The Book of Rapture. Nikki Gemmell
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Название: The Book of Rapture
Автор: Nikki Gemmell
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Зарубежные любовные романы
isbn: 9780007335718
isbn:
‘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.
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.
‘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.
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 СКАЧАТЬ