Yuki chan in Brontë Country

by Mick Jackson

  Another couple of Jameson and Cokes, she thinks, and she might well roll back the carpet, yank up a couple of floorboards and crawl right on through there. Sure, she’d get covered in dust and pick up even more cuts and bruises, but it’d be worth it just to have a look around. Then she remembers the tiny toys they discovered under the floor at the parsonage – little toy soldiers and wooden blocks that the infant sisters must have played with. And is so deeply moved, so filled with love and hurt that she just knows she must tell Kumi all about this, right away.

  Kumiko’s phone rings twice before it cuts to the message and Yuki’s talking before she hears the beep. Saying how she’d forgotten to mention earlier about these tiny books she saw at the parsonage. Sweet little things, all handwritten and stitched by the Brontës. Just like the two of them used to make when they were children, but even smaller, with little drawings of tiny sailing-ships and sitting rooms and someone standing by a tree. And writing so intricate, so absolutely microscopic you’d think a mouse had done it. Enough to break your heart.

  As she speaks she notices she’s having trouble with her pronunciation. Like driving a car with soft tyres that keeps on slipping on the bends. But she perseveres. She talks about the movie she’s watching and how she’s hoping for some big bust-up or car chase. Talks about the characters’ incredible clothes and hair. Then suddenly runs out of steam. Stops. Yawns into the phone. Says Goodbye and hangs up.

  She lies on her stomach, with her head at the base of the bed. Tells herself she’ll give the movie another half hour or so. But within a few seconds she’s beginning to nod off. So she turns the TV off, cleans her teeth and climbs back up onto her big old bed. Turns out the light, puts her head on the pillow and, just like Shinomiya and Oshima, drops down, down into the depths and darkness, as heavy as a stone.

  *

  For hour upon hour she rolls and turns in sleep. Weighed down by alcohol and half-oblivious to her dreams. Then, quite suddenly it seems, there is some sort of calamity. She is in danger, desperate. She sees the water’s surface high above her, with nothing like enough breath to reach it, and comes racing back towards consciousness, practically throwing herself from the bed.

  Almost immediately she comes up against a wall – solid and unforgiving, her mind still trapped down below, while in the flesh she slips and flounders. Her hands sweep across cold wallpaper. She thinks, I have to hold my nerve and work my way across it. Try to find some crack or schism. She is in a room, it would seem. Being kept prisoner, in the dark. Then her left hand takes hold of some material, thick and plentiful. And she pulls it back to find the streetlight. Then she remembers England. About being in Brontë Country. Looking for her mum.

  And the world comes flooding back and she breathes, breathes – brimming with adrenaline. Stares down at the street, her heart pounding madly. The whiskey is burning in her stomach so she goes over to the sink and takes a drink straight from the tap. Stands there, still recovering. Thinks, this happens every month or two. I come hurtling up out of some dreadful torment and by the time I’ve worked out where I am, the dream’s disintegrated – has folded back in on itself and slipped from view.

  She has the light on now. Goes over to her rucksack and rummages among the few things still left in there till she finds the little headtorch she bought in London for just such night-fears. Turns the light out again, closes the curtains, and once her torch is switched on uses it to find her way back to bed. I’ll keep it in my hand, she thinks. It’ll help me stay calm until I get back off to sleep. But pretty soon she pulls it onto her head, with the elasticated straps holding it in place. Sits up against the pillow for a full five minutes, checking the messages on her phone. Then looks up, letting the light swing slowly from one corner of the ceiling to the other. Thinks, I should’ve had this with me when I was blundering round the graveyard.

  Until at last she feels sleep begin to move back in on her. She looks over at the window with the curtain still open a little and thinks about the Coke out there in the cold. How her Aunt Kyoko used to tell her that after giving her hair a brush she should pluck the hair from the bristles and put it out on the window ledge, so that the birds can take it and use it to build their nests. And even now she can’t decide whether this is just the kind of stuff grown-ups love to tell a child to fill their little heads with nonsense or whether there aren’t in fact at this particular moment tiny birds taking hair from window ledges all around the planet. Grateful birds picking up girls’ hair and using it to make their nests.

