Excerpt from my new novel
Blurb
When two digital nomads find an abandoned van, they uncover a story about a young woman who falls in love with a North Korean defector and helps him escape—but all is not how it first appears.
1 Lana
YOUTH DIED TOO SOON IN BEAUMONT, and before I gave up on my craving for adventure, I left town to travel the world. A single day in Kyoto was all it took to change everything; nothing could have prepared me for meeting Lana.
Fifteen hours earlier, I had arrived in a rain-drenched rickshaw in the middle of the night. My driver dumped me at the hotel and muttered something that I took to be a dislike of foreigners. I’d been told Kyoto was not as progressive as Tokyo and fairly traditional. The hotel’s foyer smelled of cleaning products, incense and sex. Quieter than a hostel, cheap enough for international students to partake in casual hookups and somewhere broke digital nomads got their bearings. The walls had big faded prints of bowing geishas and proud sword-wielding warriors sporting hipster top knots. I noticed shame hidden in the concierge’s eyes about the a.m. goings on., but I was too tired to let him know I wasn’t bothered either way. I’d just caught two buses, a metro and a high speed train from Tokyo. I smiled, grabbed my key and caught the elevator.
My room was bog standard for Asia with a bed, a fan and a fridge. I lay down on a mattress as hard as a board, except for the middle where the lats were missing. Thankfully some sadistic soul had put breezeblocks below to stop me slipping into the hole. A heavy downpour woke me later that afternoon, and I ate pot noodles and planned the next week, via the super fast wifi, before I headed out in the evening.
Kyoto’s rainy districts were thick with sakura trees raining petals into neon-drenched puddles and pagodas stacked with slanted roofs like layered umbrellas. Narrow streets lined with tea houses and lantern-lit cafes fanned out in every direction, each one sheltering an underweight, pale girl hunched over a laptop or angling for the perfect selfie. I filmed as I drifted through the markets, where you could find anything from ornamental samurai swords to American VHS movies from the eighties still wrapped in cellophane. I’d gone to video the traditional wooden machiya houses, shuffling geisha’s and the casual way innocent looking Japanese women chewed live octopus. I couldn’t make it more than ten feet without stopping to peer into smoky woks frying up delicious smelling food—ginger, honey and giant prawns—great thumbnail material.
The modern malls drew a particular type of bearded westerner, guys in big headphones obsessing over rare Pokémon cards while pretending not to see the groups of girls in school uniforms who, it seemed to my mind, understood something about the slow-motion awkwardness of male development. I caught the eye of a few girls, which was meant to be casual, friendly and a little sympathetic—they looked lonely to me. Friends back in Dublin had warned me about meeting people here: Switch off your brain. Let it run on autopilot for a while. It’ll click.
I wasn’t planning to meet someone; Kyoto was just a better starting point to kick off my planned year in Japan. Less of a neon-fueled dance-fest and more cultured than Tokyo or Osaka. Somewhere I could ease into Japanese life and restart my digital-nomad career.
An untapped oil-well for original content, friends told me, ‘If you can fix your self-conscious, weird face.’ The whole walking and talking thing to camera still didn’t come naturally to me, even two months after my first travel vlog in Amsterdam. I was beginning to think I’d never improve on monotone commentary and angst-riddled facial tics. Making money was top priority now—my channel needed to go viral and soon. I’d already decided I wouldn’t hang around and planned to break away from the usual yoga retreats and kombucha fetishes and find myself a bit of lowkey danger. A different angle on the whole travel-vlog thing. Something that might push me out of my discomfort zone and get my social media monetized.
I had parked myself on a bench beneath a sakura tree raining pink petals like confetti and checked my balance. This was an almost religious, nervous tic after getting robbed in Stuttgart when my credit card was swiped at a fake ATM card reader. Thankfully I’d planned ahead and spread money across several banks and only lost a few hundred, which my bank was tracking down. Travel income came from shares as part of a package working for an American pharmaceutical company in Dublin, which I sold—in exchange for my soul—before getting let go. A week after my boss told me I might want to try something that required less self-motivation than sales, I decided to go travelling. The channel had so far only made me poorer, but I was cautiously optimistic of a change in Japan.
