The Book of Rapture (4 page)

‘Who
let on we were here?’ You scrunched up the paper and flung it into the bin.

‘Maybe it wasn’t too hard to work out,’ Motl said quietly.

He retrieved the letter and smoothed it down with his fingertips. A bell jar of quiet fell over him. The rest of you gathered at the kitchen table, hushed. He smoothed down that letter long after he’d finished reading, smoothed and smoothed it, couldn’t stop. You knew his thinking. He’d seen it all coming. He was always going to get his family away, make you one hundred per cent safe, have you emigrate. To become refugees like his sister, the professor who one day had had enough of the raids on her history department and the falling student numbers because the new slogan was
The More You Read The More Stupid You Become
, so what, any more, was the point. The Great Leap Back, that’s what she dubbed it as she explained why she was pulling out. Her brother’s family was to follow. Next summer, winter, year. Ah yes. Your pottering, dreamy, boy
of a man. Always so good at procrastinating and sleeping in and handing his papers in late. Brilliant, yes, but. Then one day ‘getting out’ was too late — the borders were closed off. You were trapped.

And not one of you around that kitchen table said a word as Motl smoothed that letter down, smoothed it and smoothed it until it ripped. The letter shrilling at you to abandon the magic house.

We are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels.

18

Night unfurls. A pow-wow abruptly halts. Fury hangs in the air. Soli keeps saying, ‘It’s going to be all right,’ in a silky mother tone but it doesn’t come out right, it just winds her little brothers up. Who gave her permission to be so knowing in this place?

‘Mummy-stealer!’ Tidge shouts. ‘Stop using that voice.’

‘It’s going to be all right.’

‘But the doorknob?’ Mouse fires at her, rat tat tat. ‘And this room? And the kick?’ He’s the expert at questions and you’re always encouraging it except when a migraine’s coming and then he has to stop. ‘Everything is
so
not okay,’ he flings. ‘I saw your face when that key came. You had no idea what it means and no idea what’s next. There was this flinch, in your eye, it
told
me. It was like a music counter going tic tic tic.’

‘Everything will be okay,’ she soothes again.

Mouse storms off to the room’s cupboard and curls inside, his notebook a teddy to his chest. His brother props his elbows at the window and stares out. Your girl is abandoned. She’s failed and she so rarely does that, she’s your high achiever who likes everything to be just right. She curls on her side on the bed. The flinch in her eye going tic tic tic.

However irritated you may feel, never speak harshly.

19

Eventually Soli unwraps her limbs and coaxes Tidge back to her. Finally he comes. She lies with him, her arm a seatbelt over his torso. She holds and holds until he’s soothed into the release of sleep, then gingerly extracts herself and pads to the cupboard.

‘Come on, you. It’s late.’

Mouse glares. Owl-awake. ‘I’m keeping guard. Someone has to. Thank God you’ve got me in this place. A bit of gratefulness wouldn’t go astray. Like, thanks, Mouse, for watching over us.’

No way is he getting back into that bed. You know why. There’s no grown-up to insist and it’s a room he doesn’t trust, ditto a sister with a secret and a brother too accepting, who’s fallen too easily into sleep. The moon outside is a sliver of a thumbnail. As bright as a bone. He’s staying up with it, all night if he must. It’s in the set of his mouth. Your worrier. Always thinking too much, everything cutting so deep. Too glary in his head is the enormity of navigating his way through life, he finds it so hard to shut off the fear. You’re anxious about the teenager he’ll become with all that complicated energy bottled up.

Your entire life, as a mother, is about anticipation. Of accidents, trip-ups, abductions, disasters. Second-guessing that walk to the corner shop, the crossing of the road, the swim at the beach, and God help them if they ever get near a motorbike.
You’ll never stop the hovering. Motl says you have to, you must learn to let go. You retort that he doesn’t worry enough.

I alone dare not seek rest. The ordinances of heaven are inexplicable but I will not dare to follow my friends and leave my post.

