Yuki chan in Brontë Country (9 page)

From that point on the dog is falling behind them. Perhaps it feels it has achieved what it set out to do. And the more the bike pulls away the less inclined it seems to pursue them. Until finally it lollops to a halt. And the last time Yukiko sees it, it’s standing in the middle of the path watching them go.

They rattle on between the hills until Denny’s quite sure they’re clear of danger. Drops the throttle back and over her shoulder asks Yuki if she’s OK. But it’s only when she pulls up and turns right around that she has any idea just how upset Yuki is. Yuki waves her forward – telling her to keep on going. So they carry on for another few hundred metres. But even then, as Yuki does her best to explain how the dog managed to bite her, she keeps on glancing back down the path, expecting to see the dog charging towards them, determined to get its teeth into her again.

There’s a small rip in Yukiko’s trousers, high up on her thigh, and by shifting the material back and forth she’s
able to locate four small punctures, each brimming with blood.

We should go back and bloody well kill it, says Denny, though neither she nor Yuki expects them to do any such thing. Then Denny quizzes Yuki about tetanus jabs – whether she’s had one lately. But all Yuki wants to do is get back to her room and try to forget this ever happened. Get off this damned moor and never come out here again.

A quarter of a mile or so short of Haworth Denny parks the bike at the side of the road, flips the seat up and tucks the pistol into a secret little compartment there. Then the two of them head into town, with Denny carrying Yuki’s rucksack and Yuki limping alongside her. The first few houses have just come into view when the snow starts to fall again, a little more heavily now, and by the time they reach the steps of the Grosvenor Hotel the air is thick with it and the whole world feels as if it’s shut right down.

Y
ukiko sometimes has trouble remembering how she felt about snow before the death of her mother. She assumes that, like most other children, she admired its powers of disruption and transformation and considered it great material with which to play. Even now, despite what it did to her mother and, indeed, how it fucked up her entire family, she doesn’t resent or particularly fear it. She’s simply a little more inclined to take it seriously.

It must be five or six years since she first heard of Ukichiro Nakaya and his snow experiments, although she didn’t get her hands on
Snow Crystals: Natural and Artificial
till she was at college and managed to track down a copy in the library. Nakaya is sometimes credited with compiling the first general classification of snow crystals, and indeed one page of the book has each fundamental type laid out in a grid, like a sort of periodic table of snow. But Yuki knows, even from her own amateur investigations, that Suzuki Bokushi created a similar chart a hundred years earlier, in
Snow Country Tales.
No, the reason Yuki is so in awe of Ukichiro Nakaya is that he approached snow with the same intelligence and rigour you’d expect of any scientist, and
along the way worked out what conditions influence each crystal’s design.

She’s no idea how many years he devoted to snow analysis before attempting to create his own artificial crystal. There are photographs of him out in the snow up Mount Tokachi, bent over a microscope, and to this day Yuki can’t conceive how you take a crystal, fix it to a slide and tuck it under the eyepiece while keeping it intact. He had assistants, Yukiko knows this. Quite possibly a whole team of snow-folk eager to serve him in any useful way. But when she pictures him going about his icy business she prefers to think of him out there on his own – monastic, as befits a man contemplating something as delicate, as ethereal as snow.

The first time she opened up
Snow Crystals
in one of the study cubicles at the university she all but squawked, like a goddamned bird or something. The book contains some text and a fair number of graphs and tables, but most of it just consists of hundreds of microscopic photographs of snow crystals, half a dozen to a page. In hindsight, she should maybe have limited herself to a couple of pages on that first encounter. Allowed herself to be blown away by the weird mechanical beauty and the astounding symmetry, before returning the book to the shelves – and come back, refreshed and psychically rested, the following day. But she turned the page to find another dozen, even more ornate and viciously barbed creations, all sprouting from the same hexagonal core. So that by the time she turned the page a second, third and
fourth time she was inundated, and what had seemed incredible a minute earlier became so strange as to be practically meaningless.

She had to leave her cubicle and walk about, to try and clear her head a little. But even as she did so, with all those peculiar shapes jangling around her, she couldn’t help but marvel at the fact that their only component was plain water, extravagantly spun way up in the clouds.

