So. You were gently but firmly grabbed from behind. Pulled to your feet. Pinioned by your wrists which were then cuffed to a belt and a hood was placed over you, cutting off any light. Shortly afterwards, a sharp blow and your world went blank, everything addled, your family lost. And now you are here, in this place.
Mouse jerks awake.
Okay, okay. Something else. From that last night at Salt Cottage. Dad crying but trying not to. His tiny spasms held in. I’ve never seen him cry before. I WISH I HADN’T REMEMBERED THAT. I wish wish WISH we were all back there. Back. Please, get us back.
Now is the time when what you believe in is put to the test.
Set me as a seal upon thine heart.
32
You need to burst into their room right now. Need to climb into their dark world and flick on the light and spring-clean it with your laugh. Want their glee back. You know each of their giggles exactly, they’re like three fingerprints of joy and you’ll always hold them tight, so tight, in the fist of your heart.
‘Trust me,’ that’s what he said, ‘never forget that.’ But it’s so hard to hold on to.
This is the way to die: Beauty keeps laying its sharp knife against me.
33
Early morning. Tidge still vastly under. His face smooth as if it’s lit from within, his eyelids shiny like they’ve been brushed with Vaseline. Mouse awake. Rises stiff. The night’s anxiety still curled in his bones and even more nagged by worry now. Because dawn’s here, the closeness of a key that works. Light slits open the black. Brightness comes quickly and he runs to the window and presses his palms to the sky and wants to dive up, up into that wide happy blue, wants to lick the lovely air. Footsteps. Outside. In suits and heels as they brisk along in that hurried way that city feet do. Your boy knocks on the glass but they cannot see or hear; unknowing they pass. Cars, finally. Thank goodness. He picks up his notebook.
The traffic lights have a reason now. I was getting worried for them, they looked so forlorn. Like they’d been stood up.
The busyness of the waking city seeps into the room and your youngest stands sentinel, waiting for goodness knows what: Motl and you perhaps to rush into this place and scoop them up whooping and laughing with relief but then his eyes squeeze shut — no, no — he shakes his head, no more crying’s allowed out, Dad wouldn’t want it.
But they didn’t come. They didn’t get us out. We’re ALONE. What happens to grown-ups when their past catches up? And their kids. NO FAIR what happens to them. NO FAIR.
Your hand sits in the classroom of God.
34
Hot water ticks in the old pipes. Groans. Shudders. The building’s waking up. Mouse’s fingertips push at the glass. People walk by unaware of the panic fermenting at their feet. He looks at the bed and hesitates; soon he’ll have to wake his siblings but he can’t quite do it yet. They need their sleep. The warm shock of his caring heart; one of those moments when you think, hey, what’s the worry, he’ll be all right. Your dear, dear boy, trying so hard to be the man for a bit. He smooths a lock of hair from his sister’s face. She needs her sleep, the weight of responsibility is scowling her up; she’s got a new line in her forehead from trying so hard to be the mother of the group. And he doesn’t want to crash all his anxiety into his brother just yet. This will swamp him. That nothing has changed, that you never came in the night.
Well well.
His brother’s woken like he’s heard his thinking. Mouse burrows under the covers. ‘They’re not here, dude,’ he says, ‘and there were noises. Outside the door. And there’ll be a key soon and … I’m scared. Tidgy? I want to go home.’
His brother gulps, eyes wide, trying to remember Motl’s words, to hold on to hope. He opens his mouth, nothing comes out, terror clogging his talk. And so here they are now, your beautiful boys, waiting, minute by snail minute. For goodness knows what. Deep wavery breathing from them both. Now their boxers are back. Punch-punch, punch-punch. Jabbing away at their skin. As they stare out at the morning they can’t get to. At the window they cannot break.
Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night? The watchman said the morning cometh, and also the night.
35
This will not defeat you. Light is anyone’s birthright and you want it back. By heart you know Salt Cottage. Those words are not accidental. By heart.
The winds blew and beat upon that house and it fell not: it was founded upon a rock.
36
A group is being hurried down the street. Mothers and grandmothers and children. The littlest are crying. The mothers are pulling them along with still, hollow faces like the life has been walloped from them. Even the smallest hold bags. Some are just plastic from the supermarket. Several have coats over their pyjamas as if they’ve been caught in their sleep.
‘Where are the boys?’ Tidge asks. There are small ones, yes, but none over seven or eight.
‘I don’t know, dude,’ Mouse replies. And as he speaks it is like mercury coming into you, seeping through your veins, its stately chill. ‘I don’t know,’ your youngest repeats, rubbing mist from the window, from the horrified O of his mouth.
‘The boys are with their dads,’ your daughter interjects, teacher-bright. ‘They’re on their way to school’
But a glittery quiet. As the three of them keep watching. Mouse’s tongue blunted now and you know why. Because he overheard Motl and you talking once about fields on the edge of the city with freshly turned soil that trembled for three days then stopped.
‘Why, Mummy, why?’
‘Sssh, darling, not now, get some sleep.’
But knowing snapped open in him like a switchblade.
