Page 102 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

On the fourth day, Six was anxious and brittle.

‘The diplomats say no one’s allowed outside. Nobody will say why.’ She went naturally into Japanese now. English was for school. ‘They say we should keep quiet. Mariko says the men outside want to kill me. Not her, just me.’

‘They don’t want to kill you personally.’ Thaniel lifted her onto the piano stool beside him, though he wanted to put her on his knees. He had a feeling she needed the dignity more than a hug. She was carrying a bag of flour, and her sleeves were already white with it. Like everyone else, she’d spent the last few days casting it around. Everybody wanted to know whose ghost they were sitting in. He brushed it off her. ‘It’s all of us. We’re British. The men outside are angry because people like us have done terrible things here before.’

‘What things?’

‘Bombs, warships. Treating people like they’re less good than us. You can’t blame them for feeling like we shouldn’t be here.’

‘But we haven’t done anything—’

‘No, no, no, no,’ he said over her, wanting to nip that sentiment before it could grow any more. ‘Doesn’t matter. You know that story about the trolls under the bridge who eat people? You couldn’t really blame anyone who rushed up and chased them out instead of waiting around to be eaten. Even if those particular trolls didn’t hold with eating people at all and just handed out tea to anyone who stopped by. They’d still look just like the dangerous trolls.’

She smiled.

He squeezed her gently. ‘We’re like the nice tea trolls. This is the price we pay for looking like something evil. Even though we’re not. You just have to be a bit patient with it. I don’t think we’d help anything by getting angry. What do you reckon?’

‘Yes,’ she agreed. And then, solemnly, ‘Rar. Arg. Tea troll.’

He grinned. ‘But we’ll be going home soon, so it won’t matter.’

‘To London.’

‘Yes.’

She frowned. ‘But we have to speak English there all the time.’ She was looking into the middle distance in exactly the way Mori did when he could remember a future he never wanted to see. ‘There are things it’s hard to think in English. There’s not a word. You can think them but you can’t explain properly and the thought just fogs away because you can’t call it anything. What if we forget how to think properly?’

‘We won’t. We’ll still speak lots of Japanese. We’ll still see Osei.’ He bit the end of his tongue. ‘Anyway, you can’t say everything in English, but that doesn’t stop you thinking it.’

‘Makes it harder though,’ she murmured.

‘Help me with this,’ he said quietly, because he wanted to distract her, and because he needed to look away. He showed her the music on the stand.

‘What is it?’

‘You know how I told you about the moths in the piano, at Aokigahara? This is what they sang, more or less. But I don’t know how it goes from here. You’re in charge of the left hand, mine hurts.’

She wasn’t that musical, but she did it with a deep concentration now, frowning. The notes furled woodland colours round everything in the sparse frozen room and made it warm-looking, at least.

‘I like that,’ she said at last, puzzled. ‘That’s different to normal music.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Dad,’ she said slowly. He could tell she’d been working up to it for a while and braced himself for something difficult. ‘How come we’ve got so many ghosts?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, they had three at the Dutch legation. But we’ve got them everywhere.’ She pointed to the floor. ‘It feels crowded in Dr Willis’s surgery. If you put flour around, there’s loads of ghosts there. It’s like a party.’

‘I don’t know, petal. Maybe we’ve got the best view.’

‘That’s facetious,’ she sighed.

Someone tapped on the door. ‘Time’s up.’

He touched her back. ‘Six. What you were saying about speaking. That’s what music is for. Anyone can understand.’

She looked up. ‘No. Numbers do that. That’s why scientists from different countries talk in numbers. They don’t talk with pianos.’