Tales of Crow- The Complete series Box Set Read online

  Bee rolled his huge eyes. They seemed to take a few seconds to come around again. ‘The last email from the promoter said we’d sold thirty-seven tickets. I’m pretty sure it won’t end our career any more than the last three years has been doing.’

  ‘But I was going to meet someone!’

  Ken sighed. ‘Can’t you just toss one off like the rest of us for once?’

  Dai said nothing. He thumped a hand against the dashboard and jerked the van into reverse, spinning them backwards so fast Ken gasped as he thought for a moment that they would smash straight through the low, rusty crash barrier and plummet down into the ravine below. Bee looked unconcerned and O-Remo just laughed.

  ‘You never know, there might be some hot doom metal fans at this place,’ Ken said.

  ‘Fat fucking chance,’ Dai muttered. ‘There’s hardly any left in the whole country. We should have broken this band up years ago.’

  ‘No one’s stopping you,’ O-Remo said. ‘Drummers are like persimmon trees. You don’t notice how many there are until winter comes along and strips away the leaves. And then they’re everywhere. And they all look the same.’

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ Dai said.

  Bee disappeared back in among the equipment and the others lapsed into silence. A few minutes later they came to the small turning on their left, almost hidden by overhanging foliage. Dai turned the truck into the thin lane and ahead of them appeared an ornate corrugated steel gate announcing BRITISH HEIGHTS.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Dai muttered. ‘I hate the fucking British. All they listen to is whiny indie shit and pop crap.’

  The others were quiet as Dai steered the van down a little street with mock Medieval buildings lining both sides. He reached a small roundabout with a Christmas tree tied up with fairy lights on a little central island, and took the first left turn up to a large castle-like structure with a car park at the front.

  ‘I’ll go in,’ Ken said, just wanting to get away from the others. ‘Stay here. I’ll see what they say.’

  He climbed out of the van and went up a set of steps to a main entrance. Inside, a Japanese girl and a couple of blonde-haired foreigners were sitting behind a reception desk. The foreigners stared at him glumly, but the girl, whose nametag identified her as MIKA, offered him a nice smile.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’

  ‘We lost our way,’ Ken said. ‘We were supposed to be in Toyama tonight but our van has a fuel leak and we heard there’s a heavy storm coming in. Do you have rooms or something? And ideally a mechanic who could have a look at our van?’

  Mika smiled. ‘Of course. She pushed a tariff card across the desk towards him. ‘These are our hotel rates. Three meals are included.’

  Ken glanced down the list. It wasn’t cheap, but it was just for one night. There were singles, twins and even quad rooms available, but the last thing he felt like right now was spending any more time with the others. He had a credit card, and he could charge it to the band account. It might or might not ever get paid off, but at least he could forget about it for a while.

  ‘Four singles, please. Just for tonight. We’ll be moving on in the morning.’

  ‘Certainly.’ She tapped away on the computer while the two foreigners just stared at him. After a few seconds she looked up. ‘And we do have an onsite mechanic who can have a look at your vehicle. There will be a small fee, of course.’

  ‘No problem.’

  Mika handed him four keys. ‘These are for your rooms. You’re all in the Lord Winchester building. Desmond will show you to your rooms.’

  She said something in English to one of the foreigners, and a dorky kid of about eighteen stood up. ‘This way,’ he said in English, leading Ken back out into the car park.

  The others had climbed out of the van. Dai was looking eagerly towards an annex building on the edge of the Grand Mansion titled The British Arms. A sign displaying a picture of a frothing beer mug stood outside. O-Remo was scratching at his face, while Bee stood silently and still beside him, like a wraith.

  ‘You can leave your van here,’ Desmond said in thickly accented Australian English which Ken could only just understand. Then he waved at them to follow as he headed off towards one of the buildings.

  They had just got inside, and Desmond was showing them to a quartet of antique but comfortable-looking rooms, when Ken heard a gaggle of laughter coming from a set of stairs that led up to the second floor. He turned around, his eyes widening as a cluster of schoolgirls came skipping down the staircase towards them.

