The Book of Rapture

by Nikki Gemmell

  Hey. Mum talked to us about pale rooms like this. Once.

  You did, yes. Creamy rooms from your college days. After you’d drunk a bottle of champagne Motl had smuggled home because he knew it would soar your heart and perhaps, with luck, turn you into the woman he remembered once. He burst through the door holding high his prize and you smiled with your eyes just slits like a cat with the warmest sill of sun. Then you summonsed them all to your high wide bed and were transformed into someone else. Young again, light, loose. And Motl was all cackly with glee as he handed across your last, cherished, bone china teacup, the one with the red spots, but it was full of champagne.

  Then the stories came. Of university days when your country was something else. Of houses with roaring fires whose heat made your face go tight. Of windows three storeys high looking over oceans of green. Of carpets so soft you could sleep on them. And you did, long ago, at parties that began at midnight and lasted until dawn where you’d dance barefoot and dance until the softness of the floor pulled you down. And you’d wake beside people who were astonished to learn there were two ten o’clocks in the day, who never knew the meaning of grubbily grey clothes that had been white once or of plates crazed with cracks. Because those kinds of people lived lives of a delicate shade of cream. Which is exactly this waiting place.

  But no, not exactly.

  Because back then there was always a way out. A spider of fear picks its way up your spine. Those were days before Project Indigo, before all Motl’s wariness over the direction it was heading in and where it was dragging your family let alone yourself.

  ‘I’m just not comfortable with what you’re doing any more. Religion gives you a framework to work in, and you scientists are creating this new priestly caste which seems every bit as arrogant and condescending as the old lot. Eh?’ He poked you in the stomach for affirmation. ‘I’m just not sure that humans are capable of a morality outside religion. Who, madam, is fencing you in? Anyone?’

  ‘So you’ve found God, my love, after decades of intelligent rationalism?’

  ‘Look, as a scientist, I’ve come across no evidence of a God existing. But I haven’t come across any evidence of he or she not existing, and I’m intrigued by that. We have to understand that there are things in this world we cannot understand.’

  You snorted your disgust.

  Motl laughed. ‘You lefty liberals are the most narrow-minded of the lot. So judgemental and indignant, bursting with all your pompous, righteous certainty. Extremely vulnerable, Missy, to your sheep-like opinions, don’t you think? Urgh. All rattly and hollow and … un-calm … yes.’

  ‘You believe in superstition, mate, I believe in fact.’

  ‘I just can’t quite believe that order came out of chaos, that’s all.’ He shrugged. ‘The idea that God has created human beings makes more sense to me than he hasn’t. Science isn’t the only way to truth, my love. It can’t actually explain how our world came into being. All the extraordinary complexity of it.’

  ‘So you’ve found religion.’

  ‘Not quite. Let’s just say I’m surrendering to the mystery. There’s a lot of solace I’m finding in my books. And I’m loving the journey, Mrs,’ and he padded off to his study, full of chuff.

  Let your diet be spare, your wants moderate, your needs few. So, living modestly, with no distracting desires, you will find content.

  26

  A thud. Outside their door. Mouse gasps. Eyes wide, rabbit-still. Until he was five he’d pad into your room when the terrors of night became too much. You’d open out the duvet and sling him in close and he’d nestle against you like a door jamb to a door and you’d smile at the hot firm wedge of him and wish it would go on forever and want it now, so much. Everything’s worse after dark when the fear crowds in. Those strange bumps and scrapes outside their door are like secrets being shifted in the dead of night and your boy is rigid with fear.

  You long for rest. That moment of grace every night in Salt Cottage when you’d tiptoe into their bedroom and the short, sharp shock would come; alone, every night, standing in that room that was filled with the sleep of your children. Just … breathing them in. Then a great warmth would flood through you, an enormous, glittery, heart-swelling gratitude, and you’d find yourself closing your eyes in unstoppable thanks. Prayer is gratitude, oh yes. You never told Motl of those luminous moments, can’t understand what combusted within him, resolutely do not believe yet want to, need to, at times. Religion may be a delusion but it’s a delusion of solace and there’s something to be said for that. Yes, it may be all lies and creaky myth but what is this stillness that steals through you in moments, what? The short, sharp shock of it.