The astonishing variety was, in part, what drove Nakaya to attempt to create his own crystals – the fact that the sky was apparently capable of casting out an infinite range, all perfectly and elegantly fashioned. It forced him in from the cold, into his mountainside laboratory, where, ironically, he had to replicate the freezing conditions he’d just left behind. Yuki read somewhere that he’d zip himself into an old flying suit to keep himself warm. She’s heard how astronomers in the Fifties and Sixties also wore them – some of them heated, and trailing electric wires – since an astronomer is busiest in the long, dark nights of winter and once the roof of the observatory is opened up, well you’re pretty much out of doors. Yukiko delights in the fact that pilots, astronomers and snow researchers have all worn the same strange suits – entirely different disciplines, but all preoccupied with the sky and what goes on up there.

Sooner or later Nakaya must have grasped that the only way to observe a crystal in mid-formation was to try and cultivate his own. So he got himself a cloud chamber
and set about doing just that. The problem he had was replicating the conditions that would normally occur in mid-air, so he threaded all sorts of string and filaments through the chamber to try and give the nascent crystals something on which to grab a hold. It was only by accident, the story goes (and Yuki has noted how it is often an accident that operates at a tale’s significant moment – an accident, in this instance, being another name for Fate) that a rabbit hair off the hood of Nakaya’s coat found its way into the chamber. So that when he next peered in he saw the beginnings of a crystal, perched on the tip of that rabbit hair. Something about its texture offered the crystal the necessary traction, when all the previous lengths of thread and twine had been too smooth or knobbly – or not smooth or knobbly enough.

There is cine footage – Nakaya’s own, Yuki thinks – of the work that followed. Time-lapse sequences of these microscopic forces exploding, in eight different directions. Then even closer/more magnified footage of the growth of a single branch of ice, like a rocket nudging through the upper atmosphere. And if seeing microscopic photographs of crystals in all their glory isn’t mind-blowing enough, then seeing footage of one taking shape, wilful and sinister, will probably do it. On first encountering the film, Yuki was reminded of her own junior snow experiments – how amateur they were in comparison (she was only young, after all, with no major funding) but also how hers were doing quite the opposite, since Nakaya was attempting to replicate this
most incredible act of creation, whilst hers were nothing but reduction of the bluntest kind.

Having created the circumstances necessary to cultivate a crystal, Nakaya found that altering the temperature and saturation in the chamber encouraged the crystals to assume different forms. The colder the conditions in the chamber the less ornate the crystal. There were moments, as Yuki sat in her own small cubicle, when she’d think, I’ve ploughed through all this stuff, hoping to get to grips with snow and maybe somehow dismantle, even
disarm
it. But the deeper I go the more threatening it appears. Through a microscope’s lens most things start to look a little alien, but a snow crystal is like something from a sci-fi nightmare – looks positively murderous.

Then, when she felt she was just about done with Nakaya, a friend put her in touch with someone at Kobe University who was carrying out some real, academic research into the man. They exchanged polite emails and the researcher eventually mentioned that he had a short clip of Nakaya being interviewed in his laboratory in the early 1950s. Unfortunately, the accompanying sound was missing, but the researcher said he’d had the footage digitised and that he’d happily send it over to Yuki, on condition that she promised not to copy it or show it to anyone else. She agreed, and a couple of days later a small package arrived with a memory stick, wrapped in a typed note. Yuki imagines the researcher hearing, through their mutual acquaintance, how her mother had
died in the snow and how she’s since become something of a snow-maniac. That this was her way of trying to come to terms with her mother’s death, etc. Either way, she felt honoured to have the footage, despite the fact that it was only two or three minutes long – footage that practically no one beyond Nakaya’s family and close colleagues had ever seen.

As soon as she found the package in her pigeonhole she went straight up to her room and loaded it onto her computer. And there he was, in black and white, sitting in his mountainside laboratory, with a sheepskin hat on his head and the flaps down over his ears, apparently talking quite earnestly, with the warmth of his words turning to steam before his face. Yukiko assumes that he was discussing his work, not least because at various points he’d turn and nod towards different corners of the laboratory. But for most of the short film he talked straight to the camera – as if he might have set it up and started it running himself. So that his solitariness, which is of such peculiar importance to Yuki, might be maintained.

