Introducing Miss Emi Kawasaki ...

IT was 11.30am precisely when the girl named Emi Kawasaki roared into the parking lot astride her shining, ochre Honda Goldwing, brassy music blaring from its twin speakers. Nervous laughter erupted from deep within me when she removed her helmet and told us her name. Embarrassed glances from the guys queried my outburst – I could only shrug apologetically and gesture towards the ‘wing.

Hutch and Stepek left us alone and then, as we had arranged on the telephone a few days before, we passed the next forty minutes posing as boyfriend and girlfriend, making out intensively in an exposed booth at the centre of the grubby roadside diner. Her rapacious enthusiasm displayed a commitment to the job which took me completely by surprise; I had, rather naively, assumed that we would sit quietly, hand in hand, waiting for something to happen. I would have asked her to chill a little, stunning as she was, had it not been for the fact that she was soon to straddle that ochre Goldwing and depart in a four-stroke roar leaving me with only a self-satisfied yet uncomfortable memory.

As she laughed at nothing, drank her coffee and let her free hand stray through my hair, I allowed my eyes to wander around the room, searching for one face, a face I knew so well. But there was nothing. It felt like a huge waste of both my time, and that of Miss Kawasaki’s.

I reflected on another afternoon in another life, an afternoon in which I lay on the bed with E while she rambled on about this and that, twisting her long black hair between her fingers and wriggling her tiny pink toes until they cracked. She had, just that very afternoon, told me in her own particular way that she loved me, but went on to say that it was just so very different since Kaisha had left. I leaned over and kissed her cheek. I was under the impression that Kaisha was still with us, but I kept this thought to myself. Later that day, E left the apartment to go and buy something “outrageous” and never returned.

Needless to say, I was right about Kaisha.

Emi Kawasaki looked up at me and asked me if I could see the person I had come here to find. I was about to say no, when from the corner of my eye a certain colour/shape combination drew my attention. It was the man Kaisha had called Franklin Jaw. I turned to look directly at him, watching the spittle froth at the corners of his mouth while he silently cursed me. I grabbed the girl’s arm and as one we leapt over the back of the booth and ran towards the door. I could hear the crash behind me as he pushed his table back to resume the chase.