  There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple.

  27

  You drove that last afternoon at Salt Cottage. The five of you. Not too far because there would be roadblocks up ahead and none of you was completely convinced about that former student’s heart. But far enough. A brisk breeze buffeted the car like a boat in a wind-tossed sea and you said to Motl to stop, you were going to be sick, and stumbled out and straightened and stood there tall with the stiff wind skating off the plain but flinch you would not, break you would not. Breathing in the spite of it but not bending, not giving an inch, tears streaming down your cheeks. That was the core of you then, holding your face to that sting and that hurt. Fury had become your glowing nub. The embers were intense and they would never soften out.

  You drove home in silence. Held your cheeks high to the slit of the car window like a dog needing air. Your jeans were wet from the long grass and petals were crushed on your boots and dirt flecked your face; it was as if the land itself was trying to cling on to you, to hold you back. And you knew now what it was to be sick in your heart.

  You will fight this dispossession and God willing your children’s children will fight it if they must. Your land holds your heart hostage. You long to bury yourself in it, to stretch belly down and feel its warm soil in your blood and your bones, to prostrate yourself in its earth.

  Not in the sky, not in the middle of an ocean, not in a mountain cave, can a man escape the effects of his ill deeds.

  28

  Maybe they cracked? Yeah. Maybe they ordered this because we WENT TOO FAR. So, like, we’ve been cast out and this is our punishment and they’re above us in the roof — he looks up — surveilling everything and seeing how we cope.

  They were really pushing it towards the end. Among all the snipping and shouting between Motl and you were three kids flurried up. It was like flint in the air before a storm. Everything charged, as if each one had new batteries in. All the squabbling and Chinese-burning, the hair-pulling, name-calling, toy-snatching, kicking, biting, even that.

  Then after that last drive, the stopping. Back in the house. That awful moment when the air itself seemed shocked. You, of course, at the centre of it. Becoming a woman you hadn’t seen for years, since the kids were babies and they’d drag you into that deep, deep tired and you’d wake up tired and never find a firm footing with the day. Standing there wailing that you couldn’t cope any more, couldn’t cope, with your fingers curled frozen at your head and the bones in your hands little rakes. ‘I can’t do it any more,’ you keened, ‘can’t — do — it.’ All of it, everything. Motherhood, Motl, Project Indigo, the way it was vining your life, dragging everything along with it, all the uncertainty of what was coming next.

  Then Tidge rushed in and clung like a wet plastic bag slicked about a tree, one that’s impossible to prise off, and as you held him tight you found calm again and apologised for the mother you’d become, and wept. They all ended up on you, trying to still you down but the shuddering wouldn’t go, wouldn’t stop.

  Nup nup nup. Something else was breaking Mum that day, something far beyond any of us lot. Being here isn’t because of plain old naughtiness. It’s something FAR BIGGER than that. Is this all Mum’s fault? Where is she? When is she coming?r />
  I am as if intoxicated with the grief of my heart.

  29

  The final night at Salt Cottage. Rain-whipped. Sky pressing into the land, pummelling it; wet hammering the windows like a giant flinging pebbles; as if heaven itself was stopping anyone listening in. Your kitchen had the glow of a special occasion. Candles were lit. You were wearing your favourite perfume, the gardenia one, and Motl nursed a mug of his beloved whisky, the Ardbeg you love breathing in.

  He had informed you earlier he had a plan. Fevery, excited, flushed. ‘It will work.’ You had to trust him. Why? Because those three children filled every inch of his heart as hugely as your own. He couldn’t tell you exactly what the idea was. He said he was protecting them, and you. ‘There are ways of extracting information, any information they want, you know that. It’s too risky, Mum. For all of us.’ And did you have a counter-plan? No, you did not.

