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shifty, and said it was probably just as well they were all together, especially as Hisako had collected
enough loot on her shopping expedition to make aconquistador jealous.
They trooped down to the docks and through the fish market, then got lost in a maze of small, crowded,
noisy streets. Mr Mandamus was delighted; the area was called 'Sal si puedes', which meant 'Get out if
you can', and it was traditional to get lost in it.
'You mean youknew we'd get lost?' Broekman said, once they were lost. He waved away a variety of
people trying to sell him things.
'Well, I thought we would,' Mandamus said thoughtfully.
'Youthought we would, you crazy man?'
'Of course,' Mr Mandamus said, glowing with airy satisfaction, while a lottery ticket salesman and the
owner of a Chinese restaurant studied the map of the city Mandamus had produced. (They were
arguing.) 'They keep changing the street names, you see,' Mr Mandamus explained. 'The maps have the
new names but the people call the streets after their old names. It's quite simple, really.'
'But what do you want to get uslost for?' Broekman said, almost shouting. 'This city's bandit country
these days! We need to know what we're doing! We need to know where we are!'
'Don't worry,' Mandamus said, wiping his brow with a white handkerchief. He pointed to Endo, who
was filming the arm movements of the two arguing Panamanians. 'Mr Endo is a navigating officer!'
Hisako looked round, clutching her shopping bags to her because Broekman had said she ought to, but
despite the heat, and the crowds, and the fact they were lost -- feeling happy. Not because she'd bought
so much, but because here she was, finally in a completely different place. It was dangerous, sometimes
frightening, quite lawless compared to Japan, but just so different. She felt alive. She tried to think of
what music it would be good to play now, what composition she could take this mood to, so that the
notes would sing and speak and take on resonances she hadn't heard in them before.
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They got out eventually. They continued walking, admiring the old Spanish villas, the cathedral, Plaza
Bolivar, and the brilliantly white presidential palace with its flamingos. 'I take it the anti-aircraft missiles on
the roof are a recent addition,' Broekman said, looking over Mandamus's shoulder at the guidebook.
'So one would imagine.'
They went down to the sea, to the Plaza de Francia, and looked out from the old walls to the islands in
the bay; the Pacific was green and blue and violet, shimmering under a cloudless sky. Seabirds wheeled
in the baking air.
They strolled back up the Avenida Central until they came to a café called the International, run by a
huge black man called MacPherson who spoke with an accent that combined Jamaican and English
public school. They took tea. Mint for Mandamus. Chinese for the rest.
'Oh!' Mandamus said suddenly, still reading the guidebook. 'Listen: "The lower part of the ramparts,
near the law courts, contains vaulted cells in which condemned prisoners were chained at low tide."'
Mandamus looked up, eyes bright. 'You see? And then, when the tide came in, the Pacific drowned them
... themoon drowned them! We should go back and see these cells. What do you say?'
Her classmates made fun of her because she looked like a hairy Ainu. The Ainu were the natives of
Japan; its abos, its Injuns. After the eighth century they'd been pushed further and further north by the
Yamato Japanese moving in from the Asian mainland until they clung on only on Hokkaldo, the most
northern island. Stereotypically the Ainu were tall, thick-built and hairy, and Hisako -- though of average
build -- had deep black hair, and bushy eyebrows which almost joined up with the hair at the side of her
scalp. Her eyes were deepset, which added to the Ainu look. So the children in her school taunted her
and offered to tattoo her lips and wrists, the way real Ainu were marked.
In school she was poor at almost everything except English, and the other girls told her she'd never get
to university -- not even a two-year one -- because she was stupid, and never get a husband because she
was an ugly hairy Ainu, and she'd grow up a poor widowed office lady like her mother.
She ignored them, tried to read fairy stories in English, and practised her cello playing. Once, in the
middle of winter, four girls caught her in a school cloakroom and held her hands down on a
near-boiling-hot radiator; she cried, screamed, struggled, while her hands blazed with pain, and the girls
laughed and imitated her cries. Finally, roaring with the agony and the unfairness of it all, she pulled her
head free of their grip -- leaving one of the girls with a handful of bloody, thick, black hair and sank her
teeth in the wrist of the biggest girl. She bit as hard as she could, and heard the screams go on around her
though her mouth was closed and her hands still burned.
She woke up on the floor. There was blood in her mouth and her head ached. Her hands were seared
and red and tight, and she sat there, legs crossed, rocking back and forward with her hands in her lap,
weeping quietly to herself and wishing that life was like a fairy story, so that her falling tears would heal
her hands where the drops fell on the raw red skin.
Her mother seemed to accept her story about pulling an iron rod out of a bonfire on the way back from
school: Mrs Onoda said nothing about the patch of missing hair, or the bruise on the side of her
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