As I mentally stretched ten grand across the next year, a diatribe of swear words drifted over the sound of spluttering mopeds and rickshaws. Everyone else respected Kyoto’s calm but not this American bullhorn.
“Mothafuking NPCs. What a bunch of gremlins. Another 50 unsubbed.”
The girl she was ranting at muttered back—in a forced Americanised accent, “Yeah, that sucks.”
I slid along the bench to get a better look, expecting to see some undisciplined weapon of mass destruction who nukes everyone for her social media shortcomings. In a cafe window, yellow-blue eyes looked up, peering at me from beneath a straight brown fringe. Cute and she knew it.
Japan so far seemed full of isolated loners hanging around cafes. They stared at you like you might be the one to fly in and make their lives better, like life is a Marvel comic. Not quite hikikomori, not yet, but terrified they were on the way to barring their bedroom door with a mattress and wasting their days jerking off to hentai—Japanese cartoon porn, that is way too close to paedophilia for anyone’s liking. This girl, with her insane confidence and swaying hips, moved amongst them like their American queen, and she had me in her gamer crosshairs.
I glanced up a few times as she spoke to loners, making them feel special with little touches and smiles. Then she eyeballed me, hard.
The restaurant behind me had Wagashi—I’d heard Koyto’s version of the traditional Japanese sweets were unreal. When I picked up my small haversack, she ran to the door across the road and waved me over.
“Bro, bro, come.”
I stared at my phone and glanced up a couple of times. Her long legs stepped down, bare feet plunged into a puddle on the road. Scooters sped past, young Japanese riders slowed and honked their puny horns at her short denim skirt. Only one honk each in fairness—Japanese are respectable perverts. They laughed in that high-pitched Japanese way, like unruly school girls. She stepped onto the path in front of me.
I gazed at her feet: old henna tattoos and gold rings on her toes; tribal ink on one ankle and a dreamcatcher tat on the other that stretched halfway up her bronzed shin. She loomed over me, waiting. Expectant! I gave a half glance up, smiled and looked back at my phone.
“Dude, I saw you earlier in the market,” she said, with a rising inflection like she couldn’t fathom my coolness, couldn’t compute that I kinda already disliked her overconfidence and entitled attitude—signifiers for me of malignant narcissism.
“Irish yeah?”
“Yeah.”
With the grace of a million Irish mammy influencers, I gave a polite little chin nod, even though she seemed, as many an Irish mammy would privately have called her, a cocky little so-and-so. My chin nod was supposed to shoo her off, supposed to clearly state, look you’re hot and all, but I’m not interested in lonely solo females who miss their boyfriends after dumping them to become strong independent women, who aren’t actually coping alone. Clearly, she was intent on finding someone.
We stared back, a silent ping-pong match of assumptions and counter assumptions. I had to admit, she looked like someone who had lived alone in Japan a long time and was immersed in the life; comfortable and maybe even happier on her own. What does she want from me?
I dunno why I put on this broken Welsh-Pakistani-Japanese accent for some reason. “No speeek Engleesh, saw—wee.”
She grabbed my hand and turned my phone to see what I was looking at. “And we have an English translation app.”
“No speeek Engleesh toodaaay,” I said. “Only Japaneeese—e.”
“Go on then.”
“Ehm, konnichiwa… watashi… no namae wa Killian desu.”
She put her hand on her hip and cocked her head. “Dono kurai Nihongo o hanashite imasu ka?”
Perfect pronunciation. I hadn’t the first clue what she said and grinned. “Alright, fair enough.”
“From Dublin, right?” Her eyes were all business, her smile something from a fairytale—even with the two slight fang incisors.
“Yeah, Killian.”
“Lana.” As we shook hands, she broke eye contact. “You’re cute, Killian.”