EVERYTHING is too close.
Your wild love. Your wild love.
They make haste to shed innocent blood.
37
Busyness has come. The city’s tootling on with its day. Sunlight bursts through gliding clouds and a big happy blue hollers for the three of them to get out. Outside the window a plastic bag turns cartwheels on the street, joy riding on the breeze. People hurry about in their too-busy-for-stopping way that city feet do. The doorknob spins and spins catching on nothing. They’ve all had a go and everything is too quiet in this pale cocoon of a room but not in a calm way, a birds-hushed-before-an-earth-quake way.
‘I wonder what happened in this place. You know, before,’ Tidge wonders aloud.
Mouse still can’t talk. Thinking too much.
Our turn will come. And all we can do is stand here and stand here waiting for goodness knows what.
Because of what you did once.
Then said I. Lord, how Ions?
38
Okay What I’ve heard because no one’s telling me, are they? Dad saying this regime stops people being human but Mum saying it doesn’t stop people being human it brings out the worst in them, what lies buried in everyone underneath. That we all have this animal inside us, every single human being, and Dad says, no, Mrs, not everyone, and then it’s a fight. Mum all shouty that everyone has this capacity to be inventively, viciously cruel, to any person who’s the outsider — the threat — and it’s been like that since humankind began and it will never stop and then the stories come and I crouch under the stairs winded by the listening. What grown-ups do. New-born babies put outside a mother’s cell in a bag with a starving cat. Jumping on a back until it breaks. Pigeons stuffed into mouths. Eyes gouged out with spoons. Drilled flesh. Villages gassed. Families holding tight in the centre of a room and single people at the edges by themselves. Parents forced to shoot their children as punishment. Parents forced to watch as their children’s throats are slit. Parents forced to watch as their children are starved to death. Mothers beaten by their babies until the babies are dead. Right. What grown-ups do. All of this. MUM? DAD? Are you out there? CAN YOU COME? Please come.
So. All those scraps of late-night conversation that he’s caught in Salt Cottage when he should be asleep but he’s been listening from his cupboard und
er the stairs and his scream is his pen and you’re being filleted as he writes, everything that is beating and warm within you because childhood, any childhood, is not meant to be this and how does it get to this point.
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
39
They’re all awake. In a line, contemplating a television with legs in the corner. ‘It means it’s really, really old,’ Tidge says solemnly. None of them can get it to work. Your TV junkie can’t understand the cruelty of one blank. ‘Maybe there’s a hidden camera in it.’ Tidge comes up close. ‘Maybe the three of us are in some freaky experiment and Mum and Dad are watching, to see how we cope. You know, a reality TV kind of thing.’ He flashes his smile that melts everyone but his family and holds a hand flat to his heart. ‘I must stop saying I’m hungry all the time. I must be kind to my sister and brother. I must share all my chocolate. I must blow the TV kisses. A lot.’ He gives it a big smooch.
‘I don’t think so,’ Mouse says. He lies in front of the screen staring in. ‘Maybe they’re dead,’ he says softly, and you shut your eyes and hover your love, in the vivid air; imagine lying along the length of their backs, pressing into them calm and strength.
‘The dead help, Dad says so,’ your daughter responds, in that strangely dispassionate way kids sometimes have when talking about death; as if so what.
‘No!’ Tidge cries. ‘They are not, they are not. Maybe they’re being tormented by us here. Imagine that? And there’ll be no food ever and they’ll be watching us as we turn on each other and then get quieter and quieter, and close our eyes, and … stop … finally. Maybe it’s the way to get them to talk.’
Everyone quiet. Thinking of that.
And God will say, ‘Taste ye your own doings.’
40
The doorknob. The rattling. Back.
‘Okay,’ Soli whispers, ‘okay We could face them down but…’
Tidge takes over: ‘we’re kids not super-heroes and this is real life.’
The nerve-rash Mouse gets is claiming his face. ‘The bathroom’s scaring me like crazy, guys,’ he warns. ‘What went on, before, in the bath, it’s got scratches like something was trying to get out and, and …’ He can’t go on.
‘Didn’t,’ Tidge concludes. Neither has been to the loo all morning in fact.
‘The bed,’ Soli commands. They scramble under it. She drags down the duvet to cover the gap between the mattress and floor and Mouse finds his brother’s hand and they wait with trembly breaths.
Footsteps. Hesitating. Changing direction. Heading to the bed. Closer. Closer. They stop. The cover’s grabbed. Tugged. Your daughter yanks back. The boys are now gripping each other so tight Mouse’s fingernails are digging into Tidge’s palms and there is blood in tiny sickles. Tidge can feel its sticky wet—
‘Why do you lot always have to make everything so difficult?’
The duvet’s dropped. Three little faces peer out. Burst into laughter.
It’s B.
B! They are safe, they are safe and you sink to your knees with relief unfurling in your chest. Motl’s protégé, surrogate son, closest friend.
‘Um, sorry, guys,’ says your daughter, ‘love you lots but there’s something I’ve got to do.’
She dashes to the bathroom.
