The Book of Rapture. Nikki Gemmell

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       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?’

      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.

       WE WILL GET OUT!!!!

      His words shout with all the certainty of childhood.

      Tidge leaps up, glee in his eyes. Tugs at the curtains. Yep, they’ll hold, they’ll do for a Tarzan rope. ‘Come on, guys!’ he rallies.

      You laugh. God help this careful room. Motl and you haven’t dubbed them the Ferals for nothing. Your three vivid-hearted kids, so brimming with life. The rapture of them, the rapture; you feel haloed by light as you watch.

      And now back to your own words. To stoke up your own fire, to nurture the blaze, the warmth. Back to all your husband’s books and his scribbles crowded irreverently into every sacred volume, into margins and the front of them and the back. Quotes, arguments, provocations, thoughts. Once, long ago, it was compilation cassettes; now this. What did he tell you near the end? You were barely listening, you’d tuned out. ‘Ageing has become this process of retreating from certainty, but not in a terrifying way, a wondrous way. Listen, you. In mystery lies the sublime, that’s the only way I can describe it, and it’s a shocking, transforming journey and I’m absolutely loving it. I can finally be myself. The relief of it, lovely. The relief He’d gone on some momentous journey, and you had little idea of it, had zoned out.

       When I am painting I feel happy and I let the feeling take hold of my hand.