Read Online Yuki chan in Brontë Country by Mick Jackson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mick Jackson
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warmed by her mother’s skin.
She washes her face and cleans her teeth at the sink. Pictures her mother doing these same small things next door, with just a wall between them – the two of them leaning in towards each other.
Some people, possibly out of a misguided sense ofkindness, have said that Yuki looks like her mother, but she can’t see it. What they share, she thinks, is the same fretful nature. The tendency to keep on picking away at something long past the point when it’s likely to do any good.
She has one last look in the mirror – at her standing in her mother’s clothes. Then grabs her coat, goes down the stairs, across the geometric carpet and out into the cold, old town.
The streets are pretty much empty. The people who went up and down the pavements a few hours earlier are now back home, slumped in front of their TVs. Or, like Mrs Kudo and the other Elders, gathered in a hotel bar, talking, drinking and pecking at bowls of nuts.
Within a few minutes she reaches the little lane that leads to the parsonage and heads on up it, past the ancient graveyard with its monstrous trees. A tall wooden gate blocks the steps Yuki took this morning. So there’s nothing to see of the parsonage but the vast blank wall at its side. Yuki stands and stares up at it, quite impassive. Plenty of other people must’ve tried to break in, she thinks. Brontë Obsessives. The Brontë Deranged. But they’d almost certainly have tried to gain entry via the doors and windows. Whereas Yukiko now sees that the way to do it would be to shimmy up the drainpipe, climb onto the roof, pull up four or five of those old tiles and squeeze down into the loft. Then it would just be a matter of kicking a decent-sized hole through the ceiling and dropping onto the landing. In no time at all you’d bebuttoning yourself into Charlotte’s pale paisley dress, to go exploring the place at your leisure – poking your head into all the interesting little corners you’re not normally allowed anywhere near.
Of course, the staff wouldn’t appreciate you barricading yourself into their precious parsonage. Wouldn’t be at all pleased to turn up for work and find the front door wedged shut with Emily’s Death Bed. They’d call the cops. Shout down the phone at them, about how some crazy Jap had broken in and was wandering around in Charlotte’s dress and Emily’s No. 1 bonnet. But, other than a great deal of complaining, really, what could they do?
Curiously, now that she’s standing here, right beside the parsonage, the one thing she’d really like to get her hands on is that little lock of Charlotte’s hair. How incredibly strange, she thinks, to trim a lock of hair from a young dead woman. Did they imagine it might carry some of Charlotte’s spirit? Some clue to her literary talent? And yet here Yuki is, in her dead mother’s clothes, a couple of hundred years later, and not at all the conventional Brontë Fan, but desperately wanting to feel between her fingers the hair that once grew on poor Charlotte’s head.
Yuki has a good look at the gate. It’s quite conceivable, she thinks, that with a little scuffling and scrambling, she might manage to clamber over it. There are tiny gaps and recesses in the stone posts on both sides where her feet might go. But she’s already got a smashed-up shoulderand another fall would almost certainly kill her. She doubts she’d be able to accommodate the pain. So she begins to wonder if there’s maybe a way of climbing the wall back down the lane, over into the graveyard, to get to the wall at the bottom of the parsonage garden, which may not be as tall as the one bearing down on her here.
It’s worth a go, she thinks, so strolls back down the alley, looking for a section of wall she might have a hope of getting over. The top of the wall comes up to her shoulder, so Yuki sees how she’s going to have to compensate for her lack of natural ability in the climbing department with maximum
She washes her face and cleans her teeth at the sink. Pictures her mother doing these same small things next door, with just a wall between them – the two of them leaning in towards each other.
Some people, possibly out of a misguided sense ofkindness, have said that Yuki looks like her mother, but she can’t see it. What they share, she thinks, is the same fretful nature. The tendency to keep on picking away at something long past the point when it’s likely to do any good.
She has one last look in the mirror – at her standing in her mother’s clothes. Then grabs her coat, goes down the stairs, across the geometric carpet and out into the cold, old town.
The streets are pretty much empty. The people who went up and down the pavements a few hours earlier are now back home, slumped in front of their TVs. Or, like Mrs Kudo and the other Elders, gathered in a hotel bar, talking, drinking and pecking at bowls of nuts.
Within a few minutes she reaches the little lane that leads to the parsonage and heads on up it, past the ancient graveyard with its monstrous trees. A tall wooden gate blocks the steps Yuki took this morning. So there’s nothing to see of the parsonage but the vast blank wall at its side. Yuki stands and stares up at it, quite impassive. Plenty of other people must’ve tried to break in, she thinks. Brontë Obsessives. The Brontë Deranged. But they’d almost certainly have tried to gain entry via the doors and windows. Whereas Yukiko now sees that the way to do it would be to shimmy up the drainpipe, climb onto the roof, pull up four or five of those old tiles and squeeze down into the loft. Then it would just be a matter of kicking a decent-sized hole through the ceiling and dropping onto the landing. In no time at all you’d bebuttoning yourself into Charlotte’s pale paisley dress, to go exploring the place at your leisure – poking your head into all the interesting little corners you’re not normally allowed anywhere near.
Of course, the staff wouldn’t appreciate you barricading yourself into their precious parsonage. Wouldn’t be at all pleased to turn up for work and find the front door wedged shut with Emily’s Death Bed. They’d call the cops. Shout down the phone at them, about how some crazy Jap had broken in and was wandering around in Charlotte’s dress and Emily’s No. 1 bonnet. But, other than a great deal of complaining, really, what could they do?
Curiously, now that she’s standing here, right beside the parsonage, the one thing she’d really like to get her hands on is that little lock of Charlotte’s hair. How incredibly strange, she thinks, to trim a lock of hair from a young dead woman. Did they imagine it might carry some of Charlotte’s spirit? Some clue to her literary talent? And yet here Yuki is, in her dead mother’s clothes, a couple of hundred years later, and not at all the conventional Brontë Fan, but desperately wanting to feel between her fingers the hair that once grew on poor Charlotte’s head.
Yuki has a good look at the gate. It’s quite conceivable, she thinks, that with a little scuffling and scrambling, she might manage to clamber over it. There are tiny gaps and recesses in the stone posts on both sides where her feet might go. But she’s already got a smashed-up shoulderand another fall would almost certainly kill her. She doubts she’d be able to accommodate the pain. So she begins to wonder if there’s maybe a way of climbing the wall back down the lane, over into the graveyard, to get to the wall at the bottom of the parsonage garden, which may not be as tall as the one bearing down on her here.
It’s worth a go, she thinks, so strolls back down the alley, looking for a section of wall she might have a hope of getting over. The top of the wall comes up to her shoulder, so Yuki sees how she’s going to have to compensate for her lack of natural ability in the climbing department with maximum
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