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

not a trace of the join, not to the eye or the fingertip, when the five segments are closed, and the inside is as perfectly finished, as smooth and gleaming, as the outside. The merchant turns the pieces through the grey winter light so the inro leans, articulated, and then in one movement of his fingers reassembles it into the solid object Tom was handling. He wants it back, but the man picks up the next one, the spinning top, blows a speck of dust from it and passes it to Tom. The gourds are cold to the touch but the bronze looks warm and the big-bellied shapes, the size of the top joint of Tom’s clumsy reddened finger, hold a golden light.

As dusk falls, he comes home. No need, he has persuaded Tatsuo, to escort him back to the house every day, and Tatsuo, who has mentioned a father once and friends twice, seems happy enough to return to the real world, where he doesn’t have to try to imagine how Japan might look to a man from somewhere else, where he doesn’t have to keep explaining how the paper is made to be waterproof or why some married women still blacken their teeth or what is the point of carving carrots into the shape of miniature carp. Where he doesn’t have to assist in the abduction of his country’s heirlooms. Tom pushes his hands deep into his pockets and lets his shoulders hunch to close the draught around his neck, but he doesn’t hurry. Nightfall is not as slow here as at home, but there is a twilight while people move around the city, from work to home, from the shops to the kitchen, from school back to mother. The raised wooden geta come into their own now, for Tom’s trouser cuffs are soaked in the slush and his boots beginning to leak. Two schoolgirls clatter past him, giggling behind their fingers as their split skirts flutter in the wind. Lights flicker and glow behind the window-screens, and the smell of cooking, of soy sauce and miso and fish, begins to drift into the street. Behind each of these wooden screens will be a family gathering around a hibachi, sitting close under the quilt laid over the stove while they share the news of the day, and in the background the bustle of women preparing food. Baths will be heating, and the man of the house changing from European or work clothes into the yukata in which he’ll spend the evening. There is singing in one house, and children’s laughter from another. And later, later they will roll out their futons and lie down together, man and wife and the afterthought of the stove’s heat still charcoal-scented in the air, warm enough that quilts can be thrown back, kimono opened, whatever is underneath eased away by gentle hands. He wants Ally.

Except for the red lettering on some of the white paper lanterns still hanging under the awnings of restaurants, the colours are gone by the time he reaches his own street corner, the city blocked in shades of dark. He slides open the front door, steps in, and shoulders it shut behind him. The house closes around him, dark and still, holding him like a heart under its ribs. No-one will see him, there will be no more speech, until Tatsuo calls tomorrow morning.

T

HE

K

EY IN

H

ER

C

OAT

P

OCKET

Spring advances hour by hour as the train moves south and west. In the park yesterday, there was only the first suggestion of green on the trees, infant leaf-buds still curled tight on the lindens and clenched fingers of furred grey on the horse-chestnuts, the wind still sharp about her ears. In Wiltshire she sees the first bare field dusted with grass-green, surveyed by a scarecrow and a boy with a rattle. In Somerset there are lambs leggy and bounding, grouping together on a rise like schoolgirls to watch the train pass, and the shadows of clouds scudding across the Levels from which the spring floods are receding, leaving the land damp and black and simmering with life. Devon: the kind of Englishness she had not believed until she saw it, thatched cottages whose garden greens, hedge-dark and lawn-bright, are already flecked with daffodil yellow and lily white. Almost, she thinks, almost one can see the cream and eggs on a gingham cloth on the kitchen table. Almost one can smell the lavender scented sheets on the beds and the polish on the wooden furniture made to last. And she thinks, as she always will in the face of comfort or pleasure, of the children in every way stunted by malnutrition and cold in the back streets of Manchester. But one must either devote oneself to total revolution, forsaking all else, or find ways of seeing happiness and beauty without grudge. These are both possible courses of action: she persuaded Annie—in a gloriously unsuitable hat—to accompany her to a lecture on Socialism last week, but for now she has other occupation, ambitions easier to achieve than social justice. She glances across to the compartment’s other occupant, a man who boarded the train at Reading and has been asleep since Castle Cary. His mouth has fallen open and his head, wobbly as a new-born’s, settled at last against the partition at an angle that will cause him pain for the rest of the day. She feels in her bag for Dr. Crosswyn’s letter, which she has been carrying as a kind of talisman, a passport that offers, after such a long period of limbo, justification for her presence, or at least, if justification is not required, permission to call herself a doctor again.

She unfolds the letter. I meant to write earlier to congratulate you on the publication of your excellent paper, he writes, but the delay means that I now also make a proposition on which I hope you will look favourably if you are still at liberty and intending to return to this