Read Online 69 by Ryu Murakami - Free Book Online Page B

anything to upset your mother. Shit. What a time to start preaching at me. I went back up to the second floor, changed my clothes, and climbed quietly onto the clothes-drying platform. There was a full moon. Being careful not to make a sound, I slipped into my basketball shoes. (We didn’t say “sneakers” in those days, we called them bashu — short for basketball shoes.) From the platform I crawled down to the first-floor roof. Right in front of me was a little cemetery. A row of gravestones glistened in the moonlight at about the same level as the roof, being higher up the slope. I jumped down into the cemetery—or, rather, I jumped onto a gravestone. I wasn’t what you’d call religious, but I felt a bit guilty doing that. I always used this particular grave when I sneaked out to go to cafés or a porno film or Adama’s boarding-house, and I was sure the occupant would put a curse on me someday. When I was a little kid, my grandfather had a friend, a bald-headed old guy who’d been a commander in the navy. My grandfather had only been a lieutenant commander, so Baldy lorded it over him even then, more than a decade after the war had ended. Baldy would come over in the middle of the day to drink, and my grandfather would tipple right along with him. I liked Baldy because he always brought me a new picture book when he came. But he had a bad habit: whenever he got drunk, he’d step outside and piss in the cemetery. My grandmother hated that and always said he’d be sorry, that one of these days he’d be cursed and die; and then one day his heart gave out and he really did drop dead. I was convinced he’d had a hex put on him. So whenever I slipped out to the all-night porno flicks or whatever, I’d press my palms together as I stepped on the gravestone and say Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, over and over again. I prayed this time, too, but it was different now. I wasn’t going to a dirty movie; I was going to barricade the school. Revolution. Surely the spirits of the dead would let this one slide.
     
    Everybody was there by midnight , standing under the cherry tree next to the pool. We divided into two teams: one to paint graffiti, and one to seal off the doorway to the roof and hang the banner. I was with the graffitists. So was Adama. It was more dangerous for the roof team: after barricading the door, they had to climb back down on ropes. I suckered Narushima, Otaki, and all but one of the other kids into taking the roof by telling them it was the most revolutionary part of the whole operation. Adama was afraid of heights, and I just didn’t want to risk getting hurt.
    We were all set to roll when Fuse, a dark and filthy-minded little guy said, “Wait a minute.”
    “What’s the problem, man? We’ve just gone over everything.”
    A hesitant, lecherous smile spread over Fuse’s face.
    “It’s just that, uh, well, you don’t get a chance like this very often.”
    Chance?
    “I checked a while ago, and it wasn’t locked.”
    Locked?
    “The girls’ changing room. Can’t we just take, like, five minutes and have a look inside?” He gave a horny little chuckle.
    There was only one way to respond to this.
    “Look, you fucking asshole, we’re here on a sacred mission, and you want to peek in the girls’ changing room ? If that’s where your head’s at, man, the whole thing’s a failure before we’ve even started.”
    But nobody said anything of the sort. We all agreed to Fuse’s plan immediately.
     
    A sweet fragrance wafted here and there inside the room. It wasn’t that the whole place smelled that way. As you groped about in the dark, you’d suddenly get a whiff of the unmistakable scent of a young girl blossoming into womanhood. Nobody swims with their underwear on, which meant that girls got totally naked here—that’s what all of us were thinking. Everybody was running their hands along the shelves against the wall. I told them to stop, that they were leaving fingerprints,