Before You Sleep (4 page)

She was right because I heard feet coming up the stairs. ‘Yuki?’ Mama called out. ‘Yuki?’

‘I have to go,’ I told Maho and stood up. ‘I’ll come right back and we can play.’

She didn’t answer me. Her head was bowed so that I couldn’t see her face.

‘Yuki, what would you say if I told you we might be moving? Going back to the city?’ Mama looked at me, smiling. She thought this news would make me happy, but I couldn’t stop my face feeling all long and heavy. Mama was sitting on the floor next to me in the cold room where she found me. Even though Maho had hidden I knew that she was still listening. ‘Wouldn’t you like that?’ Mama asked me, ‘You’ll see all of your friends again. And go to the same school.’ She looked surprised that I was not smiling. ‘What is wrong, Yuki?’

‘I don’t want to.’

She frowned. ‘But you were so upset when we moved here.’

‘But I like it now.’

‘You’re all alone. You need your friends, my darling. Don’t you want to play with Sachi and Hiro again?’

I shook my head. ‘I can play here. I like it.’

‘On your own in this big house? With all this rain? You are being silly, Yuki.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘You will get tired of this. You can’t even go outside and use the swing.’

‘I don’t want to go outside.’

She looked at the floor. Her fingers were very white and thin where they held my arms. Mama sniffed back her tears before they could come out. She put the back of one hand to her eyes and I heard her swallow. ‘Come out of here. It’s dirty.’

I was going to say, I like it in here, but I knew that she would get angry if I said that. So I stayed quiet and followed her to the door. In the corner, in the shadow, I saw a bit of Maho’s white face as she watched us leave. And above us, in the attic, little feet suddenly went pattering. Mama looked up, then hurried me out of the room and closed the door.

That night, after Papa finished my bedtime story, he kissed my forehead. He still hadn’t shaved and his lips felt spiky. He pulled the blankets up to my chin. ‘Try and keep these on the bed tonight, Yuki. Every morning they are on the floor and you feel as cold as ice.’

‘Yes, Papa.’

‘Maybe tomorrow the rain will stop. We can go and look at the river.’

‘I don’t mind the rain, Papa. I like to play inside the house.’

Frowning and looking down at my blankets, Papa thought about what I had said. ‘Sometimes in old houses little girls have bad dreams. Do you have bad dreams, Yuki? Is that why you kick the sheets off?’

‘No.’

He smiled at me. ‘That’s good.’

‘Do you have bad dreams, Papa?’

‘No, no,’ he said, but the look in his eyes said yes. ‘The medicine makes it hard for me to sleep. That’s all.’

‘I’m not scared. The house is very friendly.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because it is. It just wants to make friends. It’s so happy we’re here.’

Papa laughed. ‘But the rain. And all the mice here, Yuki. It’s not much of a welcome.’

I smiled. ‘There are no mice here, Papa. The toys don’t like mice. They ate them all up.’

Papa stopped laughing. In his throat I watched a lump move up and down.

‘You don’t have to worry about them, Papa. They’re my friends.’

‘Friends?’ His voice was very quiet. ‘Toys? You’ve seen them?’ His voice was so tiny that I could hardly hear him.

I nodded, and smiled to make him stop worrying. ‘When all the children left, they stayed behind.’

‘Where . . . where do you see them?’

‘Oh, everywhere. But mostly at night. That’s when they come out to play. They usually come out of the fireplace.’ I pointed at the dark place in the corner of my room. Papa stood up quickly and turned around to stare at the fireplace. Outside my window the rain stopped falling on the world that it had made so soft and wet.

The next morning, Papa found something inside the chimney in my room. He started the search in my bedroom with the broom handle and the torch, poking around up there and knocking all the soot down, which clouded across the floor. Mama wasn’t happy, but when she saw the little parcel that dropped down from the chimney, she went quiet.

‘Look,’ Papa said. He held his arm out with the package on the palm of his hand. They took it into the kitchen and I followed.

Papa blew on it and then wiped it clean of ash with the paint brush from under the kitchen sink. On the table Mama put a piece of newspaper under the parcel. I stood on a chair and we all looked at the bundle of dirty cloth. Then Papa told Mama to get her little scissors from her sewing box. When Mama came back with the scissors, Papa carefully cut into the dry wrappings. Then he peeled them away from the tiny hand inside.

Mama spread her fingers over her mouth. Papa just sat back and looked at it, like he didn’t want to touch it. All around us we could hear the rain hitting the windows and rattling on the roof. It sounded louder than ever before. Then I knelt on the table and Mama scolded me for getting too close. ‘It could have germs.’

