The Book of Rapture (11 page)

70

The key.

He’s back.

Unfurl your heart.

Bursting into the room like a striker who’s just clinched the World Cup (Mouse’s love diminishes, a touch). ‘You
won’t
believe it.’ Dropping to his knees, bursting with triumph.

‘Mum?’

‘Dad?’

‘Well …
no
… but you wait.’ He whips up his shirt and out tumble three bread rolls and a chicken leg and two cigarettes unlit which Soli promptly snatches.

‘Not for another five years, mate,’ and slips them into her pocket. ‘Besides, you need a lighter.’

But Tidge pulls out a matchbox with a gleeful voilà and rattles it high and dances around the room in a delirious jogging dance, pumping his arms like a sprinter warming up.

‘As silly as a wet hen,’ Mouse observes, leaning against a wall.

‘You next, dude, come on.’ Tidge points at him.

‘Excuse me.
I’ll
decide who’s next, thank you very much.’ Soli snatches the matchbox. ‘And I’ll be twenty minutes. To the dot.’ She glares at Tidge.

He dances his fingers up her tummy — ‘Go on then,
go
‘ — cackling like he’s drunk and flopping in a cartoon fall backwards onto the bed.

‘And in a decade,’ Mouse adds drily from his wall, ‘we’ll be wanting those cigarettes back.’

When a man speaks or acts with good intention then happiness follows him like his shadow that never leaves him.

71

So. Your two boys. Side by side now. Leaning against the wall. Tidge slinging an arm over his brother: ‘Just try it, come on.’ Mouse flinching him off. You sigh. It’s always this. Your youngest wanting to stuff his brother’s glee back inside him, like a sleeping bag into its sack, wanting to pull the toggle tight. You worry he’ll grow into one of those men who slip through the cracks, who are lost. An adult who underlives and you dread that. He’s always lagged with so much: eye contact, smiling, sport, making friends; has never had the rescue of a best mate. Old souls, so different, from the moment they were born. You sensed it. Tidge’s theory is that all the waiting souls are hovering above the skin of the earth ready to slip into the parents they want, the flesh they need; that there’s intention in their choice. ‘I chose you to make you happy, Mummy,’ Tidge explained, aged five. Mouse: ‘I chose you for your toast.’

And when everything’s going well for Tidge he grows bouncy and sleek and full of light. Which is now. And the one thing the twins have always had is the ability to second-guess each other but Tidge’s breaking away here, going off on his own, thinking independently and they both know it. Tidge is shining as Mouse shrinks ever more glowery beside him, shining as his brother stands with his back against the wall and pushes him away. It’s heartbreaking. They’re growing up. It morphs into punching, Mouse attacking with a terrifying force and now
they’re rolling on the floor and kicking and hitting like two lion cubs and now the giggling comes, the change, just like that.

‘Let’s hide from her,’ Tidge says suddenly.

Mouse looks at him sharp. Well, well, he can’t say he disapproves. Perhaps his big brother’s not completely lost to him yet.

Tidge surprises you sometimes with the shock of his nastiness. There’s a side of him that doesn’t know tenderness. He can’t do a soft tickle, a loving stroke; yet complex little Mouse brims with sensual touch. The contradictions in all of them. They never stop wrong-footing you, there’s always a next stage just as you think you’ve got them worked out.

Everyone goes about his business at the beginning of the day and sells his soul: he either frees it, or causes it to perish.

72

Soli’s back twenty minutes to the dot. Her eyes are sparkling, she’s lit. ‘Guys?’

An abandoned quiet.

‘Hello?’

The voice of a little girl. She stares at the key in her hand. Shakes her head, quickly, as if she’s trying to shake sense back into it. Runs to the bathroom, screeches aside the shower curtain. Runs out of the room moaning, ‘No, no, come back.’

An explosion of giggling from under the bed.

‘Get out.’

A furious, tear-brimmed voice.

She drags up Mouse, knows exactly whose fault this is. Her fingernails dig in hurting and deep. ‘Don’t you
ever
do that to me again, you … brat.’ She shakes him viciously and he starts to yell but stops.

Because of something new in her.

Something exhausted, and old, and pushed to the brink.