  Motl’s fingers now drummed the kitchen table and when the whole family was settled he leaned close. You sucked in your lower lip: something in him had firmed and you loved him like this. He was one of those people whose mind is concentrated, magnificently, under pressure, who grow in stature once they’ve moved beyond the initial shock. He announced calmly that you would all be going away. Held up splayed hands to the questions. He said everyone had to remember two things and two only: that no situation had ever been improved by thinking it couldn’t be changed, and you all had to keep on hoping even when hope seemed lost.

  ‘What’s happening?’ ‘Where are we going?’ ‘Can we have chocolate?’ ‘What’s going on?’

  Motl shook his head at the shrill of voices. He smiled. He said there was just one thing each child had to remember, to get them through, and they all had to listen carefully. He turned to his youngest. ‘You, my little book muncher of the family, have to write everything down. Be our memoriser. Tell our story, tell the truth.’

  Mouse nodded, thrilled with the weight of his task.

  The professor turned to his daughter. ‘You, madam, my big, beautiful girl, have to look after your brothers. Be the mummy of the group.’

  Even now you can hear Soli’s deep, wavery breathing as she contemplated the enormity of that.

  Then his older son. ‘And you, my sunny soldier boy, have to believe. Keep up the hope and keep smiling, for all of us. Be buoyant. That’s all. Set an example for your brother and sister.’ Motl has told you that he thinks Tidge is one of those people who can plug themselves into light and be an enormous light to others. ‘Belief will be your shelter, all right?’

  ‘Eh?’ His boy yelped in bewilderment but Motl didn’t have time to explain any further; he asked everyone to hold hands and with an enormous impish glee declared he had a secret, the most secret of secrets, and as he spoke the hairs stood shrill to attention on the back of your neck.

  ‘One day we’ll come back to Salt Cottage. I promise. I have a plan.’

  But he wouldn’t say what. And you remember clearly the shine in his face as he spoke because it reminded you of nothing so much as some lone, crazy, heart-bursting salmon, fighting its way up river, never stopping until it’s home. Then Motl tented his fingers under his chin and declared that this new regime would eventually collapse because it was a denial of every single human value that was good and civilised and right. Because it shrivelled people’s hearts to just two emotions: fear, and a desperate, ugly sense of self-preservation. Because it stopped friends and neighbours trusting each other. Because it killed history by rewriting the books. And lastly, obscenely, because it stole joy. Anyone’s right.

  ‘And all this is being done in the name of freedom,’ you spat, in a voice they’d never heard.

  The whole family looked across. Because you had become old, it had begun from that night. But Motl was all-calming. He murmured ‘Mum’ in his warning voice. He said people can choose to live as victims or courageous fighters and we all had to think very carefully about how we proceeded from this point. And that there are some people who are broken by unfairness, and there are some people who are not.

  ‘And we will not be. We will not.’

  Old is my body, heavy and frail, it moves not with my fleeter thoughts. But strong my purpose, strong my heart.

  30

  Mouse’s eyes aren’t working properly any more. He’s rubbing them, they’re filmy, scratchy, raw. His writing has grown ragged, the notebook drops. He’s curled at the foot of the bed; surrendering, finally, to sleep. On the floor, just like he used to approaching six, when he couldn’t bear to hear his father’s hrumph of annoyance any more but was still terrified of the dark so he’d pad into your room and lie meekly on the carpet so as not to wake you both up. In the morning the politeness of his curled little body on the hard floor would break your heart; you couldn’t, possibly, get cross. Children are so much better than adults.

  Tidge’s the big brother only just. Mouse got stuck and had to be dragged out, Tidge just … slid. That about sums them up. The first boy was baked to perfection but the second emerged a touch overcooked, his skin raw and angry with rash. And upon arrival your youngest child took one look at his big brother and yowled a howl that sliced through the room. It was as if he sensed right then that this beautiful creature would dog him his entire life, that his big brother had glamour and he did not. For the elder is like one of those mysterious creatures from the ocean depths who glow, unstoppably, with an inner light. And Tidge’s taller. You don’t know what happened to Mouse’s inches, they just got lost in the unfairness of the genetic lottery. ‘Tidge’ll never get spots as a teenager,’ he wailed to you once, and you fear he’s right. Your youngest is a head-downer as he talks, he’s not used to the slap of face-to-face. He has a gift for aloneness and moodiness and withdrawal, from birth that pattern was set.

