The Last Samurai

He stopped and he began to laugh a breathy scratchy laugh like the stubble on his face.

No cheap jokes, he said.

He said

This will do. This is just what I was looking for.

He picked up a silk heart and he took £10 out of his pocket and handed it to a salesperson. He had to use his other hand to get the money, so he dropped his hold on me. Now he went up a short flight of steps, then up another step to a platform overlooking the store, and I followed him up to the top. On the platform were three round black tables and three chairs with cane seats. There was a table against the wall with two coffee machines and a sign that said Help yourself to coffee and Milk in the Fridge; next to the table was a fridge. A couple of small speakers sent Virgin FM scratchily out.

He pulled a second chair to one of the tables and sat down. I sat down.

He tore open the cellophane with his teeth and unwrapped the white silk heart. He pulled the Stanley knife free of its cardboard.

He said

You know my agent? He can tell you who’d give money for this; he’ll find someone who’d like to buy it.

He held his thumb up. He breathed on it, and then he ground it onto the white silk.

He said

You know the old joke. I suffered for my art and now it’s your turn.

He gripped my thumb tightly. I thought he would do the same with my thumb: it was dirty enough from my climbing. He held it so tightly it hurt, and before I understood what he meant he had seized the knife and slashed my thumb with the blade.

A big gout of blood welled out of the cut. He let it gather on the blade and then he took this away and did something on the silk, and then he scooped up more blood with the knife and transferred it to the silk, and he did this nine or ten times. Then he put the knife aside and he brought my bloody thumb down on the silk beside the black mark he had made.

He lifted my hand and dropped it on the table. He retracted the blade of the knife and put the knife in his pocket.

On the white silk were the two thumbprints, one black one red with a cut across it. Underneath was written in wet letters

Washed white in the Blood of the Lamb

4

A good samurai will parry the blow

Looking for a father had turned out to be an unexpectedly high-risk activity. Stand behind the door, Kambei tells Katsushiro. Bring down the stick as hard as you can, it will be good training for you. Any more training and I might not live to see 12.

A week went by and we got three red bills on the same day. Sibylla called the project and asked when she could expect her cheque for £300 and the person she talked to was rather snide and said if they took as long to pay as she did to do the work she would probably get the cheque around Christmas. So Sibylla said she would send in 10 issues of Carpworld by the end of the week and the rest the week after that. They sent the cheque for £300 and Sibylla paid off the bills and we had £23.66 to keep going until she got paid for Carpworld.

I was reading a book on solid state physics. Sibylla gave it to me for my birthday because it said inside the front cover that the extension of our understanding of the properties of solids at the microscopic level is one of the important achievements of physics this century and because she had found a damaged copy on sale for £2.99. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite the bargain it looked, because the blurb went on to say: Dr. Rosenberg’s book requires only a fairly basic background in mechanics, electricity, and magnetism, and atomic physics along with relatively intuitive ideas in quantum physics. Sibylla thinks no one is put off by difficulty only by boredom and if something is interesting no one will care how hard it is; it is certainly an absorbing subject but to follow it you really need at least some kind of introductory materials on the above-mentioned subjects. I was getting rather frustrated but I thought I would rather die than sell the heart, not because I wanted to keep it but because it would be horrible to take money for it.

I came in one night after a useless day at the Museum of Science and Technology. Considering they charge an entrance fee you’d think they’d hire people who knew about science and technology, I thought the attendants would be able to help me when I ran into trouble but the one I asked couldn’t.