Read Online One Morning Like a Bird by Andrew Miller - Free Book Online Page B

Has he, she asks, lost some weight? He says it is unlikely. In the holidays everybody ate a great deal. ‘You know how you get in the winter,’ she says. He says he knows. ‘I pray for you,’ she says. He says he knows. He thanks her. ‘You must listen to Dr Kushida,’ she says. ‘He will advise you. He has been a good friend to the Takano family.’
        Behind her head, Ryuichi, school uniform buttoned to the throat, school cap clasped in white-gloved hands, examines Yuji with a gaze he can only endure for a few seconds, such is the weight of judgement in those twelve-year-old eyes. Above the photograph is the slender cross of ivory tipped with iron presented to Grandfather Yakumo when he left the college in Seoul, and on the table below, a stick of incense, a flickering nightlight, an offering of mandarins.
        He passes his mother her birthday present, a box of taorizakura cakes from the shop by Ueno Station. She thanks him. She says she hopes he hasn’t spent too much money on her. He assures her he hasn’t.
        ‘Really?’ she says, unwrapping her gift, ‘but it looks so expensive.’
        ‘Just something small  . . .’
        ‘You’ve been too generous.’
        ‘Not at all.’
        ‘Still  . . .’
        Haruyo brings them tea, then retires to the far side of the screen. Though he would admit it to no one, Yuji is frightened of Haruyo, her slab face, the unseemly vivid bulk of her, afraid of her ever since the night – the second after his return from Uncle Kensuke’s – he crept down the stairs from his new room hoping to find comfort in Mother’s bed and found instead Haruyo, motionless by the side of a lantern whose flame splashed her shadow over the walls, big as a net. Nothing was said, but she looked at him then as no adult had looked at him before, certainly no adult he knew, no adult who lived in his home .
        ‘What is your news?’ asks Mother. ‘Let me hear your news.’
        He tells her what seems appropriate, harmless. A few remarks about his friends, about what he’s been reading. He does not, of course, mention the matter of the allowance. Nothing of that nature can even be hinted at. They are silent for a minute. Yuji looks at his tea but does not pick it up.
        ‘Your father  . . .’ she says.
        ‘Yes?’
        ‘How hard it is for him now.’
        Yuji drops his chin in what he hopes will be taken for a gesture of reflection. How long has he been in the room? Fifteen minutes? Half an hour?
        ‘There’s blossom on the plum tree,’ he says.
        ‘At the bottom of the garden?’
        ‘Yes.’
        ‘That was always the first.’
        ‘Shall I bring you some?’
        ‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘though sometimes I prefer just to picture it in my mind. It seems more perfect.’
        He tells her – the clever boy lecturing his mother – how the old poets used to cover their windows on the night of the full moon so they could imagine its beauty rather than be distracted by anything so obvious as the thing itself.
        She smiles. ‘My son,’ she says, ‘a poet  . . .’ And for a few seconds it looks as if she might hold out one of her long, white hands to him, as if the spell might break. But then she shivers and looks down. Behind the screen, Haruyo stirs in her fabrics, clears her throat. Yuji rises to his feet, his movements, in this strange room, soft as incense smoke.
     
     
    That evening after supper he opens the doors of the storage cupboards that stand on the landing between his room and Father’s. The cupboards are so solid, so mysteriously large, he has no idea how they were brought into the house. Lowered through the roof? Carried up the stairs plank by plank and assembled there by a carpenter? For all the years of his life (and for years before that) the cupboards have been the dark and mothballed repositories of whatever was finished with but could not be thrown away. Bamboo fencing