The Book of Rapture Read online

  One religion is as true as another.

  6

  Over those galloping days of regime change the writing in Mouse’s notebook increased. And the lure of Project Indigo began to sour. You’d signed up in the ruthless ambitiousness of your pre-children days, when motherhood was dismissed as a weakness, a giving in. But suddenly, in your late twenties, your periods became heavier and your body was held hostage to a new, monstrous phenomenon: baby-yearn. Insisted. And with children all your job-hunger just… softened away… like water spilt into sand. You struggled for so long to come to terms with it. Fought, hard. But motherhood slowed you, loosened you, evened you; addled you with tiredness and forced you to relinquish control. Eventually, you gave in. Children won.

  ‘Thank God you’ve seen the light,’ Motl said. Because he didn’t feel safe any more with Project Indigo hovering about you; it was getting too jumpy in this new political climate. There was no consistency, neither of you liked what was happening around you; your country was riven with ancient rivalries and the situation seemed impossible, hopeless, intractable; never to be untangled; never to be bathed in forgetting and peace. The different ethnic groups had fought each other since time began and long memories and grievances had fed a vendetta culture and now everything was escalating to a dangerous extent; there was extreme nationalist rhetoric on both sides and your project was an explosive secret at the heart of it and it was best to slip away, disappear, forget.

  So. You both decided on a new word. Measures. Your life would now swing like an ocean liner changing its course. The plan was to flee the sparkly new house until your country worked itself out. You’d all vanish in a night. The past wouldn’t find you any more; you’d be too far away, too remote. You’d find an old wreck of a place in the middle of nowhere, where your family could weather any trouble flat-broke but far away, and safe.

  You whisper that lovely word now.

  Safe.

  It’s the most luminous word in the world, don’t you think?

  When making your choice in life, do not neglect to live.

  7

  Their doorknob’s now rattling like someone wants to shake it right off.

  A bang.

  The door shudders. Everything is quiet. Not good quiet, creepy quiet. And the only noise is their jagged breathing too loud and they can’t still their breaths as the three of them stare at that feral door wondering what on earth it’s springing on them next. And you. Watching. Glary with guilt and helplessness, riddled with rangy light. Your middle child, Tidge, is bone white. He clutches his chest, at a mothy flittery something inside him batting away like a sparrow in a room, trying to find sky, get out. He reaches across and finds his little brother’s hand but Mouse’s pulse is leaping like a flea on steroids and Tidge winces, he’s not good with blood and bone, he can’t hold any more, lets go. ‘Thanks, dude,’ Mouse says, soft, ‘great.’ So his siblings can hear it but the person out there can’t.

  His wiliness constantly surprises you. That guile of the third-born. He can’t compete physically so he’s always competed with something else. Cunning. Irony. An aware heart. One day perhaps he’ll run rings around his brother, you’ve always said that, but is he wily enough to get out of this? Can any of them? You can’t help them, they’re by themselves.

  Everything ahead, wide open, like a bull on the loose.

  Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

  8

  When they woke up they were in another world entirely. A room pale all over as if a big milky tongue had licked it into stillness. With a hush like all the silence of the world had gathered in it. A congregation of quiet. As if the space had been waiting patiently, just for them, its breath held like a morning frost.

  ‘This room doesn’t like us,’ Mouse whispered.

  ‘We have to get out,’ Tidge.

  ‘We can’t.’ Soli. Miss Practical, raising her eyebrows at the door.

  ‘It doesn’t like us,’ Mouse repeated.

  As fear tiptoed up your spine like a daddy-long-legs.

  These are the unbelievers, the impure.

  9

  Salt Cottage. That was its name. The little house purchased in the name of a friend who would never be traced back to you. Dirt roads faltered to it, lost their will and almost petered out. ‘No, no, no,’ Mouse protested on first seeing it, twisting his head as if possessed. He didn’t do rural, didn’t get it. But the land had kidnapped your heart. It was near to where you’d grown up and the sanctuary of home, the thought of its embrace as the world darkened around you, stilled you down.

