by Mick Jackson
Mr Fields mimed taking a photograph with an invisible camera, and shook his head.
Mr Fukurai didn’t use a camera, he said. Then brought a flat hand up beside Yukiko’s temple.
Just photographic plates … to try and capture people’s thoughts.
Yuki knew something of this. It was the kind of notion that at one point in the day seems almost reasonable and at another quite ludicrous.
Now, did you know that Professor Fukurai came to England?
Yuki didn’t. In fact, she was sometimes inclined to imagine that her parents were the first Japanese people ever to set foot on British soil.
Then Mr Fields strolled around the table and picked up one of the photographs of balls of light hovering between a group of people.
William Hope, he said. One of the best-known British spirit photographers – invited him over in 1928 to deliver a lecture at the International Spiritualists’ Federation. Then up to his home in Crewe, to carry out some experiments.
Yukiko was still staring at the photographs, baffled. Mr Fields looked steadily at her.
I think perhaps this is something your mother might have been interested in, he said.
Yuki and Denny lock the bedroom door and tiptoe back along the landing, with Yuki convinced the B & B Lady is loitering somewhere in the shadows, thinking, What the hell is that Crazy Jap Girl up to in my house?
Back in Yuki’s room Denny climbs up on the bed, stretches out and stares at the ceiling. Yuki still has the key to her mother’s bedroom in her hand, growing warm there. Will have to put it back on its little hook at some point. But not now, she thinks, when the B & B Lady is hanging around, waiting – ready to leap out at her.
Of course, this could very well be the same key her mother used when she stayed here. In which case, couldn’t there perhaps be some vestige of motherly kindness buried deep in it, beneath the heat of however many hundred other guests have used it since? Then Denny calls to her. Yuki turns and finds Denny sitting up on the bed now, pointing. Yukiko looks down and sees a patch of blood on her trousers about the size of the palm of her hand. At first it seems that bloodstain might be a manifestation of some psychic encounter. The kind of thing Mr Fields might have in his collection. And Yuki is still staring down at it, dumbfounded, when Denny comes over, takes her hand and leads her back to the bed.
As she limps along Yuki thinks, Well that’s kind of interesting. It didn’t bother me at all until I saw it. Now, suddenly, it hurts like hell.
She undoes her belt and the button at the top of her trousers and Denny carefully pulls them down, clear of the wound. The tissue she’d packed against it is soaked right through with blood and peels away with the trousers. The wound is all puffed up, kind of shiny, and the four neat holes are leaking blood.
Maybe it didn’t like you moving around, says Denny.
But Yukiko isn’t listening. She’s thinking, So, this is it – me bleeding to death in a B & B in Brontë Country. Soon the B & B Lady will knock at the door and present me with some Victorian chaise on which various other female guests have passed away.
Denny’s over at the window now, looking out at the snow, still falling. I’d take you to the A & E at Leeds, she says. But we’d be slipping and sliding all over the place.
Denny’s thinking – seems to fairly brim with purpose. OK, she says, and goes back over to Yuki. Helps her pull her trousers back up. She looks around for Yuki’s coat and is buckling her belt when she suddenly stops, lifts her head and looks her square in the eyes.
You’re not gonna faint on me, are you? she says.
When they step out into the street it feels a whole lot colder. The snow’s already thick on the ground and shows no sign of slackening. One or two cars still creep along the streets, but with great care now, and Yuki and Denny advance with similar caution, their every fifth or sixth footstep shooting away from them, which is not what Yukiko wants at all.
Yuki holds tight onto Denny’s forearm as they make their way slowly down the steep high street. Across the road they see an older woman slip and fall and other people go hurrying over to her, and Yuki thinks, If we do manage to get down this hill, there’s no guarantee we’ll ever get back up it.
At the bottom Denny leads Yuki onto a quieter street where the falling snow has the place pretty much to itself. A hundred metres or so along it they arrive at a doctor’s surgery, which is not a whole lot bigger than the little houses on either side. Denny goes up to the door and pushes at it, but it’s locked.
