The Book of Rapture (19 page)
Read The Book of Rapture Online
Authors: Nikki Gemmell
Babylon is fallen, fallen, that great city.
A man watching them. Pin’s father. Of course. They do not see him at first. You remember what B said once: that clinicide involved three types of murder — serial killing, treatment killing and political killing — and this man is an exponent of the latter. ‘Doctors murder more than any other group,’ B warned, ‘never forget that. Let’s hope your paths never cross.’ And this man would be particularly interested in you, a scientist, your line of work.
And now. In a corner near the door, not moving, watching your children’s eyes. What they are resting on, what they are noticing about a way out. How quick they are, how adult, how worn or alert. He is startlingly handsome, but in a way that makes a woman wary; you had a colleague like that once, a man who’d never had to strive at life, who’d been adored by his mother and every woman after her so he’d never had to try, didn’t understand failure, had never had to reveal a vulnerable heart. Men who’ve not grown into fully fledged humans. He’d be a lonely fuck. He could never be taught. Coldness is what you remember about your former colleague the most. And vanity. This, too, is a man who cares about his appearance. His hair has been ploughed severely with a comb. His cuffs are glary white.
Tidge meets his gaze. Your boy does not flinch. Because he knows something this man knows also: that his son is theirs, for the moment, and it may not last but they have him now,
just. Careful, brave boy, tread light. Because this man’s eyes are the eyes of a winner. Well, well, says Tidge’s stare, we’ll see about that. But how on earth can a child compete?
Pin comes in last. In a glance you have caught the raw man, the one under all that suit, the furnace inside that his eyes do not match. He loves this boy. You know that love, the way a child can fill a heart.
Pin is pre-teenage-scowly, dismissive. ‘It was nothing, Dad, a silly mistake.’
Through love a king is made a slave.
And now the father turns to what stole the son. He scrutinises the general stain of your children and they shrink back at what is vivid in his face. Hate. They are rats, mosquitoes, swattable, nothing; beneath human. And hatred at the leaking of your ways into his son, at the daring to lure him across. But there is something else too and you lean: it is the look of someone threatened. You saw exactly that face, years ago, as a child yourself, in the father of a girl in your class who was pushed to be the best and he never let up with his pushing and one day you beat her in a test and then did it again, and her father marked you out from that time, marked you out with his hatred, wanted you vanished from the grand plan of his daughter’s life. Grownups aren’t meant to look at children like that but they do. And in Pin’s embarrassed scowl now is the beginning of something this man dreads. A boy newly questioning the ideology that has spined his entire existence; journeying into the terrain of skittery, independent thought. And their holy book above all holy books thunders against the tempters who whisper into hearts.
Question everything
, oh yes.
Though they learn it all by heart, but fail to study its import — learning by rote — they do so to their lasting hurt and ill.
The man brisks over to a desk. He takes a small pistol from his drawer, a Tokarev with a mother-of-pearl handle, obviously cherished; he aims it aims it at Tidge’s head. This man is an affront to his god. Undo this dark, undo it.
Mouse begins to speak.
‘Silence,’ the man erupts.
‘Dad,’ his son interjects.
‘Watch this, son.’
‘They’re just kids.’
‘No, you don’t understand, it’s not what they do now it’s what they’ll grow into. Do unto them now as they shall do to us tomorrow, remember,’ and he is quoting the words of your own people, what you have said many times yourself. ‘Have you forgotten what they have done to us?’
‘They’re my friends, Dad. They’re just kids.
Listen
to me.’
But he does not respond, does not hear; one less of them one less and you were that once, you recognise it; wanted them all removed, gone from your life, he as grubby as you, both of you, both.
Offensive acts come back upon the evil doer like dust that is thrown against the wind.
‘Sir, permission to speak,
sir!
Everyone turns. It is the captain who dealt with Motl.
‘Granted.’
The doctor annoyed, not wanting interruption, enjoying this.
‘There’s a doll’
‘What?’
‘A suspicious object, sir. They weren’t going to give it up. And now … it’s gone.’
‘Where is it?’
Your kids look at each other, blank.
‘Where?’ The doctor grabs Mouse’s vest; panic floors your boy, he shakes his head in terror, doesn’t know. ‘We need it right now,’ the doctor says. ‘Who left it behind? Who else is in on this? If one of you doesn’t tell me right now who left it behind I’m going to deal with each of you one by one. Starting with … him.’
Tidge. Your beautiful shining boy. Unfinished business of course. And doesn’t a person’s behaviour tell you exactly where they are spiritually, whether they’re rattling and unhinged and empty or filled with light? You breathe in this little man like ash and flame and it scalds your throat for this is a person who once had three hundred killed, as a birthday gift, every two minutes, in the back of the head; you have heard of it. And now, and now. Your son’s eyes. Eight years old. His whimper. The pistol at the beautiful plane of his temple you’ve grazed so much with your lips.
‘Who left it?’ The pistol moves closer, harder, your boy sobs.
‘Tell
me.’
‘It was me.’
His brother steps strongly forward and looks the man straight in the eye.
‘I did. I left it.’
‘Well, you fool’
And with the full force of an adult hand Mouse is hit across the face.
He falls back. With a blow to his head. On the punishing edge of the jade desk.
As if heaven itself has sucked in its breath.
Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.
your broken little boy
pale as flour on his back and still
so still
so still
legs and arms wrong
then blood, now blood, blood.
from the back of his skull.
slow … a single stream
Put on the whole armour of God.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
.