  Long before the death of her mother, when she would suddenly have very good reason to take an interest in it, Yuki was already carrying out her own little snow experiments – odd exercises in melting and freezing that she could easily dismiss as faintly ridiculous now that she’s no longer eight or nine years old. But if she can’t always remember the detail of the experiments she can recall her commitment. As you get older, she thinks, it’s all too easy to forget the serious business of being a child.

  Her bedroom window had its own broad ledge and, below it, a small flat roof above her father’s study. One winter, when it seemed to snow every day for weeks on end, Yuki opened her window to find a modest drift of snow, with its flat white surface facing her, pristine. She studied it for a while, then began to systematically destroy it. The next day she brought up a candle and matches and melted some snow in an old tin, which she held with a rag at the rim. First on the ledge of her window, then, when the wind kept blowing out the candle, on the desk just inside her room.

  The previous year she’d seen a TV movie in which a bearded man traipsed about some snowy wilderness teetering on the edge of extinction, which had scared the life out of her. She remembers him packing snow into a small pan and melting it over a fire, to make tea or drinking water. So it’s likely that Yuki was, in her way, exploring ideas relating to survival and mortality. Lying in bed at night she would imagine herself huddled in a shelter made from leaves and branches. As the wind roared she’d pull the sheets around her and think, Stay awake, Yuki chan. If you fall asleep you may never wake up again, like that beardy man out in the snow.

  In part, she supposes, her experiments were simply investigations into transformation. Because, having melted the snow over the candle’s flame, she’d then tuck the tin back out in the corner of the flat roof to see what effect the night’s freezing temperatures would have on whatever was inside. She exposed quite a number of things to the cold that winter: lemon juice … detergent … raw egg. She might even have logged her findings. In between, she would drip hot wax onto the back of her hand, as if she was being tortured. After that first shock of heat, when it seemed the wax would burn right through her, she’d see the wax quickly shift from clear oil to something milky. The pain would abate and the wax would stiffen, until she could pull it up, still warm but pliable and carrying a perfect imprint of every hair and pore on her skin.

  Her little experiments continued right up to the point when the tin became so blackened it looked ready to shatter and she was having to reach further and further out onto the roof to retrieve some untouched snow. Sometimes Yuki thinks that, given the right encouragement, she could’ve been a chemist of some repute. She imagines herself standing, proud, in her lab coat, with a test tube pinched between her fingers. She looks quite serious – as befits a scientist of her rank.

  It’s still dark when Yuki’s phone starts ringing. She has to drag herself out of what is, for once, a deeply restorative sleep. Sits herself up. Then has to try and find her phone, still ringing and lost among the sheets.

  Before she’s tracked it down she feels the pressure on her forehead, lifts a hand to it and finds the torch, still strapped in place. She locates the phone, sweeps the screen and brings it up to her ear. What, she says.

  And without hesitation Kumiko is off, wanting to know precisely how much she drank last night. You sounded like some bum, she says. Like some degenerate. If you’re not careful you’re going to inflict some permanent physical da
mage.

  Yuki climbs out of bed, arguing, quite reasonably, that Kumiko drinks far more than she does, but Kumi dismisses this. I’m bigger than you, she says. My liver’s bigger. My liver could beat the shit out of that puny little liver of yours.

  Yukiko’s over at the mirror now, trying to disentangle the torch from her hair.

  Also, Kumi says, why the hell were you getting so worked up about some little books the junior Brontës made? Three days ago you knew practically nothing about these stupid women. Now you’re talking like they’re long-lost cousins. What is wrong with you?

  Yukiko thinks, She called me this early on purpose. Knowing I’d still be sleeping and less likely to put up a decent fight. She leans in towards the mirror – there’s a circular red mark in the skin where the torch was clamped against her forehead. I’m going to have to wear one of those awful beanies the rest of my life, she thinks. Or grow some ridiculous fringe.

