Soli buries her head in her hands and groans. Despite yourself you laugh, remembering those golden days at Salt Cottage when it was like the four of them existed on this earth to bring laughter into your life; your beautiful, buoyant coterie; all those days burnished with them. The varnish of them all, glowing you alive, and you are so thankful for that no matter what your existence is now because you lived, truly lived, once.
And the day star arise in your hearts.
65
‘Why couldn’t I have been the perfect one? The one who’s … cherished.’ Mouse watches Soli pacing the room like a dog in the back of a stationary pick-up.
‘The squeaky wheel on the bike always gets the attention, mate,’ she responds, fierce, like he should get it. ‘They never worry about me. I never get any hovering. And I don’t look like any of you guys, either.’ You lean; there’s a pale, soft underbelly in her voice that she rarely allows out. ‘Maybe I was adopted.’ Tremulous, younger than she’s sounded for years. Oh, love. She’s blue-eyed and black-haired and none of the rest of you are but it means nothing and you need to tell her, enfold her in your arms; need to tell her how vividly different all your three children are and it constantly amazes you. Need to tell her that when you were pregnant with her Motl would put his hand on the drum of your belly and a calmness would bloom through you; need to tell her that as a tiny baby she taught you to relinquish control, to shed selfishness, and you’re so grateful for that.
‘You’ve got Mum’s laugh,’ Tidge says brightly. That boy. It’s as if he’s permanently surrounded by bluebells and daisies when there’s not a bluebell or daisy in sight.
‘Not lately, mate.’
‘Well, we could all do with it back,’ Mouse says by way of apology.
A soft quiet. Peace at last. They need this. When the twins were in utero they’d jump awake when they heard Soli’s toddler cry, so blood-bound, all of them, and over the years the fundamental force of that has been lost. Perhaps, perhaps, this room can knit it back.
Mouse flops down on the bed and opens out his arms. A cuddle’s needed. ‘Sis?’ He clings then pulls her off in alarm. ‘Where are you?’ Running his hands over her skinniness, feeling her bones, the jittery pulse of her flesh. And the bananas going off, and the apples bruised, and two days now up.
Engineers fashion wells, carpenters fashion wood, the wise fashion themselves.
66
Okay The deal. I DO NOT want my skeleton found in this cupboard, thank you very much. I do not want ants delirious at my flesh.
Three days since B left. His food hasn’t lasted as long as it should.
Wish list: a full belly. A lovely snuggly roll in Mums laughing. Air as crisp as an apple bite.
Mouse gazes out of the window and sighs. Buds are on the bare tree, the air outside is lightening, the cold’s beginning to unclench.
‘It still smells good out there,’ Tidge throws in from the door. He’s got all fancied-up today, in his good clothes: red checked shirt, jeans with the knees out.
Mouse straightens his brother’s collar and wipes a soap smear from his face. ‘Anyone we know?’ he teases.
Tidge lifts him in a hug. ‘Does it still smell good to you, dude? Is it a smell you could trust?’
‘He could be just minutes away.’ Soli throws a warning across the bows of the room. But both boys have caught a telltale chink in her voice.
‘Ah-ha!’ Tidge cries, triumphant. ‘So you’re starving too, eh sis?’
‘Something must have gone wrong,’ she says, quiet. ‘He said to stay put,’ quieter still.
Mouse throws in that maybe this was planned. Weeks ago. ‘It needs to be said.’
Soli takes the key from her pocket and places it next to the doll and kneads her right temple just as you used to when a migraine attacked.
‘I can’t bear this,’ Tidge declares, hands on his hips. And with a lunge he grabs the key and walks out. Locks the door behind him, swiftly and cleanly, like a sail on a yacht snapping free from its rope.
‘I won’t be long,’ he yells from the other side.
Gone. Gone. Gone.
Just like that.
The sensible man is not influenced by what other people think.
