“Old lady? Since when have you started calling your mother my old lady? It’s so, well, so outmoded. It makes me feel hopelessly over-the-hill. I don’t care if you talk that way about me with your sister, but I won’t have you referring to me that way to my face.”
I was wiping away cold sweat as I tried to cover up my gaffe. “Hey, I’m sorry! It just slipped out! All sorts of things have been going badly for me. I just threw it out there. I promise I’ll refer to you properly from now on, Mother.”
“What’s been going badly? Your job? You and Mamiko-chan are getting along all right, aren’t you? I feel completely in the dark. You really need to come here soon and talk things over. Is something wrong?”
I was about to get back into turd talk but then thought it a dumb idea and instead took another gambit. “It’s something I’d rather not talk about.”
“What? Now you’ve got me fretting. Something you can’t tell me?”
“It’s not that I can’t . . . I don’t want you to worry.”
“Talk like that makes me worry even more!”
“Ahh, I’ve made a real mess of things. I really didn’t want to burden you with this.” Having dragged out the exchange, I suddenly blurted out, quite off the cuff: “I’ve piled up some debts.”
I was blown away by my own words. I had spoken in a subdued, somber tone, my voice weak, as though petrified by the very idea (me? in debt?). It was quite a performance. Mother’s dismayed reaction was only to be expected.
“Oh dear!” she sighed with an air of fatigue. She was silent for a moment and then asked in a thin, strained voice: “How much?”
“Well . . .” I started to say, only to find myself at a loss. What was I waiting for?
“Well, how much?” she repeated.
“I knew I shouldn’t have said anything. Never mind. Forget it. I’m all right.”
“How much?”
I had now gone too far to back away. I had to brace myself for telling her “the truth,” but would I be able to create the right atmosphere for leveling with her?
“Two million yen,” I muttered as though to myself.
She sighed deeply. I had come up with the right amount. Now I had to think of what had made me borrow it.
“And the interest?”
Not having thought of that, I was momentarily thrown off. “Uh, there isn’t any,” I said falteringly. “That’s at least one thing I don’t have to worry about.”
“It’s not a consumer-credit loan?”
“No, no. It’s like this: Some time ago I caused a horrible accident while driving a friend’s car. We were both drunk, so there was no insurance to cover it. I went around borrowing money from other friends. I’m paying it back little by little, but I feel really bad about it, and things have gotten a bit rocky with them. I want to return the money as soon as possible, so I’m moonlighting, and that’s leaving me exhausted, you know, like totally frazzled.”
“An accident? Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m better now, though I’m still having some trouble walking.”
“What about your friend?”
“He’s okay. His car was more banged up than he was.”
She took another deep sigh. “If you needed that kind of money, you should have come to your mother,” she said grimly. “But at least you borrowed it from friends. The thought that you might have done what your father did and found yourself indebted to loan sharks was already giving me angina. What worries me the most is the feeling that you’ll follow in his footsteps—right over the edge.”
Having come this far, I now understood why in the cell phone contacts there wasn’t an entry for Father. “Please don’t be so morbid!”
“But I really am worried. If you’re in such a pickle, I suppose I should do what I can. But, of course, if I lend you money, you’ll have to pay it all back fair and square.”
“You’d really be helping me out. And I genuinely appreciate your concern. Though I want to cope with my problems as best I can—on my own.”
“But you’ve clearly dug yourself into an awful hole. Honestly, if you’re going to be in debt anyway, I’d feel much better if you’d turn to me.”
“Well, now that you put it that way . . .”
“Are you still hiding something from me? Are you sure you’re not saddled with something else? There’s something fishy about this.”
What she found fishy may have come from the fact that she was talking to a phony. I felt a pang of guilt. Not wanting to disappoint Mother, I knew I had to provide her with a more convincing scent of reality. As strange as it may sound, I now had for the first time a perverse sense of mission: to favor her by taking her money.
“Yes, I suppose I really am in a bind. To tell you the brutal truth, one lender friend was fired when the police nailed him for marijuana. So now he’s hard up himself, with rent payments and such. I’ve got to get him a million yen by tomorrow. The fact is, I’m feeling so desperate that I’m thinking of going to the loan sharks after all. There’s nothing else to do.”
“What?” She fell silent. I pictured her falling into a deep abyss. “By tomorrow?” she finally said.
“If possible, by today.”
“Give me your bank account number.”
“Uh, it might actually be better to deposit the money directly to my friend’s account.”
“One million will do?”
“I’ve got 100,000 yen on hand myself. So another 900,000 would get me by.”
“I’ll put in a million. You can use what you’ve got to come home.”
“No, I’ve scraped together enough to return 100,000, so all I need right now is the 900,000. If I give him too much, he may ask for more. And I’m in no position to refuse.”
“Fine. So give me his account number.”
I gave her my own. I felt that I’d been taken for a ride—with me as the driver. Providing my real name was a very bad idea. I warned myself that everything was sure to immediately unravel and that I’d soon be caught. I’d been tearing along without thinking and now couldn’t stop.
I swear that my original intention had been to pull some sort of harmless prank. I wanted to comfort Mother in her loneliness. Just for minor amusement. But the words kept coming out, and one thing had led to another.
And yet at some point the joke had turned real, and I missed the point of no return.
Before hanging up, she asked once more: “Are you sure it isn’t a consumer-credit loan?”
“I swear it isn’t,” I replied.
Even when the conversation was over, the sense of not being myself lingered. Feeling removed from my normal reality, like a cat in a strange house, I kept waiting for another call from Mother. She would be sure to call after making the deposit. I should have been worried that she’d call “my” older sister or that Daiki would realize that his cell phone was missing and have the service suspended. Instead I thought: Well, if I’m caught for stupidly giving out my own name and number, so be it. And so, in no mood to do anything, I idly turned on the television. Five minutes later I was dozing off.
* * *
The cell phone began vibrating again. An hour had passed.