The room was oppressively hot; the window was wide open, but not a breath of air came in. Only the noise from the road outside. A large lorry coming to a halt at a red light blatted out a hoarse air brake, reminding me of Ben Webster on the tenor sax in his later years. We were all sweating. I walked up to the desk, introduced myself, and handed the security guard my business card. He took it without a word, pursed his lips, and stared at it for a while, then placed it on the desk and looked up at me.
“You’re pretty young for a teacher, aren’t you?” he said.
“How long have you been teaching?”
*
I pretended to think it over and answered, “Three years.”
“Hmm,” he said. And didn’t say anything else. But the silence spoke volumes. He picked up my card and read my name again, as if re-checking something.
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“My name’s Nakamura, I’m the chief of security here,” he introduced himself. He didn’t proffer a business card of his own. “Just pull up a chair from over there if you would. I’m sorry about how hot it is. The air conditioner’s on the blink, and no one will come out to fix it on a Sunday. They aren’t nice enough to give me a fan, so I sit and suffer. Take off your jacket if you’d like. We might be here for a while, and it makes me hot just looking at you.”
I did as he told me, pulling over a chair and removing my jacket. My sweaty shirt clung to my skin.
“You know, I’ve always envied teachers,” the guard began. A stillborn smile played around his lips, yet his eyes remained those of a deep-sea predator searching my depths for the slightest movement. His words were polite enough, but that was only a veneer. The word
“You have over a month off in the summer, don’t have to work on Sundays or at night, and people give you gifts all the time. Pretty nice life if you ask me. I sometimes wish I’d studied harder and become a teacher myself. Destiny intervened and here I am—a security guard at a supermarket. I wasn’t smart enough, I suppose. But I tell my kids to grow up to be teachers. I don’t care what anybody says, teachers have it made.”
*
My girlfriend wore a simple blue, half-sleeve dress. Her hair was piled up neatly on top of her head, and she had on a pair of small earrings. White sandals with heels completed her outfit, and a white bag and small, cream-coloured handkerchief rested on her lap. It was the first time I’d seen her since I got back from Greece. She looked back and forth between me and the guard, her eyes puffy from crying. She’d been through a lot,
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it was clear.
We exchanged a quick glance, and I turned to her son. His name was Shin’ichi Nimura, but his classmates nicknamed him Carrot. With his long, thin face, his shock of unkempt, curly hair, the name fitted. I usually called him that, too. He was a quiet boy, hardly ever speaking more than was necessary. His grades weren’t bad; he rarely forgot to bring his homework and never failed to do his share of the cleaning up. Never got into trouble. But he lacked initiative and never once raised his hand in class. Carrot’s classmates didn’t dislike him, but he wasn’t what you’d call popular. This didn’t please his mother much, but from my point of view he was a good kid.
*
“I assume you’ve heard about what happened from the boy’s mother,” the security guard said.
“Yes, I have,” I replied. “He was caught shoplifting.”
“That’s correct,” the guard said and set a cardboard box that was at his feet on top of the table. He pushed it towards me. Inside was a collection of identical small staplers still in their packaging. I picked one up and examined it. The price tag said
¥850.
“Eight staplers,” I commented. “Is this all?”
“Yep. That’s the lot of it.”
I put the stapler back in the box. “So the whole thing would come to ¥6,800.”
“Correct. ¥6,800. You’re probably thinking, ‘Well, okay, he shoplifted. It’s a crime, sure, but why get so worked up about eight staplers? He’s just a school kid.’ Am I right?”
I didn’t reply.
“It’s okay to think that. ‘Cause it’s the truth. There are a lot worse crimes than stealing eight staplers. I was a policeman
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before I became a security guard, so I know what I’m talking about.”
The guard looked directly into my eyes as he spoke. I held his gaze, careful not to appear defiant.