The surgery’s opening times are stencilled onto the glass in the door in silver letters. Denny peers at them, then pulls her phone out of her pocket. Says they must only have closed a couple of minutes ago. Then she puts her face up against the glass and stares down the corridor. There’s someone in there, she says. I can see them wandering around. And she starts hammering away at the glass.
Eventually, a disgruntled-looking woman appears and announces, muted through the glass, that the surgery’s closed and what time it’s going to reopen later on. But Denny turns and points over at Yuki. She’s hurt herself, she says. She’s bleeding. Then turns to Yuki. Open your coat, she says. So she can see the blood.
It’s pretty impressive. The woman goes off and a minute or so later, reappears, opens the door and leads them through to a tiny waiting room, where they have to sit and fill out various forms. Magazines are stacked up on tiny tables and in one corner is a pile of brightly coloured children’s toys. Yuki looks at the magazines and toys and imagines all the bacteria and viruses smeared all over them, incubated in the radiator’s heat.
Once the paperwork has been thoroughly checked and sanctioned, Yuki and Denny are shown through to the surgery and before they’ve even taken a seat Denny is talking to the doctor, as if she’s Yuki’s personal interpreter. Telling him about the dog and how it came galloping over towards them. How it leapt up and bit Yukiko, while the two of them were out having an afternoon stroll.
The doctor asks Yuki to undo her trousers and gets her to lie down on a sort of gurney. He pulls on a pair of latex gloves, rips open a sterilised pack and uses the folded cloth to wipe away the blood.
That’s a nasty bite, he says.
Denny’s right beside him, peering in at the bloody, puckered holes. I’m thinking it was maybe some sort of wild dog, she tells the doctor. A wolf, maybe.
The doctor stops for a moment and looks over at Denny. Then goes back to cleaning the wound. Well, whatever it was, he says, if I were you I’d report it to the police.
He asks Yukiko if she’s planning to stay in town long, and suddenly Denny is stock still and silent.
One day, she says. Maybe two.
The doctor says, OK. Tells her he’s going to dress the wound and give her a tetanus shot, but that she might want to take a regular dose of paracetamol for a couple of days, just to keep on top of the pain.
Denny seems almost disappointed. As if she’s been imagining Yukiko confined to bed, in a fever. Her bringing Yuki her meals on a tray. The doctor gives Yuki the shot in her good thigh, hands her a card with a phone number on it in case things suddenly worsen, and a couple of minutes later she and Denny are back out on the street.
The snow has stopped and the town is perfectly still. As if the snow has quietly stolen something away, but with such delicacy that people aren’t inclined to mind. As they walk along the street Yukiko thinks, In the Beautiful Decrepit Future this is how it will be. Pristine and a little terrifying.
The cars have abandoned any hope of climbing the high street and the pavements have become so treacherous Yuki and Denny have to make their way from the window ledge of one shop to another.
Halfway up, Yuki stops to catch her breath and Denny asks her how her leg is feeling. Yukiko looks down at it. Thinks, It feels much the same as it did half an hour ago, but now the other leg’s hurting, where the doctor stuck me with a needle. So I’m basically limping with both legs.
It’s OK, she says.
Yuki spots a
teashop over the road and suggests they go on in, just to warm themselves up. So they creep across the cobbles, with Denny holding onto Yuki’s arm, order two coffees and take a table near the back. The place is dimly lit and the only window is the one out onto the street which instils in Yuki the feeling that she’s in some sort of cave-cafe that’s been carved right out of the hillside.
Yuki checks her phone. There’s a text from Kumiko wanting to know when Yuki’s going to get back to London. Yuki thinks, I’ll deal with all that later on. And since the phone is in her hand she tries to find the recording she made in her mother’s bedroom, to check that it’s actually picked up something. She locates the file, presses ‘Play’, and she and Denny lean in and listen, picturing the two of them standing there, breathless and anxious. A girl brings their drinks over and slips the cups and saucers onto the table as they listen. Yuki’s convinced she can hear the car pass by in the distance and, a few moments later, footsteps as the B & B Lady approached. She looks up and nods at Denny. Denny smiles and nods back at her. And the two of them sit there, listening to the recording of the two of them standing and listening. Watching the door. Waiting it for it to swing open. And they feel some of that same anxiety sweep back over them again.
