‘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.