96
Midnight. Mouse thudding into Soli’s warmth in the dark, curving round her back and clinging on, mutual hot-water bottles in the clustering cold. It is as if the chill wants to slip straight through them tonight, into their bones, to curl up and nest. Tidge hasn’t emerged from the bathroom. He’s locked himself in, hasn’t said a peep. His brother’s in the bed vividly awake. Hating who he is. All the scatter-gun words that come out.
Okay it’s official, Dad. THE RETREAT FROM WONDER. I’m sorry. It’s gone. Kaput.
Motl dreaded it would ever come to this. Their world glooming down like a fish tank clouding over with a lack of light. Hope lost.
The air is thin here. Breathing is hard. And sleeping. It’s like being stranded up a rocky mountain in some high altitude of despair and you can’t go forward or back. How much longer will we be here? Where is G? We can’t leave, even though we should. Can’t have him returning to an empty room and reporting to Mum and Dad that we’ve vanished and the thread to them is cut. And we’re out in the world somewhere, lost.
No stars tonight. The orange glow from the street lights has bled them away. You never see stars in this place. Your city nieces told you once that they only happen in movies, and how you laughed at the time, at what their world had become. That was before your nieces went. ‘They’ve gone to another country,’ you’d say abruptly, to the endless enquiries, ‘they got out, before it’s too late,’ and then you’d glance across at Motl with something like hate. You couldn’t bear to read their letters in the end, their missives from exile shouting of a new life.
You need a real sky tonight. Something dark and weighty and rich, a sky you can read not this weak orange glow.
It feels like the world is shutting down. That one by one all the rooms are being locked up and the sheets thrown over furniture and the lights turned off.
Your Soli’s crying. She hardly ever cries; it’s a shock. She’s doing it quietly pretending she isn’t. Her whole body’s shuddering in tiny spasms as she tries to hold it in but can’t. Mouse looks at her in panic. Glances across at the bathroom. Each sob is a little hook into your heart. Eventually your little boy curls around his sister and tucks his hand firmly under her arm and soothes, ‘Sssh, it’s all right, sssh.’
Do the dead help? IS ANYONE OUT THERE?
Where is your man? Where? You have no sense of him, no certainty. Is he with B, are they planning a rescue, is he lost, fighting this, fired up? The unknowing is a black hole of grief. You shut your eyes, he’s holding you again in sleep, his arm slinging around your waist in a belt of warmth. He’s scraping back your hair as you’re crouching over the toilet bowl and vomiting in the first flush of pregnancy, he’s putting his head to your stomach and telling his tadpole child not to make Mummy sick. He taught you that good sex is a spiritual experience and the best sex profound, he taught you that at the height of ecstasy you’re taken to another place and that place is above all transcendent, God’s gift perhaps, his lure, his little chuckle. Because of course from sex comes that most magnificent decision in all of life: to create it. Which together you did. Three times, with the most solemn and sanctified intent.
Nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of God.
97
When Mouse wakes, the world seems different. The light is bright, accusing; it’s the latest he’s slept in this place. Soli is perky on the end of the bed. The old book is on her lap. Her hands are flat like a pharaoh’s upon it. She’s waiting for her boys. They’re side by side, lover close. Tidge crawled beside his brother in the early morning and a smile fills Mouse up when he realises. ‘Wake him,’ Soli now instructs. Mouse shakes him and he makes a whiny noise and turns over with a hrumph and puts the blanket over his head; it’s a manoeuvre perfected through years of practice; he’s still asleep. Mouse tugs. Tidge sits bolt upright. Soli takes a tiny key from her pocket and slips it into the book’s padlock. It springs open gratefully at her touch. She lifts the cover. Both boys lean. Gasp.
It’s not a book at all. It’s a box.
Its golden sides are carved to resemble paper. The front cover is a lid and inside is a multitude of tiny bundles packed tight. Gently, reverently, your daughter lifts out each little shroud and places them in a forensic line upon the bed. ‘It’s a memory box,’ she whispers. ‘From Mum.’ She looks at them both. ‘For all of us.’
