The Book of Rapture

by Nikki Gemmell

  ‘Where is it?’

  Your kids look at each other, blank.

  ‘Where?’ The doctor grabs Mouse’s vest; panic floors your boy, he shakes his head in terror, doesn’t know. ‘We need it right now,’ the doctor says. ‘Who left it behind? Who else is in on this? If one of you doesn’t tell me right now who left it behind I’m going to deal with each of you one by one. Starting with … him.’

  Tidge. Your beautiful shining boy. Unfinished business of course. And doesn’t a person’s behaviour tell you exactly where they are spiritually, whether they’re rattling and unhinged and empty or filled with light? You breathe in this little man like ash and flame and it scalds your throat for this is a person who once had three hundred killed, as a birthday gift, every two minutes, in the back of the head; you have heard of it. And now, and now. Your son’s eyes. Eight years old. His whimper. The pistol at the beautiful plane of his temple you’ve grazed so much with your lips.

  ‘Who left it?’ The pistol moves closer, harder, your boy sobs. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It was me.’

  His brother steps strongly forward and looks the man straight in the eye.

  ‘I did. I left it.’

  ‘Well, you fool’

  And with the full force of an adult hand Mouse is hit across the face.

  He falls back. With a blow to his head. On the punishing edge of the jade desk.

  As if heaven itself has sucked in its breath.

  Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.

  137

  your broken little boy

  pale as flour on his back and still

  so still

  so still

  legs and arms wrong

  then blood, now blood, blood.

  from the back of his skull.

  slow … a single stream

  Put on the whole armour of God.

  138

  Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

  From his brother; from his sister.

  But louder and longer from someone else.

  Pin.

  ‘He was my friend. I told you.’

  His mouth as indignant as an opera singer’s, a web of wet.

  Men loved darkness rather than light.

  139

  A soldier bursts into the room. ‘Sorry, got held up.’ Grinning like a little boy. Something under his arm. Everyone looking.

  ‘What is that?’ Pin’s father.

  ‘A doll.’ The soldier laughs. ‘The kids had it. It must have dropped on the floor.’ He tosses Motl’s doll across to the captain, who catches it by a leg, strides across to Mouse, and kicks him.

  ‘Fool,’ he hisses, ‘idiot.’

  As if your world has stopped.

  At your boy.

  What he has done.

  His mad sacrifice.

  One shall be taken and the other left.

  140

  Out of the stunned silence softly but gathering force Tidge’s wailing comes; it goes on and on, it does not stop; a cry of the most agonising distress. Souls, angry souls, feel close.

  ‘Get out,’ the doctor orders the soldiers.

  Tidge drops to his brother’s crazy enormous impetuous heart and hovers his hand over it, can hardly bear to touch, then lies down next to him as close as he can, breathing him in, and slings his arm over him and cries, ‘Mousie,’ but a cloud bank shifts across your boy’s face; it is going to another place, there is a stately progression from sun into shadow and Soli drops down and lifts his head and cradles its terrible flop. Her other hand finds Mouse’s and entwines it in hers, a hanky to her wet face, and Tidge looks up at Pin’s father: ‘Please return my heart,’ says his face, ‘which you have just wrenched out with a filthy fist.’

  I shall so softly all my years in the bitterness of my soul.

  141

  A roaring silence.

  Only when he knows does he say that he knows.

  142

  ‘We need a doctor.’ Soli, soft.

  ‘My father is a doctor.’ Pin cries. ‘Ask him what a noble kind he is. Show us, Dad. Be the hero. I want to see it.’

  ‘I will not let you win this,’ Tidge shouts, sweeping up the doll and slipping it under his brother’s arm then rising before them half the person he was minutes ago but standing before them someone new, a warrior of his blood. Stripped of all his silliness, grown up. Pin stands strong beside hin, shoulder to shoulder.

  The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge.

  143

  But your beautiful broken boy. Mouse’s pale face, his eyelids shining. Tidge and Soli now cradle his looseness in their arms and breathe him in like a first cigarette, breathe in the sharpness of his slipping but his beautiful face is stopped, the wind picks up, a window slams shut; his eyes flicker under his lids, back and forth, back and forth, as if he’s witnessing the most astonishing sight; he doesn’t look distressed, he’s embracing whatever is ahead, striding strongly into it.

  ‘Come on, dude,’ his siblings plead. ‘Come on.’

  Your wild love, your wild love.

  He wakes.

  He wakes.

  ‘I’m starving. What’s to eat?’

  It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

  144

  Four children. Laughing and laughing. A great audacious glee pushing through them.

  They try to shut it off but cannot.

  It is life.

  So much life in this room.

  In their hearts.

  Pin laughs longest and loudest, he cannot stop. The room is ringing with his clear, unstoppable force and his father is staring at a sound he hasn’t heard for so long, at this new son in his life, at the fresh child, child, broken out. The wonder of it.

  Think of this picture as they now travel: the million candles in the sky lit and singing.

  145

  ‘We need a bandage,’ Pin says, still laughing.

  And so here they are. Father and son standing face-to-face with a great churning in them both. Each poised on the cusp of awareness. Each, unmoving.