  ‘It has the same sky’ You twirled under it and laughed. ‘Trust me.’ You bent to your scowly little man — ‘it’ll worm its way under your skin, just you wait’ — and a tickle under his chin unlocked a smile. lust. Because for you, this place was like striding into calm. You were in control again, you’d grow quiet here, relax. And if you were happy the kids would be happy, you’d learned that.

  The cottage clung tenaciously to the farthest edge of your country, a tiny stone blip among the endless squally chatter of sea and sky. The approach was impossible by sea: jagged rocks and furious waves deterred any boat. Seagulls poured down to daily scraps and the wind could blow a dog off a chain, but after six months of hard work a new roof sat snug and the cottage’s thick stone walls shielded you from the weather that whined day after day to get in. The aim: to create a little bauble of serenity far away from that niggle of anxiety that now followed you in the city wherever you went. Because it wasn’t safe for your type to go to cinemas or public pools any more, to markets and shopping malls, anywhere that people would congregate. Then petrol stations became a worry. Theatres. Airports. And far, far away from all that Motl and you were determined to make your world like a furnace lit, a furnace of warmth and light. Fat lovely life of love, in your little glow home, and how fiercely you cherished it. The pleasing circularity of your life. You were reclaiming childhood here, and simplicity; shedding the city crust.

  Free yourself of ties as a fish breaks through a net.

  10

  The three of them spin, talking through the bewilderment.

  ‘Look. The bed’s wider than it’s long …’

  ‘… which only happens when you’re rich.’

  ‘The coat hangers in the cupboard are really stubborn …’

  ‘… they won’t come off.’

  ‘The shower head’s as big as a dinner plate …’

  ‘You know, I don’t think Mum and Dad have anything to do with this. It’s all too … careful.’

  ‘They’re not here. Anywhere. They’re not. I know it.’

  At Mouse’s bitter conclusion, absolute quiet. Because they’re utterly alone. And the realisation is like stepping from the warmth of a fire-toasty house into the formal cold of a deep winter night. Tidge paces the room. Brushes the walls. Recoils. Too cold, too soundproofed. Mouse slides down the door, his hands cupped in horror at his mouth. Your worrier, always thinking too much. His anxiety’s demanding like a toddler fresh from sleep.

  ‘The window!’ Tidge exclaims suddenly. They scramble.

  A street. An old office building across the road. The eyes of its empty windows as blank as the freshly dead. Everything abandoned, everything quiet. Traffic lights changing but no traffic anywhere, not a car, not a bike. Endlessly and obediently the traffic lights changing but no people anywhere. No life.

  ‘It feels like the proper world has stopped,’ Tidge says quietly, in wonder, pressing into thick glass that doesn’t bend.

  ‘Like we’re the last ones left,’ his twin brother whispers.

  Soli shivers like a pony. As do you.

  For the world has lost its youth, and the times begin to wax old.

  11

  Motl and you battened down the hatches on your country’s strife. Created your little bauble of enchantment far away from everything while you sat the new politics out. And the new life was good, varnished with love and light. Motl was the teac
her. He was born to it, he should have done it from the start. He’d grab the kids by the shoulders and tell them to go to the window and look, look, you wallies, because there was never nothing there. A cloud like a rocking horse!’ ‘A one-legged seagull!’ A snail’s frilled foot!’ ‘Look at the sea inhaling and exhaling but it’s the tide and it’s governed by the moon.’ ‘Look at the stained-glass window of that grasshopper’s wing, that’s your art lesson.’ ‘Biology, the carpet beetle’s defensive curl’ ‘Don’t ask me one more time, What are we doing next? Work it out for yourself! Explore everything, debate, rip the world apart. I want thinkers. Children who question everything. Who have vigorous, audacious, independent thought!’ And eventually, they forgot to ask, What are we doing next?