‘Hurry up!’ Mouse wails, then Tidge.
‘La la la,’ she sings back.
Whatever one expects, things turn out otherwise.
41
The family cook, from long ago. When people like that were allowed. When you lived in your sparkly suburb, when Project Indigo consumed your life. But after the servants were long gone B kept bobbing up out of the blue, banging on the door of Salt Cottage and hollering for any grown-up to scat and yes yes, yada yada, the carrots would be mixed in with the bolognese sauce and the kids would be in bed by eight. And you knew he’d be teaching them to turn eyelids inside out and do the alphabet in burps, but Motl and you obeyed for they adored him, his stories and tickles and teasing and jokes, and it was a blessed circuit-break; a release, from the intensity of parenthood, for a couple of hours at least. He always outstayed his welcome and never went home when he should, as if he was always trying to slip into your family, as if there was nothing else. His mantra is that there are only three ways to live now: to participate, flee, or transcend. And he chooses to transcend. ‘With kids. Any I can get.’
And now, and now, it is time to surrender to trust.
Because B is Motl’s unmovable choice in this. The unlikely saviour: ‘Have some faith, Mrs, have some faith.’ But you’re just not sure about this man now embedded in your kids’ life.
Yet in that pale space right now, well, everything is upended, and you can only smile at that. Your children are suddenly in a dear white balloon of a room all hazy with a lemony light and the sun is bursting through clouds like tent ropes from heaven and life is good, so good, in this place. Certainty has spread through all three of them like parachutes floating them, gently, to the ground. Soli is renewed. Radiant. She hates not knowing, just like you; everything, always, has to be under control and now B is here and he’s a thread to her parents and everything is okay and she can hand over responsibility and her face is ironed out.
Examine everything carefully. Hold fast to that which is good.
42
‘Why should I trust him?’ you interrogated Motl once. ‘Give me one reason.’
He propped his fingertips under his chin. ‘Because, Mrs, he’s extremely clever. He’s able to flit between many worlds. And we’re damned lucky he’s on our side.’
‘That’s what you say.’
‘I’m as close to a father as he’ll get. He doesn’t have one. His dad said to him on his eighth birthday that he could no longer touch him, kiss him good night — he was a man now. And twenty years later, when his father was taking his last breaths, B grabbed him and hugged him. I’ve been wanting to do this for years, he told him, and both men wept. We’ve wept together, my love, many times since. You don’t do that with many men.’
‘Right,’ you say slowly.
‘He’s got courage and we need that. He’s a lion of a fighter, an independent thinker. That’s very important in this world. He’s his own man.’
On that point, yes. B always seems more alive than everyone else; a room always seems lit when he’s in it. He’s got a quick, wiry boy-body but everything else about him is big: the energy, enthusiasm, spark. His past is a fist balled shut but Motl doesn’t care: ‘It’s in his face, look, it’s incapable of cruelty and there are so few faces in the world like that.’ You’re not so sure. You’ve said more than once that your husband’s an old cashmere sock, too soft, and that people like him could, possibly, be blinded by B like a camera flash bleeding the world out. Because he now works for the new regime, as a chef, to various people high up, and he shouldn’t be mixing with the likes of you lot. ‘He’s fine, relax,’ is always Motl’s response. ‘He’s the only person in the world I now trust. Well, besides the trouble and strife.’
‘It’s wartime, mate,’ you respond fiercely, ‘and in wartime you don’t know who to trust.’
And so B is the reason behind Motl’s firming of heart on that final, rain-lashed night. Your three precious children are now in this man’s hands. And you have to soften, you have to soften and unclench at the thought of that.
I drew them with bands of love.
43
‘Okay, team. Everything okay here? No shark bites? Knocks?’
Soli shakes her head with sparkly eyes and B ruffles her hair with his familiar dirty grin, one side up, one side down, and something tightens in your heart. Tidge gets a wink.
‘So this is where you work?’ Mouse asks. ‘Cool, the last place anyone would look—’
He stops. Hang on, no, you lean in, to the cogs of his thinking, all your anxieties soaked through him too much. Because their supposed family friend is nestled into the heart of the new regime. He works
in the most notorious building in the country, a place where people disappear and never come back. A place Mum and Dad talk about deep into the night with no light in their voices. ‘Is this where I think it is?’ Mouse asks.
B nods.
‘Where are Mum and Dad?’ Mouse asks.
B smiles, shakes his head.
Mouse wipes his hand across his mouth, fear now capsizing everything. He steps back. Mind uncurling. Is this a cage? Are they bait? Is this how they get the grown-ups to talk?
‘How did we get in here, B?’ Yes, how?
A pink sphere of gum emerges from his lips, is smartly popped and efficiently sucked back. ‘This, my lovelies,’ he replies nonchalantly, ‘is my best story yet. Once upon a time there were three potato crates. Mighty big ones. And a delivery truck for the kitchen that was signed off by the master chef. Oh, and before that there was a boat. A little one that almost sank.’ He’s all cackly with his cleverness. ‘But it worked, guys, it worked!’
The Book of Rapture Page 5