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

their daily rounds one iota if someone left all the doors wide open. They forgot how to make choices a long time ago. She wonders what she is trying to do, and why. Indulging the mad, says Mamma’s voice in her head, wasting your days and the training for which others made sacrifices on the fantasies of the degenerate. Are there not real problems in the world? Did I not teach you to see the crying needs always at your feet?

As she leaves the asylum, there is rain drifting over the north coast, blurring the fields and trees as if someone were breathing on a window. Weather doesn’t always cross the peninsula, but she can feel the damp on her face and curling her hair as she hurries down the hill. It won’t help Mrs. Elsfield’s blackberries, and she has still not learnt to heed Tom’s advice and impede herself by carrying an umbrella even when the day looks fine, but the cold and wet, the reality of physical sensation, feel salutary. Maybe it would help some of the patients to leave the room where at this very moment they will be lining up ready to go down to the dining room to eat bread and dripping, go out into the fields and feel the rain and wind on their faces. But the cold water treatment, she recalls, is already in use in some asylums, and it is not kind, not a process over which she or Dr. Crosswyn would be willing to preside.

Her skirt is heavy with rain and beginning to cling unpleasantly around her ankles by the time she reaches the station. As she crosses the footbridge, hunger beginning to churn under her ribs, there is a shrieking whistle and then the bridge rumbles under her as if in an earthquake. The London train is coming, and she stands there, out of the way of the worst smoke and steam, to watch. There are few holiday-makers now, and most of the men of business boarding the train are probably going no further than St. Austell or at most Plymouth, but some will reach London, where Aunt Mary will be awaiting the tea-tray and Freddie’s return from school by the drawing room fire, probably passing the time with a novel rather more colourful than Mrs. Gaskell’s. If Ally were to appear, even unexpectedly, Aunt Mary would kiss her, fuss over her wet clothes, command a hot bath and the addition of buttered crumpets to the cakes and scones already on the tea-table. The train below her feet won’t reach Paddington until late tonight, long after tea has been cleared, dinner served and the servants gone to their beds, but even so the thought of Aunt Mary seems to bring warmth and sustenance. Mary pampered you, Mamma would say. She indulged you with flattery and taught you to share in her shameful extravagance. There is a beggar girl hiding from the railway staff in the shelter of an archway; Ally leaves the bridge as the doors of the London train slam and hurries down to give the girl the shilling she had been keeping to buy saffron cake on the way home. Who is she, to eat cake while others starve for want of bread?

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LONE ON A

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ILLSIDE IN

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APAN

Despite the tightly shuttered windows, despite feeling unable to use his alarm clock in a place where only paper screens divide one sleeper from another, Tom manages to wake early. Kneeling on his futon, feeling with his fingers to edge back the screen and then the shutter to hold his watch to a trickle of grey light in the blacked-out room, he sees that it is five o’clock. If he can move quietly enough, he has an hour and a half to himself after three days of sharing a cabin with Makoto. After three weeks, now, in which there have been periods of a few hours when he cannot see another person but no time at all in which he cannot both hear and be heard. Europeans do not know, he thinks, that there is a form of solitude for each sense, nor what luxury it is to have all five every night. Not, of course, that he does not look forward to sharing his nights with Ally, but it has already occurred to him more than once that a part of the art of marriage must be to learn to see solitude in its double form.

He left his clothes arranged in order on the floor beside him last night, to make this easier. He sits on the edge of the futon to take off his pyjamas, and locates his drawers and the drawstring at the front of his drawers, trousers and their buttons, socks. Undershirt and then shirt. His hand knocks against the screen’s wooden strut as he reaches through the sleeve and the heavy breathing on the other side, Makoto’s breathing, pauses. He must be sleeping right against the screen. Tom holds his breath and Makoto grunts, settles.

In the porch, shoes back on his feet at last, he can’t move the sliding front door. It rocks a little but won’t shift and suddenly he wants to kick it, put his big white fist through a paper wall: must it be so hard for a grown man to take a walk before breakfast? He steps back, drops his shoulders. The door is only bolted, an ingenious arrangement that would indeed make it impossible to open from the outside but perfectly straightforward from here. He thinks again about Makoto making the opposite journey, learning that there are other ways of opening and closing doors, of putting food in one’s mouth, of urinating and defecating. It is no wonder the Japanese are so keen on European engineering and medicine; the laws of physics and biology seem to be the only constants between nations and even then, Makoto has assured him, in many cases Japanese medicines work well on Japanese bodies. Supporting as much of