Read The Book of Rapture Online
Authors: Nikki Gemmell
‘Don’t worry,’ you said breezily to the kids, ‘Dad’s just sorting things out.’
‘Yay!’ the boys squealed. Because to them, he’s the champion at that. The chief surgeon at the toy hospital where patients are checked in overnight and by morning limbs are secured and remote controls have sprung into life.
But as you watched those onions being methodically attacked you couldn’t help throw across, ‘I prefer to cry, mate.’
‘Be quiet, be quiet, I’m
thinking,’
your husband exploded.
You all went quiet. For the depth of Motl’s anger was shocking. You’d never seen it before and you thought you knew him so well. Thought, suddenly, my God, who is this man? You didn’t recognise him at all, he was someone new.
A person who the world had caught out, yes. A man whose finely crafted code of goodness, that had spined his whole life, had been overturned in the blink of an eye. He used to say that a gentleman always does the kind thing but that didn’t work any more. He was one of those old-fashioned sorts of people
who was caring and polite and thought it was the proper way to exist. Mouse asked him once, as a toddler, ‘Daddy, are you from the past?’ He was the man who never told his parents he knew the tooth fairy wasn’t real because he didn’t want to hurt their feelings, who fed sparrows in his garden until they were too fat to fly, who opened doors and stood on buses and wrote thank you notes. You married him for all that. He attracted extreme people like a magnet because of his core of stability and quiet. But those types of men now seemed soft and naïve and weak. In this new, sour-spirited world, people like Motl were swallowed up. And he knew it.
Ask your heart to decide; righteousness is what the soul and the heart feel tranquil about; and sinfulness is what is fixed in the soul, and roams about in the breast.
Mouse makes another expedition and another back to his sleeping brother and sister. He slips his arm over them both and burrows close. A skin diver, diving in, cupping his brother’s serenely heaving chest and breathing in his slumbering deep, deep, wanting some of that trust to rub off. Tidge’s crossed his fingers and Mouse unlocks them and they wait for a beat then spring back. Mouse chuckles. His would never do that, you’d need pliers to pull them apart.
Hey. Mum talked to us about pale rooms like this. Once
.
You did, yes. Creamy rooms from your college days. After you’d drunk a bottle of champagne Motl had smuggled home because he knew it would soar your heart and perhaps, with luck, turn you into the woman he remembered once. He burst through the door holding high his prize and you smiled with your eyes just slits like a cat with the warmest sill of sun. Then you summonsed them all to your high wide bed and were transformed into someone else. Young again, light, loose. And Motl was all cackly with glee as he handed across your last, cherished, bone china teacup, the one with the red spots, but it was full of champagne.
Then the stories came. Of university days when your country was something else. Of houses with roaring fires whose heat made your face go tight. Of windows three storeys high looking
over oceans of green. Of carpets so soft you could sleep on them. And you did, long ago, at parties that began at midnight and lasted until dawn where you’d dance barefoot and dance until the softness of the floor pulled you down. And you’d wake beside people who were astonished to learn there were two ten o’clocks in the day, who never knew the meaning of grubbily grey clothes that had been white once or of plates crazed with cracks. Because those kinds of people lived lives of a delicate shade of cream. Which is exactly this waiting place.
But no, not exactly.
Because back then there was always a way out. A spider of fear picks its way up your spine. Those were days before Project Indigo, before all Motl’s wariness over the direction it was heading in and where it was dragging your family let alone yourself.
‘I’m just not comfortable with what you’re doing any more. Religion gives you a framework to work in, and you scientists are creating this new priestly caste which seems every bit as arrogant and condescending as the old lot. Eh?’ He poked you in the stomach for affirmation. ‘I’m just not sure that humans are capable of a morality outside religion. Who, madam, is fencing you in? Anyone?’
‘So you’ve found God, my love, after decades of intelligent rationalism?’
‘Look, as a scientist, I’ve come across no evidence of a God existing. But I haven’t come across any evidence of he or she
not
existing, and I’m intrigued by that. We have to understand that there are things in this world we cannot understand.’
You snorted your disgust.
