TURBINE | KAPOHAU

If she lay on her side, her shoulder scraped the ceiling. If she lay on her stomach, ear-pressed, she could hear the mumble of the people next door. If she lay on her back, she couldn’t breathe.

The moments before he left were the hardest. Her legs, full of musty air, would start to prickle at the sound of his electric toothbrush. She would trace his movements out on the ceiling with her fingertips. Bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom. All the muscles in her limbs would tense to stop from kicking. He’d walk out past her, a shadow she couldn’t see, and the door would close with a click. Then she would count. When she could be sure he wasn’t coming back, she’d slide the door open and breathe.

*

There were two rooms in his apartment. The bedroom where they both slept was simple and uncluttered. His futon lay in the middle of the room, white and well fluffed. The only other furniture was an antique kimono chest, where he put his few foldable clothes and a lacquered crimson table. There was a futon cupboard that held his shirts and slacks, his spare business shoes — the same brand and style as his current ones — and his spare sheets. Above this, there was the sliding cupboard where she lived. She didn’t know how long she’d been here, she had decided at the start not to keep track, but it had been seasons. Sometimes on the weekends when he cleaned, he’d slide the futons into the bottom of the cupboard underneath her, so that he could sweep the tatami mats, and she would lie insect breathing as he got close.

The other room was larger, though had less space. Cedar shelves lined the south wall and the books, hundreds of them, were shelved in a way to conserve space rather than aid their retrieval. There was a thin path of silvered tatami through the room, and on each side were mountains of clothes. Dusky blue, navy blue, white, grey and khaki. The uniforms of long dead soldiers from many different wars. In his well-trained hand, on a piece of textured white card, he’d written carefully the nationality, age and rank of each uniform and affixed it to the collar with the slenderest pin, so thin it barely disturbed the weave of the finest fabric. The ones that lay on top changed daily. She imagined he would wear a different one every night. After his bath he would pull and tuck and smooth them on, and sit with a tall can of beer and fried noodles in front of the television: a German, a Soviet, an Australian.

*

She had slept very well. Some nights were better than others. Once the house was hers she made a large breakfast. He’d left rice in the cooker which she spooned in teaspoons onto a small blue china plate, careful to leave the half circles of the spoon shape intact, so that it lay in petals. She reached into the back of the fridge, underneath the aging vegetables, limp and neglected, to the piece of salmon she had bought the day before. She patted the still-firm peach flesh with soy sauce, rice vinegar and sugar and slid it under the grill. She checked the end of her cupboard; there was none of the instant miso soup she had bought last week left. She missed proper miso. Mixing the red and white together in the proportions her grandmother had taught her, adding stock, drop by drop until the paste turned liquid. He had miso in the fridge. And checking the cupboard, she saw he had stock granules as well. She never took his food, not except for condiments and rice, which were impossible to keep track of, and in any case, she took care to note the shape in which he had dug it out from the cooker, so when she made more in the afternoon she could replicate it. But she could feel salt on her tongue and the scalding thinness of soup in her mouth already. He wouldn’t notice such a small amount of paste missing. She checked the salmon with a chopstick, and pressed and clicked one of the elements on. Just this once. She sliced a thin white sliver off his tofu, not taking it out of the fridge, to lessen the crime, and cut it into long silken noodles. She took a single shiitake mushroom, nipped off the stem with the tip of the knife, carved a deep cross in the cap and dropped it into the soup with the sunken tofu. She took the fish out from under the grill, its skin glistening darkly and laid it across the rice. She ladled the soup into a lacquered bowl, and pinched off a single stalk of mizuna to put on top, its long green stem twisted loosely in a knot. She ate on the balcony, underneath his damp laundry, her back against glass bricks.

*

As she took the dishes in to wash, she noticed a bunch of flowers sitting limply in a vase in the corner of the bedroom. She had been a florist once. Funny, how she’d almost forgotten that. They were carnations, limp and frilly, picked up quickly from the convenience store. Did someone buy them for him? Unlikely. They were not the sort of flowers women bought men, when they bought them at all. They were too feminine, too cheap. They were the sort only men would buy. They stayed in her mind as she cleaned the bathroom. She couldn’t stand using it in the state that he left it, with finger length black hair in the drain and a waxy layer of soap along the bottom of the tub. She preferred to bathe at night, before dinner, but she worried that the bath heat wouldn’t dissipate before he got home and so bathed in the morning.

*

She thought about the flowers as she sat on the stool scrubbing her feet clean, as she rinsed the herbal shampoo from her hair and as she slid into the hot bath. She hated carnations, there was something so nothing about them. Their sickly ruffles and their bland sweetness irritated her. She disliked the marbled variety he had on the chest the most. She combed her hair and was careful to remove all the long black strands which then she let fly off her fingers into the wind, out of the bathroom window.

*

She moved them only slightly. She straightened the one budding flower and placed it in the middle of the others so the drooping older stems had balance. As she lay awake in bed that night, she panicked that he might notice. He might realise that he wasn’t alone here and call the police and then she’d have lost him.

In the morning there was nothing. The flowers were as she had left them. She still felt anxious and left the cupboard only to use the bathroom. She felt like she was in a box that day and as punishment she wouldn’t allow herself any light. She pressed her index finger against a nail that protruded from the other side of the wall. Pushing the pink pad of her finger down, the skin tightening, until, a noise she couldn’t hear, but feel. Click. And the steely tip was in her flesh, the blood huddled around the metal, holding it and rolled around it; paused. She let the nail out. She couldn’t see the blood but could feel its warmth on her skin. She put the finger in her mouth.

He came home that night at the usual time. She lay quietly, her body tensed, waiting for the sound of other men come to take her, but instead she heard the ping and crackle of him making dinner, and then the flick and hum of the television and so she relaxed. He rustled in the uniform room.

*

In the morning she woke before him and listened to his heavy sleep-breathing. As he woke and got ready for work, she traced his movements on the ceiling with her fingertips, her index finger curled in her palm. Bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom. She decided as she waited that she would go for a walk today. Her body was stiff from a whole day in the cupboard and she needed to make amends. She would buy some hot noodles, she still had enough money left for that, and pick up some more soup packets. It was difficult, more difficult than usual, to pull her legs up to her chest, and she made a thump as she landed on the tatami. She straightened and looked outside at the thin fingers of sun coming through the cracks between apartment buildings. She had been lucky. As she turned around, she saw laid out in a line on the kimono chest, next to an empty wooden vase: a seed pod, four waxy open leaves the size of her palm, and one slightly larger, a single, perfect lotus flower, the deepest blush of pink, several small curling leaves and the long, straight, unfurled bud from a yellow water lily. The three phases of existence. She picked the lotus up in her hand and placed it in the centre of the vase.

*

She liked it best when he came home. She would be warm in her sleeping bag, and pleasantly restricted. The cupboard door would be open, so there was air and light to read by, and her belly would be soft and full. When his keys clicked in the lock, she would slide the door across slowly with her fingertips pressed like a spider. He’d stand beneath her as he put his coat away and she’d press her hands down against where he stood. This was how she touched him. She would fall asleep listening to the sound of his evenings.