When the recording finally ends they both sit back for a moment. Denny looks at Yuki and asks what she was hoping to find in the bedroom. Yukiko’s not sure – and even if she knew she’s not sure she’d know how to articulate it, in English or Japanese. So she picks up her phone and opens up her photos and scrolls back through them – the ones she took at the parsonage … her hotel room in Leeds … Kumiko drunk … Kumiko pulling faces … Buckingham Palace … right back to the ones she took at the institute, of Mr Fields’s precious photographs.
She’s looking for a shot of an old couple sitting upright, with a small globe of light between them. But before she can find it, Denny leans forward and asks Yuki to slow down so she can have a better look. There’s the shot of Ada Emma Deane, bristling beneath a shrouded beauty. The headscarved woman, wincing and writhing, as if possessed. Denny swears under her breath. And when an image sweeps onto the screen of a group of people holding hands around a table, and a buttoned-up woman at one end with her head tipped back and her mouth half-open, Denny reaches out and places a finger on the head of the medium.
So that’s why you booked yourself in at the Grosvenor? she says.
Yuki looks up at her. Doesn’t understand.
The psychic, says Denny and taps the screen, so that she inadvertently opens up the image and the possessed woman slides beneath her finger. That’s why you’re staying at the weird B & B.
When Yuki finally grasps what Denny is saying she finds that the B & B, as she pictures it in her mind now, accommodates a medium quite easily. And given that in the last few years of her life her mother was pretty much obsessed with visions and psychics, Yuki’s sure this must have figured in her decision to rent a room.
She’s getting a little light-headed and wonders if this feeling – when everything seems about to come together, and she might even be levitating just a centimetre or two – really is preferable to the conviction that her investigation has reached an impasse and that there is simply no more to be done.
Denny does her best to explain that it isn’t the woman who currently runs the B & B who is the psychic but that woman’s mother – and that she retired some years ago and passed the business on to her daughter.
Yuki asks if this psychic’s still alive. Denny nods. I think so, she says. She used to live in a home …
And Denny points up the hill. Yuki half turns and stares at that same impenetrable wall, as if she might now see right though it and find the old woman off in the distance, staring enigmatically back at her.
For old people, says Denny.
Yukiko turns back – doesn’t understand. So Denny hunches her shoulders and grips an imaginary walking stick. For people who are very old, she says.
And Yuki suddenly sees this woman, ancient and fragile, her presence in the world hanging by a thread, and thinks, If I don’t talk to her soon she’ll be gone and I’ll have lost the last good chance of understanding what my mother was doing here.
Can we see her? she says. Her eyes widen. Tomorrow?
Denny says, Sure. Then she turns and looks towards the window, to see how much daylight there is still out there.
Or we could go now? she says. It’s only a mile or two out of town.
And so they take one last gulp of their coffee, pay and make their way up the high street – still tentative, but a little less tentative than before – then call in at the B & B so that Yuki can pick up her map and her mother’s photos, plus anything else she thinks might be of use. Stuffs them in her rucksack. And the two of them head back out into the cold.
The light is already starting to fail as they leave town, and it’s getting colder. Yuki looks around. Thinks, This snow isn’t going anywhere. It’s all going to be right here tomorrow morning, but with a layer of ice on top.
Denny says that the old people’s home is not too far away, but Yuki can’t tell whether this means they’re going to arrive lightly chilled in fifteen minutes or frozen in an hour and a half. She’s a little alarmed when Denny leads them off the road and out towards the moors again, but Denny assures her that climbing this one small hill will save them having to walk all the way round the road.
