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

the strange and unnatural things to which he himself and everyone he knows is forever blind. The bleakness of the moors, where heather ruffles like water under the wind. Farmhouses of grey stone below grey-green hills. The pulsating verdure of a hedgerow in spring, bluebells scribbled purple in the shade of budding trees. The ancient forts and earthworks that form a chain across the uplands of the north.

‘It did not look odd to you? Perhaps desolate or bleak?’

‘Desolate?’ Makoto’s tongue still can’t quite point the ‘l.’

Tom accepts his tea, ducks his head in thanks. ‘Er, comfortless, I suppose. Bare and unwelcoming.’

Makoto’s back straightens. ‘We were most kindly welcomed. Most generously.’

Oh Lord, Tom thinks, it is not possible, even when an Englishman and a Japanese man speak the same language it is not possible to talk.

‘As I have been here,’ he replies, bowing.

A

NOTHER

P

RESENCE AT

H

ER

S

HOULDER

Ally is running through the woods, thorns snatching at her dress and hands. Although the sun is hot, there are no shadows and blood pounds painfully against her eyeballs and eardrums. She must hurry. She may already be too late. Something snatches at her ankle—a bramble, its barbs deep in her skin—and she tears free, tries to run faster but she’s dodging around trees and there isn’t a path, she may be lost, may be wasting even more time. Too late, too late, she has failed. A branch whips her face, snags her hair and she hurries on but it’s too late; by the time she stumbles into the clearing May is gone.

She wakes sweaty, tangled in sheets and blankets meant for two. The mizzle has at last cleared and the moon stands bright in the window. May, she thinks, May’s grave under this same moon. She sits up. Her hair has come undone and is tangled around her neck, stuck to her hot face. She pulls it back. It is normal to have such dreams, normal for the unguarded mind to resurrect the dead, to re-enact the catastrophe that is so hard to accept. She gets out of bed to straighten the covers and brush her hair at the dresser whose mirror is full of moonlight. Her own face, swollen with sleep, gazes out into the dark room and there is no shadow, no flicker, of another presence at her shoulder. The hard thing, Ally thinks, plaiting her hair, is not that May is with her, trailing her, peering from behind, but that May is gone from the world. It is not ghosts but absence that is harder to bear. She fastens her braid and closes the curtains, rattling on their iron rail. Perhaps this idea offers some understanding of Mrs. Ashton; perhaps she is simply, childishly, in flight from mortality, fantasising spirits to spare herself the finality of death. She should see if Mrs. Ashton’s admission papers would offer some explanation for her disorder.

Ally wakes feeling better, less hollow, as if seeing May even in a bad dream offers some kind of strength. May was never afraid of Mamma. May was able to be angry with Mamma, to refuse her demands and reject her reasoning without the reaction Ally suffers from any attempt at resistance. If you wish to reply, May would say—and goodness knows Mamma has left enough of your letters unanswered over the years—tell her that it is not convenient to you or your husband for you to leave Falmouth this winter. If a person wishes a married woman to pay visits, she should not express such opinions about her marriage as Mamma has done about yours; you need no further reason to decline her invitation. Nineteen-year-old May sniffs. If you want to call it an invitation.

But perhaps this is not what May would say. More probably Ally, like Mrs. Ashton, is conjuring the dead in her own image, imputing to a girl nine years buried what she herself knows she cannot say. How can you say such things, Mamma would say, how can you be so hurtful, so selfish? Have you no care for my feelings? Alethea, you run mad. Ally presses her hands over her eyes and sags against the wall. She needs Tom, or Annie, or Aunt Mary, someone whose voice comes from a real face. There are too many voices.

Stop being so theatrical and put your clothes on, says Mamma in her head, there’s nobody watching your hysterical tricks.

I don’t know why you listen to her, says May, she’s driving you mad. Again.

Ally, alone in her bedroom, trying to select her day’s clothes, wants to stop and scream until they both—all—fall silent. She’s not a madwoman. She’s a doctor. She fastens her stockings, her petticoats, her blouse, settles her skirt and goes downstairs. In half an hour, she can leave for the asylum.

She asks William for the key to the record room, and makes her way there directly, before the vortex of patients’ needs pulls her in. Along the ground-floor corridor, the great windows open to daylight like a cage, past Dr. Crosswyn’s office and the parlour to another plain wooden door, stained dark. She has been here before, finding out that Mrs. Middleton’s belief in her own damnation goes back to her girlhood and was probably shared by her mother, that Mrs. Elsfield’s husband was a heavy drinker and that the village doctor knew that Mrs. Elsfield was often seen in church with a black eye in the days of her marriage. The detail of the admissions forms varies widely; some country doctors have narrative tendencies and others appear to regard the form itself as an impertinence. The files are kept in boxes arranged, unhelpfully, by year of admission, with no particular policy governing those admitted more than once. Ally has never heard of anyone consulting the files except to add the note of a patient’s death or discharge to the admission form.

Dust rises as she takes down and returns box after box, beginning nineteen years ago when Mrs. Ashton was sixteen, for although the asylum