by Mick Jackson
The woman who opens the door is in her sixties maybe, but not quite as old as Mrs Kudo and company. Once she’s hauled back the door she gives Yuki a big smile, which is much appreciated. And it occurs to Yuki that she should have maybe rehearsed a handful of words regarding the requesting of a room. Instead, she lifts the OS map and the street map. As if to say, I’m a Foreign Tourist Person. Do you really want to hear me desecrate your language? And this seems to suffice, because the woman steps back, to allow Yuki to come on in.
The hall is a little overwhelming. There’s an old table covered with stacks of leaflets. The walls are filled with framed prints and old photographs. The carpet is its own geometric universe of greens and oranges, which by one doorway intersects with something predominantly pink and floral. Yuki makes a mental note to come back later and take a photograph or two.
The woman holds out a laminated list with the cost of a room printed on it – a figure which to Yuki seems wholly acceptable. Then, once she’s written her name in an upholstered ledger, the woman leads Yuki across the hall into the dining room.
As they stand on the threshold, the woman explains that they no longer offer evening meals. We’re really just a B & B, she says. And, seeing Yukiko’s look of bewilderment, she does her best to explain what a ‘B & B’ is.
She slips through another door, re-emerges with a key in her hand, then leads Yuki on up the stairs. The bedroom has a big old bed in it and lots of large, brown furniture. Yuki looks around for a door to an en-suite bathroom. Where’s a person meant to do their pee-pee? she wonders. In the sink?
The B & B Lady beckons Yuki to follow and opens a door across the corridor. Steps back, to let Yuki pop her head in there – a tiny room with a massive bath, and a toilet and sink right beside. The woman smiles and Yuki smiles right back, nodding madly. Perfect! Now I can brush my teeth whilst sitting on the lavatory.
As soon as she has the key and the B & B Lady has left her to it, Yuki climbs up onto the enormous bed. Thinks, I could fall asleep – right now, in these cold, damp clothes. I might not wake for a month or more. The sun would slowly swing by the window. People would go up and down the street, oblivious. And when I finally woke, all my little obsessions would’ve been smoothed away and my life would be solved, like a puzzle. I’d have a cup of tea at one of the little tables in the dining room, pay the bill, take the elevator down to Haworth International and fly straight home.
Eventually, she sits herself up, takes out the folded envelope and picks through the photographs. Finds the one of an open window and carries it over to the window in her room. She pulls the net curtain back and stares across the street. Not bad, she thinks. In the photograph, a dressing table stands in the foreground, with paper and pens spread across it. The window’s open, and clearly visible in the distance is the house across the street. It’s the same house that Yukiko can now see, but from a slightly different angle. A little to the left of where it should be. But to have come all this way and to be this close, thinks Yuki. That really is not so bad at all.
Yuki takes off her damp clothes, hangs them over radiators and the backs of chairs and wraps herself up in a large white towel. She sits on the edge of the bed and calls her sister, but there’s no answer, so she leaves a message. There’s been a bit of a mix-up, she says. Give me a call. Then hangs up, double-quick. Thinks, Well, that should put a little heat under her.
She unpacks and has a little tour of the room, checking out all the furniture and fittings. Everything really is quite old. She goes over to the door, quietly opens it and looks up and down the corridor. Creeps over to the bathroom. Has another glance at the massive bath and ancient lavatory. Then goes tiptoeing down the corridor, to the next door along.
All the time she tells herself, If someone suddenly appears I’ll just pretend I was looking for the bathroom. I’m Japanese. I haven’t a clue.
She stops by the door – and listens. Has another look back down the corridor. Then leans forward and puts her eye right up to the keyhole.
She can see the bed, and a set of drawers beyond it, but not much more. Maybe the window is further round to the right. And yet there’s something about the light. The quality of the light in there feels much warmer. Is that possible? That the light in one room can be that much warmer than the one next door?
She gets to her feet and wraps her palm around the handle. So sorry, she says to herself. I thought this was the bathroom. Turns the handle … so, so slowly … all the way … and pushes. Is almost relieved to find the door is locked. Then half-convinces herself there really is some noise, off down the stairs. Someone coming. And scurries back to the safety of her own room.
She climbs under the duvet, to warm herself up, but within a minute she’s thinking, This isn’t working. My temperature’s dropped below some critical point. So she kicks back the sheets, picks out some dry clothes and heads to the bathroom.
She sits on the lavatory seat, watching the water come chug, chug, chugging into the worn enamel. I should take some pics, she thinks. Of the linoleum, all creased and cracked in the corner. The pipes under the sink, rusty at the junctions. The timber rotting beneath the paint in the window frame.
She checks the lock before undoing her towel, jams her trainers under the door for extra security and steps into the bath. The water must be half a metre deep. She thinks, Perhaps the English don’t actually use so much water? But if not, why have such super-deep baths?
She sits with the water up around her ribs for a moment. Then takes a breath, lies back and lets all that hot, hot water come rolling over her shoulders. And she is gone.
