Darts

It's a quiet Wednesday night and I've finished work early. Since my girlfriend left me, I've been in the habit of shaving twice a day. Rituals keep me anchored. I've got my Gillette Mach Synch 3 razor and my sturdy can of Schick shaving foam. I get home about five and I stand in front of the bathroom mirror scraping beard off my face until all that's left is a greyness behind the skin. As I'm shaving, I wonder why in movies no one ever finishes a shave. The doorbell or the telephone always rings halfway through and the handsome star emerges wiping the foam off his face with a towel and sucking his gut in. Then he dresses up in a suit and goes out on the town. Was it the fashion to sip cocktails with half a beard back then? I manage to finish without interruptions.

Darts is all the rage in Japan. And one thing I've noticed is that lots of cute girls play darts. With this in mind I decide to head out in search of a darts bar with my trusty darts set tucked in my pocket. I've bought some new "Homer Simpson" flights with a hope of appealing to the opposite sex. After splashing a little extra hair tonic on my head and brushing the do back, I set off for the station. I pick up a couple of chu-hai cans at the station kiosk and drink one on the platform, saving one for the train. I get off only a few stops down, so the two cans send a rush of dopamine to ease the grip some hand has on my head and trickle an easy feeling down through my brain. By the time I'm walking around the station looking for darts bars I'm already pleasantly mellow. I decide on an English style pub still in the middle of happy hour.

Inside, it resembles an English pub only in decor: wood panelling as opposed to solid wood. Even at happy hour prices, the Guinness comes in at 500 yen a pint. "A pint of Guinness" translates as "Ginesu no 1 painto", so I get one and settle down at a seat in view of the wide screen TV. There's a game of volleyball on which will do. Watching a ball going back and forth is about as challenging as you want when you're drinking. The pub is still pretty empty and it's about three pints later before I strike up a conversation with a foreign guy who's here with a local girl. He's a very boyish looking character with a freckly face and a red complexion. She's large-boned with a calm face and dimples high up in her cheeks. She's especially sturdy from the waist down, with legs like oak trees. He's an English teacher and she's a manager at the same school. Jim and Yukiko.

Everyone's drinking Guinness, but Yukiko's still on her first pint by the time Jim and I reach our third. We've talked on a surface level about eikaiwa, Japan, our own countries and beer, when I ask, "So, are you guys going out together?" "Nah. nah," says Jim. Yukiko smiles faintly and the dimples in her cheeks deepen. Jim throws the question back at me, "What about you, you got a girlfriend?" "Nah.nah." Yukiko has got up to go to the toilet. Jim is very vocal on his appreciation of the local girls while she's away but changes the subject when she comes back. I notice as she sits down that there are red patches on her cheeks. She looks in slight dismay at her still half-full glass of Guinness.

Jim and I agree to have a game of darts. Yukiko is happy to watch and maybe join in when she's worked out how the game goes. The board is just behind the bar and it's a nice one, a Harrows bristle board surrounded by plain wood for protection from stray darts with the whole thing mounted on a large, mahogany panel. We set a couple of fresh pints of Guinness on the counter and start a game of 301. We get through the first few games in five or six rounds. With the bar so near, it's almost too easy to refill our glasses, and the Guinness is very good; bitter, smooth and creamy. Jim asks them after a few pints to stop putting the shamrock pattern on the froth, "just for the hell of it," he says. Yukiko chats with us as we play and asks questions about the rules. To each answer she says "hei?" with a rising inflection, as though great mysteries were being unfolded in a mock English pub that quiet Wednesday night.

As we drink more pints, the six round games turn into ten round games, then twelve, then fifteen--Jim appears to be a little shaky on his feet and goes round muttering,"...fucken shamrock" under his breath. The Guinness begins to taste syrupy and heavy. Finally we find ourselves stuck on a game we can't finish. We are both trying for a double three and have been there for about ten rounds. By this stage, few of our darts are actually hitting the board, and we decide to make it a contest to see how many darts we can get to stay stuck in the plain wooden area. We've completely forgotten that Yukiko was meant to be playing with us by now. But she still sits there feigning interest. When she talks, she barely opens her mouth, the sound coming out through small lips and teeth almost clenched.

At some point I get the great idea to see how the darts will stick in the dark mahogany panelling, and we find that they do! The wood makes a sucking sound as it receives the darks. Thwuck thwuck thwuck. Jim and I have fun with this for a few rounds. Thwuck thwuck thwuck. Yukiko is beginning to look worried. "Jim," she says. "Jim." But he's too involved with putting holes in the mahogany. I lean over to her.
"Should we stop?" "This is your fault."

It becomes apparent that we've outstayed our welcome at the pub, mostly because we get kicked out. Something to do with "abusing the dartboard." Stepping outside, it's obvious Jim and I have drunk too much Guinness. We need to go to somewhere to sober up. The three of us find a small jazz bar and walk in. Sitting up the back in the dark, we sip on gin and tonics while Sonny Rollins's saxophone bleats somewhere high above us. I can feel myself sobering up with the sharp lime entering my nostrils, but Jim isn't doing so well. First he sits with his head down, then leans back, then forward again. Finally he stands up and fumbles around for his wallet. I say:
"It's okay. At least finish your drink."
"Nah...nah," Jim says and stumbles out the door. Which leaves me and Yukiko. She still doesn't look happy. I watch her dimples for a minute, and the thin mouth that has become down turned. "Master!" I holler out. "Blues!"

A minute or two later and there's Billy Holliday crooning her way back through history to the Bose speakers, gardenias in hand. I can almost smell them. And there's me and a girl I don't know called Yukiko, with cute dimples at the top of her cheekbones.

"I'm sorry about ..."
'You drink too much."
"Yeah, I lost my girl..." I stop.

We listen to the lady for a while. I watch Yukiko sitting with her arms folded. She's slumped in her seat. Looking, I can imagine her lounging around at home. Once, she expels a breath of air through her lips. I visit the toilet and look at my face in the mirror. The grey on my jaw is starting to show through. Somehow, my body has been planning my survival even through twelve pints of Guinness. When I come out, Yukiko is gone. On the table is 3000 yen and a name card. Yukiko Sakabayashi. I stuff them in my pocket, lean back and listen to songs of just how blue life can get.

I get home at about 3 a.m. I feel I've drunk myself sober and decide to have another shave before falling asleep on the couch. I set up the Schick shaving foam and the Mach Synch 3 razor. I check for dimples high up on my cheeks in a coy way, trying not to catch myself looking too closely at my own face. Even smiling none appear. As I shave, for the first time in years my hand slips. Quickly, I check in the mirror for blood. On my right cheek, behind the thick foam, a crimson line has appeared. Beads form and slowly fall through the cream. I pull out a hand towel from the basket and wipe the foam away from around the cut. Three straight red lines, as if measured with a ruler, are carefully cut into my cheek. I feel a coldness as the blood trickles out. I wipe the rest of the foam off my face and toss the towel into the washing machine. Before I walk away from the mirror, I look once again at the tears of blood hanging on the edge of the new indent near the top of my cheekbone.

I lie on the sofa, thinking of other people lying on other sofas at three in the morning, maybe expelling air through their lips and watching a little TV before turning in for the night. I check Yukiko Sakabayashi's name card and turn it over for the Japanese. There is none. Instead, there's a phone number, hand written in the serifed style popular here. Three things occur to me. I failed to finish my shave. I like Yukiko Sakabayashi. And a few hours from now an entire country will haul itself into a new day with no awareness at all of what has just happened.