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

told. There is no love worth dying for, she will say, or at least no love that grows from death. Shame can be redeemed, sin pardoned: even for extreme poverty, on an individual level there are possible solutions, and in her experience those who feel most alarm at their destitution are also those most easily shown to be deserving of assistance. The patient can be sent to Mamma’s Home, to Canada, even, should she wish to confess any truly criminal act, to prison, where she can expiate her wrongdoing. There is no life, Ally will tell her, that cannot be changed, no-one beyond redemption. We can outlast sadness and despair. Whatever damage has been done to this girl, whoever has harmed her, she is, is she not, still here? Still able to begin again?

Nurse Sedley touches her arm. ‘It’s fever, Miss Moberley. Set in these two hours. We were about to call you.’

She hurries to the bedside, still careful to tread quietly past the uneasy sleepers under the gaslights. Nurse raises her candle. The patient’s eyes are open but unfocussed, her face flushed. Her breathing is fast and audible. Ally touches her forehead.

‘One hundred and three,’ says Nurse Sedley. ‘Going up. I’ve sponged her.’

‘Has she taken any fluids? Eaten anything?’

‘No. I spooned in brandy but she let it run out of her mouth.’

‘Bring some clear soup, please. And a spoon.’

The woman in the next bed, not, after all, asleep, sits up to watch. ‘Throw it in her face, I would. Soon wake her up.’

‘And a screen, please, Nurse.’

Ally strokes her patient’s arm, folded, now, protectively across her breast. ‘You’re running a bit of a temperature. I expect you’re feeling hot and your limbs ache, maybe as if there’s a heavy weight on your chest. It’s important that you drink something. We also need to keep your strength up so I’m going to offer you some broth.’

She wants to say that without it, her patient will become sicker, faster, but this may be exactly what the patient wants. She holds her cold hand and listens to the shallow breaths until Nurse Sedley returns. For Ally, the patient closes her mouth and turns her head away—acknowledgement, perhaps, of a kind—but she does not eat, and as the night passes, her fever continues to rise as her breathing becomes laboured.

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I can’t, Al,’ says Annie. ‘Really. We’ve only got three weeks. It’s not the time. It won’t make any difference if we go after the exams.’

Annie’s right, she knows. Now she should be concentrating on her preparation, tending to the exact balance of study, exercise and rest required for success. There will be six hours of examinations on four consecutive days, and then vivas the following week. One must train as a horse for a race, and all else must wait, must be put aside until afterwards. But what if something distracts, if there is such a persistent slipping of the mind that it would be perhaps more efficient to address one’s distraction in order to return, single in mind, to revision? She has made it her business to find out what might happen to the next suicidal patient. Two doctor’s signatures are required—and sufficient—to confine a patient to an insane asylum, to suspend, in most cases permanently, a citizen’s most basic rights. The mad have no freedom of movement, no right of habeus corpus. Lunatics, like women, may not vote; may not control money, may not marry, cease as the doctor writes his name to be the guardians of their own children and the owners of their own houses. It is widely acknowledged that there is no clear border between madness and sanity, and widely known that sane people are and have been confined as mad for spurious reasons. It is, then, not the least important aspect of a doctor’s calling to make this distinction, deciding who in this nation of eccentrics may safely be left to practice unusual habits and extraordinary ideas and who poses a danger to him or her self and others. Or perhaps who cannot be entrusted with an estate, or a child, or who is so lost in fear and despair that confinement in a place of safety and routine is an act of charity. One would think that the ability to recognise such states and distinguish one from another would be as important as the ability to tell pneumonia from a cold or a twisted ankle from a compound fracture.

Annie closes her toxicology book, her finger squashed in the later pages. ‘You are quite right, Ally. Papa would agree with you. You should write to the authorities and suggest a change in the curriculum. And I will willingly accompany you to the asylum after the exams. But exactly because the treatment of the insane is not part of our syllabus, I see no need to address it now.’

Ally, leaning against the chair beside Annie’s, stops fingering the brass rivets securing the back of the green leather upholstery. There is blue sky outside and the garden will be full of sunlight and rustling leaves. The loops and twists of Annie’s hair shine like polished mahogany in the sunshine coming through the window, and her shadow makes a cameo on the green baize tablecloth.

‘I know. But it seems wrong to graduate without having visited one. To accept the responsibility without understanding the consequences. Without at least having seen where we’re sending our patients. Asylums are surely not as bad as people imagine.’ And if they are, all the more reason to go, to know what damage is being done before and while doing it.

Annie takes her hand, soothes the bitten fingertips. ‘I will go with you. I promise I will sign no confinement orders until I have visited an asylum. But not now.’

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She is late. A quarter of an hour late. Of course he has gone. He is a busy man, his days in London already short, and if she cannot show him the fundamental courtesy of valuing his