Yuki’s mother would often speak about how, as a child, Yuki’s cries seemed to demand something more than milk. It was as if, while still barely a whisper on the wind, Yuki had fallen through the wrong fold of time, accidentally slipping into the skin of a child. Into a small body that contained an anger that babies are not meant to have. Her screams had been frightening; they pealed with rage, at the injustice of being alive. Yuki had been taken to the doctors to try and root out the source of her anguish—a rash, a cold, an ear infection—but there was nothing wrong with her. She was a healthy child.
As Yuki grew, that anger turned in on itself, found nooks to fill. In its place fell a wilful quiet that contained more volume than her childhood tantrums. Only with the violin could she express herself fully. There she found her voice again, between forte and fortissimo .
At night, sitting with her parents at the kitchen table, heads bowed, eating in silence, Yuki would feel her teenage body itching with decay. The fury would slam against her bones, backlogging her limbs. When Yuki’s father would burp, she felt like stabbing his eyes out. When he questioned her mother’s cooking, she felt capable of murder.
Her father carried a subtle violence in his body, even if he never raised a hand. When he entered a room there was little space for anyone else’s needs. His presence, heavy, darkening the rooms he walked into, and Yuki’s mother, strong but servile, putting up with it. She made him his favourite meals, remembering always to omit the list of things he didn’t like. She folded away the washing before he could rage. She anticipated his grievances until they became her own. Burdens she wore in the lines on her face, the knots in her shoulders. Burdens she excused away with hushed stories of his broken childhood.
His mother had been killed by the atomic bomb in Nagasaki when he was a toddler. Tomiko was twenty-three years old and visiting her parents when it fell. She had left them at the bomb shelter to go and pick up a treasured watermelon from the house. A special treat they had been saving for a hot, perfect day. She was walking back with their dog, Hanachan, when she heard the noise of a plane. She looked up and saw a black thing fall through the cloudless sky, followed by a blinding white light that blasted her off her feet. When Tomiko came to, there was a large wooden shard through her leg and she was surrounded by searing fire. She staggered through hell. First came the vomiting. Then the swelling of skin across her body that blistered, peeled and fell away. She watched in a dazed horror as her left breast slid from her chest. She died in agony a few days later in hospital.
The dog was never found. The horrors her little sister Junko saw when she left the shelter to search for Tomiko were too much to bear. Children, women, men, animals strewn across the ground, scorched and swollen or blown apart. Those that were still alive whispering for omizu . Purple bloated bodies bobbing up and down the river. Bone and muscle and eyeballs hanging from sockets, littering the ground. Tens upon tens of thousands dead in a single minute. It was too much to see for one so young. The nightmares plagued her day and night. The figure of the little boy in the tattered trousers crawling towards her, crying for his mama.
Junko blamed herself for her sister’s death. She had been the one who had begged for the watermelon. She dragged the bones of her sister wherever she went until she passed of leukaemia, fifteen years later. A side-effect of the atomic bomb.
Yuki’s father thought about all of these things a lot. But never spoke of them.
It was this subterranean violence that Yuki had to run from.
Her violin had carried her out of that place, and now it would be Alex who would keep her from returning.
*
After the five-week course is over, Alex offers Yuki a room in his Earl’s Court apartment. He insists she is too good a violinist not to receive formal training. He suggests that, in exchange for three free one-on-one sessions a week, Yuki can act as a housekeeper, cooking each night and cleaning his apartment on a weekly basis. He suggests a trial month, insisting that there is no commitment, that Yuki can leave at any time. He says,
We’ll see how it goes . . .
With the ease of someone who has nothing to lose.
The offer makes Yuki irrationally happy. When she thought of returning to Japan it felt as if her life was ending. The image of herself back in that house killing any hope she had for her future. She could not return home and be satisfied like her school friends. Those that were resigned to procreate with dull men with decent salaries.
When Yuki’s mother receives the tentative letter proposing the extended stay, her unease is swiftly overridden with pride. She reassures herself with the knowledge that Yuki has been singled out, that she will be learning under her teacher’s esteemed expertise. Any doubts about Yuki being mediocre disappear, and she is left with the comfort that her daughter’s departure was worthwhile after all. Yuki’s father is quietly concerned by the news, but does not voice his worries, committed to the idea that, if he does not involve himself, the problem cannot cause him pain.
The apartment is a small, comfortable one-bed—a detail Yuki leaves out of her letters—on the second floor of an old building on Earls Court Road. Through the heavy fire-proof doors of the apartment block, there is a worn midnight blue carpet with a pattern of yellow specks. The walls are covered in a cheap, glossy timber and the narrow dark halls smell round with cooking oil. Alex’s apartment, in contrast, is light, sparsely furnished and noncommittal.
