She struck a match (the sound made me jump) and lit candles. There was a table against the wall and two chairs. Apart from that the room was bare, with two open doorways leading into darkness. All colours seemed to be tones of orange or black and there was the smell of candle wax and stone. Long shadows danced tiny movements on the walls like winter, her bare ankles so delicate they could snap beneath the downy skin.
My heart was pounding heavy in my chest and the hairs on my arms were alert.
‘What is this place?’
‘I don’t actually know. When I found it there were odd things, probably from the war. I think people might have hidden here when the Nazis came.’
‘I thought the Nazis occupied the catacombs.’
‘They had a bunker; it’s miles away, though. They stuck to their bit. The Resistance used the tunnels as well and all sorts of other people. They couldn’t fight a war down here. It was too complicated. Do you want some water?’ she called, disappearing through one of the dark openings.
‘Please,’ I said, more out of reflex than thirst.
‘There isn’t much to eat, I’m afraid. Can I get you a yoghurt?’
I could hear water pouring from a jug, not a tap. How could she see?
‘Yeah. Yoghurt’s good.’
She put two glasses on the table and then came back a moment later with two pots of yoghurt and teaspoons. ‘There.’ She sat on one chair and I took the other.
‘Butterfly?’ My voice had a look-I’ll-come-straight-to-the-point tone to it which wasn’t natural (we had never come straight to the point).
‘Ben Constable?’
‘What’s going on?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean you told me you were dead and I haven’t seen you for seven months or something. You left me a trail of clues leading me to stories where you said you’d killed people, and to the other side of the world where you’d constructed a crazy scheme to entertain me, and now I’ve followed you down here where you live like a hermit/ballet dancer/fugitive on yoghurt and water. You are stranger than fiction and seem mad like I’ve never seen you before. I can’t work out why you would have done any of this.’
‘Oh God. Why is complicated. You never used to ask about why, that’s what I liked about you. We spent whole evenings drinking and talking, but you never wanted to know reasons for things.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s a rare and endearing quality.’
‘I kind of came to save you,’ I said from nowhere. I felt I should explain myself.
‘Well, that is the sweetest thing anybody has ever done in my life. I don’t know that I can explain why I did all those things. Even if I told you everything I know, I don’t think the pieces would fit together, or that everything would make sense.’
‘How about if you just told me why you said you’d killed yourself?’
She looked at the floor and I could hear her breathing.
‘OK. I’ll try to explain.’ She peeled the top off her yoghurt pot and I did the same.
‘I really was going to kill myself. I’d known it for a while and I was starting to make a plan; things were beginning to fall into place . . .’
‘So there never was a terminal illness or anything like that?’
‘I was depressed; depression’s a sickness, and if it makes you kill yourself, then it’s terminal.’
‘OK, I agree, but what you wrote was misleading. You made it sound like you were in the terminal phase of cancer or something.’
‘Yeah, I know. I thought that would make it easier.’
I’d already finished the yoghurt and was running my finger round the inside of the pot to get the last bit. Now that I’d eaten I was really hungry.
‘So what went wrong?’ I felt drunk on that yoghurt.
‘I’m trying to explain. I wanted to kill myself because I was desperately unhappy. I had been brought up to do things that I would regret every waking hour of my life and I started to understand that no matter how far I ran, no matter how much I changed the way I thought, or who I was, my past was chained to me. It would never fade. Nothing and nobody would ever free me from that weight. There was no hope of any kind of honest happiness.’
‘I thought you were happy sometimes when we talked. We laughed a lot.’
‘We did laugh a lot. Those are good memories. But they were only ever interludes from the endless disgust at my life. And so I decided to die.’
I felt my throat constrict. She was wrong. Depression makes you think like that, but there are always other ways to think. We’re not chained to our past. Her past is only stories that she made up—I mean there was a real past as well, but not the stories. They were a way of expressing something else. That’s how stories work.
‘So I started planning my death and organising things, in particular the treasure hunt, and it took over my brain. I thought about it all the time. When I slept I dreamed about it and when I woke I wanted to get up and carry on planning, and I was writing you letters every day and screwing them up and starting again and I was going through my journals looking for interesting things and throwing out embarrassing stuff. And I was happy. I was happy to be playing with you. For the first time in my life I wanted something to go on forever. I’d never known what that felt like before.’
Part of me wanted to hold her hand, but part of me didn’t as well. I drank my water and lit a cigarette. She watched me enviously.
‘Could I have one of those?’ she said.
‘Help yourself.’ I pushed the packet towards her.
She lit one and it sat uncomfortably between her fingers as she took a deep, trembling drag. She noticed me noticing. ‘Nicotine rush,’ she said. ‘I don’t really smoke anymore.’
‘So you decided that planning your death was the first thing you’d ever done that you enjoyed.’ I didn’t sound as if I believed her. I don’t know that I did believe her.
‘Yes.’ She looked at the floor again.
‘And so you told me you had killed yourself.’
She was silent.
‘Can you even imagine how much suffering it causes when people commit suicide? Can you imagine what goes through their family and friends’ brains?’
‘I don’t need to imagine.’
‘It’s not something you just say to people for a game, Butterfly. It’s crazy. It’s the cruellest lie I can think of.’
She didn’t say anything but looked at me with wet eyes, and I could see the shadows on her throat where it was blocking up.
‘I love you.’
‘Is that something you just say whenever, like a way of mollifying people around you?’
‘It’s what I say to you and to some other people as well. Just special people—nobody else.’
I’d seen her like this before. I couldn’t let her get away with hiding behind whatever mechanism she had for protecting herself. I wanted her to break down and vomit up everything, then she could be brand-new.
‘Was telling me that you were dead the only way you thought you could get rid of me?’