The boys stare, open-mouthed, in wonder. And as their sister unwraps each familiar item from their Salt Cottage life you wonder if they realise that you have packed love itself into this box, just like you used to years ago, with their school lunches; among the sandwiches and fruit you’d always slip little treats: a novelty pencil or a speckled feather, a beautifully shaped stone or a spotted egg. Your throat tightens as you watch. Can they feel the fierceness of your love in each object? Can they ever know it?
‘She’s everywhere,’ Tidge whispers.
‘But where we know,’ Mouse adds quiet.
You are so in love with life.
It is the spirit that quickeneth.
98
THE MEMORY BOX
A List by Heart
1: Tiny shells from our beach. A scattering of frail bleached thumbnails that smell of home.
2: A drawing from when I was five of all of us with our two pets, Bucket, the three legged dog, and Biscweet the cat addicted to dad’s lap. The twitcher who burned his tail in the toaster. My sister married Bucket once but divorced him when he sicked on her bed (HA HA). That picture was always on our fridge, whatever fridge we had, in whatever home. The last place, Salt Cottage, a kitchen anointed by the sun.
3: Mum’s dangly earrings like teardrops. Mum has lots of earrings but she’s only packed these ones. Your only screwons, your best.
4: An empty oyster shell. It’s for me me me, no one else! I ate an oyster once and laughed and laughed. ‘Hey, Mum, I swallowed the sea!’ And was always pestering you for more.
5: A pot of Vicks VapoRub. They take it in turns to sniff deep. It plunges me back instantly to snuffly nights of rain on the roof and flat lemonade and honey toast. Yes, yes.
6: A scrap of the busy jumpy wallpaper in our bedroom with the cowboys and horses on it. Who’d sleep with that, I always moan (sorry, Mum). What were you thinking? No wonder he’s neurotic, it’s the wallpaper’s fault.
7: Mums little old manicure set. The powder in its compact is worn to a pale hardness. It smells of Granny, of kissing her cheek. For your girl and she knows it.
8: A postcard from Mums favourite artist, Rothko. It’s always on the fridge too. She says there was a time long ago in our country when art and beauty and calm not only existed but were celebrated. That time will come back. The world swings, regenerates, forgets.
9: Instructions from Dad’s grumpy typewriter he refuses to toss in spite of its disobedient E.
– NOTES FOR THE LITTLE MONKEYS –
BEd for twins by 9 and th Ey MUST do a wEE b Efor Ehand. No ghost storiEs for TidgE bEcausE hE’ll havE bad drEams. (HE bEliEvEs EVERYTHING.) ChEck regularly for nits Esp. if somEonE is scratching thEir hEad Esp. around thE Ears and thE back of thE nEck. Gritchy usually mEans slEEp. MousE will always gEt sickEr than TidgE EvEn though thEy usually gEt thE samE thinG. TEEth brushEd morning and night. DO NOT GROW DULL. DO NOT UNDER-LIVE. FIND THE BEAUTY IN EVERYTHING. DO NOT LOSE YOUR SHINING SPIRITS. YOU MAKE US LAUGH SO MUCH. WE LOVE YOU FOR THAT.
I hold the paper over my face and breathe in the greed of Mums love. Can just picture her typing away at this. She’d always do it so elegantly. A conductor not of music but of words.
And now this, your last work, your symphony of the splayed heart. Behind his typewritten sheet is a scrap of kitchen towel with your scrawl that gets worse over the years.
Soli’s laugh
Tidge’s cough
Mouse’s hand
He frowns, confused, then smiles.
Of course. These things aren’t ours but our parents’. The laugh and left-handedness Mum’s.
The cough Dad’s. He holds the sheet to the light. The handwriting’s dug deep. Mum stabbed the end of the pen viciously into her chest to get it working. Time must have been short. You were stressed. The pen didn’t properly work. The watcher observes well.
