The fear plague has come, it has hit.
And all you can do is stand here helpless in the wings of these words with your greedy, voluptuous love haemorrhaging out.
Nothing evolves us like love.
Nothing evolves us like love. Five words. From your husband, in a whisper, from one of his books. His collection of books. The only things with you in this room of held breath, his gift of a bookshelf he was curating for his children. Tomes on every religion. So each child could one day, eventually, decide for themselves. Be a student of all of them or none. That was the plan.
Did he slip them into your suitcase at the last minute? His final surprise? Once, long ago, it was Mickey Mouse stickers all through your address book and notebook. His silent chant, in gleeful sing-song — ‘I’m he-re’ — that little giggle of impishness from your perpetual boy up the back of the class.
But now this. A dozen or more books. All that’s left from your past life. All that’s allowed. Each volume fanned with dog-ears on the bottom corners. You know his method, he’s had it since university: each turned-up page will have a tiny indentation down a phrase of interest, a thumbnail scratch to remind him to take note.
Nothing evolves us like love.
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.
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.
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