Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss (top ten ebook reader TXT) 📕

Across the ward, Mrs. Elsfield, somehow neat even with sagging stockings and a dress that trails on the floor, is listening, her head cocked like that of bird wondering whether to fly away.

‘It will be burning and burning forever. Not like when you touch your hand to the range, no, not like when the bath water’s too hot. Flames stroking your bare body and the skin blistering and then darkening, crackling, and the flesh underneath turning white like pork and it won’t end. When they used to burn people at the stake it ended, they died, but you’ll be already dead and it will go on and on down all the years, fire eating your face oh yes, and down there too, flames in the dirty places and you deserve every minute down all the years, yes you do—’

It goes on for hours, sometimes days.

‘You know,’ says Mrs. Elsfield, ‘I always think, whatever you say to the Established Church, you don’t find Anglicans going off like that. I can’t say I know what the unforgiveable sin might involve, exactly, but wouldn’t you think it’s not likely a middle-aged Methodist Cornishwoman has committed it?’

‘Skin popping and crackling like logs, like apple logs at Christmas, nice and dry, and then they come with the pincers, iron to tear flesh from bone and you think to die but you won’t, there’s no rest and no end and it’s what you deserve, every moment of it—’

Mrs. Elsfield nods. ‘It’ll be a terrible deathbed, won’t it, her thinking she’s bound for the bad place and smelling the smoke as she goes. I hope she finds peace at the end, that’s all. Don’t believe in all this promiscuous praying in the parlour but that’s what I ask come Sunday. Bring her peace. All of us, come to that. Wouldn’t you like to see the silly thing’s face when she sees it at the last, the fields of lilies and the silver sea and St Peter waiting at the gate when all this time—’

Ally almost saw that silver sea once, at Broadstairs when May was still alive.

‘Pitchforks stabbing and stabbing, deep in your belly and twisting in your guts and other places too, the places you want, and the pincers ripping at your feet, on down all the years and no end to it.’

‘Mrs. Middleton,’ says Ally. ‘Come with me now. Come.’

The dark-haired nurse has paused in her reading of letters. ‘Yes, Mrs. Middleton. Go have a nice little stroll with Mrs. Cavendish. Because that’s what happens when you kick a nurse down the stairs, a kind lady comes for a chat. Isn’t that so, Mrs. Elsfield?’

Ally takes Mrs. Middleton’s hand and the monologue stops. She finds herself stroking the roughened knuckles. The nurses touch the patients all the time, she knows, pushing them into their places at table, pulling them into the line for the airing courts, getting them into and out of the weekly baths, but how long is it since any of them was stroked or embraced? It is no-one’s job to do that, least of all hers.

‘She’s got three little girls, you know,’ says Mrs. Elsfield. ‘And wasting her whole life in here. And who’ll marry them, with their mother off her head? It’s no wonder they stay away. That, and you wouldn’t want children hearing her, would you, even without they’re already weak that way.’

Mrs. Elsfield has a group of invisible companions, some of whom are unpleasant, but between times she can seem perfectly rational. At least, Dr. Crosswyn says, until she is discharged. Ally might like to consider making a study of such patients, for there are several who appear to recover after a few months in the asylum but relapse within weeks of ‘release.’

‘Come. We will go to my office, Mrs. Middleton. We have things to discuss.’

S

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K

IND OF

M

EMORIAL

The jinrikisha man is blue. He’s wearing only a loincloth, and his skin, from elbows to neck and down to his knees, is stained with indigo and ornamented with patterns that shine and ripple under his sweat. A giant fish, the curve of its belly looping his spine, the scales etched into his shoulder. A foaming wave, and small red things—flowers?—across his trunk. The man pulls the canopy forward to protect Tom from the sun before they set off. He is older than Tom, and so thin that his bones and musculature under the painting, naked and yet adorned, remind Tom of the drawings in Ally’s anatomy books. As the man begins to pull, even the cords fastening muscle to bone stand out, as if the giant fish, the carp, shifts over his skin. Tom has seen tattoos before, initials and hearts, sometimes the name of a ship, the result of voyages so long that men who can’t or won’t read and write take to a kind of self-mutilation out of boredom. I was here, they write in their own blood. I love her. He imagines himself taking a needle, a knife, and carving Ally’s name on his breast.

The wheels rattle and bounce on the cobbled lane. They need springs, the Japanese, Tom thinks, and more than that they need horses or donkeys or teams of dogs, anything less stark than one man pulling another through the streets. The contraption reminds him of a perambulator in reverse, and although the passenger is in theory master, he feels sometimes like a frustrated child being carried too fast past things he would like to see and too slowly when his blood fizzes with energy and his muscles long to work. There is no reason why another man, an older and poorer man, should move two bodies around the streets. There must—or at least there might—be some inoffensive way of explaining to Makoto that he simply likes to walk. Although more probably anything he might say would be a slight, to Makoto who arranges the jinrikshas or to the Japanese Department of Public Works that pays for them or even to the Emperor who probably approved