The last few years when Yuki lies back in the bath she always thinks of her mother. Her aching-deep, motherly love. Maybe it goes right back to her mother bathing her, when she was a baby. Maybe it’s the same with everyone. When she was nine or ten Yuki would let the weight of her body drag her right down until she was flat out and her head went under, and she could feel her hair gently floating all around. Then she would count – to thirty … forty … fifty. To see how long she could stay down there. The trick, she worked out, is to try and relax – especially around the shoulders. To try and keep at bay the quite reasonable fear that you’ve just taken your very last breath. You tell yourself, Just try and stick it out for another few seconds. And you let a few bubbles of air out through your mouth. Then again, Just another second or two. Until it really is too, too much, you feel you’re about to burst or pass out and know that you absolutely must get some air back inside you, before the blackness moves on in. And you come up in a great burst of water. Panting, frantic. But, at the same time, exhilarated and feeling very good indeed.
Yukiko still occasionally does a little bathtime breath-holding. Enjoys that underwater feeling – of being both distant and ever so close. She’s a great admirer of the Japanese freedivers Ryuzo Shinomiya and Shun Oshima. Men who can fill their mighty lungs and go down, down, down like an eel, for a hundred and fifty metres. No earplugs. No wetsuits. Just mortal flesh in the ever-tightening grip of all that water pressure. Yukiko has often wondered what it must be like to feel the water go cold and black around you, as you push down, down, down … then down, down, down again.
She has some cuttings at home in one of her books. Two or three of Shinomiya and one of Loïc Leferme. She was flicking through the book a couple of days before she came out here when she noticed how, on the opposite page to the photograph of Leferme holding the rope, with all the black of the deep down below him, there was a photo from a magazine taken from some spacecraft, at the very edge of the earth’s atmosphere. Half the picture is the pale blue earth, with a fine misty strip above it. The rest is just the deep, deep black of space. And it struck her how, despite having cut the pictures out of magazines weeks apart, they both represent the parameters of our existence – where there’s nothing beyond but that abysmal blackness, dead and heavy.
Today she doesn’t allow her face to go right under. Has reservations about doing so in an unfamilia
r bath, in a foreign land. Clunking her head or getting her toe tangled in the plug chain and drowning here in North England would cause her profound psychic upset. Much more so than drowning in a bath back home.
So Yukiko slides on down as far as she can without her face actually going under water. Her toes barely touch the far end of the bath. She’s pretty much floating, with the heat beginning to get right into her bones now, when she thinks she hears something. Lies there, listening, for a second – super-alert. First the suspicion, then the conviction that the sound she’s hearing is her phone, back in the bedroom. Then all at once she’s dragging herself up and climbing out of the bath, bringing all that water with her. Grabbing her towel, wrapping it round her and heading for the door. Her fingers slip on the lock. She has to crouch down and yank her trainers from under the door. Before going hurtling out into the hallway.
Then – whump!
She hits the floor before she knows what’s happened – that her wet feet have shot out from under her on the bare floorboards. She’s on her side with all the wind knocked right out of her. Her shoulder’s hurting and she really is pretty shaken up. But once she’s sure she hasn’t broken anything she gets back to her feet, opens the door to her bedroom. Then limps over to the bed, grabs her phone and brings it up to her ear.
She swears into it. I fell, she says. Damn near broke my neck.
Yuki brings her shoulder round and studies it, to see if there’s any major damage. Shit, she says, that really, really hurts.
Kumiko wants to know what the fuck is going on and why Yuki keeps calling her on her mobile when she knows she’s at work and can’t answer it. Also, what does she mean about there being a mix-up?
Yuki gives herself a moment, to try and conjure up the necessary indignation. She rubs her shoulder. Limps back over to the door and pushes it to. The damned coach, she says. The damned coach went off without her and left her stranded. She rolls herself onto the bed. I was there, where I was meant to meet them, but the damned coach must have set off early. Oh, she was so, so angry, she says.
There’s a pause down the line from Kumiko. So where the fuck are you now?
Yuki explains how she’s still in Haworth, but how, in a way, that’s not such a bad thing. Because they’d only had a couple of hours to look around the village. Which is nothing like long enough. These tours are always in such a hurry to get on to the next place. So at least now she’ll be able to have a proper look around.
Yukiko pauses, to see if Kumiko’s got anything to say yet.
And where are you staying, she says.
Yuki tells her how she found this lovely little guest house. You should see the bath, she says. I was practically swimming from one end of it to the other when you called.
Another silence from Kumiko. Yuki does her damnedest not to jump on in and fill it up with bluster. She’s making more of an effort these days in that respect.
Says, I’ll probably just have another look around in the morning and get a train back in the afternoon.
What’s it called?
What’s what called?
Yukiko’s looking round the room now. Can’t think of anything.
The hotel. What’s the name of the place where you’ve got a room?
It’s the first English word that comes into Yuki’s mind. The Brontë Hotel, she says. Then pulls a face to herself. It’s a little bit scary. Just full of loads of weird old Brontë stuff.
Kumiko seems to be calming down a little. She says she just wants to be sure Yuki hasn’t gone mad or anything. That you’re not going to go wandering off onto the moors and disappear.
No way, she says. I’m just going to have a look around the village.
Another little Kumiko silence. Then she says, I know what you’re doing, Yuki. You’re so goddamned morbid.