From his brother; from his sister.
But louder and longer from someone else.
Pin.
‘He was my friend. I
told
you.’
His mouth as indignant as an opera singer’s, a web of wet.
Men loved darkness rather than light.
A soldier bursts into the room. ‘Sorry, got held up.’ Grinning like a little boy. Something under his arm. Everyone looking.
‘What is that?’ Pin’s father.
‘A doll.’ The soldier laughs. ‘The kids had it. It must have dropped on the floor.’ He tosses Motl’s doll across to the captain, who catches it by a leg, strides across to Mouse, and kicks him.
‘Fool,’ he hisses, ‘idiot.’
As if your world has stopped.
At your boy.
What he has done.
His mad sacrifice.
One shall be taken and the other left.
Out of the stunned silence softly but gathering force Tidge’s wailing comes; it goes on and on, it does not stop; a cry of the most agonising distress. Souls, angry souls, feel close.
‘Get out,’ the doctor orders the soldiers.
Tidge drops to his brother’s crazy enormous impetuous heart and hovers his hand over it, can hardly bear to touch, then lies down next to him as close as he can, breathing him in, and slings his arm over him and cries, ‘Mousie,’ but a cloud bank shifts across your boy’s face; it is going to another place, there is a stately progression from sun into shadow and Soli drops down and lifts his head and cradles its terrible flop. Her other hand finds Mouse’s and entwines it in hers, a hanky to her wet face, and Tidge looks up at Pin’s father: ‘Please return my heart,’ says his face, ‘which you have just wrenched out with a filthy fist.’
I shall so softly all my years in the bitterness of my soul.
A roaring silence.
Only when he knows does he say that he knows.
‘We need a doctor.’ Soli, soft.
‘My father is a doctor.’ Pin cries. ‘Ask him what a noble kind he is. Show us, Dad. Be the hero. I want to see it.’
‘I will not let you win this,’ Tidge shouts, sweeping up the doll and slipping it under his brother’s arm then rising before them half the person he was minutes ago but standing before them someone new, a warrior of his blood. Stripped of all his silliness, grown up. Pin stands strong beside hin, shoulder to shoulder.
The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge.
But your beautiful broken boy. Mouse’s pale face, his eyelids shining. Tidge and Soli now cradle his looseness in their arms and breathe him in like a first cigarette, breathe in the sharpness of his slipping but his beautiful face is stopped, the wind picks up, a window slams shut; his eyes flicker under his lids, back and forth, back and forth, as if he’s witnessing the most astonishing sight; he doesn’t look distressed, he’s embracing whatever is ahead, striding strongly into it.
‘Come on, dude,’ his siblings plead. ‘Come on.’
Your wild love, your wild love.
He wakes.
He
wakes
.
‘I’m starving. What’s to eat?’
It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
Four children. Laughing and laughing. A great audacious glee pushing through them.
They try to shut it off but cannot.
It is life.
So much life in this room.
In their hearts.
Pin laughs longest and loudest, he cannot stop. The room is ringing with his clear, unstoppable force and his father is staring at a sound he hasn’t heard for so long, at this new son in his life, at the fresh child,
child
, broken out. The wonder of it.
Think of this picture as they now travel: the million candles in the sky lit and singing.
‘We need a bandage,’ Pin says, still laughing.
And so here they are. Father and son standing face-to-face with a great churning in them both. Each poised on the cusp of awareness. Each, unmoving.
‘We need a bandage,’ Pin repeats. ‘You’re a doctor.’ Wordlessly it is the father who eventually walks away. He retrieves a first-aid kit from a drawer of his desk. Wordlessly it is he who wraps a bandage around your boy’s head. When he is finished he goes to a jade panel and presses his body into it and closes his eyes as if he is trying to press out an enormous weight. An elderly man suddenly. With a ruined kind of brokenness in his face. The stillness of a warrior who has just had a crushing loss, who has never had a defeat of such magnitude in his life. Because it involves the one thing he controlled the most. He has had to surrender, to get his son back, to save the grand plan of his life.
As drops of water eventually fill a pot, so is an unskilful man eventually filled with cares.
But Pin has not finished.
‘Let them go, Dad.’
His father blinks, slowly, all the winter in his heart back.
‘Just let them walk out of here?’
‘They’re no one. And they’ve been through enough. Let them off, just this once.’
‘Do unto them what they will surely tomorrow do unto us.’ But weary now.
‘Maybe they’ll be so grateful they’ll never consider it.’
‘Oh yes. It always happens like that.’
‘What’s happened to you? Who
stole
you?’ The boy walks up to his father, firmer, stepping into a new self. ‘If you don’t let them go I’m walking out of this room and never coming back.’
His father snorts in disbelief.
‘I’m so sick of living like this.’
‘What about the man downstairs, being interrogated as we speak?’
‘Perhaps he was telling the truth. I wanted someone to play with. I dragged them into this. He came in to find them and they all got caught.’
‘It’s gone too far, son.’
‘I will leave you. I will disgrace our house. I’ve read our holy book. It says to love not to hate and you and your men, you all change the words and turn it into something else.’ And without another word Pin turns on his heels in disgust and
walks out. An act of glorious, mad, courageous independence and you long to tell Motl of it, to feel the room fill with his air punch because compassion can still be found and he needs to know, he’d lost faith, it was all in his cling on that final night at Salt Cottage as he curled around his children and held them tight, so tight, and didn’t want to set them loose, didn’t trust the world anymore, had lost hope.
Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness but a sign of strength.