  What time it is, she says.

  I don’t know. About six thirty, says Kumiko. I’ve got an early meeting.

  So why not call me after you’ve had the meeting? When you know I’ll actually be awake?

  I was concerned, she says. I turned my phone on just now and heard all your incoherent babble. And I thought, I need to check on my little sister straight away. Make sure she’s not about to do anything strange.

  This last comment, Yukiko knows, is just Kumiko fishing. She tells her to wait a second, puts her head under the tap and takes a couple of gulps of Yorkshire water. Wets her hand under the tap and wipes it across her face.

  So when do you get back to town? Kumi wants to know.

  Oh, I don’t know. I need to look at the train times. Watching herself in the mirror, thinking, Look at that. Not even a flicker. I’m lying through my teeth and I didn’t even blink.

  Kumiko tells her to try and get back by five or six, so they can meet up after work. Taiki and Paul are talking about eating in Soho. And Yuki thinks, Well, that seals it. I’m just going to turn my phone off and stay up here for the rest of the week.

  Kumiko says she has got to go. Makes Yuki promise she’ll call when she’s on her way, then hangs up.

  Yuki limps off to the bathroom. Then tidies her room a little. She knows breakfast won’t be served for another thirty minutes, so she takes out her mother’s photos and the Ordnance Survey map and spends some time studying them. But pretty soon she’s thinking, If I don’t eat or drink something in the next ten minutes I may collapse, slip into a coma. So she pulls the bottle of Coke in off the window ledge and pops the lid off the tin of Brontë biscuits – just to get some sugar inside of her.

  She washes and dresses super-slowly. Then finally decides she’s had enough, picks up a couple of things and heads down the stairs. She wastes another few minutes looking at leaflets in the hallway, then goes on into the breakfast room. The table by the window is the only one with crockery and cutlery laid out on it, so she takes a seat at it.

  She keeps herself busy by shifting her knife, fork and spoon about until they’re all good and straight, but after a while thinks, Maybe I should make some sound, to let people know I’m actually sitting here. Or perhaps there’s a little bell somewhere I’m supposed to ring?

  Eventually she tells herself, This is crazy. So she gets up and creeps over to the kitchen door, which has those special hinges that allow the door to swing both ways. Yuki pushes gently at it, but instead of opening onto a busy kitchen with people dashing around, lots of steam and pots and pans, there’s just an empty carpeted corridor.

  She can hear a radio, off in the distance. Wonders whether she should call out, or maybe walk the extra couple of metres along to the corner. And as she’s looking around she notices a row of hooks high up on the wall to her left with little bunches of keys hanging from them and pretty quickly works out what these keys are for. She’s still standing there, staring at them, when the B & B Lady comes storming round the corner. Yukiko jumps, but the B & B Lady doesn’t seem to mind her poking her head round the door. She’s laughing and saying, Good morning, Good morning and a few other things Yuki can’t quite make out as she leads her back to the table. Then, when Yuki’s about to take her seat, the B & B Lady gives her a little pat on the shoulder. Really just the gentlest squeeze of affection, but to Yuki it feels like just about the best thing to have happened to her for quite a while.

  Once she’s settled in her chair the B & B Lady hands Yuki a menu and starts talking through the main four or five options, some of which have little sub-sections of their own. Yuki’s thinking how much easier it would be if all the food was laid out in stainless-steel tubs, brightly lit, like they do in most hotels, so you can just pick out whatever food you happen to recognise. And in the end Yukiko just points at one of the options, says, Thank you. The B & B Lady nods and smiles and heads off back to the kitchen, and a few minutes later she’s back with a pot of coffee and a couple of croissants, which is just fine as far as Yukiko’s concerned, though it occurs to her that the way things are going she may eat nothing but bread, pastry and biscuits the whole time she’s in this town.