67
Your boy your boy your boy. You cannot see him, he is lost. You flap your fingers at your face like you’ve eaten something hot. Disbelief. Panic. Anger. That he could be so disobedient. ‘This might just work.’ Soli, tight, pulling at her fingers like she’s trying to pull off invisible rings. ‘As long as he doesn’t open his mouth’ — thinking it through — ‘because he’s got that ridiculous habit of being friendly, to everyone, as long as he thinks, yes.’ Her voice rises in horror and yes, you repeat, yes. Because you’ve coached them all that they’ll get into more trouble now by being honest than by making things up, but if anyone’s not going to follow that advice it’s your elder son, your shining boy. The bugger. So naughty that he ran away, and left his siblings behind. So selfish and unthinking; he’ll get a slap for it, smart on the bum, when everything’s right again, for what he’s put you through. You won’t forget this.
‘Remind me,’ Mouse is saying slowly, ‘exactly why this might work?’
Soli takes a deep breath. ‘Well, you know. His face always makes people… like him. And that has to be good. He bewitches them.’
Mouse says nothing. He hates that about his brother. Always wished he was an identical twin, wants the same face. ‘Yeah,’ he whispers now. ‘People seem to … adore him, don’t they?’
Your daughter mutters, God knows why, and gravely Mouse repeats, God knows why, but it’s true, it’s like he’s spent his whole life seducing you and you always fall for it, you even steal him at night from his bed sometimes and just hold and hold him, kissing him, breathing him in, and now he’s gone, lost, this has gone wrong, they’re not meant to go off alone, they’re stronger together than apart.
Often when I pray I wonder if I am not posting letters to a non-existent address.
68
Ten minutes. ‘As long as he walks with confidence,’ Soli says. ‘He’s got to walk straight down the middle of the corridors. He can’t hug the walls. He has to walk like he belongs.’
Actually,’ Mouse says, ‘I can’t see the dude ever hugging a wall.’
Neither can you. Because Tidge is the St Bernard of the family, crashing through life with his big lollopy tongue and licking people adoringly, wherever he can, whoever he can get. He’s not prepared for this, has no idea about fields that tremble for three days then stop.
WHY CAN’T YOU SEE HIM?
Nineteen minutes. He mustn’t open his mouth in amazement; he has a habit of doing that. Close your mouth, my darling, you will him now, close your mouth, close your mouth.
You cannot bear this.
Anger now. Because he doesn’t worry about pleasing others, he breezes through life, bugger the consequences, doesn’t think. Mouse, on the other hand, is your thinker, your pleaser, and he has such a build-up of resentments because of it. Where is your sunny boy, where is he?
Twenty-eight minutes. Bewitch them, yes. Beauty is power and it’s helped Tidge his entire life and it may help him now, please, please yes. The unfairness of his brother’s beauty has built up through the years like silt over Mouse’s heart but you’re all hoping now that Tidge’s face is protecting him, because everyone’s always gazing at him, ruffling his hair, transfixed; even though your heart is telling you this new world doesn’t work like that any more, among those men out there who’ve lost their light hearts.
‘I should have gone,’ Mouse announces.
‘If anyone was going to do this,’ Soli says, ‘it’s him.’
She’s right. Because he’s the doer of the family. Your type always survive, you teased Mouse once; you lie low, you commentate, you watch. That makes me feel like a rat, he protested in response.
‘I should have gone,’ he now repeats, standing taller at that door than he’s ever stood in his life.
&nbs
p; ‘No,’ Soli says fiercely, ‘I’m not having you lost next.’
Only men of ability and virtue can give complete exhibition to the idea of sacrifice.
69
‘He’s gone to find the secret room controlling the hidden camera in the telly. I know him. He’s gone to get Mum and Dad. He thinks they’re … close. He wants to rescue them. He’ll climb the crow’s-nest of this city to search them out. I know him, he’ll never stop.’
A white balloon scoots across the pavement and gusts into the air, tumbles like washing in a dryer, shrinks to a tadpole speck, a black dot, is nearly to heaven, gone.
Four little hands, splayed flat on the glass.
