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

They are going to put Mary ‘in seclusion,’ in a windowless room on the top corridor where Dr. Crosswyn himself has authorised the use of restraints on patients experiencing episodes of unmanageable behaviour. It is therapeutic, he says, for those who have lost all control and find themselves quite at the mercy of destructive mania, to remove all sensory stimulus and all means of destruction. It is not unknown for patients entering such a phase of illness to ask for seclusion.

Mary drags her face around. There may be some traumatic deformity of the frontal bone and her eyes are already blackening. ‘No, please. I’ll stop, I promise. Please don’t send me up there.’

‘Pity she didn’t think of that earlier, isn’t it, doctor? Get the chair, Nurse Crawford. We won’t chance any tricks on the stairs.’

They are going to tie her to a chair and carry her up those stairs.

Mary’s eyes meet Ally’s. ‘Please, doctor.’

‘Trying to put one over the doctor now, are we?’

So which are you, Alethea? A madwoman or a doctor? Did I not know, did I not warn you from childhood of your nervous weakness, of your propensity to hysteria and unreason? You chose the asylum, Alethea, because you indulge yourself in feeble-mindedness. Because despite all your training and all your so-called qualifications, you are still crazed.

‘No,’ says Ally. ‘No. Nurse, stop this. You are unkind.’ Her voice is too loud. All of them, even Mary, fall silent. ‘Tell me, nurse, how would you have to feel, to do as Mary does? How bad would it be, in your head, for you to run against the wall until your skull cracks, or to force a knife through your own flesh to the very bone? What would it take, Nurse?’

There are tears on her face. She swallows.

‘That is how it is for Mary. That is it. She is like you, and like me. Like all of us. Only more sad.’

She cries, there on the ward. She has not cried for years.

They do not let her go. They take her down to Dr. Crosswyn’s office, a nurse on each side, where one of them stays with her, watching her, until he comes.

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Drops of rain gather on the twigs and hang, suspended like icicles, longer than seems possible before gravity plucks. Concentric circles spread in the pond, reaching out until they overlap into miniature overfalls, sometimes tossing a floating leaf just as a small boat would be tossed by wind-over-tide. He has not yet seen a leaf capsize. Another drop gathers and rolls down the central vein of one of the last leaves left on the tree, hangs tantalising from its point. The weight of rain must have some bearing on the fall of each leaf. The drop falls, and an insect supported by the pond’s surface tension skids and rocks. He watches the ripples diminish, trying to identify the moment where they become invisible although the shock continues to spread, immeasurably, to the mossy bank, taking shape around the stepping stones and the water lilies. Tom shakes his head. In Japanese terms this may be contemplation, one of the purposes of the summer house. Penvenick would call it time-wasting. As soon as he gets back to the city, he will find out about those silk workshops. De Rivers could have given him a more specific commission: what if he purchases something that seems to him extraordinary and De Rivers does not like it? I bear that risk, De Rivers said, if I do not want it myself I will sell it and as long as you meet my specifications my investment will be sound. But get it right, Tom, and I’ll pay you a bonus, enough that that wife of yours can sit by the fire doing fancy-work as long as she likes instead of dragging your name around the county asylum. It’s enough to make a man wonder if you should pay a visit yourself, allowing it.

Even at this distance, Tom’s buttocks and shoulders clench. But the money is enough, just about. Ally herself is a pragmatist; let him say what he will, she said. It does not hurt me and his money will certainly help. Goodness knows worse things have been said of all of us working for women’s liberation and not by people who are offering money either. One of her little smiles flickered out at him: we can use some of De Rivers’ payment to offer a small bursary at the Hospital for Women, if you like. His breath catches. Ally.

Enough, he thinks, enough. What is he doing here, gazing at raindrops like an infant left in a crib? He will take a walk. It is wet, but not cold. The path to the shrine went on, winding up through the woods. A very old route, Makoto said. There used to be a monastery up there. He should try to tell someone where he is going, or that he is going, not slip away from his hosts like a thief in the night. He tries to imagine the pantomime, the risk of insult, of giving the impression that he does not intend to return or that he is going in search of something they have failed to offer him. He won’t be long, just far enough beyond the temple to see where that path leads.

The forest is loud. Rain hisses on the dying leaves overhead and drips through the bushes at the edges of the track. Bamboo leans whispering at the path’s turnings; he remembers the creature he didn’t meet on the island, and Makoto telling him a country saying to the effect that it’s foolish to fear bears because one within twenty paces will kill you whatever you do and one at any greater distance will run away whatever you do. Bears will be preparing to hibernate now, and hungry. There is no birdsong, no slithering or pattering in the undergrowth. Everything will be sheltering, bright eyes peeping from under leaves and twisted