She doesn’t particularly mind the fact she’s no idea what he’s saying. Watching someone talk without the sound makes you appreciate their facial expressions – particularly, what they do with their eyes. There are two or three moments in the film when Nakaya looks so intently into the camera that Yukiko really does feel that he is addressing himself quite specifically to her. And on more than one occasion she’s been inclined to think that
his words, if she could only hear them, would turn out to be a message, or some sort of explanation. A personal apology, on behalf of the snow.

Y
uki finds her key and leads Denny on up to her bedroom. Hasn’t had the chance to properly examine her leg yet, so she sits on the bed, moves her trousers from side to side again and presses down on either side of the bite, as if trying to purge herself of venom – of the memory of the dog getting its teeth into her. The frayed rips in her trousers are blood-soaked and she’s having trouble seeing what’s going on so she stands, undoes her belt. Then hesitates. Denny shrugs. Says, Go ahead. So Yuki eases her trousers down over the wound. The blood has already started to congeal in the four neat holes, and the neighbouring skin is beginning to bruise. Denny leans in. Asks if it hurts. Yukiko nods her head two or three times. She seems kind of bewildered. Has never been bitten by a dog before.

They’re both still looking at the bite when Yuki asks Denny why she did it. Why she shot the woman. Denny thinks for a while. I just couldn’t resist it, she says. And starts to laugh again, but not half so hard now, or for half as long.

It feels to Yuki that her leg has been kicked rather than bitten. The muscle beneath the cut is growing tight and
aches like mad. She sits back on the bed and sees the dog’s head easing up beside her, as if it just wanted some attention – a stroke, or a chuck under the chin. Can feel its hot breath against her leg, for that single second … see its ears flatten … its eye roll back and look up at her … its big mouth parting … it leaning in and taking a nip at her.

Denny’s wandering around the room now, looking at Yuki’s belongings on the chest of drawers and hanging over chairs, while Yuki continues to gently prod at her thigh. Here and there Denny stops to have a closer look at a book … a blouse … Yuki’s Japanese toothpaste. Then turns and tells Yuki that if she really doesn’t want to see a doctor, she should at least get some cream and clean things up a bit. Yukiko doesn’t argue. And after a little more looking around Denny takes the keys from the bedside table and heads out into town.

Yukiko can hear the front door being pulled to and Denny’s feet on the steps below the window. She carefully lifts her legs and slips them beneath the covers. Wonders what would have happened if she’d fallen off the bike as they tried to get away. Imagines the dog tearing her to pieces – her disappearing into a small storm of shredded flesh and clothing, like the scene when the Brontë Father chopped up Charlotte’s clothes. And she’s half asleep fifteen minutes later when Denny returns, with snow on both her shoulders and a takeaway coffee in each hand.

Denny fills the sink with hot soapy water and dips the facecloth in it. Yuki perches on the edge of the bed and
once the blood’s been cleaned away the two of them have another good look at it. It’s not a huge wound, but as Denny says, you really don’t want any extra holes in you if you can possibly help it. She opens the tube of ointment and smears the thick white cream over the bite marks – can feel the punctures beneath her fingertips as she smoothes it in.

Denny says, Damn. I should’ve bought some plasters. Then stands and looks around the room. Yuki doesn’t understand what she’s talking about, but Denny asks for directions to the bathroom and returns with some toilet tissue, folds it twice and places it over the wound. She hands Yuki her coffee and a packet of paracetamol, kicks off her own shoes and climbs up onto the bed.

Yuki takes the Brontë biscuits from the bedside table and she and Denny are working their way through them when Denny looks round the room at the drawers, the dressing table, the little sink in the corner and says, This place kind of gives me the creeps.

Yuki has a look herself. Other than the hotel room in Leeds and Kumiko’s, it’s the only place she’s slept since she got here. She was beginning to think maybe it wasn’t so strange.

When she’s finished her coffee Denny asks if she can look at Yuki’s notebook – the one in which Yuki asked her to draw a wolf. So Yukiko takes it out of her rucksack, hands it to Denny and sits and watches, to see what she makes of it.

The book is pretty evenly split between text and
sketches. Quite a few of the drawings appear to be ideas for eccentric clothing: vast-collared capes … futuristic hats … platform boots with secret compartments. Scattered through the book are various unusual haircuts. In one sketch a woman’s hair is swept up into a towering beehive, with a miniature camera hidden in it. Yuki explains that it’s for a project in which she secretly photographs people’s reactions to her own spectacular haircut, but isn’t sure Denny quite grasps what she means.

