the third floor of a nearby building. It showed a woman lying on a tropical beach, and he thought it was rather ironic for such a business to be showing the sort of client that was probably the last person to come to them for a massage. He was drawn to the idea, but at the same time, part of him did not want anything inappropriate to take place. Inappropriate to whom? a voice inside him said.

  He went up the ill-lit staircase, which was surprisingly quiet, to his mind. Not sure of himself, he knocked on a door on the second floor and a young woman in a Bo-Peep outfit came up to him. Thinking this was the same business as advertised outside, he asked for a price list, but as soon as he was given it, he realised this was a different place, out of his financial league.

  He made his apologies and went on up to the top of the stairs, where a dowdily dressed
middle-aged Chinese woman was speaking to a man of about his own age and looking through a brochure of photos of young women, all Chinese. When his turn came, he determined that he could not exactly know what he was going to get for his money, let alone know what the rooms were like, so he made his excuses, saying he would come back some time. He half-meant it. The woman had been friendly, and the whole experience had not been totally dispiriting. He had dipped his toe in, without taking the plunge.

  On his next visit, on the train journey into town, he was touched by the sight of an attractive woman practising a dance routine. Supporting herself lightly on a vertical handrail, she seemed to be running through a very limited part of a flamenco routine. There was nothing flamboyant about what she was doing; on the contrary, she was concentrating so much that she must have been almost oblivious to the few people on the carriage who noticed her. He admired such single-mindedness. That someone could almost disappear within themself like this, almost hide in plain sight, comforted him. He would like to have asked her if it indeed was flamenco she was rehearsing, but it would have been uncool, and he did not want to disturb her.

  This fortunate event almost succeeded in taking his mind off a familiar habit of his but ended up reinforcing it: counting the number of people wearing masks on the train. In contrast to the woman, their way of hiding was crass – and antisocial. Opposite him were two young, probably attractive (though you could not exactly be sure) women in their thirties chatting away quite contentedly, as if half the features of their faces weren’t indecipherable. He spotted two middle-aged men with masks, one sitting, one standing, as well as a teenager. He could not explain exactly what annoyed him so much about this practice, but it was something to do with the way the masks made one focus on the wearers’ eyes, and especially how they made those eyes seem as if they were targeting him, in contrast to the way Mariko’s eyes seemed totally welcoming.

  At the surgery, he was told he would need an injection, as the deep pocket cleaning might be particularly hard on his gums this time, so, as Mariko went off to one of the many partitioned spaces, he surrendered himself to the least pleasant aspect by far of any session, barring having a tooth extracted, something which he had not experienced since childhood and was determined never to let happen again. He could still hear the dentist from long, long ago shouting at him how he was a coward. So ingrained was the memory that he could remember her thick black-framed glasses and over-sized fake gold earrings.

  In this case, the injections were done by what must have been a young trainee dentist, as Yuki felt a certain unsteadiness in the man’s hand. It was not that Yuki was hurt in any way, rather that the trainee seemed to be taking extra-special care to steady himself. And it was not just one injection, but several.

  In such instances, Yuki found it calming to think of his Jimi Hendrix collection, of the many different CDs he had, official and non-official, studio and live performances, not to mention the various versions he had downloaded from the Internet. Trying to remember what he had learned about the various live versions of Jimi’s famous standards and how they had been messed with and corrected and updated over the years was enough to make him forget his nervousness for a while. The different masterings on CD of a handful of the posthumous compilations was a mind-bogglingly complicated area on its own. At the same time, in his head, he was listening to a favourite solo, and, strangely, he thought, if he were to experience a sharp pain from the needle and it were to coincide with one of the high notes on Jimi’s guitar, it would somehow mitigate that pain, if not dissipate it. But luckily, there was no sharp pain on this occasion.

  When Mariko reappeared, her face bound by her mask as usual, his bottom lip was already feeling numb. He managed to exchange a few pleasantries with her, but he was feeling a little sleepy even before she started cleaning. He could not be sure, but he thought, before his eyes closed and his mind started wandering again, that he heard himself invite her to have a coffee with him.

  He was walking along a dark, narrow corridor, being led by a woman. The hand was soft to the touch. The décor was brownish-orange, and there was a strong smell of incense. He noticed drab nylon sheets at intervals on either side, covering what were probably small cubicles. He heard a knocking against one wall and stopped to listen, but the hand pulled him on. She gave him a towel and told him to step into the shower. She insisted on him putting his phone in a waterproof bag and taking it with him into the shower, where he hung it on a hook. After checking the flow and temperature, she directed the shower head on him.

