Signs for Lost Children Sarah Moss (best way to read books .TXT) 📖

of the forearm, where a down of dark hair is beginning to push, the skin is swollen and red, as if scalded, and in the centre of the burn is a scribble of blue and green and red.

Tom reaches towards it. ‘What have you done?’

‘Don’t touch. Bloody sore and all. ‘S a dragon, see? Almost finished.’ The boy licks his lip. ‘You can’t do ‘em all at once. No-one could stand the pain.’

‘Someone on board does this?’

The boy touches his arm with a fingertip and grimaces. ‘Koni done it for me.’

‘Koni?’

‘Chinaman. AB.’

Able Seaman. Tom has seen several sailors who would fit such a description. He leans over the boy’s arm and sees that there is indeed a dragon, a winged serpent whose scaly head reaches towards the wrist while its tail curves towards the pale tenderness of his inside arm. He cannot be older than about fourteen. Tom remembers the betto, the blue-skinned jinriksha man. He pushes up his sleeve. He thinks of pain, throbbing through the hot night, of having a real sensation as his constant companion. He thinks of the risk of infection, and of healing as the ship makes its slow way west.

‘Do you think he would do one for me?’

H

IS

C

HILDREN’S

C

HILDREN

The sky is clear on this side of the peninsula. It’s the first time, he thinks, he’s seen the sun since the Endellion entered the channel ten days ago, and it’s already low over the sea. Out there is Scilly, the Wolf Rock, and then Spain, Africa, the Atlantic gathering and swirling towards the equator. But even in his mind he can’t fly as far as Japan from here.

Ally’s hand lifts and falls again, as if she thought better of reaching towards him. He puts his arm around her, hears her intake of breath and sees her glance at the driver. As if they were not man and wife. He pulls her in to him. She adjusts her hat.

‘You are thinking of lighthouses,’ she says. ‘Of Bishop Rock, and Wolf?’

‘Yes. And that everything is different here. I had always thought it a nonsense when people say that the light in one place is distinctive, but it is true that the sun shines differently and the very air seems to have another composition.’

Ally’s gloved hand pats his. ‘No. The mechanisms of respiration are just the same. But Cornwall is unlike anywhere.’

‘You have learnt to love it. While I was away.’

She looks out. In the back of the trap, they are just high enough to see over some of the hedges, across stony fields and down to the shimmering sea. He has been to Penzance often enough but this is the first time he has taken this road, along Mount’s Bay and over the hill to—what is the village called again? Perran-something. As they all are.

‘Perhaps. I am not sure, about loving a place.’

She does not have many places, he thinks. Manchester is a trap from which she has escaped, London, or at least her aunt and uncle’s part of London, only her foster-home. Now that De Rivers has paid him he can give her a home of her own. If she wants one. Not Florence Terrace, quite, but somewhere large enough for a servant and a child or two. He sits back and takes a slow breath: damp earth, wild garlic, sea wind. And homes must be made, not given.

There are mine-workings on both sides of the road, and the chapel dwarfed by mining towers better built of larger stones. The towers will outlive the churches, will stand above the low-lying fields when the damp in the walls and the roof timbers has undone all the cottages and the jerry-built miners’ terraces have fallen like dominos. His mind’s eye strains for the future, for what will happen when all the tin has been taken away, how this place will appear to the eyes of his children’s children. If any. It is another conversation they are not having. They turn right, towards the sea. Perranuthoe, he remembers. You didn’t take a honeymoon, Penvenick said, and a friend of mine has a small house, nothing much but it happens to be between tenants just now. I’m giving you a week’s holiday and here are the keys. My wife reminded me, even in an established marriage it’s hard when a man returns from a long trip. But my wife, Tom said, she has her own professional commitments. The new convalescent home. Penvenick had already arranged things with Crosswyn. The road narrows, gorse and grasses brushing the sides of the trap and the seat pitching and bucking over ruts and potholes. Ally turns to him in alarm and he shouts to the driver. We will walk, he says, take the luggage on and we will walk from here.

Perranuthoe is not a village, barely even a hamlet. Three farm houses and a few fishermen’s cottages, a new schoolhouse with the bricks—bricks, here?—still sharp and red between the granite cornerstones. And here it is, with their valises and the box of food outside the door, another unfamiliar house where there will be another unfamiliar bed in which he will wake to the unfamiliar light of another day. The last in the row of cottages, with only a field between the front windows and the sea. It’s smaller than the white house in Falmouth and has thinner walls, probably colder and the wind will come straight off the open sea. Come, he tells himself, Penvenick has seen enough homecomings and knows what he is about. Tom takes the key from his pocket and opens the door for his wife.

They step straight into the front room, where a fire has already been lit for them. The floor is flagstones, but there is a hooked rug before the hearth where two deep armchairs await them, and a carved wall-cupboard of antique appearance hanging from the whitewashed wall below the stairs.

‘There’s water laid on,’ Ally calls from the room on the other side of the warped wooden door.