  ‘We need a bandage,’ Pin repeats. ‘You’re a doctor.’ Wordlessly it is the father who eventually walks away. He retrieves a first-aid kit from a drawer of his desk. Wordlessly it is he who wraps a bandage around your boy’s head. When he is finished he goes to a jade panel and presses his body into it and closes his eyes as if he is trying to press out an enormous weight. An elderly man suddenly. With a ruined kind of brokenness in his face. The stillness of a warrior who has just had a crushing loss, who has never had a defeat of such magnitude in his life. Because it involves the one thing he controlled the most. He has had to surrender, to get his son back, to save the grand plan of his life.

  As drops of water eventually fill a pot, so is an unskilful man eventually filled with cares.

  146

  But Pin has not finished.

  ‘Let them go, Dad.’

  His father blinks, slowly, all the winter in his heart back.

  ‘Just let them walk out of here?’

  ‘They’re no one. And they’ve been through enough. Let them off, just this once.’

  ‘Do unto them what they will surely tomorrow do unto us.’ But weary now.

  ‘Maybe they’ll be so grateful they’ll never consider it.’

  ‘Oh yes. It always happens like that.’

  ‘What’s happened to you? Who stole you?’ The boy walks up to his father, firmer, stepping into a new self. ‘If you don’t let them go I’m walking out of this room and never coming back.’

  His father snorts in disbelief.

  ‘I’m so sick of living like this.’

  ‘What about the man downstairs, being interrogated as we speak?’

  ‘Perhaps he was telling the truth. I wanted someone to play with. I dragged them into this. He came in to find them and they all got caught.’

  ‘It’s gone too far, son.’

/>   ‘I will leave you. I will disgrace our house. I’ve read our holy book. It says to love not to hate and you and your men, you all change the words and turn it into something else.’ And without another word Pin turns on his heels in disgust and walks out. An act of glorious, mad, courageous independence and you long to tell Motl of it, to feel the room fill with his air punch because compassion can still be found and he needs to know, he’d lost faith, it was all in his cling on that final night at Salt Cottage as he curled around his children and held them tight, so tight, and didn’t want to set them loose, didn’t trust the world anymore, had lost hope.

  Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness but a sign of strength.

  147

  The doctor storms out after the son and your three children spin to the windows, to the celebratory blue hollering for them to get out.

  ‘Come on,’ Soli whispers.

  ‘Quick.’ Tidge laughs.

  ‘No,’ Mouse says, ‘not yet.’

  ‘It’s just there,’ Tidge cries with his arm around his brother’s shoulders but Mouse rubs his head and says, ‘No,’ as if the whole idea hurts. Tidge drops his hand. His brother hasn’t stopped them because of his pain, he’s stopped them because of something else.

  ‘This isn’t the way to do it,’ Mouse says. ‘It’ll only make things worse.’

  Be truthful, be patient, be generous. These are the three steps to godliness.

  148

  So. The three of them here. Staying because they have to. Because it can’t be just two of them escaping, because no one’s being left behind. Waiting in this room of shimmering light as two enormous wills do battle in the corridor outside and as Pin walks through the door his face tells you what you never thought you’d see: he has won.

  Brim your heart.

  Pin gives them the thumbs up, his eyes dance, Soli runs to the waiting blue. Holds out her palms and laughs, holds them flat to the light; drinks up the sky for it’s theirs now, soon, back. The beautiful repairing sun, any moment. The doctor comes into the room and brisks to the desk. He picks up the phone, drumming his fingers impatiently on a book.

  ‘How did you do it? What did you say?’ Your children fire questions as the doctor concentrates on his call, a hand shielding his forehead as if holding in an enormous headache.

  ‘I know something I’m not meant to,’ Pin sings in a whisper.

  ‘What? What?’

  ‘Something a lot of people want to know. And will pay a lot of money for.’

  ‘What?

  ‘I know where__________is. The exact location.’

  Your children suck in their breaths. Where, exactly, the man at the heart of this endless fear plague is; the puppet master with the sad speaking eyes who has kept their world under his thumb, for years now, by a masterful manipulation of paranoia and mystery and fret, by an audacious sense of grandeur and theatrical cunning, by an unholy lust for death. The world has been searching for him for decades now; it’s not known if he’s still alive, he’s morphed into myth.

  ‘There was a note. A map’ — Pin grins — ‘in Dad’s pocket. I found it by mistake. I copied it. I was looking for Tic Tacs. And I’ve said to Dad that I’ve told several people who I trust where I’ve hidden the information. They don’t know exactly what’s in the envelope, but it’s somewhere in this building, and it’s to be sent on my behalf if ever I give the signal. Or if something ever happens to me. And I’ve just told Dad that if you’re set free — all of you, the four of you’ — your children gasp in joy — ‘yes, every one’ — he pokes Tidge playfully in the chest — ‘then he can have his envelope back. You’re nothing to him. And the information is priceless.’

  Pin smiles a smile that in an afternoon has grown up. ‘The things I do to get you off. And those crazy siblings of yours.’ He steps back and assesses them. ‘I’m not sure it’s worth it, you know.’

