Free Number9Dream by David Mitchell

make the other smile and look away wins. I pull stupid faces but they bounce off her. Her Cleopatra eyes are sparked with bronze. She wins – she always does – by bringing her eyes close to mine and opening wide. Anju returns to her higher branch and looks at the sun through a leaf. Then she hides the sun with her hand. The webby bit between her thumb and forefinger glows ruby. She looks out to sea. ‘The tide is coming in.’
    ‘Going out.’
    ‘Coming in. Your whalestone is diving.’
    My mind is on miraculous soccer exploits.
    ‘I really used to believe what you told me about the whalestone.’
    Bicycle kicks and diving headers.
    ‘You spouted such rubbish.’
    ‘Uh?’
    ‘About it being magic.’
    ‘What being magic?’
    ‘The whalestone, deaf-aid!’
    ‘I never said it was magic.’
    ‘You did. You said it was a real whale that the thunder god had turned into stone, and that one day when we were older we would swim out to it, and once we set foot on it the spell would be broken, and it would be so grateful that it would take us anywhere we wanted to go, even to Mother and Father. I used to imagine it happening so hard that I could see it sometimes, like down a telescope. Mother putting on her pearls, and Father washing his car.’
    ‘I never said all of that.’
    ‘Did, too. One of these days I’ll swim out to it.’
    ‘No way could you ever swim that far. Girls can’t swim as well as boys.’
    Anju aims a lazy kick at my head. ‘I could swim there, easy !’
    ‘In your dreams. Way too far.’
    ‘In your dreams.’ Waves break at the foot of the grey humpback.
    ‘Maybe it really is a whalestone,’ I suggest. ‘A fossil one.’
    Anju snorts. ‘It’s just a stupid rock. It doesn’t even look like a whale. And next time we go to the secret beach I’m going to show you and swim out there, me, and stand on it and laugh at you.’
    The Kagoshima ferry crawls across the horizon.
    ‘This time tomorrow—’ I begin.
    ‘Yeah, yeah, this time tomorrow you’ll be in Kagoshima. You’ll get up really early to catch the ferry, arrive at Kagoshima junior high school at ten o’clock. The third years, the second years, then your match. Then you go to the restaurant of a hotel with nine floors and eat while you listen to Mr Ikeda tell you why you lost. Then you come back on Sunday morning. You already told me a zillion times, Eiji.’
    ‘I can’t help it if you’re jealous.’
    ‘Jealous? Eleven smelly boys kicking a bag of air on a pitch of muck?’
    ‘You used to like soccer.’
    ‘You used to wet our futon.’
    Ouch. ‘You’re jealous because I’m going to Kagoshima and you’re not.’
    Anju stays aloof.
    The tree creaks. I didn’t expect Anju to lose interest in our argument so soon. ‘Watch,’ she says. She stands up, feet apart, steadies herself, takes her hands away—
    ‘Stop it,’ I say.
    And my sister jumps into empty air
    My lungs wallop out a scream
    Anju flashes by me
    and lands laughing on a branch below, swinging down to a lower branch. I hear her laughter long after she has vanished in the leaves.

    Fujifilm says two o’clock has come and gone. A single night is stuffed with minutes, but they leak out, one by one. My capsule is stuffed with Stuff. Look up ‘stuff’ in a dictionary, and you get a picture of my capsule above Shooting Star. A shabby colony in the empire of stuff. An old TV, a rice-cracker futon, a camping table, a tray of cast-off kitchen utensils courtesy of Buntaro’s wife, cups containing fungal experiments, a roaring fridge with chrome trimmings. The fan. A pile of Screen magazines, offloaded by Buntaro. All I brought from Yakushima was a backpack of clothes, my Discman, my Lennon CDs and my guitar. Buntaro looked at my guitar doubtfully the day I arrived. ‘You don’t intend to plug that thing in anywhere, do you?’ ‘No,’ I answer. ‘Stay acoustic,’ he warns. ‘Go electric on me, and you’re out. It’s in your contract.’ I am not going to