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

a person’s mind? There is no research on the capacity for recovery of lunatics confined permanently at home, nor indeed much reliable information about their numbers. If a person can be driven to madness, by what means is she to be driven back to sanity? A place of healing, she thinks, a place of healing and hope for the future as well as a distaste for the past. It is not the first time such ideas have been voiced, but it is, so far as she knows, the first time a doctor has suggested that part of the work of an institution could be to undo the work of the family, that there are sick households as well as sick individuals. Households that can’t allow or sustain sanity. She thinks of her patients: Mary Vincent, hurt by her master; Mrs. Elsfield, reverting in her old age to the blows and harsh words of her long-dead mother; Mrs. Ashton, haunted by perverted grief for her lost brothers. She remembers Margaret Rudge saying that everyone has been hurt but not everyone ends up in the asylum. What distinguishes those who survive their harm from those found to be mad? There are undoubtedly cases of organic brain disease, but there is also a great deal of damage, often passed down from parent to child like Tom’s Japanese foxes. Ally gazes out into the branches, on whose winter lines the first leaf-buds are beginning to form. The sky is white, neutral, and from the street below the sounds of activity drift, people going places, moving things, working and coming home. The profession needs a definition of sanity, or needs at least a discussion about the definition of sanity, about the boundaries of grief and rage and pain. The profession needs someone to say that some domestic homes, some families, produce madness not by hereditary organic disorder but by a modus operandi that requires the insanity of one or more members. That families can be dangerous. She pushes back the hair from her face, picks up her pen and begins to write. She has things to say, and it is not as if her professional life has anything left to lose.

T

HE

F

OX

I

NRO

The snow has melted. This morning, every roof and twig dripped as if the whole city had become one of the slow fountains in a courtyard garden and every step left a footprint as if stamped in grey ink, on cobbles now only furred with collapsing crystals of white. All morning he and Tatsuo have walked to the tinkle and sluice of water in bamboo pipes and gutters, purling through the drains and streams, and still he can see through the open screens drips falling from the eaves both here and across the street.

The shop’s screen doors are pushed back so the box he’s being shown lies in cold sunlight, and whatever heat is generated by the hibachi beside the counter does not reach Tom. He wriggles his toes inside his boots. He pulls his fingers out of his gloves’ fingers and balls them in his fists.

‘Spring, summer, autumn, winter,’ says Tatsuo. He steps back so that Tom can see.

Four inro lie in a wooden box. Indentations have been carved in the polished hinoki for each of them to nest, and their curves rise in way that reminds Tom of women lying on their backs, bellies and breasts mounded. Four different shapes: a cylinder, gold inlay on black lacquer; a disk with frisking animals—foxes?—carved in red lacquer; a rounded oblong whose corners beg a finger’s touch, embellished with pregnant bronze gourds, and a green-and-gold shape like a spinning top or a censer. Each of them has a plaited cord through it, because inro, he has been told, were the Japanese version of pockets, boxes to tie around the waist holding whatever small things a rich man might want during the day, originally seals but later paper prayers or amulets and then medicines or even playing cards. The toggles, netsuke, were used to secure inro to the belt, and each inro has a netsuke umbilically attached: a curled up fox, just the size to nestle in a man’s palm. A gourd with a stalk whose hairs are visible in what looks like ivory. A magnolia bud, blousy and peeling, and a tassel for the spinning top, carved in dark wood so finely that each strand of the plied silk is plain. It crosses his mind to wonder what De Rivers is going to do with such objects, already redundant even in Kyoto, but at the same time his hand is reaching out and he knows the answer. De Rivers is going to possess them. Tom removes his gloves and stuffs them in his pocket.

‘May I?’ he asks.

The seller lifts the red one from the case with reverent fingers. Tom places it in the palm of his left hand and lets his right index and middle fingers trace the carved foxes. Three weave around each other, the lines of tails and backs and pointed noses making one sweeping curve, and there is another small one sitting, head cocked, nose raised, under the shoulder of the inro. It is perfection, he thinks, the angle of their ears, the quizzical cast of their faces. How can a person carve four perfect foxes on a rounded and hollow shape smaller than his pocketbook? How could another person bear to use such a thing, to have it hanging at his side where it will get knocked and scratched and wet? It would be different, life would be different, if one walked through one’s days with a perfect object always at one’s side. He lets the fox netsuke crawl into his hand and nestle there.

The dealer holds out his hand for Tom to return the fox inro. Tom gasps. The dealer is breaking it up, sliding it apart. It’s made in sections, of course. Not a box but a stack of boxes, held together by the cord through the sides, although there’s