  You want to hold that boy for a very long time, hold him and hold him, in this crackly air, for he has sanctified himself.

  A faithful friend is the medicine of life.

  149

  Pin asks his father if they can have one last play in their room.

  The man begins to speak but stops, a hostage now to a son who knows too much. ‘But I’m coming with you,’ he says, ‘I want to check that room out.’

  So. There those children are, abreast, walking tall down that corridor into four new lives. Did they call themselves alive in the past? It is nothing compared to now. Their hearts are like windsocks in a stiff breeze, filled up, and you feel stunned by all of this. You have learned astonishment today; from your children, from their friend, from everything that’s gone on. Getting softer and looser by the minute, like an anemone sprung into life by the water’s caress, rescued by forgiveness and brimming with light. They are better than you. They teach you so much.

  They take the lift to the basement. Miss Jude Pickering the Third gives not a flicker of recognition, but as your children step out she brushes Mouse’s back, once, in fleeting warmth. It’s all he gets but it’s enough. She’s in the secret, silent loop, just as B is, and so many unseen others in this fragile world and even, perhaps, your Motl, you will never know, it doesn’t matter now. For you have made your choice and you are strong with it. You are so in love with life.

  They walk tall to the room that has imprisoned them for so many days, feeling straighter and stronger with every step they take. Relief is turning them all zippy and giggly, they can hardly contain their energy; soon they’ll be flooding their lungs with sun, soon. And you must let them go now, you must turn from this, striding into a darkness that is luminous, marinated in love and at peace.

  Friend, go up higher.

  150

  Pin’s father checks behind curtains and whips the cover from the bed. Begins to open the cupboard with Mouse’s quilt of words within it. Your boy’s face is as white as flour. The man’s pocket rings. He takes out a phone, concentrating on the call and missing entirely the meticulous chronicle of their life in this place. The man turns to a corner of the room deep in talk. Mouse flops on the bed, arms spread, and smiles in enormous relief.

  Suddenly, slogged by tired. All four of them. There’s still much to be done. Mouse looks at the cupboard; his words have to be tidied for a start. He hates the thought of leaving it unfinished: ‘Write as if you’re dying,’ you’d said with a laugh once, ‘believe me, it works.’ He slips out his father’s pen and gazes at it as if it’s a sword to be carried through the biggest battles of his life. Each of your children takes a last look around. Part of them will be left behind in this place but three new people are stepping out, uncurling their pale backs, grown tall, spined up. Outside a wind has come, it’s whipping up a flurry of leaves and dust, rattling windows and snatching hats, moving the world on. Calling your children into the tall happy light and they’re more than ready now to be among it, your three bouncy puppies, running and lolloping at all the green shoots.

  Look at Soli. Shining. Retrieving your scrap of kitchen towel from inside her pillow case, holding it to her face and breathing it in deep, your gardenia perfume still faintly upon it. Look at Tidge. Clutching his father’s doll as he reaches under the bed to collect your old key to whatever they want, clutching his doll like he’ll never give him up. He can’t reach. Pin drops to his knees, gets it, just: ‘Bingo,’ he says, handing the key across. Your boy holds it to his lips and chuckles his thanks, chuckles and chuckles, they both do, can’t stop. The others join in, joy roguish through each of them and the wonder intensifies. At all of this, all that has happened in this place. Because it feels like you’ve been bulleted into living and the world surprises you still and that gives you hope. You’ve witnessed something rescuing here. Grace. Which can change everything in an instant. Release hearts.

  They’ll be all right, they’ll be all right.

  A serious house on serious earth it is.

  151

  The doctor drifts into the corridor, lured away by the
importance of his call. Mouse calls Pin across. Opens the cupboard door, trust now brimming his heart.

  ‘Wow,’ his friend whispers, running his hand over all the words like a jockey appreciating a horse.

  ‘You can read it all when we’re long gone from here. Will you look after it for me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘My dad told me to do it,’ Mouse says. ‘He said that telling the truth gives you this weird kind of calmness among all the craziness. It’s been like my daily glass of whisky, I guess.’ They both laugh. ‘Now there’s just one more thing I’ve got to do.’ He slips inside. ‘To finish it off. I just need a moment.’

  This. (Hang on. Soli’s yelling out. "What, sister dear?’ ‘Thank you, Mr.’ ‘For what?’ ‘For being so grown up. For helping out. You write that down.’ Well, if I must, I must.)

  Whistling away in there, and your heart is filled with it.

  Now where I was I? Oh yeah. Imagine this. I’m running down to the beach at Salt Cottage and stripping off and getting sand all over me and cleaning myself with it and RUBBING THIS WHOLE EPISODE OUT. Kaput. And then I’ll just be quiet for a bit. No words. I want to lose talk for a while, and all the writing, and just stand there and let the sea and the sun and the wind blow it clean out of me. And rest. God yeah, that. Ahead feels like this big empty house that’s warm with light and waiting and ready to be filled up. It’s CLOSE! YIPPEE!!