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

looks charitably at the river, at the fat stone colonnades on the bridge where two small boys sit precariously fishing.

T

HE

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PLASH AND A

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RY

Doctor!’ Nurse Johnson’s voice is high and sharp.

Dr. Stratton puts down her needle. ‘Please excuse us one moment. Miss Moberley?’

Ally hands the patient a pad of gauze. ‘Hold this firmly on your arm. We will be back very soon, but please ring this bell for a nurse if you are concerned or feel unwell.’

The woman, who has said nothing, not even explained what appears to be a knife-wound on her arm, nods, her gaze not quite focussed.

‘Good.’ Is it good? She hurries after Dr. Stratton.

There’s a policeman whose uniform is dripping onto the floor, muddy smears and footprints across the tiles, as if someone has dragged a bag of earth through the room. A crowd of people around the nurse’s table, someone sobbing, a child left to itself cruising determinedly along a row of chairs.

‘Dr. Stratton?’ she says. ‘Do you need assistance?’

Muttering, the crowd parts. There’s a bundle of wet cloth on the table, more water—sepia-tinged water—pooling around it, around Dr. Stratton’s neatly-shod feet. The bundle contains a white hand, a thrown-back face over which Dr. Stratton bends.

‘Roll her,’ says Dr. Stratton.

Hands reach from the crowd and push at the bundle, resolving it into human form. It contracts and spews more brown water onto the front row, coughs. The policeman sits down as if someone has cut his strings. Dr. Stratton waits, her fingers on the wrist. The patient gasps, retches again.

‘She will do now,’ says Dr. Stratton.

Under their gaze, life resumes.

It is Ally who is called when the patient awakes. The sky is paling, and from the doctor’s bedroom she can hear the first birdsong. The policeman did not see the young lady jump, only heard the splash and a cry, but the stones in her pockets tell a story that will be hard to belie. Ally follows the nurse down the corridor, where the gas jets flicker like ghosts in the brightening day. The patient nearest the door stirs, mutters as they pass. The nurse, standing at the end of the bed, seems disposed to stay, to harvest a story for the tea-table.

‘If she’s in trouble, it’s not showing,’ she says. ‘And nobody’s hurt her that we could see.’

‘Thank you, Nurse, that will do.’

The patient lies on her back, her head propped at an uncomfortable angle against a pillow. Her hair, which looked dark as Ally’s own when wet, has dried to a honey colour. She is slim, her collar-bones prominent as handles in the wide-necked gown, but the wrists are rounded and the hands pale, without obvious marks of labour. She looks young, but also like the sort of woman who will always look young. The patient gazes at the square of white sky above the bed opposite her own. Lifting it carefully, not to wake anyone else who might have a taste for grisly detail, Ally sets a chair beside the bed and sits down. She dismisses an urge to take the patient’s hand.

‘You are in the London Women’s Hospital,’ she says, as if making some observation about the weather. ‘You were pulled out of the Hanborough Ditch yesterday and brought here. You were not breathing. One of the doctors revived you. You have pains in your ribs and chest because she had to push the water out of your lungs. Your throat is probably sore because you vomited several times. You may have a headache or feel sick.’

She stops. The patient has not moved, her eyes have not wavered.

Ally tries again. ‘We don’t know your name,’ she says. ‘Would you like to tell me your name? I am Miss Moberley and I am finishing my medical training.’

There is no response.

‘You will need to stay here for a little while. Sometimes people catch a fever from water like that, and it will take time for us to be sure that you are quite well. Would you like to send a message to anyone? Family, or friends? We can write if you have no-one in London.’

The woman does not blink. Her brain, of course, may be affected by the drowning, or she may have been an idiot before she jumped into the water. Is it true, Ally wants to ask her, that drowning doesn’t hurt? Did you come up three times before you sank, despite the stones? The stones are at the police station: where did she find stones in central London? Bricks would be easy enough to come by. Ally can, she finds, imagine perfectly well what it would be like to prowl the newly-made streets where clay-red terraces spring up overnight, in search of bricks to hold herself down. The sun has risen and the rumble of the streets, of London, has begun. Soon, she will go home, have breakfast, allow herself a couple of hours’ sleep before she meets Tom. She wants to take him to the new Kensington Museum, which has just bought one of Papa’s stained glass windows, and then perhaps there will be time for a walk in the Park before he must give his lecture. She should attend one of his lectures, while there is still opportunity. It would be good for her to think about mathematics again.

After all, she pats the woman’s arm, lying inert in a hospital sleeve on the blanket.

‘Very well. Try to rest. I will come back to see you again before I go home.’

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LORIES OF THE

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USEUM

He likes to see her on her way to or from work, likes the authority in her step, the neatness of her movements. He watches her approach along the courtyard, her skirts swinging with her brisk walk. She has not seen him yet. It is not that she is diffident or clumsy at home, but she is different, her posture perhaps less upright, her gaze more often averted. She is, like him, like many men but no other woman in his experience, someone most at home when