‘In a way, yes. You’re a persistent motherfucker. You don’t leave things alone. I tried to do it differently.’
‘To do what differently?’
‘I tried not killing myself. I tried to put distance between us, but you couldn’t understand. Having had my attention, you wanted it all the time, so if I disappeared, you would always come looking, calling me up or texting. You just wanted to know that I was OK. You just wanted to hear my voice and laugh about stuff or tell me about your day. It was horrible because I loved it so much and it fuelled my plan to hide treasure for you. You would follow the trail into my world of clues and writing and I would kill myself and I was excited and happy for the first time ever. But I had to really do it for it to work. I had to really kill myself. I had to believe it.’
‘So what changed? Why didn’t you just kill yourself for real? It might have been easier than all this.’
‘Two things . . .’ I’d asked her a question she knew the answer to. She’d got away with it. She wasn’t going to break down. ‘The first was that I wasn’t ready in time. I’d given myself a date. It was like a rule. I had to be ready for this deadline—March fifteenth.’
‘Why that day?’
‘It was the anniversary of something.’
‘The anniversary of what?’
‘Of my father’s death.’
‘Oh.’ I suddenly felt as though I’d strayed onto untouchable territory. I nodded.
‘And of Komori’s death too.’
‘Shit. They both died on the same day?’
‘A year apart.’
‘Hold on, you never know what date it is or what time or anything. I’m sure if you missed your suicide by a day or two, it wouldn’t have been that bad.’ I was talking as if she’d fucked up by not killing herself. Is that what I really thought?
‘I just wasn’t anywhere near ready. I knew it weeks beforehand. And then I found the door.’
‘What door?’
‘The entrance to the catacombs.’
‘By the plant in the metro?’
‘No. I found that later, after I’d been exploring. It was in the basement of my building.’
‘What?’
‘I was clearing out my stuff—every apartment in my building has its own locker-sized room in the basement, with a door and a padlock—and I saw this door that was different from the others. It was steel plated with two locks cut into it. While I was sorting through my things, a neighbour came down and I asked him whose door it was and he told me it went into the catacombs. I asked him who had the key. He said he didn’t know.’
‘So how’d you get in?’
‘I looked it up on the Internet. It took me about four hours to get it open the first time. Nowadays, so long as I can get a blank key for the lock, I can get through just about any door in five or six seconds.’
‘Where on earth do you get blank keys?’
‘Friendly locksmith. Rue Ménilmontant.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said kind of sarcastically.
‘Coming down here saved my life.’
‘How?’
‘Well, at first I was excited. I thought I was going to find an elite club of militant clock repairers, and I have since met quite a few people like that, but it was the time I spent on my own that was the best. There was something about being contained underground that made me feel good, like I was wrapped up and safe, like there was a world where I could be alive and well, and not need to die. Then I went back aboveground and I wanted to kill myself immediately; I came back underground and I was cured. From then on I knew what I was going to do. I found these rooms behind locked doors that nobody had been through for generations and decided that this was a temporary replacement for my death. I had nothing to lose. If ever it got bad again, I could always kill myself, but for now I was OK. I’d just decide every day whether I wanted to kill myself or not.’
‘Strangely, that does make sense. But it doesn’t explain why you told me you were dead. There wasn’t any need.’ I put my cigarette in the empty yoghurt pot and poured the last drop of water from my glass to make sure it was out, then pushed the pot to the middle of the table for Tomomi Ishikawa to use. She flicked in her ash and it hissed, then she accidentally blew smoke in my face. She wafted an apologetic hand.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know what?’
‘I suppose I do know,’ she sighed. ‘Part of the plan was for you to find my notebooks. I knew I wanted it to be you. You were the only person in the world who I wanted to read them. That was because you have a dark and twisted mind and I love you. And it’s because I needed—I wanted—to share those notebooks. I wanted somebody else to know what was inside. They are the weight I have been carrying around all my life. But for you to read the books, you and I could no longer live in the same world. I wouldn’t be able to stand your pity or your questions. There just wasn’t room for both of us. I had been planning to kill myself anyway. Telling you I was dead seemed like an obvious solution. It wouldn’t change anything for you and it would mean that I could carry on for as long as I felt like—which I didn’t think would be very long anyway.’
‘Well, now I’ve read your books, and I know that you’re living a second life, underground, after death. What now?’
‘I don’t know, Ben Constable. Your curious wandering mind has messed up everything, and I love you all the more for it.’
‘But you wanted me to come here. You wrote “Down here, BC” by the plant in the metro.’
‘That was before you’d read the books. I was pretty confused. I wanted saving and I wanted you to know me at the same time. But it was one or the other, the treasure hunt, or coming to find me. You chose the treasure hunt and I erased the signs. You weren’t supposed to do both.’
And I had this vague feeling of understanding, like I could see a blurred form emerging out of the mist. ‘Oh,’ I said, and there was quiet for an eternity as my brain put it all together. ‘I really am sorry. You are the strangest person I have ever met, Butterfly.’
‘I guess I know that.’
‘The thing is, once I knew you were alive, I had to know that you were all right. I had to understand. My brain couldn’t just leave it at that. There were too many questions left unanswered.’
She pushed her chair back, came and stood in front of me and took hold of my hands; I stood up too.
‘I really never meant for any of this to upset you,’ she said. ‘It was a game for you and me to play together; it was an adventure. I was just so wound up in what was going on in my own sad, twisted brain that I forgot to think about how you would feel. I’m no good at this sort of thing.’ Her fingers played with mine.
‘What sort of thing?’
‘This sort of thing.’ She put a hand behind my head and pulled it towards her and kissed my mouth. She’d never done that before.