I wasn’t—I mean I had a look if you were into skinny, slightly bookish, pale skin and shite hair. She hit me with an expression she was confident about. When I played it cool, she smirked.
“The miso soup in that place is best in town.” She acted pensive as if to show me she had a brain; wasn’t all mouth.
I shoved my hands in my pockets and casually looked back. “Miso, yeah? I’ll give it a try.”
“I’ll order for you if you want.”
I shrugged. “Why?”
She tutted. “Jeez man.” And went inside.
She casually looked through the glass at me, and I wondered how much effort I’d need to keep in the conversation. Not much with her; she seemed to love the sound of her own voice. Despite my reservations, I followed her in. Why? Honestly, she was the kind of traveller I needed to be—ballsy, open and free.
In the first ten minutes of talking to her, I learned she was twenty nine, a graphic designer, a painter, a tattooist, a website builder, a digital marketer, a public speaker and a former junior public relations executive. “Like seriously, dude, it was soul sucking. And my bosses were on me all the time like their landlords were banging down the door, threatening to evict them from their Central Park penthouses.”
Before I could tell her I had a similar experience with corporate America in Ireland and how Dublin was becoming the unofficial 51st State, she told me she was also a survivalist in her spare time. Then a tiny woman with a nosey attitude came over with a notepad.
She looked at Lana for a while without speaking and then asked me, “Wha you wan?”
“Miso soup and two Amachas,” said Lana.
“You wan tofu?” the waitress asked me, insistently, like a mother ashamed of her son.
“Carnivore right?” Lana said to me and shook her head at the woman before I could answer.
“You wan chicken, yeah?” said the waitress through a grimaced smile.
“Yeah, go on.”
“You wan wata or cock?”
I bit my lips to stop a burst of laughter. “Big cock or small cock?”
“Only one size.”
“One cock so.”
Lana raised her eyebrows and grinned.
“You wan sake?” asked the waitress and gave me this disappointed glance while she wrote.
“No thanks, he’ll just have the coke and the soup,” said Lana.
She tutted. “Okay, be bak one mina.”
She returned a few moments later, flung down a tea pot and glass mugs and came back with a steaming bowl of miso soup. “Enjoy.”
“So you’re single, Killian,” said Lana, cupping her mug under thin tadpole nostrils.
“How’d you know?”
“I can tell.”
“Just great.”
“You kinda got it all figured out, what’s the deal?”
“Checklists. Women don’t get to know guys anymore. Anyway, it’s not important to me right now.”
“No, I want to know.”
“Ah, I can’t be bothered trying to live up to someone’s unrealistic expectations. I’m nothing special but, ye know, when you get to know me, I kind of am.”
She smiled. “I wanna get to know you.”
“Cool.” I spooned the salty broth into me and watched her wrap her lips around a sip of tea. “So, live off the land kind of survivalist or what?” I said. “Miso’s next level by the way.”
“I know, right.” She gazed blankly into the cup. “My dad taught me. He’s ex-Air Force. We’re a military family.” Proud then slumped, she shifted in her chair. “He says one day the government will turn rogue, and I’ll need to know how to kill.”
I wasn’t sure if she was joking. “So, you came to Kyoto for… ?”
“Work. I was in Tokyo and Osaka, but it’s too much there. Partying every night. And. I can’t do hangovers anymore, apparently.” She swirled her cup and gazed at tea leaves then back at me, repeatedly like she was pretending to read my fortune and not covering something up.
“I know what you mean. I overstayed my welcome in Bangkok. Stopped off in Tokyo on the way here. Not long. Too many silly giggling girls for my liking.”
Right?” She nodded and a cute little crease formed at the corner of her smile—offsetting the fangs.
“I was hoping to do some vlogging here,” I said.
She nodded, assured, but there was a little taint of doubt in her eyes. “I am, actually.”
“Losing followers?”
“Bro!” She glanced away and then eyeballed me. “You overheard, I take it.”