  ‘Oh my,’ Dai muttered beside him.

  One or two of the girls looked up, and a flash of recognition crossed their faces. Then they were being bundled out of the door by others coming down the stairs behind them.

  Ken nodded slowly. Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to be stuck up here for a day or two. Once, high school girls had been their bread and butter, filling the halls and the live houses, and often later their beds, as their popularity grew.

  They hadn’t appealed to the nice types. Nice girls didn’t like their kind of music. They appealed to the girls hanging on by a thread to respectable society, the girls destined to become hostesses, disillusioned waitresses in titty bars, factory floor workers, and pachinko parlour cashiers. The disaffected youth.

  And Ken had seen plenty of disaffection coming down the stairs. Bad girls stood out a mile—they wore too much makeup, their skirts were rolled up higher than school policy allowed, their shirt buttons were undone, they wore rings and earrings, their hair was tinted with dye.

  Beside him, Dai was smiling.

  ‘I hope that pub’s open late,’ the drummer said. ‘I think we’re going to enjoy staying here after all.’

  3

  Karin remembers her past

  Karin Kobayashi rolled over in bed, reaching out a hand to caress the sheets. She touched a wet patch where Rutherford had been lying and hastily withdrew her hand. She rolled back over, pulled the duvet down and hooked her arms over it, staring up at the ornate ceiling.

  What happened to me?

  Her body ached and her vagina still tingled from the sex. Rutherford had gone, throwing some clothes on and hurrying downstairs as a bus group showed up a little earlier than expected, leaving her alone in the Queen’s Bedroom, a mock-country home-styled room which was usually opened as a museum for guests. Today though, it was off limits—closed for “renovation”—as Rutherford was feeling a little kinky.

  She had discovered with Rutherford that foreign penises were only uniformly large in the porn industry, but what he lacked in size he made up for in effort, making use of his fingers and his tongue like some fifteen-year-old getting laid for the first time, doing just enough to satisfy her, making her forget for a few minutes that she was screwing someone more than double her age, who had probably never been attractive.

  Unfortunately, looks weren’t everything.

  She closed her eyes, dreaming of how she might utilise his money to revive her career once they were married. She could probably afford to finance a comeback album, pay for some good reviews in the press, maybe land a TV appearance or two. She was only thirty. She wasn’t quite past her best yet.

  Where did it all go wrong?

  She had danced her heart out. Trying not to puff as her heart raced, Karin stood in line as the tall man with the slicked-back hair strode up and down in front of them. Some of the other girls were making eye contact, offering little smiles, one or two even winking, the little tramps. Karin just kept her eyes down, not daring to suggest anything. It would be or it would not be.

  ‘You,’ he said to a girl three down from her, and in a burst of giggling and excitement the girl jumped out of the line and ran over to the crowd of waiting parents and friends. A middle-aged woman with a weathered version of the same face swept her up in a hug, spinning her around.

  Karin didn’t even dare to sigh. The girl was not the best looking, not even the best dancer. Karin’s hopes rose.

  Six mo
re times he picked girls out of the lineup of thirty. As their chances of selection become slimmer, so the euphoria of the selected grew. The seventh girl gave a high-pitched scream worthy of a horror movie victim and actually fell to her knees, slapping at the ground. The tall man gave a humph and moved on.

  Karin was beginning to despair. At sixteen, she still had time for other chances, other auditions for other singing troupes. But this was the big one. Girls Chorus was already established as an arena act; if she made the cut as a junior member she had a ready-made staircase up to stardom in front of her.

  ‘And … you.’

  Karin barely dared to look up, but the well-shined leather shoes had stopped in front of her, pointing in her direction. One foot tapped impatiently.

  Karin looked up over immaculately pressed Ralph Lauren slacks and a Versace smoking jacket to a chiseled face with cold eyes and a tight, thin-lipped mouth. He was frowning slightly like a teacher about to admonish a student.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ was all she could say as she took a single step forward.

