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

briar rose curtains are faded on the folds and threadbare at the hems. She remembers the curtains new, and Aubrey sitting on May’s bed telling her and May about the prince who came to hack his way through a hundred years’ growth of thorns to reach the sleeping princess. You stuff their heads with nonsense, said Mamma, as if a woman’s life began and ended with romance, as if girls had no souls but only hearts. I won’t have it. The next day the black and white text was on the wall. If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

Ally eases the door open and closed behind her. Her feet remember where the creaky floorboards are. There is a line of golden light under Papa’s door, behind which will be velvet drapes, candles and a log fire. The hall is full of winter dusk, thick around her ankles. The kitchen door handle is sticky to her touch, but inside there is warmth by the range and candles still in the same drawer. Papa might at least permit gaslight in the kitchen, where he hardly sets foot and certainly would not paint. Ally lights the lamp on the table and holds it up. The tiled floor is spattered with food around the range and table, and there are crumbs and hairs in unswept corners of the floor. She carries the lamp to the sink, where there are slimy potato peels piled up and stains on the enamel. She can smell the damp cloth on the draining board. It is clear, at least, what she should do until Mamma’s return.

H

E

I

MAGINES

B

EING A

C

HILD

The station was much nearer the village than Tom expected, barely two hours’ walk down the cobbled track through the forest, and then along the valley bottom over a swooping new bridge and so into a town where a stone school building with glass windows squatted among the wooden houses and shops. No, Makoto said, he did not go to school there but from the age of ten stayed with his mother’s brother in another town. The train comes so close, Tom thinks. Any of those villagers who believe in demon foxes and stare at his white skin and red hair as if they had never heard of other nations could walk down here, where there are newspapers in the shops and even milk for sale, and be in the city by dinner time.

There are only two other people in their carriage, one asleep with his head lolling against the window and the other reading at the far end. Tom waits while the train pulls out and the town buildings give way to more forest. Makoto, in the window seat, appears intent on the passage of trees.

Tom clears his throat. ‘Makoto? I have been thinking about the foxes. I am puzzled.’

Makoto does not look at him. ‘Please, do not trouble yourself. It is a foolish tale. Not worthy of the attention of an educated man.’

There is a house in a clearing, where they must hear the approach and passage of every train loud as thunder.

‘But I don’t understand. If people worship the fox gods in shrines, why is it an accusation to say that someone is a fox owner?’

‘As I said, it is foolishness. Superstition.’

‘I am interested, even so.’

‘Then you should consult someone who has made a study of such things. I will try to arrange an introduction.’

Makoto takes a book from his bag, not the one he was reading before. Tom gazes out of the window, feeling bruised, remembering the garden in the rain. It is not as if he had asked Makoto to speak of foxes, as if he had behaved like a nosy foreigner. He would never have known about the superstition if Makoto had not volunteered information.

Most of the railway buildings look European, as if a giant little boy from Hamburg or Edinburgh had laid out his train set around the hills and plains of Japan. The porters wear braided jackets and peaked caps as they stand before relief Corinthian columns and arched windows. The engine whistles and blows the same tune as at home, but the street-sellers carry bamboo baskets containing artful arrangements of rice and vegetation and the women shuffle in geta and kimono, as if the little boy’s sister has added a scattering of dolls from a very different game. Green hills and rice paddies gave way to huddled wooden houses a while ago. Tom wants to turn back,

Makoto lowers his book. ‘I will take you to your residence, or you would like to eat first?’

‘My residence? I am not returning to the guest house?’

He had been looking forward to it, now he knows how to behave. A little more about how to behave. He wanted to see the woman’s kimono approaching below the curtains, and glimpse the courtyard through the paper screens.

Makoto makes eye contact for the first time since Tom came down to breakfast in his tweed suit. ‘To stay several weeks? No. Mr. Senhouse offered an apartment in his house. You will have a bed, tables and chairs. More comfortable.’

‘Oh,’ says Tom. And then, ‘Thank you.’

Makoto ducks his head. ‘It was nothing. I hope you will be content there.’

‘Of course. I thank you.’

‘Not at all.’

It is as if they have gone right back to the beginning. Perhaps it is rude, to present a man in the morning with what he said the night before. He does not see, anyway, why Makoto should regret merely asking a question of his parents, asking permission, for how else is one to obtain an answer? (Perhaps not, perhaps in Japan there are ways of knowing how a question will be answered before it is asked, in which case the question is merely ritual, though it is increasingly clear that Japanese ritual is not mere.) Are fox owners a caste or was the status acquired, and if so, when and by whom? Why did they send you away? Who will inherit the