Yuki chan in Brontë Country

by Mick Jackson

  After another four or five steps, she stops. Then watches as the sheep continues to limp away from her. Pushing on and on until it’s slowly swallowed up by the night. Then there’s just the sound of the fencepost dragging … the last flash of wool in the torchlight … and it’s gone.

  Yuki stands, staring after it. Years from now, she thinks, when I’m least expecting it, that creature will come blundering back into my consciousness and scare the crap out of me all over again.

  As soon as she turns back she realises she’s lost her bearings. She looks around for some clue as to what direction she came from but there’s nothing but snow – scuffed here and there by a rock’s edge or scrap of heather. She senses the breadth of the moorland all around her, but still without feeling particularly perturbed. Like an exaltation almost, having finally uncoupled herself from all that’s gone before. She stands in the snow, waiting for some almighty terror to descend upon her. But nothing happens. The stillness deepens, is all. Then she looks down at the ground, turns in a tight circle, staring into the patch of light, until at last she finds her own footsteps forming their own path back through the snow.

  She follows the footprints back to the spot where she first saw the sheep in the distance, then does her best to resume her original course. Her feet are soaking now and freezing, but she’s still confident she’ll find the wind-bent tree, and remains confident right up to the point when the ground starts to fall away. From her mother’s photograph and Mrs Talbot’s description Yuki has assumed that the bush must be in a position of prominence. How else would the wind be able to make such an impression on it? She lifts her head and looks straight ahead until the light peters out in the darkness. Then she turns back and scans the top of the hill. The horizon is a fine line with the night sky behind it, until finally she sees the wind-bent tree, ragged and listing.

  She trudges up the slope, and as she walks, she notices that for the first time – in years, it seems – her mother is absent. Neither drifting over her shoulder nor up ahead somewhere, formless and pitiful. Perhaps it’s the booze, she thinks. Or the fact that I’m so busy just trying to stay alive out here. Certainly she couldn’t countenance a permanent separation. Life without the ghost of her mother would leave her denuded, deranged.

  She needn’t have worried. She’s barely reached the top of the hill when she feels her dead mother’s presence settling back upon her, like a heavy coat. Yuki’s breathing hard as she approaches the tree. Doesn’t appreciate quite how tired she is until she stands there and takes it in. It’s grown a little in the last ten years, but still correlates quite easily with the photograph.

  Each branch is trimmed with snow, which gives it the strange glow of a negative. Yuki tramps slowly round it until it finally presents itself in the same way as the photograph. Then she moves in, as if bringing it into focus. The tree and its photograph slowly merge and she feels that at last she stands where her mother stood.

  I’m so close, she thinks. As if there’s nothing more than a sheet of silk between them. And it’s the strangest thing, but for the briefest moment Yuki has the idea that the bush might conceivably embody her mother. That given a set of appropriate, if exceptional circumstances, Yukiko could slowly walk right into the bush, disappear from view, and find herself tangled in her mother’s arms again.

  She stands there, feeling the last of her body’s heat being drawn out into the night. Sees herself dissipating. She takes a step towards it. Then another. Keeps on until the branches all but brush her face. She lifts an arm and reaches in through the branches, bent and knotted, like the horns sprouting out of that sheep’s dim head. Then deeper, until her arm is lost to her.

  And Yukiko thinks, If some unknown force were to take hold of me now and drag me in, then I’d allow it. To be dragged in, drawn right down into the ground and be gone from here.

  Yuki stands, half in and half out of the bush, until her arm grows tired. Then finally withdraws it. Turns, finds a rock jutting up out of the snow not far away and goes over to it. As soon as she sits she can feel the cold come in on her. She knows there’s only so long she should stay out here, but she’s still not remotely anxious. She’s nearer the ground now and in her torchlight she can identify the two branches Mrs Talbot’s mother must have knotted, coiled together now like two huge eels.