And she’s right, because pretty soon they’re over the top and padding down a snow-packed path with the big old house not far below them tucked among a dozen leafless trees. The lights are on in maybe half the windows, but the place looks exceptionally gloomy. And England, Yuki thinks, seems to be full of such old, exhausted-looking places which must surely have a corrosive effect on the national character.
The closer they get to the house and the old woman the more apprehensive Yuki is feeling. She asks Denny what sort of thing this woman used to do. Denny’s not sure. One of her grandma’s friends sometimes used to visit her but never disclosed many details, as if such revelations might displease whatever spirits she was so keen to come into contact with. But she’s heard from other people that Mrs Talbot might just sit and hold your hands for a while … study your aura … ask about your past and discuss what lay ahead … and that after three or four sessions some other force or presence might enter the room. A force or presence, at least, that would be known to her.
Yukiko imagines Mrs Talbot reaching out to cup her cheeks in her bony old English fingers – looking deep into her – and is horrified. Not so much at the idea of the old lady delving so deeply into her, but at what abysmal horrors she might find.
They leave the path and Yuki is pleased to feel the solid road beneath her feet again. They head towards the house and pause by the stone gateposts. A gravel drive leads right up to the main door. A patch of orange light spills from the foyer onto the steps, and Yuki thinks how good it would be to find herself in that heat and light. Denny sets off, Yuki follows, they climb the steps together and have barely entered the building when a large and largely cardiganed woman steps out before them.
We’re not having visitors, she says. Not for another couple of hours.
She’s eyeing the two of them up now, quite comprehensively. Then says, Who is it you want to see?
Instinctively, Denny lies. My grandma, she says. Elsie Taylor.
The large woman looks back at her, even more suspicious now. We don’t have any Elsie Taylors, she says. Are you quite sure that’s her name?
The woman looks from Denny to Yuki, as if she’s thinking, There’s something wrong here. Some girl turning up at the wrong time asking for non-existent residents, with this Japanese-looking young woman who refuses to look me in the eye.
Denny feigns disappointment and says, Well, I must’ve got the wrong place. Then she turns and leads Yuki back to the door, down the steps and out onto the snow.
They tramp down the drive and are almost at the gate before they glance back, to find the woman still s
tanding there, guarding the warm light. They walk out of sight, and wait against the wall until she slips back inside. Then Denny says, OK, c’mon. And she leads Yuki through the gate, round to the left of the building and under the trees where the snow is thick and smooth.
They carry on, deeper into the darkness, and are right around the back by the bins and a derelict outhouse when they reach a metal fire escape, bolted to the wall. They stare up at the steps for a moment. Denny gives Yuki a wink, then sets off up them. There’s snow on each step and a strip of snow along the handrail, which is shattered each time their hands take a hold of it.
They creep up three storeys, stopping at each fire door, trying and failing to force it open. Until they’re right at the top of the steps on a metal landing and feeling a cold breeze coming at them, before another closed door. Denny leans out to her left to examine the nearest window. Then, before Yukiko can intervene, she’s over the rail, reaching out to the window ledge and trying to get her fingers under the bottom of the window frame.
She turns back and says, I need something long and thin – like a knife. Yuki’s thinking, What do I have that is like a knife? She looks around. Is about to slip off her rucksack to look inside it.
Then Denny says, Doesn’t matter.
She’s managed to nudge the window up a little, then a little further. Now has both hands right through the window and transfers her weight over onto her forearms so that she’s scrambling against the wall, with nothing but a long drop beneath her feet.
She crawls head first into the building and has all but disappeared from view when she clips her heel on the edge of the window frame and knocks her shoe off, which goes tumbling into the bushes below. Then she’s gone. A couple of moments later, she pops her head out, panting and laughing. Yuki points at the bushes and says she’ll go and get it. So she pads all the way back down the fire escape, wades into the bushes and pokes about there, but can’t find Denny’s shoe. She’s still looking for it when Denny hisses down at her from the top of the fire escape.