  Immediately there was chaos, as the girls not chosen exploded into dramatic displays of grief and failure, crying, shouting, wrapping each other up in hugs. Karin stood quietly, glancing up at the crowd of caring mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, wishing that just one of her family might have come.

  Only her boyfriend, Hiro, stood there, a smile on his face that had forced itself through the cloud of uncertainty. He put out his arms to embrace her as she walked slowly over, but she saw his thoughts in his eyes. They were over. He had come because he loved her and supported her, but they both knew that in the event that she was chosen—how unlikely she had thought it would be!—their relationship was dead. Hiro, captain of the baseball team at their school in Kanazawa, would have to wave goodbye as she moved down to Tokyo to spend the last two years of her high school days in a special stage school. They might play the game of a distance relationship for a while, but it wouldn’t last.

  ‘Well done, Karin,’ Hiro said, finally wrapping his arms around her. ‘I’m so proud of you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said into his shoulder, feeling a mixture of disbelief and regret. ‘I can’t believe I did it.’

  ‘I always knew you would. I can’t wait to see you up on stage performing,’ he said. ‘You’ll be on the TV and everything. I can tell people, “There’s my girl”.’

  She smiled, but it was sad, full of pain. Hiro was a nice guy, better than she was worth. But even if it wasn’t for the distance that would now open up a void between them, the very nature of her future would stamp their relationship out.

  The first rule for all the girls in Girls Chorus was the simplest: no boyfriends.

  She climbed out of bed and pulled on her clothes. The showers in the Queen’s Bedroom were ornamental, so she would have to go back to Rutherford’s suite to clean herself up. She pulled on her dress, brushed out a few creases and went over to the window, peering out on the courtyard below.

  A bus had parked up in a corner of the car park, alongside it a shabby van with a faded logo on the side. From this distance Karin couldn’t read it, but the colours were vaguely familiar. Between the buildings at the bottom of a gradual slope away from the main hall, the distant peaks and hills of the Alps were visible, already coated in snow. White stripes like lines of paint angled down the hillsides through the trees, and if she squinted she could just about make out a few moving dots that were skiers and snowboarders.

  Karin scowled. She hated winter and everything that was associated it. She would never have left Tokyo if it hadn’t been for the scandal.

  She made her way down the corridor and through a door at the end. The Queen’s Bedroom suite, together with the King’s Bedroom and a vast study, made up most of the second floor. One door opened out on to the classrooms and a gymnasium on the second floor of the west wing, while the other way exited through a stairway that led down to the Grand Mansion’s main dining hall.

  Karin took the stairs down to the first floor and went into the swimming pool changing rooms. In winter the pool was hardly ever used, so she liked to have a swim on her own, partly to wash Rutherford off her and partly to keep in shape—if she ever did make a successful comeback she would have to look the part. Rutherford might be a doughy, balding mess, but his money was made and banked. Hers was still out there waiting for her, and unlike a businessman, in the entertainment industry you couldn’t earn it behind closed doors.

  She opened her private locker and changed into her swimming costume. Seeing herself in a floor to ceiling mirror, she couldn’t help but smile in approval. Thirty years old and she looked as good as at any time during her career. She had a tight, lithe figure and bright, seductive gaze that could grace any magazine cover across the land. It was just that in Japan, public betrayals ran deep.

  Swimming had always been part of her training regime. At the studios in Shinjuku there had been a twenty-five-metre pool which the girls used regularly to loosen up and stretch out their muscles before a hard day of dance training.

  Karin pulled herself effortlessly through the water, counting up lap after lap until after she had reached fifty she pulled herself up onto the side to take a break. Her body tingled with exertion, the muscles in her shoulders and back aching more than they might once have. She ran a hand through her hair and peered out at the courtyard.

  ‘What the…?’

  Four men were walking across the courtyard toward the van that was parked up alongside the bus. One of them went to the back door and pulled it open, revealing a bank of guitar amplifiers inside.

