James Davies
Part 1 - Roots: II
II
Yuri Kikuchi had just turned 8 when her mother died. It was sudden, violent, and horribly disruptive.
She remembered sitting in the classroom when she was summoned to the principal’s office. It felt like a walk of shame leaving the classroom, everyone’s eyes fixed on her, childish minds wondering ‘What could Yuri Kikuchi have done wrong?’ Of course, she knew that she had done no wrong, so she left with her spine straight and head high, not with pride, but with confidence.
Her father was there, in the office, his head too bowed.
“Papa? Yuri had said, quizzically.
He did not respond. The principle, Miss Goto, spoke on his behalf.
“Yuri, please have a seat.” Her hand was outstretched, beckoning her to the seat next to her father.
Yuri felt strange, weightless even. The principle never addressed them informally, and never looked so grave. Her father still did not respond. It felt, off. Odd. She could tell something was wrong.
“Papa? What’s wrong? Why won’t you look at me?”
She tried to spy a look at his face. He looked pale, but his eyes looked darkened, like the life had been removed from them. Indeed, as Yuri soon found out, like had been removed.
“Yuri. You’re probably wondering why this meeting is taking place.” Miss Goto looked to Yuri, then her father, “And, your fathers attendance here.” She paused a moment, “Kikuchi-san?”
As if on command, his head raised up, and Yuki recoiled. His eyes were red rimmed in the light, his skin a ghostly grey. The pale light of winter bathed him from the window in a grim, ethereal grimness. He looked forward, his mouth quivering slightly.
“Yuri.” He muttered, “Your mother…” His voice cut off.
Yuri’s little eyes opened.
“What’s happened to mama?”
“She was in an accident.” He bowed his head, holding it in his hands. “We need to go say goodbye to her at the hospital.”
“Goodbye?” Yuri looked between the two adults, her eyes glimmering.
The adults always fixed things, why couldn’t they fix this? She hopped off her seat, grabbing her father leg. “Papa?”
He simply looked at her, his eyes shimmering too. Tears dripped, like little rain drops mourning the burst of the clouds, the burst of a dream held so tightly within them. Yuri’s dream.
“I need to leave now.” Her father turned to Miss Goto.
Miss Goto nodded her head. It seemed to young Yuri, in her young and grief-stricken mind that Miss Goto was almost pulling strings, commanding, like the leader of a battalion, pushing her subjects to their furthest limits. Yuri stared at the woman as she was pulled along by her sobbing father.
Miss Goto, the steely example of strict and, near puritanical, anti-fun, with a stiff face, let trickle a single tear as Yuri began to scream.
“Come on!” Her father growled, hoisting her up into his arms.
Her mother was dead before they arrived.
She got to see a corpse.
It was odd. It looked like her mother, but it was pale, blueish in hue. It almost looked like a shop window dummy, a morbid facsimile of her mother, with all the features, crevices and creases, wrinkles and splits, but it was not. It did not respond like her mother.
A feeling of unreality swept over Yuri as her father knelt at the foot of the bed. A flurry of nurses left the room, their heads bowed.
For little Yuri, she felt that this would be not the first time she would encounter the death of a close one.
Her father, red eyed, turned to face her, a look of evil glinting in his eyes.
“Yuri? Aren’t you sad?”
Yuri shook, a fear overcoming her. Her father’s face was purely demonic, redder now, not with sadness, but with anger.
His little girl was not sad, was not grieving along with father, mourning the wondrous being that gave her life. Was she so selfish? “Yuri?” He questioned, “Yuri, do you understand?”
Yuri trembled. She did not know what to feel. Looking at her father, gripping the bedclothes in to tight, creasing bundles in his hands, tears streaking his plump, tomato coloured cheeks.. She fell onto her backside, looking back up to the facsimile of her mother. She slid backwards, scooting herself into the corner, shielding her little face from her father, who simple scowled, leaning on the foot of the bed, a silent, yet visible and deadly anger bubbling just below the surface of his face.
Yuri’s father soon spiralled into the self-destructive behaviour many grieving people reach in their time.
For Yuri, it was odd. As she grew up, from 8 to 10, 10 to 12, 12 to 14, she herself was experiencing the changes of becoming a little girl, to becoming a young woman.
Her fat fell off her, shaping her face to something slimmer, more gaunt, fixing her roundness into a slimmer, less jiggly version of her previous self. However, some of it may have come from the ups and downs of the life she led.
Her father was a drunk, functional, but a drunk. He struggled to maintain jobs, without someone finally outing him as a whisky-loving booze hound. He struggled to earn money, so he ended up thieving, or taking things on the promise of return, then avoiding the individual in question he had ‘borrowed’ the item from. He stopped having friends soon enough, and as his reputation began to precede him, soon people began shutting him out. Jobs followed suite, as he slowly began to spiral further into debt and, eventually, near homelessness.
Yuri remembered one specific time, when she was 15, when three strange men had entered the house. They sounded angry. She looked through the banisters, into the living room as the three men stood in front of her father, slumped on the sofa, half-drunk.