10: A dried-out leaf. Soli says if it’s crushed the smell will take us back to Salt Cottage. He holds it flat in his palm then closes his fingers over it, hovering a crushing, wanting home so much. Gently she takes it from him. ‘Not now, not yet.’
11: An envelope with some feathery mats of my baby hair and another with Tidge’s. Wow. We’ve got completely different colours now. The first letters of their names identify which is which. Dad shaved his head when we were six months old because our hair had refused to grow and he did it out of solidarity. But he was enormously relieved when at fourteen months, at last, their hair began to sprout, and he could have his back.
12: The last teacup, that one with the red spots, that used to hold Mum’s champagne when she told her stories. And now he weeps.
13: A key. Old-fashioned. Too big.
‘Is that our house key?’ Tidge asks.
‘Yes,’ his sister replies then hastily adds, ‘no, perhaps,’ as if she’s imagining her little brother making a dash for home that very second, clutching the key like there’s no tomorrow left. She begins packing each item back. ‘Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea …’
14: A photo of a football on a lawn. It could be any ball, any lawn, but we all know it. He holds it tight and his sister eventually stops her tugging and whispers, ‘Have it, go on.’ She hands the key to his brother. ‘Mum said to imagine that this opens whatever we want. Keep it safe. For all of us.’
‘What about you?’ Mouse protests. ‘What have you got?’ ‘Nothing. I don’t need—’ ‘You have to have something.’
Soli sighs. Looks in the box. Plucks out the paper towel with your writing gouged deep.
A blanket of quiet, a blanket of absolute quiet.
That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.
99
Mouse can’t stop staring at the photo of the lawn.
I want to be kicking that ball SO MUCH. I want to be mucky again, yeah, right filthy with dirt. I want mud caked all over my hands and knees so that when it’s washed away I’m new and soft, like I’ve been magicked alive from a drowning or a burial or something, all clean and sparky and fresh. I want to be running so far and so fast that my side hurts in a stitch and my legs ache and when I wake in the morning the ache is worse like the day after Sports Day and good grief I can’t BELIEVE I’ve just written that.
A little boy pressing his stomach and palms to the wall, then his wet cheek. Trying to press through, press out.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.
100
A piece of toothpaste holds the photograph to the inside of the cupboard wall.
Who’ll control the remembering? This hidden place. It’s a start. A heartbeat. A heartbeat to battle all the lying and rewriting and forgetting because people have to. They have to move on. It’s too hard. They don’t want to know. Dad told me. He says it’s evolution. It’s how the world carries on. And now I get why he asked me to write everything down. He said, ‘Tell our story, tell the truth’, because no one else will. And then Mum. ‘Mr, if you want to be a writer then you have to make the words leap off the page. Make them like a needle under the skin. Make them get up and shout! Mum. Yeah. Always so full-on.
He’s now ripping every single sheet from his notebook and sticking them onto the cupboard wall with dots of toothpaste, pages and pages, a vast, pale quilt.
THESE THINGS ARE HAPPENING.
The shout of the final sheet.
Too many of us are being disappeared or written out or lost and please, please don’t wreck this. Please don’t rip this down and throw it out. PLEASE DON’T FORGET US.
All his words in their hidden little harbour and you shut your eyes and turn your back on them, cannot bear it, what you have put him through; for it’s as if this cupboard is the only place in the world his precious pages can now, ever, be safe. And he knows it.
‘Sensible men are all of the same religion.’ ‘And pray what is that?’ … ‘Sensible men never tell.’
101
Tidge is asleep, the key from Soli locked within the cage of his fingers. Mouse hovers. Tries to lift it away but his brother holds it tighter, still asleep. His sister looks across; he smiles, embarrassed. Asks her what else their father left because the memory box is soaked in their mother and he’s sure, sure, their dad would have left something more of himself.
‘I don’t know. There’s the doll. What else do you want?’
‘Maybe there’s something in it. Let’s rip it open!’
‘It’s just a toy. Dad had it as a kid.’
‘But why … this?’