“I’m stuck on a few hundred myself.” Lies. Lies. Lies. Less than two hundred. 173 and falling.
“You’ll get there.” She gave a supportive half-smile.
“I dunno. I was thinking of heading into the jungle. See if I can get in trouble. Everybody vlogs about food and temples. I need a bit of adventure.”
“Cool.” She looked impressed, lifted her head and stared into my eyes—the same way she had when she first saw me, weighing something up. “Actually, you could be exactly what I’m looking for. Fancy travelling for free?”
I was immediately interested and sat forward. “Free? Yeah.”
“I’ve a van. It’s got a kitchen, wifi and a double bed.” Her expression said she’d be cool about sharing, if I was.
I was. I spooned the soup into my gob and dribbled it down my chin. “Eh, so you’re not planning on staying in Kyoto long?”
“I’m shakajin here. Japanese are,” she furrowed her brow and glanced sideways, eyes narrow, “selfless. They see people like me as unwanted foreigners, not helping society.”
“Not traveller friendly here so, no?”
“They can be quite unfriendly to travellers and clicky. I’m looking for a new videographer and someone to share the cost of fuel, if you’re interested.”
As she had just said in the previous breath that the ride would be free, I thought she was sketchy. “Eh… not sure.” I put down the spoon and looked at the stressed faces of other western shakajins burning through money. “You said if I fancy travelling for free.”
“Mmmhmm.” She held her hand out flat on the table and looked at something over my shoulder. “If you can help out with fuel for now, that’d be great. Once we get my following back up, it’ll be free.”
I realised I’d been staring hard at her lips for way too long. “I’ve got no solid plan…”
“So you’re into it?” She bit her lip.
“Yeah, why not.”
“Bro, it’s gonna be lit.”
I should have taken more time to weigh up a few pros and cons—maybe think about why she had picked me out of a crowd of other loners. But things just flowed. Back home, it wasn’t easy for me to talk to strangers, particularly females, and never one so attractive. I felt like I could be myself with her, say whatever I wanted. And she had this sexuality in her body when she moved—the way she looked at me over the steaming tea, her eyes sizing me up. I didn’t stand a chance when an hour later we were in her van, fucking.
I told myself it was because she saw an easy going Irish guy and not some asshole honking his horn at her.
Afterwards, she lay on the bed gazing at me like she’d uncovered some forlorn, undiscovered creative genius who needed saving from an0ther corporate job. I bought it all, maybe I was. Maybe when she cupped my balls and kissed me, she wasn’t some nympho and the fact is, away from pokey old Ireland, I was irresistible to women.
I tried to process how an hour ago I was muttering curses about this loud American attention seeker, and here I was, inspecting her van in nothing but a T-shirt with my balls swinging around like something out of a Jean Eustache movie. What happened to integrity, bro?
I distracted myself by inspecting the van—it was a mess of USB cables and clothes. As she lit a joint, she told me she had modded it herself after cleaning out her bank account to buy it in Osaka. Fairly decent craftsmanship, I thought, admiring a little worktop with a sink, a two-ring cooker and blue LED USB ports everywhere.
The raised bed was draped in a white crocheted throw that spanned the width of the van—that I’d half kicked onto the floor earlier trying to turn her gasps into screams of pleasure. Next time bro. Next time!
She was still laying on the bed, naked, arm draped behind her head, leg bent up in a sexy, ‘I’m ready for more when you are’ pose. Beneath the bed, varnished drawers were arranged like steps. I felt intimidated because the whole design was very well thought out. Deceivingly clever. Far better than I could ever achieve.
“Where’s the bathroom?”
She nodded at a long tinted window above the sink. “If you’re coming with, you’re gonna need to become one with nature.”
“Ah.” As I considered my next move, rain pelted the roof. The low drum on the van was relaxing; comforting. Japan had major rainstorms in autumn. I ran my hand over the natural curves of a piece of varnished wood behind the driver’s seat and noticed how cramped the space was.