  Taking it in turns to dance with their cheeks to his belt buckle and their feet on the pedals of his shoes as you’d sing your favourite song line, ‘I will wrap you in kisses’, and demonstrate. And everyone rushing outside when dolphins leapt past and standing in a row and whooping at the lovely oblivious joy of them, and at night Motl and you lifting each child solemnly to the high canopy of stars and telling them not to worry because you’re all in the magic house now, it will look after you, you’re safe here, you’re safe.

  And now, and now, you wear them like a coat. Their squirmy demanding heat. That can never be taken from you. You envy the air in the room they’re in, rubbing up close. The silence here is a presence, constantly watching, listening, taking note. You need to be released into the outrageously beautiful world. Can’t. Bear. This.

  The sun and all light have forever fused themselves into my heart and upon my skin.

  12

  Out of the window a ferocious sunset falls away. The colour of blood in it. Lightning spits and flickers in the distance as if it’s a faulty fluorescent light. A tree right outside tosses its branches at the approaching storm like a horse spooked. ‘No panicking, all right.’ Soli. A tremor in her voice she can’t iron out. She checks her new watch. So, obediently, do her little brothers. They all received them on your final night. They say 1707. The kids don’t get it. What happened to the past day? They woke just after 4 p.m., on the bed, in a line, on their backs. They’ve never slept so late in their lives. And they’re still tired but it’s an unearthly tired as if some enormous rake is dragging them down and pulling them back into sleep.

  They’re fighting it. Tidge: shaking his arms like an actor warming up. Mouse: jogging fast on the spot. Soli: biting her lip because she’s the eldest and is used to getting what she wants and no way is that sleep having her back. Because of the things that now happen in it. Because it can’t be trusted. Because of the terror that could envelop them if unconsciousness, once again, gets its chance.

  We have got ready the fire whose smoke will enwrap them: and if they implore help, helped shall they be with water like molten brass which will scald their faces.

  13

  Motl and you wormed that fat little teapot of a house into all their hearts. You both dreaded a blunting when wonder would not cradle them but it never came, for the two of you pulled happiness around them like a wondrous cape. So much of it in this briny new life! You’d forgotten how to be a mother immersed in Project Indigo, but Salt Cottage taught you that a nanny makes you afraid of your kids and it’s so much richer to do it all yourself. They chisel out your deepest feelings, your wildest love and rage and frustration and euphoria, they haul you to the coalface of life. You could be distant, remote without them; but as a parent you were forced to participate. And to your shock you revelled in it. These were the shining hours; the kids burnished your life.

  There were complaints, of course. About the new poorness. Crockery chipping and not being replaced, duvets stuffed with newspaper, baths topped up with saucepans from the stove. Complaints about windows encrusted with salt because there wasn’t a cleaning lady any more and about your cooking which you never did quite well enough (‘Not cereal for dinner again.’ ‘My repertoire is extremely limited, all right? I’m a scientist, not a cook. Give me a Bunsen burner and you’d really see something bubble up.’ Cue Motl, cowering under the table, ‘No, no, anything but that!’).

  And gradually the whining stopped because each of you knew that Salt Cottage meant one thing above anything else — survival. You were safe here, you were safe. And it was enough.

  He who is an alien to grace seeks and finds naught but disgrace and adversity: if thorny brambles grow, it is the requital of his sowing.

  14

  ‘Hey, I remember something now.’ Mouse presses his knuckles to his temples. ‘It’s coming … from last night…’ He’s screwing up his eyes as if trying to squeeze memory out. You lean.

  ‘Okay I was lying in my bed. Trying to fall to sleep. Then Dad came in. He lay down next to me and put his hand over my mouth. There was a hanky on it. He was whispering, "Sssh, little man, sssh," but his voice was full… like, like there was crying in it. And I was breathing in but feeling funny and then Dad was holding me and clamping me tight and then he was sealing off my talking and then, and then, this is the really scary bit, it was like I was slipping into this sea of the inkiest, scariest black, like some body in a coffin being slid from a ship and then the dark was crowding over me and just before I was completely under Dad was curling around me and clinging on, tight, like I was some life buoy in this vast ocean of fear …’ Your little boy looks straight at his brother and sister. Frightened eyes. A blink. ‘Then no dreams. Nothing. Just this enormous blank …’

  ‘Like being dead.’ Tidge, quiet.