During her first week, Yuki sleeps on the pull-out mattress in the living room. She wakes at seven, folds the duvet cover and concertinas the bed back into the hollow of the sofa. She makes a pot of coffee— something she forces herself to like because it is what Alex likes. That first week, Yuki adopts his tastes as if they are her own. Dark black cafetières and dusty bowls of muesli. She makes sure to elevate his mornings, turning them from rushed to ritual, complete with soft-boiled eggs. Alex tells Yuki he doesn’t expect her to do this for him, that the agreed arrangement is already enough, but Yuki insists, unable to shrug her mother’s words,
If you don’t cook for the man, you will never get the man.
Between the bookshelves and the bathroom cabinet, Yuki soon discovers a certain romance. The house of a man capable of feeling. And it is here, with the windows nudged open in the summer warmth, that Yuki receives her great education.
At first it is just the violin. On the Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday Yuki stands in the small living room of the apartment and practises Bach’s violin solo Partita No. 2 in D minor in front of Alex. On the days she doesn’t have lessons, and after Alex leaves for school, Yuki likes to walk into the small bathroom where his naked body has just been. Condensation dripping down the frosted windows, she showers, the scent of his soap filling her, rising with the steam as she washes herself. It is during this time, in the time between these long showers and her lessons with him, that Yuki acquaints herself with Alex from a remove. She walks around his apartment as a detective might, picking up idiosyncrasies that would normally be revealed through time spent together, rather than apart. She opens drawers and reads old notebooks, always making sure to place them back exactly where she found them. It makes Yuki feel close to Alex. A degree of intimacy without the physical aspect that still frightens her.
That first week he leaves her money on the kitchen counter to buy groceries. She buys broccoli and tomatoes and onions and fillets of unloved monkfish, trying to stretch the allowance as far as possible— another thing her mother taught her—so that Alex will think of her as mature, responsible. At night, she stands over the stove, flushed with anxiety, cooking up something new and impressive for her acclaimed tutor. She mostly aims for European sophistication. Supermarket crab cakes and sautéing. At first, Yuki is terrified her cooking won’t be good enough, that her sauces will be unrefined and expose her pathetic youth, but after four days of delicious triumphs she stops worrying so much. She allows herself to enjoy her newfound usefulness. On the Friday evening, she drinks a glass of wine while she cooks. It is her first time tasting red wine, though she does not say. That evening, she catches herself in the reflection of the mounted mirror, wine glass in hand, leaning against the stove, and she feels perfectly grown-up, barely recognising the half-woman she has become.
That first weekend, Alex takes her to Brompton Cemetery where they eat a picnic of leftovers, surrounded by lichen-covered tombstones and grassy mounds of dug-up earth. Yuki senses him watching her for longer than is comfortable, but she never looks back. Too afraid of what might unfold if she does. A shared ice cream is the closest they come to a second kiss. Anything more would be absolute.
The usual ease Yuki has with her instrument cannot be found. The pressure she feels to impress Alex is overwhelming, and though she knows she is a good—occasionally great—player, the more he stands close as he adjusts her elbow, the more his gaze bores into her as she stands before him, the more she secretly wonders whether her violin playing has anything to do with what exists between them.
It is on the following Tuesday in the living room, as Yuki finds her way through a particularly dense passage of Bach’s Chaconne, that Alex stands, closes the space between them, takes the violin out of her hands and kisses her. The shoulder rest clatters to the floor. The sound is familiar, the oddly shaped rest never quite hugging the violin right, always falling—but in the arms of a man, the sound shifts, fills with promise as Alex’s mouth finds her own. Yuki feels her teacher reveal a part of himself that had been hidden until now, and it is alarming in its hunger. His unchecked desire hammers at her own, nudging Yuki to accept that her feelings may also be his feelings. She softens under the honesty of his body, as her arms wrap their way around him.
It is Alex who is the first to pull away.
I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.
Sorry.
You don’t need to say sorry. It was me.
She looks up at him. Okay . . . I’m. Not sorry.
He smiles.
Well. That’s good. Neither am I. I mean, it complicates things I guess. Or . . . I shouldn’t really have done that, but no. I’m not sorry. I just think probably . . . We should discuss, talk about this. Before we. I don’t know. Get carried away.
He looks at her. Hesitates.
I like you, Yuki. A lot. I really do. Do you maybe feel the same? Or am I being an idiot?
I. Yes. I like you.
His cheeks colour, to her surprise.
I think I can be both. Your teacher. And something more. If you’d like me to? Would you like that?
I. I don’t understand.
I’m sorry. I— I like you. That’s all.
Yuki’s face flushes. She nods. She wants to kiss him again but her desire frightens her.
He steps back.
We should keep the two things separate though. Otherwise we’ll never get any work done, ha. Let’s talk more about it at dinner. Or not. I don’t know. Maybe there’s nothing to say? Anyway. Please. Carry on.
He sits back down. Yuki bends, picking up her violin rest. She finds her place. She focuses in on the quaver that will carry her forwards into her future. Their future. Her bow raised above the string, her heart punching beneath the wood, she plays. But it is faltering, restless. The sound has changed.