  Without ever quite being fully conscious of it, it seems Yuki has become convinced that locating the wind-bent tree will complete some spiritual circuit. That some deep emotional well will be replenished. But she’s beginning to suspect that, far from taking her in or offering up some revelation, the bush is doing nothing but obscure the very thing she came out here to find. And, not for the first time, she wonders why we insist on imagining that the world contrives to help and guide us, when the evidence seems to suggest the very opposite.

  She perches on her cold old stone, staring at the bush, and finds herself thinking about Koichi Mita – Koichi Mita visualising the far side of the moon. And, moment by moment, she begins to appreciate that this is what she must do with this damned bush – conduct her own experiment in psychic retrieval. But where Mita drew down the details of the moon’s benighted surface, she will project herself into the very heart of this demented tree and finally grasp what secrets it keeps.

  She gets back to her feet, a little unsteady now, and man, but oh, so cold. Positions her feet, as if to earth herself. Imagines herself as her mother, standing there. Reaches up and turns off the torch.

  And the darkness falls, cold and absolute. Her first thought is that this is too much, and she lifts her hand, ready to drag herself back from it. But in time the snow releases its cold store of light, the stars assert themselves and Yuki focuses on the bush – keeps on staring – until it finally reveals itself as what Yuki has long suspected it of being – an obstacle. An obfuscation.

  With the light gone, the cold air seems to press right in on her, and again she imagines Koichi Mita contemplating the moon the best part of a hundred years ago. Thinks, If anything, I have the advantage of being out here among the stars. I am practically celestial. She feels the universe and what it is to be universal. Sees the blank bush silhouetted before her. Thinks, It is about to turn itself inside out, in some revolting act of rupture. I’ll have to witness it, but at least then I’ll know.

  She stands in the dark, waiting, but the door stays shut. There’s not the slightest trace of what her mother saw, or even thought she saw.

  Yuki’s beginning to get agitated now. She needs to move around, if only to stop herself screaming, or fusing to the ground. If I had a lighter with me I’d set fire to the damned thing, she thinks. Burn the truth right out of it. So that if the people in the nearby villages happened to look out of their windows all they’d see would be an amber stain in the sky above the horizon. Tomorrow morning, there’d be nothing but a blackened stump, with the snow melted away all around it. They’d think it must’ve been struck by lightning. And that would be an end to it.

  She wouldn’t dare do that, of course – would be far too fearful of how the universe might respond. She turns her torch back on. Looks all around her, then down at her feet. What I need is some sort of UV light, she thinks, specially calibrated to pick up traces of psychic disturbance. And she wonders if it’s at all conceivable that the spot where her mother stood to take her photograph might be the exact same spot where Mrs Talbot stood and fainted as a girl. It would make sense, she thinks. Her mother would be unwittingly drawn to it.

  So she moves along, scanning the ground with her torchlight. Thinking, Even a scientist, surely, would back me up on this – that an event of the magnitude of Eanie Talbot fainting … of my own mother standing here ten years ago … must leave some sort of emotional deposit. She continues to walk and scan until she arrives at what feels like a place of importance. She kneels. And without quite knowing what she does, begins to clear the snow away. The soft snow on the top, then the icy, granulated snow beneath it. Keeps on digging – digging down with her cold,
bare hands. Wondering if there really might be something here, after all. If not a ring – or, at least, not one that belonged to one of the Brontës – then something physical. Some sort of proof.

  She scrapes away until she’s right down at the frozen earth and is splitting her nails on it. Then she leans back and kicks at the ground with the heel of one shoe – then both heels together. Keeps on kicking, until at last she slumps forward, breathless.

  I’m as mad as my goddamned mother, she thinks. Madder.

  She lifts her face and closes her eyes to the darkness.

  OK, she thinks. That’s enough.

  She could so easily lie on her side and pull her knees up into her arms. She senses sleep somewhere off in the darkness, finally ready to move back in on her. Instead, she warms her hands under her arms. Then finds her phone. She’s still catching her breath as she hits the number.