  The brothers look at each other. Pins and needles take over their eyes. They’re both blinking like two ships sending out distress signals and the crying’s coming now, a great dumping wave of it; young, so young, too young for this.

  Verily every soul has as a surety a guardian over it.

  15

  On a clear still night your neighbour, Ulla Ween, came around. A man of the book, flinty and devout. His house was a mile away. He was the only neighbour close. It was a Monday. He often popped in on a Monday for a meal; he lived by himself. He’d supervised your building work with heavy eyelids and weirdly bobbed hair and lips always wet. On this particular Monday Ulla Ween sat at your kitchen table and ate a meal as he always did then licked his plate clean which he never did, and placed it carefully down. He said you’d soon be informed that Salt Cottage belonged to someone else. With a peculiar smile on his face. Like he was trying to hold in the delight. You snorted a laugh. Motl stood. Because in an instant your neighbour had become someone else. He told you that it was a correcting of past iniquities. ‘Pardon?’ You laughed again, unsure, your face not getting the joke. Without another word he tucked the dinner plate under his arm and walked out, that peculiar smile still on his face. You stood in shock. Threw your own plate after him with more physical fury than you’d ever shown in your life. The china smashed and gravy dribbled down. You had finally got the joke.

  ‘That is a man completely untroubled by compassion,’ you declared as you wiped your hands of him smartly on your hips.

  And from that evening onward the future darkened around you, you could all feel it contract. History was close on that night; the world was pushing against the windows, beating the glass with its hungry palms; wanting in. And in the early hours you slipped into Mouse’s bottom-bunk bed and curled your arm over him and burrowed into his lovely warmth. You need to do that whenever the thinking flurries in your head too much, when you can’t hook on to sleep no matter how hard you try and there’s only one thing guaranteed to work: your children. Only they can distract you enough, balm you down into it.

  Now now now. Strapped to the guilt of what you did once.

  The small man builds cages for everyone he knows.

  16

  ‘You know, nothing looks like it’s going to hurt us.’ Soli assesses the creamy serenity of their room. ‘It looks, actually, kind of … posh. Eh?’

  ‘Mum?’ Mouse asks the quiet. ‘Dad?’
r />   Silence, as vast as a desert.

  His sister gnaws at a sliver of skin on her finger. There’s blood; she pops it in her mouth. Fingers the doorknob, worrying about so much, you can tell: the rattling that’ll be back with the consistency of a playground bully and she’s meant to be the mother here and how will she get the boys through the night? Hardwired into her is caring, giving, pleasing, the female lot; as a baby she’d offer the milk bottle back to you, place it insistently in your mouth. The boys never did that. Womanhood is a condition of giving, continually, and it astounds you how early it manifests itself.

  ‘Maybe the rattler has left for the evening,’ she says brightly. ‘For twelve hours. At least. Until daytime.’ But her voice grows wobblier as she speaks.

  Mouse hrumphs away. Scrunches his hands under his armpits. Feels his pyjama pocket. Finds Motl’s old silver pen with his name in a flourish along it. Your husband had slipped it to him as he curled around him on the final night because he knows that writing will give him solace, will firm him up. A smile opens his face. The pen he’s not meant to touch! That makes his writing come out neat! ‘Guys, look.’ He holds it high, along with a tiny notebook. ‘They were in my pocket! So perhaps … there’s a plan here.’ Tidge flops onto the bed with relief. Mouse lies belly-down on the floor and feverishly writes. ‘Tell our story, tell the truth,’ you’d whispered to your little scribe as he was deeply caught by unnatural sleep. Tell our story because erasure is what this new government is so effective at now and children have to be just as slippery as adults, they have to be wily, to think. Like grown-ups.