20

Tidge is vastly asleep, dangling a leg off the bed and taunting his brother with his effortless flop. Soli told him to trust and that’s exactly what he’s doing. He’s always the one who falls instantly into sleep. Motl says it’s the mark of a contented soul.

Mouse writes with a staccato pen.

    
Look at him. God. Typical! SUCH a believer. NEVER thinking ENOUGH
.

    Unlike him. And you. All the thinking haranguing you awake, night after night.

Soli’s now curled tight and troubled in unsmooth sleep. That strange-tired finally won. You long to brush the hair from her forehead and unfold all her folded bits, long to stretch her beautiful limbs back into lightness. No child should ever sleep so … condensed. Her eyes suddenly shine like marbles in the dark, she’s awake. She looks around, trying to work out where she is. Sees Mouse. Remembers.

‘I need a cuddle,’ he says, quick, even though he’s still annoyed at that mother voice she stole. But you know him. A magnet of need is pulling him into skin and warmth, any he can get. She’ll do. They hold, and hold, in this unknown dark.

So small, alone, lost.

The cuddle works, stills them both. Because even though she’s all angles and elbows and coltish length she gives the most
enveloping hugs. Like you’re a hot-water bottle warming her right through and she doesn’t want to let go, ever. She’s all-calming when she holds you and you’ve never told her the gift of it. So much you’ve never said. That you marvel at Mouse’s mind, the cogs of it, the singularity of his thought. And Tidge’s robust sunniness, his ability to weather turbulence. And the joy from all of them that floods you; that you feel stronger as a mother than you ever have in your life.

He who is unaffected by transiency can be called tranquil.

21

The soldiers came the afternoon the letter arrived. An aching bright day of air so scrubbed it hurt. There was so little time. Behind mirrored sunglasses you couldn’t read their faces. Not even Tidge could fillet something from them and he’s the heart-lifter of the family and his smile usually works. But these men didn’t seem properly human any more, with proper hearts; their faces were set. They went straight to the study with Motl and you. The kids sat on the sofa. Found hands when the quiet became too much. Your husband asked you to leave at one point. You joined the children and quietly found two palms. Only your trembling spoke. You had just been told the other members of your research team had disappeared.
‘Been
disappeared, or vanished?’ you’d foolishly joked, in shock. No response. You were the only scientist left, that’s all you knew; you, alone, could activate it.

The door finally opened and the soldiers walked out. Their sunglasses were gone.

‘What’s happening?’ the kids asked. ‘What’s going on?’

The soldiers said nothing. They left. You rushed back to Motl. Finally came out with your arms around each other and you never do that.

‘You both look smaller,’ Tidge said, stepping back, ‘like you’ve been shrunk.’

‘What’s going on?’ Soli asked with a new maturity, a brother in each hand.

Your knuckles were little snow-capped mountains as you gripped your husband tight. Dread in your stomach like sickness. What to tell them? Yes, you were being recalled. A matter of national urgency. And the kids, the kids were to be ‘relocated’ whatever that meant. What not to tell them? That you knew these people in command. Men who had lost their light hearts. Knew the cruellest thing they could do to a woman, to get her to talk, was to hurt the children in some way and have the mother witness it. The shredded state of your country now felt like an offence against the natural order of things and by God you would not give these people the chance, you would not.

And then the extraordinary part, and you can still scarcely believe it. Motl had wheedled one last night at home. Alone, with just the family. Because he had once tutored the soldier-in-command and had made him laugh and had given him an extension on his final paper when his mother was dying of cancer and had even written a condolence note and it was all remembered, that. His gentleness was trusted. He’s that kind of person. He shines goodness and people are drawn to it.

But so little time. A night, one night to reconfigure your life. What to tell the kids? What not? That their wind-licked little house would now be someone else’s. A start, yes, they would have to face it, this was how your country now worked.
‘Pardon?’
Mouse yelled in disbelief. An enormous rage at the unfairness of it all took over him and he slid down a wall, and became a howl. Roared great choking sobs. As abandoned as a toddler in a crowd.

