Yuki chan in Brontë Country (7 page)

I
t 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.

Yuki lowers the photograph and stares at her. Then the girl slowly heads on over. Seems to simply float right through the heather. Instinctively, Yukiko gets to her feet – to meet her assailant – but gets up so fast that all the blood seems to drain from her head. She can feel it cascading over her shoulders. And the girl keeps on coming, with her hair, curly and blonde as a doll’s, until she’s right there, and Yuki can see her features. Can see how she doesn’t smile. But reaches out, takes Yuki’s hand and pulls it up towards her. Studies the photo, looks over at the water, and shakes her head.

You got the wrong reservoir, she says.

Yukiko only understands about half of what the girl is saying. So there’s some confusion, before the girl finally takes Yuki’s map, points at the same patch of blue to which Yuki’s been clinging and says, You’re here.

Then takes a moment to find a second location. Points at it, and says, That’s where you want to be.

For a while Yukiko continues to stare at the map, as if it had contrived to trick her. Then the girl points up the hill, back where she came from. Takes a step or two, and beckons to Yuki, to suggest that she should accompany her. And Yuki thinks, Well, she seems to know what she’s doing. So she tucks the photo in her jacket pocket and goes trotting after her.

The girl might be a little older than Yuki had first imagined. In her mid-teens, maybe. And as she’s still a few steps ahead of her, Yuki keeps on looking at her incredible curly blonde hair. If you came to Japan, she wants to say, people would come over just to touch it. You’d have a queue right round the block.

At the brow of the hill they join a path which drops slowly down the other side and they’re halfway along it when Yuki sees the motorbike leaning on its stand in the bottom of the valley. Not a particularly powerful-looking machine – the sort teenage boys ride, with thick-treaded wheels and a high-pitched engine – but the closer they get to it the more convinced Yuki is that it belongs to the girl and that she’s going to expect Yuki to climb onto the back of it, which she’s convinced is not such a great idea.

As they stumble down the path Yuki attempts to ask the girl, in her wretched English, how she knew where to find her, and several times the girl tries, and fails, to explain. Until, finally, she stops and mimes knocking at a door. And Yuki pictures this girl and the B & B Lady talking on the doorstep of the Grosvenor Hotel and the B & B Lady pointing out towards the moors.

Of course, what Yuki really wants to know is why the girl has taken such an interest in her. It’s conceivable that she may just have been passing when Yuki crawled over the wall from the graveyard, but there was nothing arbitrary in her hanging about outside the B & B or showing up just now. There appears to be no easy way of broaching the subject. Yukiko’s only thought is that she might appear to this blonde English girl as strange and exotic as the Brontës do to her.

The girl climbs onto the bike, kicks the stand back and with the toe of her other foot flicks out the kick-start. Jumps down on it, twice, before the engine catches, and pulls the throttle back hard a couple of times, to make sure it doesn’t cut out. Then she looks over at Yuki, with the engine gently rattling, until she finally approaches. Yuki finds a footrest and swings her other leg over, as if she’s mounting a horse. And since there’s nowhere else to put them she places her hands on the girl’s waist. Then the two of them go roaring down the path.

The girl seems to know how to handle the bike, following the path along the bottom of the valley with considerable care, but when at last they come up to the side of a tarmac road, she stops and looks long and hard in both directions before pulling back on the throttle with such ferocity that Yuki almost tumbles right off the seat.

As they fly down the road Yukiko thinks what a contrast this is to all the little capsules she’s been travelling in lately. The wind blasts at her face and hair as if they’re pushing through something solid. And Yuki looks down at the blur of road beneath her feet and wonders what condition she’d be in if she were to suddenly meet it, at such ridiculous speed.

Mercifully, within a couple of miles the bike is slowing down and pulling back off the road without them having passed more than a couple of cars coming the other way. This path is a little wider than the last one – more of a dirt track, with two furrows along it and a strip of grass in between – and seems to take them more directly where the girl wants to go. A couple of times she pulls up, to try and get her bearings. Then finally stops, kills the engine, flicks the stand down and, once she’s sure that Yuki is with her, heads off up a steep slope.

The moment they clear the ridge and the water’s spread out below them Yukiko can see how this is an altogether different proposition and recognises it as the location in her mother’s photograph. The water seems closer to the sky somehow and there’s a lot more of it. Down at one end, a stone pier runs out to some sort
of small tower and Yuki finds that the tip of this construction appears at the edge of the photo, giving her something solid from which to orient herself.

She makes her way over to where her mother must have stood. Gets within a metre or so of it and glances at the photograph for confirmation. Then just stands and looks around.