  ❦

  He woke with a start as he realised that he had fallen asleep in the middle of cleaning.

  ‘So,’ she said when she was finished. ‘Which date is good for you?’

  ‘Date?’

  ‘For coffee.’

  ‘But . . .’

  I don’t even know what you look like.

  He could hardly say that, though.

  ‘Oh, oh, yes, I think any day is fine,’ he said, pulling himself together.

  ‘Any day?’

  They set a date for the following week, the day after his next appointment, as it turned out. It was a busy surgery, and she had only the one day off.

  ‘I’ll meet you downstairs’ were her last words and, as she said them, she pulled down on her mask, almost dramatically, as if she were demonstrating a mundane but necessary procedure, revealing thin lips, a small jaw, and very slightly prominent teeth, before, just as suddenly, letting it snap back into place. He decided in the end that she had performed the action absent-mindedly, as someone does at home when no one else is around.

  The woman was about thirty, her hair reaching down to her shoulder blades; her breasts were soft and puffy, yielding to pressure like small, slightly deflated balloons, a sensation he adored. She showed him a picture of a village in China on her iPhone. He felt it could have been on another planet, it looked so unfamiliar.

  With a start, he suddenly wondered where his own phone was. If they got hold of that, who knows what they could do with his data. But then he remembered that they had insisted on him putting it in a waterproof bag and taking it with him into the shower.

  She pushed him gently onto the narrow futon so that he lay flat on his back. Before he had expected it, her head was already at his crotch, working on him. Whilst he took pleasure from what was happening, he found his mind wandering. He liked her cleanliness, the strangely dry texture of her hair, and what was almost a non-smell on her. He feared the raw smell of women more than anything. Almost any bad smell could put him off a partner whilst in the act. But perhaps it was all blanketed by the intensity of the incense in the place.

  He thought of the picture on her mobile phone. Why did she make such a connection with him? Why did she even want to make such a connection? He stroked her back, moving his hand down that shallow defile to her buttocks.

  She hadn’t looked up at him since she had started. That was good, he thought, though it would be nice to remember her face.

  Still, he found himself thinking now of her village, particularly of whether she had a child. He could just imagine that she had a mother looking after her young son or daughter right now, while she did this to him. Then, he started asking himself where the money was going, how much she kept of it in the end. There must be a trail. How much of it trickled back to her family in the village in China? How long would she have to go on doing this?

  As he stood in the alcove adjusting his umbrella, about to step out into the dark and the warm rain, a figure blocked him. It was the man with shoulder-length, slightly scary hair and drab clothes. They made eye contact. Did this man guess or know something about him? More pertinently, was he judging Yuki? Maybe he even worked there in some capacity, because he went up the stairs in the direction Yuki had come from.

  He realised he was back in the market; he had hardly registered it before going up to the place, having walked around so long. He didn’t like the look of some of the vendors, many of whom appeared forei
gn, quite a few being Chinese. The market wasn’t really crowded enough for him to need to push against anyone, but he felt as if he were pushing into soft currents of flesh and clammy air. Then he realised he was a little dizzy, and stumbled. Something told him he had to get off the street into the station or he would drown in people, faces, objects.

  On the way home he realised he wanted to go back to the woman even if it meant before his date with Mariko, as hypocritical as that made him feel. He found himself trying in his mind to reconstruct her features, her bony, angular cheeks, her thin arms, and doll-like frame, a frame that could be adjusted almost like that of a marionette. By contrast, the masseuse was fuller-bodied, more womanly, in a sense. And then he thought of all of the things he could have done with her in the room which he had not dared although he had licence to do so, for a price. He wished he had a photo of Mariko, or at least some contact on social media but he didn’t even have her email address yet!

  On that first date, his heart dipped a little when she turned up wearing a mask, but as they were going for a coffee, he knew he was guaranteed some time without that particular barrier. As it turned out, they had cake and her mask came off for longer than he had expected.

  But an unexpected preoccupation came over him. As she neatly cut up the cake and ate, he found himself observing the fork as she slid the sections into her mouth, the cream topping occasionally catching on her top row, soon removed by her tongue. As the fork was divested of its load, he noticed the hook-like end of the shortest tine, and it sent a shiver through him. Then it was obliterated as it caught the light and she put it down for a while. She was talking about her interest in modern art and what she liked to see in museums, and he was encouraged by that. Maybe she would relate to his own interest in freer forms of music.