They looked sharp. The leader of the group had frosted hair, a velvet plum purple suit and matching trousers, finished with crimson leather cowboy boots. He looked like a wealthy man, and carried himself like one too. Confidently. Casually. In control. Her father and the man argued.
Money, loans, the things hounding her father continually.
“Mr Kikuchi, you booze hound, I’m going to ask you again, and you’re going to answer me. Where’s the money we loaned you?” The purple suited man spoke with a slight mumble, not really caring if the drunk in front of him could understand.
“I have it in a bank, for savings.” Yuri’s father had replied, his voice droning.
“What have you got to save for?” The purple suited man replied.
“I need to support myself. I need money to live! This is a country that runs on money. You don’t have money, you lose!” Her father droned.
“Yeah, you’re right. You lose. Not us!” The purple suited man raised his voice.
Yuri’s father sunk into the sofa, like the power of his voice had thrown him backwards.
“I need it. I need it for something.”
The purple suited man rolled his eyes.
“You keep saying that. We didn’t give you ¥5,000,000 not to gain anything out of it. You don’t have the money by next month, we’ll be back, for your house. Then you really will be homeless. Remember what we did for you here.”
The man in the purple suit clicked, and the other with him exited through the front door. He followed, stopping at the door. Not looking back, he spoke.
“By the way. The money’s been raised to ¥10, 000,000. Due to interest of course.”
The smugness of the purple suited man’s voice was thick.
Her father did not respond. The purple suited man left, leaving the door open. Her father bowed his head, heaving a sigh. He then raised it again, looking over to the stairs. He knew Yuri was watching, but was not really bothered.
He stood up, and walked over to Yuri. Her slender face, lit through the bars of the banister, was blacked out by her father’s shadow. Her hand that gripped the railing, clenched, whitening the knuckles, her finger tips. Her father looked down at her in the darkness. She felt the motion of the air in front of her as her father placed his hand on her hand. The smell of booze, and the faint smoke of stale cigarettes wafted with it too.
“Yuri. I’m leaving tonight.”
She stared up at him in the darkness.
“Dad?”
She stopped calling him ‘Papa’ not long after she had turned 10.
“I’ll leave you somewhere safe, and I will relinquish any clean money to you.”
She could not see his face, see how he was reacting. His voice was still a drunken drawl, but, there lacked any feeling in it. It was cold, but she could not see his face as he blotted out the living room lights.
“What will happen to you?”
A pause.
“I think I’ve outstayed my welcome here.”
He let go of her hand, walking back into the living room, leaving Yuri knelt on the stairs. His face was still hidden, his back to her. If she could see it, she imagined it would be redden, much like it was the day in the hospital when her mother died.
At least this time he had got to say goodbye to the one he loved.
Yuri’s father left her alone at the station, the promise of someone, a distant relative meeting her there.
She silently went along with it. What more could she do? Adults around her had failed her. They had failed to provide her stability, or an opportunity. She looked up as rain drizzled across the platform, the black concrete of the ground shimmering with the lights that lined the train line. A pool of white and oranges from the city, blues and reds from the stores and shops around the station, the minty greens and deep reds of traffic lights ushering trains to and from the station.
These lights shimmered in her watery eyes as she stood under the cover of the platform’s metal roof. The rain drumming in waves as the wind wafted the weak rain in gusts and bursts, like blossom petals caught on a light spring breeze.
It was late autumn, becoming early winter.
She presumed she would never see her father again.
And, that no-one would come collect her.
She stood with her packed suitcase, not looking at the hordes of people walking past her. They, for the most part ignored her. It was not uncommon for young girls to travel alone. But, most of all, they ignored her tears. The rush to get to the station, hastened by her father’s desperation, meant she did not have an umbrella. Getting caught in the rain had soaked them as they had walked there. The passers-by must have thought she was just soaked through. ~
A few trains stopped or sailed past, and she kept up the pretence, the belief in her father’s lie that someone would meet her. Sweep her up on a train and take her far away. ‘Hokkaido’ her father had said they would be coming from.
It was around 11 pm when a curious guard went up to talk to.
“Excuse me, little miss?” He knelt next to her.
“I’m waiting for a train to Hokkaido.” She replied.
“‘Hokkaido?’ No trains from Hokkaido stop at this station little miss.”
She bowed her head, tears dropping to the station floor.
“I understand that. I believe that I’ve been lied too.”
“‘Lied too?’ By whom?” The guard leant forward.
“My father.”
The guard gasped.
“I think my father had made a deal with criminals to get money, and now he’s on the run, or possibly going to kill himself.” She looked up to the guard. “What should I do?”
The guard looked, shocked, and bemused.
“I’ll, I’ll go call someone, to pick you up.”
The guard fell backwards from his crouch slightly, an urgency rushing through him as he ran to the phone, dialling in the number for emergency services.
Yuri did not leave that spot, never stopped looking forward, wishing for a train to arrive until the police came.