“It must get claustrophobic.”
She gave a sigh and pulled the throw over her lower body. “No it’s bliss dude. You learn to love the road—it’s so free.”
I could tell she’d been living in the thing a while. I leaned on a tall thin cabinet that contained a small fridge and shelves filled with jars of rice, pasta and condiments. “Don’t you get scared alone?”
“I wasn’t alone until recently.” Her words trailed off.
“Ah, your last videographer.”
She nodded.
“Boyfriend?”
She shrugged and pouted.
“So… do you sleep with all your videographers?” I pulled on my boxers and flipped out a chair fixed to the sliding door.
“You were into it. You can go fuck yourself.”
“I’m cool.” Just trying to gauge if you’re a raging nympho or not.
I think my grin said everything. Here was a beautiful, independent female—who could probably change a flat tire, in the rain, hungover—offering me a way to see Japan, make great content and there was no-strings sex included. “When you get an offer like that, you start wondering what the catch is.”
She sat up with a big smile and smashed her palms into the bed. “The catch is I’m crazy, bro.” Her laugh was a little too cackle-y for my liking. “Chill. This is gonna be the best decision of your life.”
I laughed it off. She was the kind of person I needed to be, had stupid levels of confidence, and if even a tenth rubbed off on me, I’d do a lot better on camera. “I think I’m down. No, I’m down.”
“Well then, Killian, you couldn’t have run into me at a more perfect time. I’m about to hit the road. What are you waiting for? Go get your shit.”
I dropped my head. “Ah,…I’ve paid for a week at my hotel.”
She sighed. “I suppose I can find myself another videogra—”
I had already started pulling on my shorts and slid open the side door. A moment after I left, I came back soaked and popped my head in. “I’ll be back in half an hour.” I ran off and sprinted back. “Twenty minutes. Don’t go without me.”
SHORT STORY I WROTE IN COLLEGE
The Piano Tuner of Versailles
by D.D. Brennan
Leo ran his finger over the Blüthner’s gold leafe applicae, admiring the craftmanship carved into the Roccoco white polished lacquer. The fallboard meeting the key bed with a muffled thud gave him as much joy as getting to play such an exceptional instrument. Closing the lid of the unique grand, he felt guilty for again harbouring an overwhelming wish to own it. His passion was so heady that he often thought about fabricating a problem with it and offering to buy from Katrina, but he could never afford it even at a quarter of the price. One way or another, he would find a way to make it his.
He pressed his deck shoes onto each of the three gold pedals once more to check that the tension in the springs were to his liking. Switching from hard to soft soles made all the difference to a virtuosa like Katrina Valentina.
Once a month he let himself into Katrina’s home to tune the Blüthner Supreme Special Edition with 24-carat gold inlay. In three years, he had met her only three-and-a-half times. Hired by her manager after a recommendation by composer, Alfred Shumer, he had managed to spend two afternoons a month inside her home for the first year without encountering her.
Their first meeting transpired when she descended the spiral stairwell in the hall. She was a sweep of blond locks and avocado eyes, pausing in her white chiffon negligee to huskily enquire, “Could you pay special attention to the damper, please?” before disappearing back upstairs.
He could only nod, so struck was he by her lonely presence. The memory of her body reposed along the banister like a bass clef lingered for days. Afflicted by concern for her, heavy emotions remained with him whenever he returned, hoping to meet her again and perhaps comfort her.
The second time they met was eighteen-months later, an accident. He was exiting her home one morning with his little brown leather bag of tools. She arrived with her arm linked by a dismissively brash man in a tux, sporting a thin moustache and impeccable skin. Her eyes barely met Leo’s but said more than her polite, “Oh, hello again.” Enough for Leo to animate worries about her safety before he dutifully left. The third time was a day later when Leo returned to hear the Blüthner after its rest day and to make any minuscule adjustments needed.