  They arrived early. Your waters broke at thirty-two weeks and they were rushed into incubators and prodded and pierced with all manner of equipment slipped under pale, translucent flesh while you turned, couldn’t bear it, and wept. And late that night, their first night in the hospital, Motl sensed Mouse’s retreat from this world: after twelve hours he’d had enough. ‘Don’t go,’ he pleaded to his fragile bundle of flesh, ‘hold on, little man, it really can be wonderful in this place.’ But his pleas weren’t enough, they didn’t convince. Then with flurrying fingers Motl listened to his heart and did something he absolutely wasn’t cleared to do: he unplugged the little scrap of life not much bigger than his hand. He lifted it clear of his plastic box. He placed it next to his big brother.

  Tidge pressed close. He curled his tiny fingers into his brother’s flesh. Squeezed. Hauled him into this life.

  Mouse’s got a lot to be grateful for. You’re always saying it in your warning voice. Which your daughter often repeats. Soli, Soli, Soli. Your prickly slip of a girl who’s always trying so hard to be good, to get everything right. Will you grow old in terror of each other, as mother and daughter, of the hurt you can both inflict? Please no. The professor and you did all your experimenting with her, the first-born; you were working the whole parent thing out. You both hovered so much, loving so fiercely, sneaking into her room and standing by her cot and just gazing, in awe, night after night. So much relaxing to get right, letting-go to learn, so much fear at the outset. Of all those things you were told children snatch from you: money, control, self-esteem, beauty, youth. It took a long time to learn what they inject: confidence, gratitude, strength.

  And now, speeding into womanhood. You’ve always been enchanted by her. Always glancing at her effortless loveliness. As for Motl, he looks at her in a way you’ve never seen before, like he looks at no one else in his life. Certainly not his wife. Some women are jealous of the gaze that fathers reserve for their daughters, but with Motl it makes you laugh. It’s so … naked. Adoring, reverent, astounded, chuffed. Evangeline was the nickname she chose for herself for when she’s a pop star when she’s grown up. ‘It’s entirely inappropriate,’ Motl’s always teasing her, but you’re not so sure. She�
�s better than you. The wonder of that.

  O thou enwrapped.

  31

  After that dinner at Salt Cottage Motl and you handed out the watches the three of them now wear on their wrists. ‘We’d been saving them for the summer hols,’ you rasped, your voice filling up, ‘but, hey, you might as well have them tonight.’ Then you clamped each of them tight like you were trying to breathe in their skin, to imprint it onto your own so you’d always have it close; their particular smell, each one so different, that you’ve known their entire lives. Trying to soak them into your dress so that in the future you can hold it to your face and breathe them back.

  Later that night Motl and you curled around each of them and put a hanky over their mouths and clung to their lovely trusting warmth like they were life buoys in a vast ocean of fear and neither of you knew when land would be reached. Then everything went black — ‘like death, I guess’ — and the three of them woke in this other world entirely, this pale, waiting place. Cast adrift, your fragile boats, and you all hope for landfall so much.

  You had assumed Motl had told them what was happening; you trusted him to lead them to safety; where is he in all of this? What happened? Is he all right?

  Your memory, just before your own world went black: Motl and you waiting, holding hands, side by side in your armchairs in a quiet the cottage never has. The arc of a car light. ‘They’re here.’ Your husband, quiet. A quick squeeze of your hand. They came in through the unlocked door; no knock. A blast of cold wind from outside blew through you to the embered place inside they cannot reach, they can never reach. You blazed life. As you sat there waiting with your eyes shut for whatever was ahead. Because it was the only way it could be done. To save the children, to free them, that’s what Motl had told you; otherwise the family would be hunted down like injured animals and the pursuit would never stop, there would never be any rest, any peace. ‘Trust me,’ he said, ‘I have a plan. It’s only you they want.’