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| Loretta & I. |
Friday, December 13th – 2024
Criss-crossed by the mesh screen over my apartment window –
Osaka parts its bleary eyes and wakes, stirring to a wide azure sky which
stretches from the jagged incisors of Nara’s mountains to the Yodo river’s
floodplains far in the north. Children pacing clumsily to school with their
yellow safety hats bobbing like rubber ducks in a brook, elderly folks stopping
in doorways to chatter through blue surgical masks and sighing “Samui naaaa…”,
as if some long-revered mantra. A hot black coffee is my companion to sip at as
I regard these fleeting scenes of neighbourhood life from my high-rise castle.
It’s a Friday, and I have to work. But the thought of that is utterly trivial
in my mind, driven to inconsequence by the thrill that builds in my chest at
the reminder of the biggest event of the year – the company Christmas party on
Sunday!
The chance to dress to the nines in polished dress shoes and an elegant tie, to
chink glass upon glass of complementary red wine before parading triumphantly
to the Kyobashi British pub where we’d stay 'til the late hours of the night, 'til your best suit is creased and faintly soaked with cigarette smoke. Which,
speaking of, is exactly what I need to pick up from Maruzensya dry cleaners.
Just down the four flights of stairs, through that narrow little alleyway where
I can hop on my bike and zip past the park an-
Where’s my bike?
Right under the sign that reads Chateau Oji, the spot usually occupied
by the sweetest bicycle this side of Nagoya…is nothing. No green frame
plastered in craft beer stickers, no worn spongey seat or slightly deflated
wheels. Despite confusion, reassurance, searching, stress, denial - the
realization leaps upon me in the middle of the street and grips me and won’t
relinquish. Some filthy pillock has taken my poor Loretta and ridden her off
into the night!
Distraught, mortified, and after utterly exhausting myself circling the entire
neighbourhood like a mother goose pining for a lost gosling, I scurry back to
my room and rip a page from my kanji practice notebook.
Notice
My bicycle was
taken from outside this building sometime between 00:30am and 9:30am on Friday,
December 13th. It’s a green bicycle with stickers all over the
frame, and a naan bread seat cover.
If you have any
information about this bike – the last time you saw it, where it might be, any
suspicious people around the building, please let me know.
This bike is very
special to me and I’m very sad it’s gone.
I’ll give a 3000+
reward to any information that results in its return.
Thank you,
Joe Smith, room
401
This is very serious business.
***
October
21st, 2022.
I’d taken my good friend Vinny’s advice and decided that
today was the day I was to buy a bike of my own. Of course, no English teacher living
in central Osaka would ever dream of owning a car, especially when all of their
branch schools are so close to metro stations. And whilst walking everywhere
might seem great from a cardiovascular perspective at first, a couple of 30-minute,
post-work marches to the supermarket in the cold quickly soured my idea of that.
Vinny’s bike shop recommendation was opposite Abeno ward office and easy to
miss, as it was tucked into a corner and didn’t actually have a sign outside.
At this point in my Japan odyssey I didn’t quite have the vocabulary or the
confidence of speaking under my belt, so when the owner came to greet me and
ask my what I was looking for I could only respond with an awkward, “Ahh…uh…mmm…hai.”
She must’ve caught on quickly as she didn’t continue the conversation
further beyond that.
In Japan, one bicycle is king among high school students and old ladies alike –
the Mamachari. A portmanteau of “Mama’s chariot”, alluding to their popularity amongst Japanese moms, these are Dutch-style
step through bikes with wide handlebars and a seat that forces you into proper
posture. I sniffed around them but honestly found them a little…geeky. I didn’t
see myself running errands with my groceries in the front basket or a fair lady
perched on the pannier rack, her scarf billowing in the breeze. No, I needed
something sleeker, something faster, something…
And that, my friends, was the moment me and her met for the first time,
clear in my memory as though it were only last week. In a little second-hand
bike store next to a McDonald’s - it was love at first sight. With her body glowing
an olive hue in the afternoon sunlight, those ivory white accents around her lower
half set her apart from every other old heap of junk that flanked her. Such elegance
caught every last drop of my attention. I picked her out, I paid 11,000 yen and took a green lock to match her frame, and I rode her home. She was christened Loretta.
What adventures we had together! She came with me to receive my first Omikuji
from Sumiyoshi Taisha, and that same evening we sped in a grand loop around
Nagai park with the wind whistling through her spokes and my hair alike. I
crashed her into bridges and cruised the streets with comrades into the late hours;
she saved my skin more than once when I slept through my alarms on a work day.
When I first picked up a camera and began my photography hobby, she was there
to shuttle me through back alleys to find the perfect shot.
And now, a week before I go back to England for the winter vacation…she's lost. At my apartment window in the dark of night I wail her name to no response.
Loretta…Loretta!
***
Pacing, pacing. I’m pacing in between the community
noticeboard and a leafless tree in the shadow of the oppressive concrete façade
of Abeno police station. Let’s rehearse the speech in my head again.