Katrina entered the piano room composed and indifferent towards a subtle tone of fear in her voice. “Can I offer you anything?” she muttered, eyes reaching for him.
“I’m fine,” he said, trying not to show he noticed more about her state of mind than was professionally acceptable.
Again, she quietly begged companionship in her contrived, “Lemon tea?”
“Okay, thank you.” He accepted despite a dislike for it, but he would not allow himself a second glance at her naked body beneath her gossamer robe. As she passed the rear bay windows, he kept his mind tuned to the Blüthner as his heart skipped three heavy knocks.
“My pleasure,” she said, flatly feigning freeness, turning back to gaze at him.
“Actually, I have my flask. Don’t trouble yourself,” he said, staring at his little leather bag then faking a polite smile.
She glanced at the stairs suggestively. “It’s no trouble.”
He unnoticed what he could hardly ignore and returned his attentions to the Blüthner. “I’m fine with my flask, thank you.”
Despite the invitation in her voice, every finite turn of his tool was to him equal to her perfectly weighted key presses. His passion for perfectionism was his concert.
Once more she said, “Lemon tea,” while ascending the stairs, her waif body turned halfway to him, empty eyes calling.
“Thank you, I’m good.”
Something quivered in her like a sustained G-3 in need of tuning, he noted as she slinked back upstairs, sipping coffee from his flask. He turned a screw an exact sixteenth of a millimetre and gave the C-5 three little taps: clink, clink, clink.
“Perfect,” he muttered. Perfect in that he liked it to be imperceptibly flat, which felt more human to him. “We will breathe life into the now and then once more, Katrina,” he muttered, looking at the empty stairwell, obediently ignoring how his voice had cracked and trailed off saying her name.
Their third-and-a-half meeting occurred four months later. Her manager had asked him to come at a specific time. Nervous at the thought of running into her again, he arrived without his soft shoes and decided to return the next day instead. The sound of her playing the Blüthner drifted through the open sash windows and made the hairs on his neck stand up. Clair de Lune was rarely played with such untainted feeling and precision.
It was this half meeting that gave him the most insight into Katrina, who assumed no audience. Hearing her spirit alive and pure, unaffected and authentic, filled him with a passion he knew would linger for days. A light rain soaked heavy into his wool coat as he waited below the window, wondering if a woman like Katrina might consider falling in love with someone like him. They possessed, after all, passion, perfectionism and a love of piano. Since meeting her, he was forced to admit, getting lost in his work could no longer keep at bay his troubling loneliness. Her passions now possessed notes of his obsession.
As he left, he shook himself free of the fantasy. Katrina might not have been so put together in reality as she was behind the piano. Plus there could be no real interest in a romance with someone like him, dishevelled, a workaholic and needily falling in love.
I’m content being the unsung magician behind her music, he thought as he skulked away.
*
Returning the next morning, the day before Katrina’s biggest concert in the Opéra Royal de Versailles, he lets himself in with his key. He pays attention to the ambiance inside the house; its absence. “She must be out.”
Sitting on the stairs where he first glimpsed her bent over the banister, he remembers every encounter with her. He wiggles his toes into his deck shoes and turns his thoughts towards the acoustics in the piano room. A touch on the A-3 is all she needs, perhaps a little on the F#-4. As he turns his head, his eyes find a sight his mind refuses to comprehend. Katrina lays lifeless on top of the keyboard, her blonde hair matted with the darkest of clarets. Beside her blood-speckled white fluffy slippers lies a small silver revolver.
He scrambles towards her, his voice breathy with a hi-pitched pine for the few times he had met her, all flashing through his mind with a sickening thump of his heart. He stops over her unencumbered body and looks at a scrawled note left on the music rack:
Thank you for your excellence, Leo. Alas, to maintain perfection we must be alone; unadulterated. I now know you are burdened by a similar passion and lonely soul. They breed madness and sickness, which my spirit can no longer endure. I hope you accept my offer this time.
With contrite glee, he murmurs the last line, “The piano is yours.”