The girl comes up alongside her. Asks to see the photo again and studies it pretty hard this time, as if now that they’re here she might see something significant in it. Some monster about to loom out of the water or something just sinking out of sight.

She asks Yuki who took the photograph. Yuki pretends not to have understood, and the girl asks again, which gives Yuki a couple of moments in which to consider how she feels about answering the question honestly. She thinks, Well, she seems quite kind. Brought me all the way out here – to a place I would never have found on my own. So she takes the photos from her pocket, finds the one of her mother standing before the parsonage and hands it to the girl.

The girl looks at it. Then turns to Yukiko and says, Is that your mum?

Yukiko nods. The girl looks back at the photo. She says, And now she’s dead. As if acknowledging it with her own small moment of consideration. Then looks up at Yuki. She died, she says.

Yukiko nods at the girl. Yes, she says.

For a while the two of them just stand and take in the
water and the moors around it. Yuki feels herself to be back in her mother’s footsteps. And she sets off down towards the water – which looks black and viscous – apparently quite happy to leave the photos in the hands of the girl. Right on down to the water’s edge, where she crouches. Trying to get her head low, so she can look right out over the water. Thinking of all the tiny vibrations and how this great block of water must consist of a million of them. Because what are waves – these little waves coming ashore at her feet – if not a manifestation of frequency?

She thinks all this and how things are now significantly different – and keeps finding herself drawn to one particular thought. Which is, If the girl wasn’t here then I’d almost certainly do it. The thought slips away, then returns, like a small, rolling wave. And Yuki thinks, Well, in that case, I should do it anyway.

She takes a couple of steps back from the water, drops her rucksack and unzips her jacket. Pulls her fleece up over her head. Unbuttons her shirt, so that the wind strikes right onto her flesh now. Balances on one leg to take a shoe and sock off. Then the other. Unbuckles her belt and pulls down her trousers. Folds them twice and places them with the rest of her clothes, on top of her rucksack. Then heads for the water in her underwear.

She feels the last of the grass and heather beneath her feet, then dirt and small stones just before the water. Is hunched and tense before her feet are even wet. And when she does finally step into the water, just up to her
ankles, it’s so cold that a jolt of pain shoots up both legs and forms a knot in her stomach.

But she carries on, stepping carefully forward, and she’s up to her knees before she turns back to the girl, just as she did half an hour ago. Wants to catch her eye – to let her know that there’s nothing to be afraid of – but is forced to turn back and look out over the water to keep her balance.

When the water’s up to her stomach it’s as if her breath has been punched right out of her, and she thinks, Well, I may not be able to do this. My body may just lock up, refuse to work. And she can feel her heart clattering now, frantic, her lungs complaining. Then the water reaches her breasts and almost over her shoulders and her hands are numb just from reaching out into the water, for guidance and to stop herself tipping to one side. She thinks, It’s not going to work unless I go right under. If I want to see her and understand where she’s been all this time I have to go so far down that every hair on my head is wet. So she takes a breath – holds it in – and drops down under. And stays there, locked in the freezing cold, for a count of ten. Then fifteen. Twenty.

The girl has come right down to the water’s edge, still holding the photographs. Stands and stares at the place where Yuki disappeared. The ripples continue to spread, like coils of rope. And as they spread out, the moors and their terrible silence seem to move on in.

Until, at last, Yuki comes up in a great rage. Back into the winter air. Wiping the water from her face. Locates
the shore, with the girl standing there, waiting – and with her arms and legs already turning to stone, begins wading back towards her.

The moment Yukiko’s skin is exposed to the air it begins to burn, and she wonders if this is what her mother experienced in her last few moments. She walks out of the reservoir, with the water still streaming from her and barely able to feel the small stones beneath her feet. And now the girl has hold of her elbow and is helping her over to her rucksack and her neat stack of clothes, as if she’s just completed some marathon swim.

Before she reaches her clothes Yukiko realises she has nothing with which to dry herself and decides to sacrifice her fleece. She grabs it, wipes her face with it – drags it up and down each limb. Then pulls her trousers on over her damp legs, which are turning red now. Leaning against the girl, who she thinks must be pretty strong. Her shirt and jacket. But it’s only when she sits on her rucksack to dry her feet and put her socks and shoes back on that Yuki really starts to shiver. All the same, she’s thrilled. Feels she’s really achieved something here. Although when she looks out at the water it’s flat and dead again, as if her attempt to get in there and stir things up is already gone, forgotten, and the water’s thoughts have turned back in on themselves.