An enormous rush of love so fierce it hurts. When you were working in the lab you’d run, run up the driveway each night, needing to hold their hot squirmy bodies close, to smell them, bundle them up, all that bursting lovely life. How to bottle it? Oh, for that morning again when you were leaving for work and your lovely elder boy farewelled you at the door and called you back for another kiss and then another and instructed you gravely to buy a sandwich before you got to the office then kissed you again and you felt weighted with grace.
‘He’s petrified of being broken,’ Mouse murmurs.
‘I know.’ We all do. Am I broken? he panics whenever he trips or knocks his head, quick, am I broken? And you have to check for blood and tell him it’s not so bad because he’s terrified of the sight. ‘I have this vision of him out there somewhere, broken,’ Mouse says. And there’s no one to help. No one to say, hey, it’s nothing. Even though it is, I bet, I bet.’
Forty minutes. Your daughter’s shaking. No words any more. Air taut.
Forty-nine. She’s just yelled, ‘I hate this, hate being grown up,’ with her fingers clawed frozen at her head and the bones in her hands little rakes. ‘I can’t do this any more, can’t live like this.’ You stare in wonder, at yourself. At what she has turned into in this place.
You squeeze your eyes shut.
I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say this to the mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move.
70
The key.
He’s back.
Unfurl your heart.
Bursting into the room like a striker who’s just clinched the World Cup (Mouse’s love diminishes, a touch). ‘You won’t believe it.’ Dropping to his knees, bursting with triumph.
‘Mum?’
‘Dad?’
‘Well … no … but you wait.’ He whips up his shirt and out tumble three bread rolls and a chicken leg and two cigarettes unlit which Soli promptly snatches.
‘Not for another five years, mate,’ and slips them into her pocket. ‘Besides, you need a lighter.’
But Tidge pulls out a matchbox with a gleeful voilà and rattles it high and dances around the room in a delirious jogging dance, pumping his arms like a sprinter warming up.
‘As silly as a wet hen,’ Mouse observes, leaning against a wall.
‘You next, dude, come on.’ Tidge points at him.
‘Excuse me. I’ll decide who’s next, thank you very much.’ Soli snatches the matchbox. ‘And I’ll be twenty minutes. To the dot.’ She glares at Tidge.
He dances his fingers up her tummy — ‘Go on then, go‘ — cackling like he’s drunk and flopping in a cartoon fall backwards onto the bed.
‘And in a decade,’ Mouse adds drily from his wall, ‘we’ll be wanting those cigarettes back.’
When a man speaks or acts with good intention then happiness follows him like his shadow that never leaves him.
71
So. Your two boys. Side by side now. Leaning against the wall. Tidge slinging an arm over his brother: ‘Just try it, come on.’ Mouse flinching him off. You sigh. It’s always this. Your youngest wanting to stuff his brother’s glee back inside him, like a sleeping bag into its sack, wanting to pull the toggle tight. You worry he’ll grow into one of those men who slip through the cracks, who are lost. An adult who underlives and you dread that. He’s always lagged with so much: eye contact, smiling, sport, making friends; has never had the rescue of a best mate. Old souls, so different, from the moment they were born. You sensed it. Tidge’s theory is that all the waiting souls are hovering above the skin of the earth ready to slip into the parents they want, the flesh they need; that there’s intention in their choice. ‘I chose you to make you happy, Mummy,’ Tidge explained, aged five. Mouse: ‘I chose you for your toast.’
And when everything’s going well for Tidge he grows bouncy and sleek and full of light. Which is now. And the one thing the twins have always had is the ability to second-guess each other but Tidge’s breaking away here, going off on his own, thinking independently and they both know it. Tidge is shining as Mouse shrinks ever more glowery beside him, shining as his brother stands with his back against the wall and pushes him away. It’s heartbreaking. They’re growing up. It morphs into punching, Mouse attacking with a terrifying force and now they’re rolling on the floor and kicking and hitting like two lion cubs and now the giggling comes, the change, just like that.
‘Let’s hide from her,’ Tidge says suddenly.
Mouse looks at him sharp. Well, well, he can’t say he disapproves. Perhaps his big brother’s not completely lost to him yet.