“Boku no…“
No no, that’s not right.
“Watashi no jitenshya wa…”
What’s the word for “was stolen” again?
Oh, nusuraremashita! I remember the word because it sounds like noose, which is
what I’m going to string the thief up in once I catch him.
Enough with the rehearsing. Pedestrians on the pavement are
starting to give you a weird side eye for loitering in front of the police
station. I’m not going to go postal, everybody!
Through the sliding doors, up to the counter. Ready to give my speech to the
young girl in the cap sat behind the perspex window. “Konnichiwa, eto…boku no
jitenshya wa saikin nusuraremashita…boku wa asoko ni sundeimasu, Oji-cho no
apato de, to-“
Suddenly I’m looking at the palm of her hand, held up to my face as she softly
tells me to wait a moment. Into the office goes a call for a Nakamura-san and
up stands a burly, stout tank of a man with hooded eyes flanked by wrinkles
that sink deep into leathery skin. He waits until he’s close enough for his
shadow to plunge me into darkness before cracking a bright and warm smile,
breaking out in perfect English.
“Hello!” Comes Nakamura’s cheery voice. “What’s your problem, how can I help
you?”
As I sheepishly divulge the situation I've found myself in, the imposing yet
soft-spoken officer nods and jots notes in a pad, then turns to his desk where
he clasps an ancient landline phone and punches in a half-dozen numbers. I
twiddle my thumbs patiently to the sounds of his Kansai dialect chattering down
the receiver.
"A detective is coming from upstairs."
A detective?! Abeno police station clearly has a great deal
invested in the theft of foreigner's rusty old bicycles.
I want you to imagine for a moment the most suave and rugged police inspector in
the Osaka metropolitan police; waxed back hair, a stern glare, a pistol tucked
into a shoulder holster. The kind of cop who busts yakuza warehouses on weekly
basis with just his fists and a bottle of Suntory whiskey.
The detective from upstairs was completely the opposite of that, and though he
may have bust heads 40, 50 years previously he now carried himself with the
carefree spirit of a gentleman who was owed retirement a long time ago. A weathered
face framed by far-receding silver hair up top and prickly whiskers around his
chin, an enormous pair of glasses that were maybe in fashion 40 years ago resting
low on his nose. His pinstripe suit permeated by cigarette-smell was amusingly
large around his shoulders, as if it had fit him many moons ago but that he
was the one who’d shrunk in the wash. Though he spoke not a word of English, his
periodic nods and “mm”s as Nakamura chatted assured me that he got the gist of
my plight. With the slightest of bows and a sip of coffee from a paper cup, the
detective excused himself outside for a cigarette. I watched him puff big
clouds of smoke that swirled upwards in the frigid morning air through the glass
lobby doors. Nakamura’s smile showed off a set of neat teeth; “We’ll be in
touch if we find anything” – not reassuring.
A single thought marinated in my mind for weeks and months; when I was on the
plane back to England for Christmas with my forehead resting against the
window, packed like a sardine onto the Midosuji line during rush hour, trudging
to the gym through rain and wind, stood on my balcony late into the night. Some
horrible, evil thief has their grubby hands all over MY Loretta! I was beyond
the pale with fury, each morning turning instinctively to unlock my bicycle and
feeling my heart catch in my throat when I saw that she was not there, and all
the memories came flooding back. Night after night I waited, desperate to feel the
ball of my foot connect with her pedal once more, or to hear the squeal of her
unoiled brakes when I rode absentmindedly across a busy intersection.
***
Late January,
2025. It’s a Tuesday morning and, as is usual for this time of the week, I’m sat
in the South corner of the Tully’s café in Tennoji recounting my weekend escapades
to my Japanese teacher as he makes grammar notes for me in my notebook. (As a footnote,
coffee shops in Japan generally do not have an espresso machine and instead serve
strictly filter coffee or café au lait. This always got a thumbs up from me but
did leave me immensely over-caffeinated come noon.)
As I’m waffling a tale in broken Japanese about going out in Umeda and having
far too much beer, I feel a familiar vibration in my leg and pull out my phone.
It’s the police.
Oh shit. Are they nicking me for smoking outside the FamilyMart again?
I answer with a great deal of trepidation. “Uhm. Moshi moshi…?”
“Joseph Smith? Yeah, we have your bike!
It’s in Bentencho. Would you like to collect it?”
It's as though every prayer has been answered, all those nights of waiting and
yearning for my Loretta. They did it. They found her! She was battered and broken, her chain wheel bent in likely from a collision sustained on whatever perilous journey she'd had at the hands of a lousy scoundrel up to Tosabori in north Osaka. I went up to the bike yard at 9am sharp the next day, signed a few forms and held her in my arms once again, felt the worn rubber of her handlebars as my fingers wrapped around them and we rode home.
And where is Loretta now, you ask? Safe in the hands of a dear friend, where her new purpose in life is to ferry him to pickleball once per week. Rest assured my sweet, we'll see each other soon.
Some day!
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