There are seating plans for retro spacecraft … cross-sections of residences with rooftop helipads and subterranean swimming pools … a still life of a pair of laceless trainers … mediaeval monsters. Denny works her way through the book, flipping forwards and backwards until she reaches the end. Then starts again, this time looking more closely at Yuki’s handwriting. She points quite randomly at a piece of text and asks Yuki to translate it. Some are just odd little thoughts – poetic, philosophical. Some are quotes from books she’s read.

Denny watches Yuki’s fingers as she translates four or five sentences before appreciating that not only do the lines run from top to bottom, they advance from right to left. She takes the book from Yuki and holds it out before her.

She says, So the front of a book in England is the back of a book in Japan?

Yukiko nods.

Denny is still digesting this when Yuki’s phone starts
ringing. Yuki picks it up, checks the screen to see who’s calling, and places it carefully back down on the bed.

My sister, she says.

Then she and Denny sit and watch the phone ringing, as if it’s some strange creature that’s just stirred from hibernation. Until at last it stops. And the room is somehow filled with Yuki’s sister’s resentment at Yuki not having taken her call.

When Yuki finally looks up Denny asks how long it is since her mother stayed in Haworth. Yuki holds up the fingers and thumbs on both hands.

Ten years? says Denny. She can see how just talking about her mother upsets Yukiko. Sees how her eyes are beginning to prickle with tears. All the same, Yuki reaches back over to her rucksack, takes out her precious pack of photos and carefully lays them out on the bed. There’s her mother outside the parsonage … the reservoir … the bent-over tree. And now she adds the photo of her mother by the Grosvenor’s front steps and the small table by the open window. Denny squints down at the last photo. Then looks up at the window next to the sink.

She stayed here? she says, pointing at the bed on which they’re both sitting. Yukiko shakes her head and points at the wall, beyond the tiny TV and chest of drawers.

Next door? says Denny. Your mum stayed in the room next door?

Yukiko nods and gives her a little smile.

Denny slides off the bed and takes two or three steps
towards it. Turns. She wants to know if Yuki has managed to get in there yet. Yuki says that she hasn’t. So Denny goes over to the window, opens it up and leans right out, to see if there’s any way of creeping along to the next window. When she pulls her head back in her hair is flecked with snow.

She drags the sash back down and Yuki watches as she tries to work out how they might contrive to find their way in there. Watches her stare at the threadbare carpet, thinking – just as Yuki thought earlier – that maybe there’s a way of crawling through, under the floor.

Yukiko waits a while – perhaps because she knows where it will lead – then mentions, super-casually, how she’s seen some keys downstairs, near the kitchen. And that she’s pretty sure that one of the keys is for the room next door.

Denny opens her palms out wide and shrugs her shoulders. Well, what the fuck are we waiting for?

Yuki digs out some clean trousers but has trouble pulling them on because her leg won’t bend as much as it should do. Plus she’s trying to keep the dressing in place. She finds some socks and shoes, then she and Denny slip out onto the landing and tiptoe along to the next room. They stand beside the door in silence, listening. Denny crouches down and peers through the keyhole. Takes a grip of the door handle and turns it. The door’s still locked.

OK, she whispers. So where’s this key?

They creep down the stairs and stand in the hallway
for a minute among all the leaflets, trying to hear if anyone’s about. Then on into the dining room and over to the door to the kitchen. It’s Denny who finally pushes it open – wide enough for them both to see inside.

There’s a faint sound, but way off in the distance. Somebody talking – or maybe a TV or radio, with the sound down low. Yuki is hoping Denny might volunteer to creep in and take the keys off the hook. It was Denny, after all, who recently shot a woman in the ass. She seems to be quite naturally wayward. But it’s not Denny who’s searching for some psychic trace of her mother – some tiny, telling vibration that may lead to greater, more significant information and help her comprehend what happened ten years ago. So Yukiko steels herself and slips past Denny. Tiptoes over and reaches up to the hook below the number 6. Lifts the keys with such care there’s barely any contact between the ring and the hook. And the moment she has them in her fist, she turns and limps off at speed – past Denny and over towards the stairs.