Leave not a stain in thine honour.

73

It takes half an hour of apologies, half an hour of head massages and foot rubs to get to the crucial question: ‘So what did you get?’ Soli raises her eyebrows and retrieves a snowy white laundry sack she’d dropped by the door with a beautiful C embroidered upon it as golden as egg yolk. She pulls out a bottle of champagne.

‘Ta da!’

‘Hang on,’ Mouse says dubiously, ‘there’s only half a glass in there. And no food.’

With a cheeky grin their sister lifts the bottle to her lips and luxuriantly swigs then she hands it across to her brothers and they drink too and she smiles like a cat with the warmest sill of sun and shakes out her hair and turns into someone looser and sillier, her eyes again lit, and your heart tightens to see it. Because she’s got her old face back, all her freshness is suddenly in the room, her huge life force. She’s so vivid-hearted, and it’s been lost under all the strain, but now it’s returned and you stand there watching with your fingertips pressed trembling at your mouth. At your effortlessly lovely girl back, blazing light.

Tidge finds his brother’s hand, he’s not shrugged off. ‘It’s Mum, dude,’ he whispers.

‘You look gorgeous, sis,’ Mouse throws across and Soli swoops him into a cuddle which turns into a swirl.

‘You next.’ She chuckles affectionately, floating him, gently,
to the ground. ‘But only half an hour. Any longer and it’s too stressful, for
everyone
left,’ and she kicks Tidge playfully on the butt.

Is it true that our destiny is to turn into light itself?

74

But Mouse. Something’s slunk away in him, like a dog with its tail between its legs.

‘I’m happy just to stay here, guys. Unless … someone wants to come too.’ His voice drops to a whisper. ‘Maybe.’ Oh, love. The nub of him. He’s grown extremely comfortable with his boundary of ‘no’ that he’s surrounded himself with over the years. Someone’s always going to help him out and that thinking has built up like a shell now encasing him; fear has become a leash on his life. You’ve facilitated it. So of course he’s happy right now to sit tight, safe, while everyone else figures out what to do next. But now this. A sister all pushy before him, his nerve-rash revving into life under her steely gaze, already claiming his cheeks, vining him, down, down, his neck, chest. It’s a sorry sight.

‘I want to go too.’ His brother, loud into the shardy quiet.

‘No. You’re too obvious together.’

‘I can’t do it by myself,’ Mouse whispers. No, he can’t. And in that vast churning silence he rubs his arms where Soli yanked him from under the bed but her face does not change, she will win this. He stares at the speedy bruises on his skin, the yellow petals already on his flesh and Tidge’s hand finds his shoulder, always there for him. Motl told them once that the difference with them is that there are yes-sayers and no-sayers and people who say yes are rewarded by the adventure they go on and people who say no are rewarded by their feeling of safety, and
neither is better than the other, it’s just the way they are. And they always have to respect the other’s choice; they have to be their brother’s protector and must never forget it.

‘We
all
have to do this.’ Soli, iron in her voice. The one who doesn’t get weakness or maybe she does, too much. She spins Mouse around and propels him out.

‘You were adopted. I think you should know, in case I don’t come back.’

Soli’s hands drop. ‘I am not.’ But a voice that believes it.

‘Dad said so. I found the birth certificate in his drawer and I wasn’t allowed to tell you.’

A new, electric quiet. Soli’s paleness. Her mouth she forgot to shut. Mouse steps back. Pebbled now by the enormity of what he’s unleashed. The taste of his meanness sour in his mouth.

‘Get out,’ Soli says finally.

‘No, you weren’t, I made it up.’ Mouse laughs too loud. Trying to spool back the situation.

‘Get out. We don’t want you here. We don’t need you. You’re never any help.’

He frowns and rolls in his lips. Rooted, panicky, to the spot.

‘And walk like you belong,’ Soli says with a furious shove. ‘Not that you belong anywhere.’

He had that coming. But there’s the huge, glittery sting of it nonetheless. It’s in his face.

Change, impermanence, is a characteristic of life.