‘This is the magic house. We’re safe here, we’re safe. You
said.’

You looked wildly around at your family and put your hands over your ears and ran outside, couldn’t bear it any more, the news or the noise, ran down to the beach, to the kelp-heavy waves heaving their load, to a gull that didn’t move on the sand
as the water rushed hungrily around its legs and didn’t move as you stood there breathing deep, didn’t move as you sucked in the sharpness of the air as if you were filling up your body. This land was your cathedral. Its yowling hurting ringing light. It held your heart hostage; you dreamed of being slipped into its soil like a sacrament upon death. And now you were being ripped from it. And every one of your little family. Because of your past catching up.

God’s beauty has split me wide open.

22

Behind you on that beach, Motl’s voice. ‘Stay back, leave her alone.’ You turned just in time to catch Soli — a flinty ball of fury — punching her father hard in the stomach. Ramming into him all her rage at his hesitation and mildness, all her rage at the teasing little boy inside him that sometimes riles you both so much.

‘Who
says
to leave her alone? If it wasn’t for you we’d be out of this country by now. You were going to do it but you never got around to it. If it wasn’t for you we’d be
safe.’

He didn’t say, no, actually, it was your mother who got us into this. Have you ever loved him so fiercely? But suddenly, an old man. Without any words. Who did only this.

He bent down. Held Soli tight. Clamped her furious churn in his arms and stilled it and stilled it until all the sobbing was gone and she went limp.

Where is he now? Your good, gentle man who you never valued enough. You shut your eyes at the memory of him pushing into your skin. Resolve melting like water thrown over ice in a sink. Opening out like a flower as he unlocked you into life. Your want is unsinkable, undrownable; like a bottle corked it will travel the world searching for him, for shelter and shore, for vast rest. The man who brewed happiness into your life. When a marriage works there’s nothing more soldering and you were given the gift of it. You were so different yet it worked; if you
didn’t have him there’d be no one else you’d want. He’d endured so much throughout the years, been battered again and again, but you know now that there are people who teach with their quiet grace. How to endure. By their courage and evenness. They help us to find our own strength.

And now you are alone.

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.

23

Mouse writes to stay awake deep into this vulnerable night.

• 1. Door. QUIET LIKE SOME TOMB when I press my ear into it. Why? Soundproofed?
  

• 2. Walls. THICK AND COLD. Okay. Like they’re collecting all the chill of all the nights into them and holding it in tight like the cold in some COFFIN down deep in the ground
  .
  

• 3. Bathroom. Hmm. FRESHLY PAINTED. Who was here before us? What went on?
  

Thinking too much. Because the room they’re in is a basement and basements are where things happen. They’re not used to half-below-ground level. They live up close to a huge clean sky, a big dramatic one, under the thumb of the weather. The sun in their bones. Your daughter’s had a dream, for years now, of being trapped under the earth; of hearing close above her a child’s thudding running and a distant bird and squeaky needles of grass being pulled up and the deep breathing of someone who’s flopped belly down and is soaking up the warm lovely sunshine, completely oblivious to her underneath, scrambling and panicking and unable to get out. It never fails to whoosh her into waking with a pounding heart.

    
4.
Window. Glass that’s NEVER going to break
.

    They tried. The three of them tested it with a chair after the rattling doorknob came but it wouldn’t smash, bend, give one bit.

    
The kind of glass you can see out of but not into. CREEPY
.

    Two layers of it with dead flies in between. Their feet twined like ballerinas.

    
Who was here before us? Did they get out? HOW?

    Your lair of lost children under the earth. And all you can do is watch.

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.

24

Motl became someone else after the soldiers left. He appeared in the kitchen with pyjamas poking from trouser legs and his old green sneakers without socks. He spray-painted I BET YOU MISS above the basketball hoop on the garage. He strode around the house with a book by Kafka like a vicar with a Bible clutched at his chest. He chopped onions while wearing swimming goggles and muttered under his breath.