  Karin dropped back into the water, peering over the edge to watch. At this distance they would never recognise her; her hair was slicked to her scalp and the floor-to-ceiling windows facing the outside were steamed up.

  ‘What are you lot doing here?’ she whispered, as O-Remo turned around, his eyes scanning the buildings of the complex, as he might once have done when faced by a baying arena crowd.

  She couldn’t help but smile. They’d broken up years ago, but she still had a little fondness for the singer.

  After all, they’d once been engaged to be married.

  4

  Jun dreams of Akane

  It was a beautiful spring day. Jun’s family and Akane’s family had piled into their cars and driven down to the hot spring town of Kamiko Onsen, where they had a picnic under the blooming sakura trees in the grounds of an old castle. While their mothers gossiped and their fathers drank cheap beers and talked about baseball, Jun and Akane ran off to explore.

  Even at ten years old, Akane was a faster runner than Jun, skipping up the steps and along the wooden paths while Jun panted and puffed as he tried to follow. It was always the case; while he hadn’t wanted to admit it, he had also followed Akane into music by pestering his parents to get him an electric guitar for his tenth birthday. While he couldn’t do more than slap at the strings in discordant aspiration, he had immediately adapted to the lifestyle of a practicing musician: days and long evenings sitting in a darkened room, only moving to eat, sleep, and go to school. Akane’s legs were as active in gym class as her fingers were on the piano keys, so when she finally came to a stop inside a little glade, she was barely out of breath. Jun bent double, trying to force air into his aching lungs while Akane laughed and patted him on the back.

  ‘Oh, Jun, you’re such a slowcoach,’ she teased him.

  ‘I let you win,’ he gasped.

  ‘Oh, that was a race, was it?’

  And off she dashed. Jun groaned, then staggered off in pursuit.

  She didn’t go far, just into the corner made by two crumbling walls that had once been part of an outer castle keep. The castle proper would have been wooden and was long gone, but the walls were made of stones the size of Jun’s chest. He sat down beside Akane, eyeing the walls nervously, as if they would defy their years of immovability to come crashing down and ruin his afternoon. Akane, as if picking up on his nervousness, patted his
arm.

  ‘Don’t worry, Jun!’

  ‘Why did you come up here?’

  Akane lay back on the patchy grass and tucked her hands behind her head. ‘Do you wonder much, Jun?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the future. What’s going to happen to us?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When we’re old, silly. When we’re really old, like our parents.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Akane laughed. ‘Isn’t there anything else you can say? Is your head full of bricks, Jun Matsumoto?’

  ‘I … I…’

  ‘How many children will we have? Will you work for the government office or will you be bright enough to become a teacher? Will I be a member of the PTA?’

  Jun knew that Akane wouldn’t accept another fobbed off non-answer. So he took a deep breath, and said, ‘We’ll have five children. I’ll definitely get a job as a teacher, probably science. You’ll work part-time teaching piano, although when you do recitals at the culture hall you’ll earn more than you do in an average month. You’ll be a member of the PTA too. In fact, you’ll be chairman.’

  ‘Chairwoman.’ Akane laughed. ‘I love you, Jun. You’re my best friend, and one day you’ll be my husband too.’

  Jun blushed. ‘Shut up!’ he heard his mouth say. ‘That’s disgusting.’

  Akane just giggled quietly to herself.

  They stayed there for a while. Jun always found Akane’s wild assertions disconcerting, but he’d learned to just brush them off as fantasy. Her mother often lambasted her for making her own piano interpretations of popular songs, because she had an overactive imagination.

  He guessed it just went with the territory.

  Jun jerked awake to find Ogiwara slapping at his stomach with a wet hand towel, a twisted smirk on his face.

  ‘Wakey wakey, sleepyhead,’ he laughed. ‘Guess who’s in trouble for missing second class? You dopey goon. I didn’t want to tell Kirahara but you were supposed to be sitting next to me. I kindly volunteered to go and get you, but you looked so peaceful that I let you sleep. I told Kirahara you’d run off somewhere.’