Tidge surprises you sometimes with the shock of his nastiness. There’s a side of him that doesn’t know tenderness. He can’t do a soft tickle, a loving stroke; yet complex little Mouse brims with sensual touch. The contradictions in all of them. They never stop wrong-footing you, there’s always a next stage just as you think you’ve got them worked out.
Everyone goes about his business at the beginning of the day and sells his soul: he either frees it, or causes it to perish.
72
Soli’s back twenty minutes to the dot. Her eyes are sparkling, she’s lit. ‘Guys?’
An abandoned quiet.
‘Hello?’
The voice of a little girl. She stares at the key in her hand. Shakes her head, quickly, as if she’s trying to shake sense back into it. Runs to the bathroom, screeches aside the shower curtain. Runs out of the room moaning, ‘No, no, come back.’
An explosion of giggling from under the bed.
‘Get out.’
A furious, tear-brimmed voice.
She drags up Mouse, knows exactly whose fault this is. Her fingernails dig in hurting and deep. ‘Don’t you ever do that to me again, you … brat.’ She shakes him viciously and he starts to yell but stops.
Because of something new in her.
Something exhausted, and old, and pushed to the brink.
Leave not a stain in thine honour.
73
It takes half an hour of apologies, half an hour of head massages and foot rubs to get to the crucial question: ‘So what did you get?’ Soli raises her eyebrows and retrieves a snowy white laundry sack she’d dropped by the door with a beautiful C embroidered upon it as golden as egg yolk. She pulls out a bottle of champagne.
‘Ta da!’
‘Hang on,’ Mouse says dubiously, ‘there’s only half a glass in there. And no food.’
With a cheeky grin their sister lifts the bottle to her lips and luxuriantly swigs then she hands it across to her brothers and they drink too and she smiles like a cat with the warmest sill of sun and shakes out her hair and turns into someone looser and sillier, her eyes again lit, and your heart tightens to see it. Because she’s got her old face back, all her freshness is suddenly in the room, her huge life force. She’s so vivid-hearted, and it’s been lost under all the strain, but now it’s returned and you stand there watching with your fingertips pressed trembling at your mouth. At your effortlessly lovely girl back, blazing light.
Tidge finds his brother’s hand, he’s not shrugged off. ‘It’s Mum, dude,’ he whispers.
‘You look gorgeous, sis,’ Mouse throws across and Soli swoops him into a cuddle which turns into a swirl.
‘You next
.’ She chuckles affectionately, floating him, gently, to the ground. ‘But only half an hour. Any longer and it’s too stressful, for everyone left,’ and she kicks Tidge playfully on the butt.
Is it true that our destiny is to turn into light itself?
74
But Mouse. Something’s slunk away in him, like a dog with its tail between its legs.
‘I’m happy just to stay here, guys. Unless … someone wants to come too.’ His voice drops to a whisper. ‘Maybe.’ Oh, love. The nub of him. He’s grown extremely comfortable with his boundary of ‘no’ that he’s surrounded himself with over the years. Someone’s always going to help him out and that thinking has built up like a shell now encasing him; fear has become a leash on his life. You’ve facilitated it. So of course he’s happy right now to sit tight, safe, while everyone else figures out what to do next. But now this. A sister all pushy before him, his nerve-rash revving into life under her steely gaze, already claiming his cheeks, vining him, down, down, his neck, chest. It’s a sorry sight.
‘I want to go too.’ His brother, loud into the shardy quiet.
‘No. You’re too obvious together.’
‘I can’t do it by myself,’ Mouse whispers. No, he can’t. And in that vast churning silence he rubs his arms where Soli yanked him from under the bed but her face does not change, she will win this. He stares at the speedy bruises on his skin, the yellow petals already on his flesh and Tidge’s hand finds his shoulder, always there for him. Motl told them once that the difference with them is that there are yes-sayers and no-sayers and people who say yes are rewarded by the adventure they go on and people who say no are rewarded by their feeling of safety, and neither is better than the other, it’s just the way they are. And they always have to respect the other’s choice; they have to be their brother’s protector and must never forget it.
The Book of Rapture Page 8