Free Yuki chan in Brontë Country by Mick Jackson Page B

for some sort of English ointment, she thinks. May have to convert my room into a place of convalescence.
    She brushes herself down then turns, with the intention of heading back towards the high street, and has barely limped any sort of distance when she has the powerful sense of someone else being there in the alley with her. She turns around and sees a figure standing, watching, not far away.
    Yuki is so thoroughly taken aback that she sort of yelps, quite involuntarily. The girl doesn’t move. Just carries on watching. And Yuki’s next thought is that this girl, whoever she is, must’ve been there when she came lumbering over the wall just now. May have even seenher go creeping into the graveyard ten minutes earlier. All of this rushes through her mind as the girl continues to stare at her. Then Yuki turns and heads away, back down the alley. She keeps on walking – hurrying now – but can’t stop herself from having one last look over her shoulder. Just a teenage girl with blonde hair, hands tucked into her coat pockets – standing and watching, silent.
    Yuki reaches the high street and limps on down it, quite distracted. It’s the sort of thing, she knows, that will get right under her skin if she’s not careful. Because what was meant to be a private act – her own peculiar little ritual – now appears to have been compromised. As if a strange young girl having witnessed Yuki creeping away from the parsonage has cut a nick in her entire Psychic Brontë Enterprise and threatened to let all the superstition and voodoo escape.
    Yukiko’s scuttling down the road, back towards the B & B, with all the cuts and bruises raging about her, when she passes a pub, catches a blast of hot food and realises that the last time she ate was at the little picnic out on the moors. So she carries on down the high street, to the one shop still throwing light out onto the pavement. She picks out some cellophane-encased savoury pastry from a cooler, a two-litre bottle of Coke from the fridge and, after some deliberation, commits to a souvenir tin of Brontë biscuits, with all three sisters staring glumly from the lid.
    If she doesn’t buy it now, she knows, she’ll only comeback and buy it tomorrow. Her only dilemma is whether to give it to Kumiko or keep it for herself. She’s doing her best to pay the woman behind the counter by offering her various bank notes … How much do you need? Just take it! Take it all! … when she remembers she still has her mother’s headscarf up over her hair. If I was wearing my Jackie O sunglasses, she thinks, it might make a little more sense.
    She limps back up the hill. Her left hip, her right shoulder and the knuckles of her right hand are all pretty painful – but she’s feeling a little calmer. Perhaps because she has some food, and is already picturing herself lying in bed, watching TV, eating. With a couple of drinks working away inside of her.
    She reaches her street and is counting down the doors to the B & B – can already see it up ahead – when she again has that sense of someone close by, watching. She waits until she’s right at the door, with the key in the lock, before allowing herself to turn around. And there, no more than twenty metres away, on the other side of the street, is the same girl who was standing in the lane beside the parsonage. Yukiko looks straight at her but, again, the girl doesn’t seem the least bit embarrassed and keeps on staring right back at her.

13
    T he evening slides by very nicely, thank you. Yukiko takes the bottle of Jameson from her rucksack, pours a couple of belts of it into the glass from the bedside table and tops it up with Coke. Turns on the TV and opens up the cheese and onion pastry. Then, to keep the Coke good and cold, she opens the window and tucks it away, right in the corner of the ledge. There’s barely a breeze out there, so it seems pretty unlikely it’s going to fall and take out someone heading down the pavement. She