Motl laughed. ‘You lefty liberals are the most narrow-minded of the lot. So judgemental and indignant, bursting with all your pompous, righteous certainty. Extremely vulnerable, Missy, to your sheep-like opinions, don’t you think? Urgh. All rattly and hollow and … un-calm … yes.’
‘You believe in superstition, mate, I believe in fact.’
‘I just can’t quite believe that order came out of chaos, that’s all.’ He shrugged. ‘The idea that God has created human beings makes more sense to me than he hasn’t. Science isn’t the only way to truth, my love. It can’t actually explain how our world came into being. All the extraordinary complexity of it.’
‘So you’ve found religion.’
‘Not
quite
. Let’s just say I’m surrendering to the mystery. There’s a lot of solace I’m finding in my books. And I’m loving the journey, Mrs,’ and he padded off to his study, full of chuff.
Let your diet be spare, your wants moderate, your needs few. So, living modestly, with no distracting desires, you will find content.
A thud. Outside their door. Mouse gasps. Eyes wide, rabbit-still. Until he was five he’d pad into your room when the terrors of night became too much. You’d open out the duvet and sling him in close and he’d nestle against you like a door jamb to a door and you’d smile at the hot firm wedge of him and wish it would go on forever and want it now, so much. Everything’s worse after dark when the fear crowds in. Those strange bumps and scrapes outside their door are like secrets being shifted in the dead of night and your boy is rigid with fear.
You long for rest. That moment of grace every night in Salt Cottage when you’d tiptoe into their bedroom and the short, sharp shock would come; alone, every night, standing in that room that was filled with the sleep of your children. Just … breathing them in. Then a great warmth would flood through you, an enormous, glittery, heart-swelling gratitude, and you’d find yourself closing your eyes in unstoppable thanks. Prayer is gratitude, oh yes. You never told Motl of those luminous moments, can’t understand what combusted within him, resolutely do not believe yet want to, need to, at times. Religion may be a delusion but it’s a delusion of solace and there’s something to be said for that. Yes, it may be all lies and creaky myth but what is this
stillness that steals through you in moments, what? The short, sharp shock of it.
There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple.
You drove that last afternoon at Salt Cottage. The five of you. Not too far because there would be roadblocks up ahead and none of you was completely convinced about that former student’s heart. But far enough. A brisk breeze buffeted the car like a boat in a wind-tossed sea and you said to Motl to stop, you were going to be sick, and stumbled out and straightened and stood there tall with the stiff wind skating off the plain but flinch you would not, break you would not. Breathing in the spite of it but not bending, not giving an inch, tears streaming down your cheeks. That was the core of you then, holding your face to that sting and that hurt. Fury had become your glowing nub. The embers were intense and they would never soften out.
You drove home in silence. Held your cheeks high to the slit of the car window like a dog needing air. Your jeans were wet from the long grass and petals were crushed on your boots and dirt flecked your face; it was as if the land itself was trying to cling on to you, to hold you back. And you knew now what it was to be sick in your heart.
You will fight this dispossession and God willing your children’s children will fight it if they must. Your land holds your heart hostage. You long to bury yourself in it, to stretch belly down and feel its warm soil in your blood and your bones, to prostrate yourself in its earth.
Not in the sky, not in the middle of an ocean, not in a mountain cave, can a man escape the effects of his ill deeds.
Maybe they cracked? Yeah. Maybe they ordered this because we WENT TOO FAR. So, like, we’ve been cast out and this is our punishment and they’re above us in the roof
— he looks up —
surveilling everything and seeing how we cope
.
They were really pushing it towards the end. Among all the snipping and shouting between Motl and you were three kids flurried up. It was like flint in the air before a storm. Everything charged, as if each one had new batteries in. All the squabbling and Chinese-burning, the hair-pulling, name-calling, toy-snatching, kicking, biting, even that.
