The Book of Rapture (2 page)

The first marked words you have come across. A key to unlock all this? A code? You hate uncertainty more than anything, he knows that. Okay. Okay. So. You will stitch his snippets into a quilt of words, trying to glean sense. Your little patchwork blanket in this place. Yes. You need to busy yourself up; need order, industry. To keep you going, to anchor you.

You cannot hear outside. You’ve always had it close. It’s
nowhere now. Where are you? So, your quilt of words. To keep you warm in this room. To brew light. Little rituals, little certainties. Words from your Motl, your Man on the Loose. Sending you a message from God knows where.

Trust me, Motl said, trust. Those were his last words to you. Trust.

Now is the time when what you believe in is put to the test.

Be still.

3

You met over Bunsen burners. Wearing white coats. Star students both. Married, louchely, young. Had three kids. A girl, then twin boys. Lived a frugal life, five people in two bedrooms, but it worked: the Giggle Palace was your tiny flat and it was crammed with books and laughter and light. Your husband and you egged each other on at the vanguard of genetic research. Then you both received the summons from the government. And everything sparkled right up.

Project Indigo.

World-changing. War-changing. A weapon of mass destruction that would blaze your names into the history books. So audacious, shocking, astounding was the idea. The thought of it once made you smile and lick your lips. That every person on earth would one day know of you, for nothing like this had ever been dared. The
grandeur
of it. You, the only woman in a team of four. A top-secret coven, searing your place into scientific history, the delicious sweetness of that.

Then Motl dropped out.

‘We’re getting way above ourselves, my love.’ He cufflinked your wrists into a grip that wouldn’t soften. ‘What moral code are we living by if we’re living beyond religion? We’re not working within any known ethical framework here. Are we? Eh?’

‘Oh, you.’ You nervously laughed. ‘Humans can be moral whether they believe in a god or not. It’s called evolution, little
boy. We’ve outgrown the religious approach to the world. All that, pah’ — you batted the thought away — ‘it’s all lies and creaky myth.’

‘I’m just not sure, wife, that it’s possible to create morality in a vacuum. By putting humans first, before a god, any god. There are lots of tasty examples from history of attempts to put people — just one, or an entire race — first.’

‘Religion,
husband
, is an affront to free will.’ You whipped your hands free. ‘It challenges reason, and intelligence, and common sense.’

‘Look, I’ve given this a lot of thought.’ His finger pressed in his lips, something big was coming up, ‘As I’ve aged there’s a … retreat … from certainty. That’s the only way I can describe it. And I do
not
think science is capable of shaping a new moral code — or a better one.’

‘Leave the project then. I can do it without you.’

He did. He resigned. Becoming, in an instant, your man on the loose. The house husband who raised the kids while studying, loosely, for yet another PhD. You became the breadwinner. Project Indigo, your stunning baby, saw to that. You weren’t letting the dream go, oh no, or the boys’ club that revolved around it. To the outside world you were engaged at the forefront of research; benign, for the good of humanity, and you were happy to keep it at that. But every day — magnificently, consumingly — you craved your baby’s illicit potency. You’d wear your Vivienne Westwood Sex shoes and fuck-me underwear under the white coat because the whole vast and greedy ambition of the work sexed you up. It consumed your life. And then you’d go home.

To the suburb everyone else wanted to live in. To the sprawling house of room upon room and lonely beds in far corners never used. Rented and furnished by the project and you touched the luxury of the place lightly, didn’t live within it but alongside it, distracted and buzzy and chuffed. To a garden
vivid with insistent life. To the children changing physically with all that space to run around in, becoming fleet. To the gardener, the housekeeper, the PA’s PA. To the nanny and her whims but you were at the crest of global fame so be it. And terrorism back then: older kids with slingshots in the next street. Another world, another country, another life.

There shall be faces on that day radiant, laughing and joyous; and faces on that day with dust upon them, blackness shall cover them.

4

Your youngest is crumbling. Here comes Mouse’s scream and your body flinches as he opens his mouth but Soli, your daughter, your eldest, holds her hand high, stopping them all quiet. ‘Sssh,’ she hisses in a voice she never shows to you. You press close, trying to will your love into them, spine them up. Mouse pushes into his big sister, needs her authority close. You know his heart, that little boxer inside him jabbing away at his skin —
punch-punch punch-punch
. Mummy, he mouths and your palm slams to your lips and you will them all strong, trying to solder calm into their skittery, swivelly backs. But little Mouse, his heart’s ramming so hard, it’s like when you forced him into swimming lessons too young and he screamed at the water’s edge and as you held him tight you could feel his terror battering your chest; it was like some wild unearthly thing in his ribcage, so huge, vulnerable, fast. My God, you thought, he could die here, his heart might just … freeze. With fright.

The doorknob turns. All their breathings stop, as crisp as an orchestra they stop—

Then …
nothing
.

The door doesn’t open. Doesn’t do anything. The person on the other side is … gone.

A vast, pluming silence. And your three children: ppfffft, like wilting tyres softening down.

Now they’ve got to work out how to get away from this place.
Fast
. Can they do it without you?

‘Trust me.’ Motl’s last words to you and you had to surrender to them.

Will see your children if you resume the project? Will you see your husband if you give over your secrets? Will you be freed from this room to eat them all with kisses? You hold the key. You do not know what is going on. No one talks, no one answers your questions. They hand you food through a hatch with eyes as dead as models’ on a catwalk. You don’t know who they are, what side they’re on, what authority they’re working for. Or where your children actually are. Or your Motl. All you have to touch, to smell, kiss, are his books; his secret missives in a thumbnail scratch.

Do not be afraid; you are with them.

5

‘Our country’s smelling of blood.’

‘Why, Mummy, is it hurt?’

Motl and you had swivelled your heads to the cupboard under the stairs, to the voice-that-couldn’t-help-itself coming from inside it. Mouse. Of course. ‘Stop tuning in, you,’ his father had remonstrated, ‘you listen too much.’

You demanded the notebook your boy was filling up.

Well, well. Like a forensic detective he’d been recording all the new chatter about him, trying to work his new country out. You sighed. This needed a talk. Because yes, your nation was changing. Battening down the hatches, locking the rest of the world out. And it was becoming increasingly uncomfortable for the likes of your family. The way you lived was seen by others as lost and bloated and wrong, people like you were being stained by the religion of your parents and grandparents, your reluctant past was becoming nigh on impossible to shake off; like some homeless dog endlessly tagging along and butting up close.

‘It’s a fear plague, isn’t it? It’s coming.’

Your little boy’s deep brown eyes, that went on forever, implored to be treated as an adult.

‘Sssh, it’s okay, it’s all right.’ As you held his silky head to your hugely beating heart.

All the empty soothing platitudes and how you hate them now. Because they believed them, they trusted you. And all you are
left with now are the books, all that male strut and threat you’ve always dismissed with a snort. Never really looked at. Carefully you sew your quilt, carefully you sew, writing in the dead language you haven’t used for so long, stretching your brain like a pianist’s fingers over keys, untouched for decades, and it all flooding back. Sew the words, sew.

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.