  The moment it’s answered she whispers, Hi, Dad, it’s me.

  Hello, my sweet, he says. Where are you?

  Haworth, she says and looks around. Still in Haworth.

  He says it must be late and she nods. What time is it where you are? she says.

  There’s a short pause and she pictures her father checking his watch. Just gone 11 a.m., he says.

  Tomorrow, or yesterday? says Yuki.

  Well, today’s Friday, he says. What day is it in the UK?

  Yukiko considers this for a moment. I’m not sure, she says.

  She looks out at the stars, even sharper now.

  I spoke to Kumiko, she says.

  I know, her father says. She told me.

  And is it true?

  I’m so sorry, my sweet. I’m afraid it is.

  And Yukiko really has had enough – of the endless investigation. Of simply trying to keep some hope alive.

  At last she says, I get to the point where I think I’ve nearly cracked it. Then I take another step and I’m right back at the start.

  Then there’s silence, reaching out into the darkness.

  Her father says, You know, Yukiko, she was very ill, towards the end. We could none of us reach her. I’m not sure you’re ever going to be able to make sense of it.

  Yukiko looks up and there’s the bush again, staring solemnly back at her, its own small abyss.

  I talked to someone yesterday, she says. A woman who met Mum when she was up here.

  Yuki can tell how intently her father is listening now. Mum told her that she kept seeing a young girl, wandering round the place.

  There’s a long pause. Then Yukiko’s father says, That’s right. I never mentioned it to anyone. I’d almost forgotten. She told me she thought it was maybe her mother. Her mother when she was a girl.

  And Yuki sees herself sitting there in the snow, quite bewildered.

  He says, She lost her own mum when she was quite young – you know that. Her father married Hisako a few years later. But she always missed her. It’s not really something she talked about. I don’t know why, but when she was at her worst, she started to see her around the place.

  And now Yukiko is crying.

  Oh, I miss her, she says. I miss her so much.

  Silence.

  We all do, my sweet.

  Yukiko and her father talk for a little longer. Then she tells him how she’s due to fly back to Japan next weekend and how she’s thinking of spending a few days at home. He says he’d like that very much.

  She’s about to hang up when her father says, You know, Yuki, you’re much tougher than you realise. Kumiko acts tough, but it’s just her way of trying to keep herself safe. Your mother and I could see who you were from the very beginning. You were right there, the moment we set eyes on you.

  They say goodbye. Then Yuki is back in the silence. The snow and the darkness.

  And she thinks of her mother out here, looking for the ghost of her own mother ten years ago.

  Yuki sleeps. And in her sleep, it seems, has spent half the night out on the moors with young Eanie Talbot and half the night walking on her own.

  From a crack in the curtains a slice of daylight cuts through the room – across the desk where her mother wrote her postcards … the thin, dry carpet … and the bed where Yuki turns.

  Someone is in the room with her – nothing more than a vague shape.

  The door was open, the woman says.

  And as she wakes, Yuki brings with her into consciousness her last actions from the previous night. Coming in from the moors, up to her room, cold and exhausted. Staring at that wall again, beyond the sink and TV. Taking the key and creeping back along the corridor. Wanting nothing more than to see the bed again – to stand beside it. But as she stood there, the linen had seemed so crisp and clean that she simply couldn’t help herself. So she just slid on in.

  Oh, she says, and begins to push the sheets back. I’m sorry.

  But the B & B Lady shushes her. That’s all right, love, she says.

  Yuki pulls herself up, so that she rests against the pillows. The B & B Lady perches beside her and points to a cup of coffee on the bedside table. Yukiko looks around and thinks, Strange, but it really does seem to make more sense with the furniture arranged this way – as if I’m on the right side of the mirror. If I’d only insisted on this room when I first arrived things might have been different. Though Kumiko would still have found a way of saying those awful things.