I thought it was a chicken’s foot, cut from a yellow leg, like the ones you see in the windows of restaurants in the city. But it had five curly fingers with long nails. Before I could touch it, Mama wrapped it up in newspaper and stuffed it deep inside the kitchen bin.

But there were others. In the empty room at the end of the hallway, Papa knocked another parcel out of the chimney and took it down to the kitchen again. At first, my Mama wouldn’t even look at the tiny shoe, even before we found the bone foot inside. She stood by the window and watched the wet garden. Leafy branches moved out there in the heavy rain, like they were waving at the house.

The shoe was made of pinky silk and my Papa untied the little ribbons. It opened with a puff of dust and he emptied the teeny foot on to the table. The rattle sound made Mama look over shoulder. ‘Throw it away, Taichi. I don’t want it in the house,’ she said.

Papa looked at me and raised his eyebrows. We went off looking for more. In the big parlour downstairs while he was poking up inside the chimney, he told me the little parcels belonged to ancestors. ‘This is a very old house. And when it was built, the people put little charms in secret places. Under the floors, in the cellars and up inside the chimneys to protect the house from bad spirits.’

‘But why are they so small?’ I asked Papa. ‘Was it a baby’s foot in the shoe?’

He never answered me and just kept poking around, up inside the chimney with the broom handle. Papa was very clever, but I don’t think he knew the answers to my questions. These things he was finding had something to do with the toys, I was sure, so I decided I would ask Maho when I saw her later. She disappeared while I was eating breakfast and was still hiding because Papa was going into every room and searching about.

The next parcel we found was a tiny white sack, tied up with string, with brownish stains at the bottom. But right after Papa opened it and poured the hard black lumps onto the kitchen table, he quickly wrapped them up in newspaper and put them inside the kitchen bin with the hand and the foot. ‘What are they?’ I asked him.

‘Just some old stones,’ he said.

But they didn’t look like stones. They were very light and black and reminded me of dried salt fish.

Papa stopped looking after that and swept up the soot from the floorboards instead. While he did this, Mama stood on a chair in their bedroom to get the suitcases down from the wardrobe. And I couldn’t find Maho anywhere. She never came out all day. I looked everywhere, in all of our secret places, but I never found her or saw any of the toys either. I whispered her name into all of the tiny holes but she never answered. But when I was checking inside the attic, I heard Mama and Papa talking underneath the loft hatch. ‘A heart,’ Papa whispered to Mama. ‘A tiny heart’ was all I heard before they moved away and went downstairs.

That night, when Maho climbed into bed with me, she held me tighter than ever before and wrapped me up in her silky hair so that I could hardly move. It was so dark inside her hair that I couldn’t see anything and I told her to let me go. I couldn’t breathe, but she was in a strange sulky mood and she just squeezed me with her cold hands until I felt sleepy.

Outside, the rain stopped and the house started to creak like the old ship that we went on one summer. Eventually Maho spoke. She said that she had missed me. In a yawny voice, I asked her about the shoe, the foot and the little bag with the lumps inside that Papa had found in the chimneys.

‘They belong to the toys,’ Maho said. ‘Your papa shouldn’t have taken away things that belong to the toys. It was a mistake. It was wrong.’

‘But they were old and dirty and nasty,’ I told her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘They belong to the toys. They put them up there a long time ago, and they shouldn’t be removed by parents. They’re like happy memories to the toys. Now sleep, Yuki. Sleep.’

I couldn’t understand this. While I was thinking about what Maho said, I started to fall asleep. It was so warm inside all of that hair. And she sang a little song into my ear and rubbed her cold nose against my cheek like a puppy dog.

Outside my bedroom in the hallway I heard the toys gathering. More toys than ever before had come out to play. All at the same time, and all in the same place. This had never happened before. It must have been a special occasion, like a parade. They had a parade when Maho’s parents left. ‘Toys. Can you hear the toys?’ I whispered into the black fur around my face, and then I dropped further into the deep hole of sleepiness.

Maho didn’t answer me, so I just listened to the toys moving through the dark. Little feet shuffled; pinkish tails whisked on wood; bells jingled on hats and from the curly toes of thin feet;
tap tappity tap
went the wooden sticks of the old apes;
twik twik twik
went the lady with knitting needle legs;
clackety clack
sounded the hooves of the black horsy with yellow teeth;
tisker tisker tisker
went the cymbal of the dolly with the sharp fingers;
dum dum dum
went the drum; and on and on they marched through the house. Down, down and down the hall.