Free If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor Page A

thinks maybe he can hear one of them crying a little, he runs his fingers through his short damp hair and laughs again. He looks at the time, it’s early but he’s wide awake now, he looks around the room andthinks a moment. He looks at the girl’s bed, neatly made, unslept in, he looks at her makeup crammed across the mantelpiece, the framed photos on the wall, the textbooks stuffed under the bed. He puts the bucket back where it came from, carefully lined up under the leaky stain on the ceiling, and he leaves the room, running down the two flights of stairs, into the kitchen, and out the back door, crashing it shut behind him, striding out through the backyard and down the alley, a man on a mission, a smile still wrapped around his face and water still dribbling down the back of his neck.
    In his room, upstairs at number eighteen, the young man blinks painfully, turning away from the window and holding the palms of his hands over his eyes for a moment. He takes the clay figure out of the box again, unwraps it, looks at it, runs his fingers over its smooth lines and rough texture.
    The small figure is the reason he started working on the dissertation subject he did, the reason he argued with his tutors about the boundaries between archaeology and anthropology, and it’s the reason he wants to travel to Japan as soon as he has finished his course, to see the real things, to see what he has imagined so many times.
    The figure comes from a place somewhere south of Tokyo, a place where mothers go when they have lost young children. Very young, as in not even or only just born; the miscarried, the stillborn, the aborted. The mothers go to this place, a Buddhist temple on a wooded hillside, and they take tiny pieces of clothing for their ghost children, and gifts, and prayers. He has seen photographs of the temple grounds, and he has spoken to a lecturer who has been there, the lecturer who gave him this replica figure, and it’s a place and a rite that has stuck in his mind.He imagines them, the mothers, walking up the steps, between soaring bamboo stems and carefully ordered miniature waterfalls, beside pools with carp drifting slowly among the lilies. He imagines them walking slowly, leaving gentle impressions in the gravelled pathways, moving to the place set aside for them, pressing their flat hands together and holding them against their faces, their limbs a triangle pointing skywards, the small space between their fingers filled with a hot breathlessness.
    He opens the red folder again and pulls out a postcard of the place, holds it behind the figure, looks at it for the hundredth time. He looks at the figures in the picture, row after row after row, dozens, hundreds of them, identical little six-inch Buddhas, the smooth domes of their heads like pebbles on a beach, numerous, indistinguishable. Some of the figures, towards the back of the picture, look a little weathered, but mostly they are new and clean. None of them were more than a year old when the picture was taken, and when he goes to see for himself there will be a new set of figures not more than a year old.
    He turns over the postcard, to remind himself of what he always thinks when he looks at this picture, he reads the words he wrote when he first saw it, the words in thick black ink, they are all named it says, each one of them has a name.
    He turns it back again, looks closer. Some of the figures are dressed up, in traditional woollen caps and shawls, or in baseball jerseys, or with tiny coloured parasols to protect them from the sun. There is one with an unused Bugs Bunny bib strung enormously around its neck. At their feet are offerings, comforts. Packets of sweets. Money. A yo-yo.
    He puts the postcard back in the folder, he takes down a photograph of Graceland, he takes down scraps of paperwith marker-pen diagrams and spidercharts, he tries to rub more blu-tac from the wall.
    In his kitchen, the old man measures out the tea-leaves, drops them into the