‘Because—’ She stops. ‘It’s complicated.’ Sighs. ‘Dad said he wanted us to have … the solace of imagination.’ Her eyes screw up with the effort of trying to get it right.
‘But what’s some manky old doll got to do with it?’
‘He wants us to believe that it can help.’ She closes her eyes, attempting to slip into her father’s words. ‘He said that people who have faith have this … serenity about them, this strength, that people who believe in nothing just don’t. That those kinds of people can be all sour and unhappy and restless and empty, and how horrible is that? He says that people who’ve reached the pinnacle of their faith, whatever it might be, are at peace. Filled with love and light. And maybe that’s a good place to be. Especially now. He says at the heart of any religion is compassion, and it’s all we have to get good at. And the doll might remind us. Or something.’ She frowns, can’t quite remember, looks at her brother; he stares back blank. ‘Dad said that at the height of any faith you can feel filled with love and strength and if we got anywhere near that, then, well, it might just help. That’s it. I think.’
Mouse rolls his eyes.
‘He said people with faith can do amazing things.’
‘Amazingly horrible things.’
‘Not always, Mr. Sometimes quite the opposite in fact.’
Integrity creates a body so vast a thousand winged ones will plead, ‘May I lay my cheek against you?’
102
A knock. Mid-morning. G never knocks.
‘Hello? Let me in.’
Your kids look at each other. It is Pin.
‘If you don’t let me in I’m getting my da-ad.’ A taunt in a voice you do not like.
‘You can’t.’ Mouse, fast, signalling to his siblings to be quiet. ‘Come back later. This afternoon. At one.’ Well done. Because it’s B’s busy time in the kitchen. Because he never visits them then.
‘Why not now?’ The voice is stubborn. Argumentative. With the sense of entitlement of an only child. He’d annoy you if he was in their class.
‘Because … we do things at this time. Every day. It’s our religion.’
Mouse looks at his siblings.
‘Okay,’ the voice says mildly.
Your three children high-five each other in astounded silence. Because it worked. Your family hasn’t done God for generations, three at least, but he bought it. When Mouse asked you why, once, you were so wary of religion, you told him that you hated all the rules and boring lectures, you thought it was a weakness, a lack of intelligence, you’re not into all that dependent thought. ‘It’s this beautiful, singing lie, my lovely, and eventually all the faiths around us will exist nowhere but the history books.’
Pin doesn’t need to know any of that. His religion’s burned into his people, by birth they’re the warriors of their god. They’re fighting your godlessness and greed. They want to stamp it all out with a rage that’s soldered into their hearts.
But now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.
103
So.
Project Indigo.
You ca
n hardly bear to sew these words into your quilt; you must.
A WMD that specifically targets a certain race. Its formula attacking a peculiarity of their genetic make-up. Preventing them from reproducing. Causing them, mysteriously, to die out. A generation or two is all it will take and then your people will be rid of them, they’ll be no more threat. The project so secretive that they’d never know what’s stopping their women from falling pregnant, they’ll just … vanish. A natural process. Humane. Clearing them peacefully from your earth. Breeding the stain out. They’ll wonder if it’s something they’re eating, their sexual practices, contaminated water, soil, pesticides, plastics; they’ll never know. But it’ll stop them multiplying like rabbits and eventually those left will abandon their cursed place; they’re superstitious, they’ll clear out. And your people will have their country back. So. Peace at last.
The audacity of it, the stun. You can hardly bear to write what you were once. Your hand is trembling.
And you’re the only one left with the key to activate it.
‘Thwart them all,’ Motl joked, long after he’d left the project. ‘Lodge your papers in the British Library so they’ll all have it, and no one will dare use it. Anyone could convert it for their own use. Imagine that. It’ll keep everyone in check.’
‘I wouldn’t trust a single one of them.’ You laughed. ‘They’ll all grab it. The world will stop.’
‘And what gives you the right to play God?’ His voice, suddenly bereft of any light. Your laughter stopped.
‘You don’t trust me, do you.’ A statement not a question.
The Book of Rapture Page 11