Then after that last drive, the stopping. Back in the house. That awful moment when the air itself seemed shocked. You, of course, at the centre of it. Becoming a woman you hadn’t seen for years, since the kids were babies and they’d drag you into that deep, deep tired and you’d wake up tired and never find a firm footing with the day. Standing there wailing that you couldn’t cope any more, couldn’t cope, with your fingers curled frozen at your head and the bones in your hands little rakes. ‘I can’t do it any more,’ you keened, ‘can’t — do — it.’ All of it, everything. Motherhood, Motl, Project Indigo, the way it was vining your life, dragging everything along with it, all the uncertainty of what was coming next.
Then Tidge rushed in and clung like a wet plastic bag slicked about a tree, one that’s impossible to prise off, and as you held
him tight you found calm again and apologised for the mother you’d become, and wept. They all ended up on you, trying to still you down but the shuddering wouldn’t go, wouldn’t stop.
Nup nup nup. Something else was breaking Mum that day, something far beyond any of us lot. Being here isn’t because of plain old naughtiness. It’s something FAR BIGGER than that. Is this all Mum’s fault? Where is she? When is she coming?
I am as if intoxicated with the grief of my heart.
The final night at Salt Cottage. Rain-whipped. Sky pressing into the land, pummelling it; wet hammering the windows like a giant flinging pebbles; as if heaven itself was stopping anyone listening in. Your kitchen had the glow of a special occasion. Candles were lit. You were wearing your favourite perfume, the gardenia one, and Motl nursed a mug of his beloved whisky, the Ardbeg you love breathing in.
He had informed you earlier he had a plan. Fevery, excited, flushed. ‘It will work.’ You had to trust him. Why? Because those three children filled every inch of his heart as hugely as your own. He couldn’t tell you exactly what the idea was. He said he was protecting them, and you. ‘There are ways of extracting information, any information they want, you know that. It’s too risky, Mum. For all of us.’ And did you have a counter-plan? No, you did not.
Motl’s fingers now drummed the kitchen table and when the whole family was settled he leaned close. You sucked in your lower lip: something in him had firmed and you loved him like this. He was one of those people whose mind is concentrated, magnificently, under pressure, who grow in stature once they’ve moved beyond the initial shock. He announced calmly that you would all be going away. Held up splayed hands to the questions. He said everyone had to remember two things and two only: that no situation had ever been improved by thinking it couldn’t be changed, and
you all had to keep on hoping even when hope seemed lost.
‘What’s happening?’ ‘Where are we going?’ ‘Can we have chocolate?’ ‘What’s going on?’
Motl shook his head at the shrill of voices. He smiled. He said there was just one thing each child had to remember, to get them through, and they all had to listen carefully. He turned to his youngest. ‘You, my little book muncher of the family, have to write everything down. Be our memoriser. Tell our story, tell the truth.’
Mouse nodded, thrilled with the weight of his task.
The professor turned to his daughter. ‘You, madam, my big, beautiful girl, have to look after your brothers. Be the mummy of the group.’
Even now you can hear Soli’s deep, wavery breathing as she contemplated the enormity of that.
Then his older son. ‘And you, my sunny soldier boy, have to believe. Keep up the hope and keep smiling, for all of us. Be buoyant. That’s all. Set an example for your brother and sister.’ Motl has told you that he thinks Tidge is one of those people who can plug themselves into light and be an enormous light to others. ‘Belief will be your shelter, all right?’
‘Eh?’ His boy yelped in bewilderment but Motl didn’t have time to explain any further; he asked everyone to hold hands and with an enormous impish glee declared he had a secret, the most secret of secrets, and as he spoke the hairs stood shrill to attention on the back of your neck.
‘One day we’ll come back to Salt Cottage. I
promise
. I have a plan.’
But he wouldn’t say what. And you remember clearly the shine in his face as he spoke because it reminded you of nothing so much as some lone, crazy, heart-bursting salmon, fighting its way up river, never stopping until it’s home. Then Motl tented his fingers under his chin and declared that this new regime would eventually collapse because it was a denial of every single
human value that was good and civilised and right. Because it shrivelled people’s hearts to just two emotions: fear, and a desperate, ugly sense of self-preservation. Because it stopped friends and neighbours trusting each other. Because it killed history by rewriting the books. And lastly, obscenely, because it stole joy. Anyone’s right.