A metro ran from Heathrow airport to one of the most famous underground stations in London. She knew this because it was in a magazine stuck into the back of the seat in front of her on the plane. The magazine said using the London metro system was very easy, which turned out to be a lie. By the time the third train was ready to leave, Neku had planned her route, bought a ticket, found a seat, and settled herself in for the journey.

If the train was dirty the stations through which it passed were worse. As for Piccadilly Circus…this was one of the world’s greatest tourist areas, London’s equivalent of Ginza, or so it said in the magazine. Neku wasn’t sure what she expected, but English people came somewhere near the top of her list.

A dozen people jostled Neku as she left the station. One man even moved her aside on the escalator, as if shifting some inanimate object out of his way. The steps up streamed with all races and colours and no one seemed to notice the mix of languages or the wild and wide variety of clothes. Identifying groups was impossible, because everyone seemed to be a group of their own. And yet how could all these people know who they were without a framework to define them?

“You might want to move.”

“I might…?”

“Come on,” said the boy in a black suit. “Let me get you out of here.” He led Neku away from the steps and around a fat metal rail that existed to stop people stepping into the road. It didn’t work, because men kept jumping over it.

“Japanese?” asked the boy.

Neku nodded, which seemed easier than trying to explain why he was both right and wrong.

“Thought so,” he said. “You look Japanese.”

When Neku touched her face, he smiled. “No,” he said. “Your clothes.”

“My…?” Neku glanced at herself in a shop window, catching glimpses of herself in the occasional gap between other people’s reflections. He was right, she did look very foreign. Too mote, much too soft and cutesy for this city.

“I’m Neku,” she said, making a decision.

“Charlie…” He shook her hand, and grinned as Neku gave a bow. “Let me buy you a latte,” he said, then stopped, seeing her smile. “What?” Charlie demanded.

“Just wondering,” Neku said, as she linked her arm through his. “What it is about strange men and coffee.”

“I’ll just be late,” said Charlie, putting a tray down on the table. “God knows, they owe me.”

Neku looked puzzled.

“I work at the Virgin Megastore,” he said. “Weekends only.”

On the café table next to the tray was a Time Out, an Elle, and a GQ…Those had been the magazines Neku recognised. Also on the table was a Mirror, Mail, and Times, plus a free paper and a magazine she’d bought from a homeless man with a dog on her way to the café in Oxford Street.

“This city smells,” she told Charlie.

He looked offended.

“All cities smell,” Neku said hastily.

“Of what?” he asked, sliding a chip into the mobile they’d picked up three doors before Caffé Nero, after Neku suddenly stopped dead in front of Vids4U and nearly caused a pile up of pedestrians.

“It varies,” she said, adding, “I’m serious,” when Charlie glanced up. “London smells of coffee and cars and women’s perfume. Also sweat.”

“And Tokyo?”

“Noodles,” she said, “and sewage.”

Charlie looked mollified. “Your battery needs a charge,” he said. “But you’ve got enough to last until then. Plug the phone in overnight, okay?”

“And I can just buy more credit?”

“Sure,” said Charlie, “that’s not a problem…” He glanced round the busy café and then looked at his watch. “I should move,” he said, sounding reluctant. “Maybe we could get coffee again sometime…”

When Charlie left it was with Neku’s new phone number and a promise they’d meet soon. “All those magazines,” he said, as he hovered on the edge of going. “Are you trying to catch up on our culture?”

“On your world,” said Neku, glad that he smiled.

She started with the Times, because that looked the most serious and she believed in getting the difficult jobs over first, then she read the Mail and the Mirror and all the magazines.

Black was back, Cartagena was the new Bogotá, Rome still believed it might win the Olympic bid, and bikers had rioted in Tokyo. The M25 corpse was currently unidentified and fifteen men had been arrested in Leeds. The police were refusing to say on what charge…

At the end of it all, having read every single sentence of every single paragraph, Neku wasn’t sure she was all that much wiser, but at least the film posters she’d seen on London bus shelters and the pictures on other people’s tee-shirts had finally begun to make sense.

The laptop Neku bought from a second-hand shop in Tottenham Court Road came with Web access, obviously enough. The small Indian woman behind the counter even threw in six months’ free connection when she realised Neku intended to pay cash, albeit in dollars rather than local currency. After that, Neku went clothes shopping, had her hair cut, and dropped her piercings in a bin. Well, the facial ones anyway.

A man in a taxi looked put out when Neku asked to be taken to Hogarth Mews. At first, Neku thought this was because of how she dressed, although there were many girls out shopping dressed far more strangely, and in some cases barely dressed at all. And then Neku decided it was because she was Japanese, but couldn’t see why that would worry him, since he looked African.

It was only when he turned down one street, turned up another, and stopped outside an arch that Neku realised she’d been less than two minutes’ walk from where she needed to be.

“Thank you,” she said, giving the man twenty dollars. When it looked as if he was about to complain, she handed him another twenty.

He drove off without saying goodbye.

CHAPTER 28 — Saturday, 23 June

Hogarth Mews came to a halt at a red door in a white wall, shortly after the little courtyard turned abruptly right. Four other houses made up the mews, three to the left of the entrance, one almost directly on the right. The house with the red door was around the corner and invisible from the street.

This house had six windows. One of them was at ground level and this had iron bars covering a rotting window frame. On the plus side, all the other windows to number 5 Hogarth Mews had flower boxes and the front door had been painted recently enough to still be sticky.

Putting down her shopping bags, Neku examined the buzzers. Not a name or a number between the lot of them. Choosing one at random, she pushed hard and when no one answered, she pushed it again. On her third try someone shouted from inside. At Neku’s fifth attempt, footsteps were heard and a woman with paint in her hair yanked open the door. Whatever she expected to see it obviously wasn’t a smartly dressed young Japanese girl in black jeans, white sneakers, and black Banana Yoshimoto tee-shirt, all from RetroMetro in Covent Garden.

Bowing deeply, Neku smiled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Could you repeat that?”

“The buzzers,” said the woman, then stopped. “It doesn’t matter…”

“What about them?”

“Fucking broken,” said the woman. “Doesn’t matter which one you choose, they all ring.” She flicked ash from her cigarette, dragged a last gasp from its stub, and dropped the filter onto cobbles, crushing it with a bare heel. “Someone’s going to have to mend it, probably me…”

Neku decided not to explain that she had, in fact, been ringing all of them.

“Which flat were you after?”

“The top one,” said Neku. “I’m looking for Kit Nouveau.”

The English woman was blonde, with long curling hair and jeans far tighter than those Neku wore. She had on a man’s shirt, with the tails untucked and enough buttons undone at the neck for Neku to see her breasts, which were very small. Vermillion paint smudged her cheek. Her teeth when she smiled were slightly yellow.