Yuki is tempted to plead ignorance, or pretend to be offended. But that would only encourage Kumiko to lecture her some more. It’s actually quite a sweet little place, she says. And looks around the room. Then – she doesn’t know why, she just can’t seem to help herself – she says, I’ve decided when I get home I’m going to read all the Brontë novels, one after the other. Possibly in English.
She can hear Kumiko sighing. Or maybe laughing, in an exasperated sort of way.
You’re like a child, she says. Like a goddamned child.
The day after she arrived in London Yuki took the tube into town with Kumiko and was down at the railings of Buckingham Palace before eight, with the roads all packed with traffic but not another tourist yet in sight. She’d told Kumiko she planned to go to Covent Garden to get some breakfast, then on to a gallery or two. If she’d told her her real intentions Kumiko would’ve probably laughed in her face.
She’d come across the photograph pretty much by accident. She was searching through a whole bunch of images of girls screaming in the 1960s, so was more or less guaranteed to end up with some shots of Beatles fans. She’s looked at the picture so many times since she can bring to mind a dozen details without any effort – how one particular girl’s hair falls across her face, the design on another girl’s knee socks, etc. – but, curiously, has trouble seeing the picture as a whole. Just lots of tiny details, all mixed up in her head.
There are, in fact, two different versions of the photograph, one more tightly cropped than the other, with fewer policemen in the shot. It adds a little more intensity, as if you’re right in the middle of all this craziness, whereas Yuki actually prefers the wider shot and the consequent perspective. The overall shape of the thing.
The girls – and the crowd consists almost entirely of teenage girls – are going wild about The Beatles. Since most of the screaming girls and the policemen who’re doing their best to contain them have their faces turned to the left of the frame Yuki assumes that The Beatles have either just driven by and are heading on into the palace, or finished doing whatever they’re doing in the palace and are about to come back out. In the foreground, five policemen are standing, arms linked and legs apart getting pushed and pulled in ten different directions, with all that teenage female emotion raging away at their backs. One policeman’s helmet is tipped over his eyes, as if it’s about to go flying. The policeman to his right leans back, mouth open, apparently gasping for air.
Then there are the girls – sobbing, screaming, arms flailing. The two most clearly visible, on either side of the policeman whose helmet is about to hit the ground, are caught in pleasing symmetry, right foot back, pushing off the ground, left foot forward and up on the toes. Their skirts stop just above the knee. So not yet quite a mini. The girl on the left is blonde and seems to be shouting, eyes wide open. The girl on the right is dark-haired and could almost be laughing, eyes squeezed tight shut. Their arms are all tangled up with those of the policemen. There’s no apparent ill-will from either contingent, and yet the sense of suspended energy almost knocks you off your feet.
When Yuki reached the palace’s railings she saw how there were, in fact, three different gates to choose from, but by bringing the photo up on her phone and studying the various columns and wrought-iron ornaments in the background managed to work out where the girls had been. She strolled on over with the photograph still up on her phone and adjusted her position until the proportions of the columns were more or less equal and the railings stretched off in a similar way. Then she brought the phone down and stared into the space where the policemen had leaned and struggled, and the girls had struggled and screamed. Again, she wondered what had become of those girls and policemen. What their memories of that particular moment were. And, again, considered the practicalities involved in trying to trace them. In bringing them back here to have them assume the exact same pose.
The first time she saw the photograph she didn’t notice the professional stills camera held aloft in the middle of the girls, as if its owner was trying to keep it dry whilst crossing a river. Or the movie camera, just inside the frame over to the right. And it was only on a later viewing that she finally
noticed the guy at the back, leaning in, with an old-fashioned pair of headphones clamped to his head, like some sort of spy from the ordinary world. So, not only were these moments being caught by several stills photographers and at least one movie camera, but someone was recording the actual sound. Because in this instance, Yuki feels, the sound is the crucial element. The medium where the event’s real power resides. Imagine bringing each participant back and having them take up their position. Telling them to close their eyes and remember that day, fifty years ago. Maybe expose them to some sort of collective hypnosis, or just have them meditate upon the photograph. To have them reach right down and try and recover their younger selves, their teenage preoccupations. Then very slowly, on gigantic speakers, you’d bring up the original recorded sound. What would happen inside those people? What would happen to the fabric of our world?
Yukiko has seen plenty of movie footage of Beatles fans from the same sort of period. Highly strung young girls perched in their seats with the band performing off in the distance. You can see the girls winding themselves up – simultaneously a part of the overall frenzy yet disappearing into their own very personal teenage trance. They bring their fists up to their mouths … take a breath, of something overpowering … then start to scream and shake their head. It looks so pure. So beautifully pure and intense.
When she wakes almost an hour and a half later the world has grown cold and dark around her. And having slept while the last trace of daylight drained away unsettles her, as if she’s woken beneath a stone.
She pulls on her dressing gown, retrieves her things from the bathroom and mops up the water on the floor in the corridor where she fell. For a minute or two she sits on the edge of the bed, still tired and fuggy. Then she takes out her mother’s blue blouse and silk headscarf, stands before the mirror and puts them on.