  And the more she comes up out of sleep, the more self-conscious Yuki feels. As if she really has managed to scale the walls of the parsonage and squeeze herself into one of those ancient, tiny beds.

  I spoke to my mother last night, the B & B Lady tells her. She said you called in on her.

  Then Yuki remembers Mrs Talbot in her own small bed, at the old folks’ home. Remembers the wind-bent tree … the ring … her mother asking about Tomokichi Fukurai. And feels all that weight and complication begin to settle back on her. Thinks, Oh, here I go again.

  She must look pretty troubled, because the B & B Lady reaches out and lays her hand on Yuki’s forearm. Just holds it there, calm and kind. Until, slowly, the pain begins to recede a little. And Yukiko returns to the room.

  The B & B Lady says, I had a look for the letter my mother mentioned – from Mr Hope, but I couldn’t find it.

  Then she turns away and reaches down to the floor. But I did find something else, she says.

  And when she sits back she’s holding a large book with a black upholstered cover, like the one that Yuki signed in the lobby downstairs. She opens it up, to a page marked with a scrap of paper.

  It took me a while, she says, but I think I managed to find her.

  She checks again, then turns the book around and hands it over. In fact, Yuki spots her mother’s handwriting before it’s even in her lap – the only Japanese script on the page. She brings it up to her face, so she can study every stroke.

  Is that her? the B & B Lady asks her.

  Yuki’s nodding.

  The B & B Lady says, And what does she say, over here?

  She points to a cluster of Japanese letters. Yukiko leans in and sweeps her finger over them.

  She says she was happy here, Yukiko says.

  The B & B Lady looks from the text back up at Yuki.

  She was happy here, she says.

  Then the B & B Lady waits, watching Yuki study the book. Until at last Yuki looks up, and the B & B Lady tells her, You know, I lost my father – when I was a little bit older than you are.

  The B & B Lady shakes her head, but keeps her eyes on Yuki. I don’t think you ever really get over something like that, she says.

  And even as she speaks, the B & B Lady sees Yuki begin to turn in on herself – some darkness descending.

  I don’t give credence to half the stuff my mother believes in, the B & B Lady says, insistent. But I do feel some part of him stayed with me.

  Do you understand, she says, and waits for Yuki to look back up at her.

  That he’s still here, she says. And she lifts a hand and gently smacks her open pal
m against her heart.

  Yuki sits in the passenger seat of the B & B Lady’s car as they sail along the lanes – the same lanes that she came in on two days ago. The B & B Lady offered to put her rucksack in the boot or on the back seat, but Yuki likes the weight of it in her lap. It gives her something to hold onto.

  She can hear the snow, wet under the wheels. But can’t envisage a thaw any time soon. Looks at the snow over the fields and bearing down on the roofs of the barns and houses and thinks, It could be here for months, even years.

  The B & B Lady reckons it’s thirty or forty minutes to Leeds and if Yuki manages to catch a train within the hour she could be back in London by mid-afternoon, which would give her a little time on her own before meeting up with Kumiko. She pictures herself sitting in some coffee shop, looking out at the world.

  The moment her phone starts to ring she knows exactly who it is. Has to heave her rucksack over to one side to get her hand into her jacket pocket.

  She glances at the number on the screen before answering.

  Hi, she says. And Denny says Hi back to her.

  There’s a short pause before Denny asks where she is – quietly, as if she’s not sure she wants to know.

  Yukiko tells her that she’s on her way to Leeds, to get a train back to London.

  I knew it, says Denny.

  Then silence. And soon Yukiko can hear her start to cry down the line.

  You promised, she says. You promised me.

  Yukiko waits a while, then says how she thought it might be easier this way.

  Denny says, And now I’m never going to see you again.

  Yukiko thinks, Maybe she’s right. She’s not likely to fly out to Japan any time soon. And I don’t intend to come back here.

  So she turns to the window and brings the phone right up to her mouth, tucked inside her shoulder.