She’s tempted to head straight back to her room, lock the door and lie on the bed till she’s recovered – so that she can be 100% sure she’s not about to have a heart attack. But by the time she reaches the landing she’s thinking, Better to carry on. To get into the room and return the keys as soon as possible.

Denny’s standing right beside her as she slips the key into the lock. They stop and listen one last time. Then Yuki turns the key. She feels the mechanism resist, then accommodate it and surrender. She takes hold of the
handle, twists it and finally the door gives way to her.

The room is pristine – the bed neatly made, every surface clean and empty. Yuki’s first thought is, They’ve kept it like this in my mother’s honour. The room is now a museum to her. Like Charlotte and Emily’s rooms in the parsonage. A sacred place.

It’s pretty much a mirror image of her own room, if a fraction smaller. The same decor, with the sink and fireplace up against the same shared wall. When they close the door it’s a little dark so Denny turns on the lamp on the bedside table, which casts a soft light over the bed, making it seem even more hallowed. Then she heads on into the room, so that she and Yuki are standing on either side of the bed. The room is suddenly still, as if all the air has been sucked right out – through the drain in the sink … the gap along the base of the skirting board … the plug sockets. Denny’s staring at the bed – at its impossible smoothness. She slowly reaches out a hand to touch it. To sweep her palm across its cold, flat sheets. But Yuki says, No – before she even knows it. And finds that she’s raised her hand, palm up, like a traffic cop.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry, she says. Then shakes her head.

Yuki is beginning to appreciate how little thought she’s devoted to what she’d do if she ever managed to get in here. It would appear, judging by her own strange behaviour, that she doesn’t want anything to be disturbed. So she stands and waits and listens – in that dead, empty space, with that vacant bed before her. Keeps on waiting, with Denny standing across from her.

She tries to remember what she was like at twelve or thirteen, when her mother was over here. Her preoccupations. She remembers talking to her mother as she packed her suitcase. She and Kumi being driven over to their grandparents. Grandma Hisako taking her into the guest bedroom. Her own lonely bed.

Then she remembers that terrible dread at both her parents being away, halfway round the planet. Feels something quicken. As if aware of something closing in on her. And another lock turns. A door swings slowly open. And all her mother-love comes suddenly rushing up in her again.

Poor Yukiko drops to her knees, with her hands on the bed’s cover, soft and kind. And suddenly crying. With her mother gone – gone and so very far away.

Denny stands and watches. She feels that she should go over, but thinks Yuki might just want to cry and remember her mother on her own. So she continues to stand and watch. And after a while Yuki lifts her head. I’m sorry, she says again. Always apologising. And finally manages to catch her breath, as if a little air has found its way back into the room.

She looks around, wiping her eyes, and heads over to the bedside table. Quietly opens and closes the drawers, one by one. Then peers down the back, by the wall. Kneels and looks under the bed – just dust and a few square metres of carpet that haven’t seen daylight in a long time. She gets to her feet and tiptoes round the room intently, as if her mother might have left a note
or dropped something significant – knowing that her daughter might come along all these years later, looking for clues.

She crouches beside the sink and slips her hand around the back of the porcelain column, plucks up the carpet in the corner, while Denny still stands and watches. Until Yuki finally arrives at the table by the window.

She wants to consult the photograph her mother took, to be sure it’s the same piece of furniture, but she left it on the bed next door, with all the others. She could easily slip back and get it, but knows that opening the door might release whatever energy is currently contained within the room and won’t be found again. She tries to convince herself that she doesn’t really need it. She’s studied it on a sufficient number of occasions and can see that it’s the same table her mother photographed, with the window open behind it and the lace curtain billowing in between.

Denny is over by the drawers now, not entirely sure what they’re meant to be looking for. Yukiko lines herself up before the table, so that it more or less matches what she remembers from the photograph. Looks down at her feet. This is where she would’ve stood, she thinks. Then looks at the table. And that is where she sat and wrote the postcard to me and Kumi, saying that she was in Haworth and had looked round the house that belonged to the Brontë sisters. With the window open, warm air rolling in from the street and the net curtain gently buckling. And Yuki has the most powerful urge to go
over to the window and close it. Despite the fact that it’s already closed.