75

The corridor. The door behind him. Just about to be firmly shut. Leaving Mouse stranded in the vast unknown. The boxer’s back. His legs aren’t working properly. It’s like walking through thigh-high mud. ‘Mummy,’ he mouths, wildly looking around, ‘Mummy?’ You need to be with him, need this, he’s so small, so young for this. You thump the wall in frustration.

And so it is. Thank God for that, thank God.

The corridor’s empty. A hum like an engine room is somewhere close. Mouse’s breathing ratchets up, his eyes are wide as he tries to work it out; perhaps there’s a furnace or a lab for strange experiments or a child-sized oven warming up, and stopping at head height are rectangular, filthy cream tiles and above them are scrapes as if enormous crates have been pushed, protesting, into the building’s dark heart. He gazes at the ceiling. Spaghetti lines of black piping run into the distance, ticking and gurgling and transporting goodness knows what. Water? Waste? Blood? He tries to spine his walk, to tall himself up, progressing slowly, so slowly down the corridor. Fire stairs, ahead. Can he do it? Can he climb them? He rubs his arms, feeling his sister’s intent, still wears her finger marks. Up, up the steps, whimpering, barely managing this. To a heavy black door on the next level and he grabs a door handle and can’t quite bring himself to turn it, to dare to see what’s beyond, but, but…

He bends. Peers. A tiny, ripped-off piece of checked shirt, tied to the doorknob. So small it’s hardly there. But it
is
.

His brother. A secret signal.

So. It must be all right. Someone’s guiding him here.

Mouse smiles and turns the handle strong.

I am the door.

76

You gasp in shock. Well, well.

So
this
is B’s world that he never talks about. Of course not. It would never fit the image of the renegade guerrilla hero in his biker boots, the principled fighter who sleeps on potato crates. ‘Oh, my God,’ Mouse whispers as he gazes through the door. ‘Oh, my God.’

A cavernous hall of loveliness, too much loveliness in a country so smashed. Marble, gleaming mirrors, shine. A colour scheme of black and silver and cream. Light streaming through a glass dome in enormous bands like highways for angels, highways to up and out. Your boy grips the door handle, the last bit of reality from his other, room-boxed life. He shuts the door and leans against the tiles. Can’t step out into this, can’t believe it’s real, can’t ever walk normally into such an audacious place. How on earth did they manage such a secret? Party so ebulliently while ranting against everything this room represents.

Again Mouse opens the door, can’t help it. The handle on the other side is a golden dolphin and looped on its jaunty tail is another of Tidge’s strips. He smiles. Of course his brother drank this up. He glances at orchids cascading in pale waterfalls from vases as tall as toddlers, at chairs with carved eagles’ heads on velvet arms, at chandeliers an umbrella span across, at a pianist’s sad back among fat silver teapots and women with hard faces in high heels and red lipstick. The new regime was never meant to be this. It shrilled that it was fighting the
voraciousness of the previous political caste, people that it spat had perfected the art of denying themselves nothing, who were obscenely immoral, excessive, corrupt. They were going to create a nobler, fairer,
corrected
way of life. Which was never this.

And B is embedded within it.

And where is Motl in all this? He said he knew his friend so well, like a son. Did he have any idea of this place? Any idea where his children might end up?

Mouse can’t walk out into it, he’s not brave enough. But there’ll be his sister’s knowing nod if he returns empty-handed; you all know she’s expecting failure. He lifts his chin, takes a deep, firming breath, and steps out. You smile in disbelief.

When thou hast enough, remember the time of hunger.

77

A white marble staircase curves like a seashell up to the floors above, up to a secretive quiet. Tidge went there, of course. It’s where his food came from, people leave uneaten food in hotel corridors, yes, but how did he get up?

A lift. Dead ahead. An old iron cage for a door that opens as if reading his thoughts. A uniformed lift-operator bows her head, all enquiring eyebrows and chuff. Your son nods in return with a wan grin not quite there on his face. The woman twinkles a smile and sweeps her hand across the showroom of her tiny space. And a lift-operator, good grief, it’s like seeing a video player or a cassette. Motl would love it so much. He’d settle on her velvet bench and travel up and down, up and down, all cackly with delight. Your son holds high his hand firmly in farewell. Shuts his door. So not good at this. He climbs the stairs and skips the first floor and opens the fire door with a 2 on it.