  When Yuki’s finished and the B & B Lady comes out to take her plate, she leans back in her chair with some deliberation, so the B & B Lady can see the photos she’s placed on the table. It’s pretty clear, Yuki hopes, that she’s trying to draw her attention to them because she’s looking up at the B & B Lady, then back down at the photos, like a dog hoping you’re going to pick up its ball. The B & B Lady moves on in for a closer look. One photo is just a tree or bush, bent right over by the wind. The other is a shot of one of the local reservoirs. Then Yukiko produces her Ordnance Survey map.

  They have to clear everything off Yuki’s table to make enough space to open the map out a little. The B & B Lady finds Haworth, looks back at the photos and checks that Yuki wants to know if she’s any idea where the photos were taken.

  Well, the tree, she says, and taps away at it. Where that tree is I’ve no idea. But the reservoir – I reckon I know where that is. And she lifts her finger, reaches over to the right a little, and places it on a patch of blue.

  Yuki leans right in to study the spot beneath her finger. And, as the B & B Lady slowly withdraws it, brings her own finger in to make sure she doesn’t let it slip away.

  It takes Yuki a good hour or so to find her way out there. The directions are pretty clear, but towards the end of the journey she encounters a wall with barbed wire along the top and no obvious way round it, so she climbs up onto it to scan the moorland beyond, and it’s only when she turns to jump back down that she sees the water glinting off in the distance, nowhere near where it’s supposed to be.

  She leaves the path and sets off through the heather towards it. The ground looks soft but is packed with stones and boulders, so Yuki has to watch every footfall and only sees the reservoir when she stops to make sure she’s heading in the right direction. Then the ground begins to even out a little and she can smell the water in the air. She climbs a low stone wall. Takes out the photo and tries to work out where she should stand.

  She goes on over to the right, but the photograph and the view before her seem determined not to correspond. Yuki wonders if she’s maybe coming at the water from the wrong direction, but on the other side there’s a much steeper bank, which wouldn’t work at all. So she wanders up and down for another couple of minutes. Then finally just stands and looks out at the cold, grey water. Tiny waves shuffle back and forth at the water’s edge, and way out in the middle the surface is being plucked up by the wind. Yuki thinks, Why would anyone want to take a photograph of this?

  Before leaving Japan she pretty much assumed that she’d just step off the coach and things would start to fall into place straightaway. That her very presence here would get the wheels turning and that the curtain would slowly be lifted on everything. Sure, it felt good to stand outside the B & B and the parsonage and occupy the same space her mother had occupied ten years before. But there’d been no great revelation. Even
creeping around in her mother’s clothes hadn’t been as productive as she’d expected. I must be a pretty poor psychic detective, she tells herself. If I was my captain I’d be considering taking my badge off me and kicking me out of the force.

  As far as she knows, the Brontës didn’t come out here to bathe or to do their laundry. It’s not on any of the Brontë maps. The bent-back tree, at least, has some peculiar beauty to it. But even on a summer’s day this water must look pretty dismal and not particularly mysterious.

  When Yukiko’s parents visited the UK her father stayed in London and her mum came up here on her own. Yuki has often been inclined to imagine that her mother may have had an affair of some sort. That there could have been a single, solitary man in her party. Or maybe even someone she arranged to meet up here. Well, perhaps this is where they came, to get away from all the others. To lie on the ground by the cold, grey water and fumble about under the North English sky.

  She looks at the ground by her feet, as if she might yet find a trace of their bodies – some faint impression in the heather. She’s got a carton of juice in her rucksack, but doesn’t have the energy to wrestle it out of there. So she just squats down and has another look at the photograph – for some tiny detail she may have missed before.

  She tries to line up the horizon in the photo with the one before her. Swings it slowly round from right to left to try and get it to bleed into the landscape. And as she does so she becomes aware of something in her peripheral vision – some indistinct shape, just over her shoulder. And she looks round to find that same strange girl, a little way off, watching. Just as she stood and watched last night.