It is a summer of beginnings. A flower unfurling, breathing, unrelenting. Yuki has sex for the first time. She cannot look at him when it is happening. It does not hurt like they told her it would. It does not feel amazing like they told her it would. Beneath her teacher who is now her lover, she learns what she likes. He encourages her to speak into the quiet moments, and in turn her own naivety forces him to see sex afresh. Alex sees himself through Yuki’s eyes, and for the first time he becomes self-conscious of his body, thirteen years older than hers. His skinniness, the bones that stick out, his lack of muscle. Alex starts running on Sundays. On the living room floor, he does variation press-ups on his forearms and sets of sit-ups. Despite the early onset arthritis in his wrists, and against his doctor’s advice, Alex fills out for his new eighteen-year-old girlfriend. It’s the first time he finds himself being moulded by desire, a need to match, to best what came so naturally, so effortlessly to Yuki: her beauty, her talent, her ability to get under the technical and emotional complexities of Bach’s sonatas and partitas in a way that most violinists could never reach, despite their best efforts. It came so easily to her, and there was a part of him, small but real, that wanted to destroy her for it.
They had edged over the agreed month and into the second. And yet, Alex still hadn’t mentioned anything about her staying on. All week, Yuki had been feeling desperate, hyper-aware of her annoying habits, her childish insecurities: not knowing how to uncork a bottle of wine, self-conscious of her stray black hairs that fell onto the carpet, collecting in clumps in corners, catching on his socks. Her inability to pronounce the word vibrato correctly. She had decided that on the Friday evening she would employ one of her mother’s recipes in the hope it would make her indispensable.
It is over a dinner of chicken escalopes, which Yuki has beaten, breadcrumbed and fried herself, that Alex, mouth full, implores her to stay with him longer.
We’re having a nice time, aren’t we? he says, helping himself to another breast.
They sleep together after that, and he is rougher than usual. She discovers blood in her underwear the following morning. Sitting on the cold seat of the toilet, looking down at the stain, she knows that if she were to show him the blood, Alex would have the decency to squeeze her shoulder, apologise, ask if she was okay. She also knows, deep down, that he would be privately excited by the discovery, thrilled to have made her bleed with the power of his thrust.
Something rolls over in the pit of her stomach. Nudges her from the inside. She ignores it.
Yuki writes to her parents, telling them she has made great progress with her violin, that she intends to stay until her four-month student visa is up, so she can maintain her blossoming education. She tells them that Alex has promised to help her with the scholarship application. That with his connections, his knowledge of the process and the best pieces to audition with, she has a real chance of getting a place on the BA. She writes that she is sorry. She won’t be helping out at the harvest. She won’t be applying for music school in Japan.
Her parents send urgent letters, begging, then ordering her to return. The guilt she feels is there, but it is layered over with a self-satisfaction. Growing up, her parents had never laughed or touched or even argued the way she and Alex do. Her parents rarely showed each other physical affection, and when they did it was only ever out of a sense of duty. A hand on the small of a back through a restaurant doorway. A kiss on the cheek on their anniversary. Cool, tempered talk about the snow in winter, the melt in spring and the same, inescapable question of,
What’s for dinner?
Yuki gets a part-time cash-in-hand job teaching Suzuki to a Japanese boy twice a week. The boy, Jun, and his mum, Kimiko, come to the Earl’s Court apartment, the mum often bringing treats of homemade anko and premium nori from her local Japanese grocers. Yuki knows that Kimiko wants to be close with her, to ally herself with another Japanese woman, but Yuki doesn’t want that kind of relationship. She doesn’t want to feel like there is an us and a them . She doesn’t want to attach herself to an outsider, when she herself already feels so other.
When Kimiko asks indiscreet questions about her living situation— whether her parents approve, whether her mother misses her—Yuki feels the impulse to slap her. She doesn’t want to be reminded of how much she misses her mother. She doesn’t want to bite into the freshly made anko cake and be taken back home.
She doesn’t want to feel that familiar itch. That childish anger ebbing and flowing across her edges. Something she thought she had rid herself of, shifting beneath the skin.