Read Online Yuki chan in Brontë Country by Mick Jackson - Free Book Online

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.

11
    T he 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 thiscraziness, 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