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 had fed a vendetta culture and now everything was escalating to a dangerous extent; there was extreme nationalist rhetoric on both sides and your project was an explosive secret at the heart of it and it was best to slip away, disappear, forget.
So. You both decided on a new word. Measures. Your life would now swing like an ocean liner changing its course. The plan was to flee the sparkly new house until your country worked itself out. You’d all vanish in a night. The past wouldn’t find you any more; you’d be too far away, too remote. You’d find an old wreck of a place in the middle of nowhere, where your family could weather any trouble flat-broke but far away, and safe.
You whisper that lovely word now.
Safe.
It’s the most luminous word in the world, don’t you think?
When making your choice in life, do not neglect to live.
Their doorknob’s now rattling like someone wants to shake it right off.
A bang.
The door shudders. Everything is quiet. Not good quiet, creepy quiet. And the only noise is their jagged breathing too loud and they can’t still their breaths as the three of them stare at that feral door wondering what on earth it’s springing on them next. And you. Watching. Glary with guilt and helplessness, riddled with rangy light. Your middle child, Tidge, is bone white. He clutches his chest, at a mothy flittery something inside him batting away like a sparrow in a room, trying to find sky, get out. He reaches across and finds his little brother’s hand but Mouse’s pulse is leaping like a flea on steroids and Tidge winces, he’s not good with blood and bone, he can’t hold any more, lets go. ‘Thanks, dude,’ Mouse says, soft, ‘great.’ So his siblings can hear it but the person out there can’t.
His wiliness constantly surprises you. That guile of the third-born. He can’t compete physically so he’s always competed with something else. Cunning. Irony. An aware heart. One day perhaps he’ll run rings around his brother, you’ve always said that, but is he wily enough to get out of this? Can any of them? You can’t help them, they’re by themselves.
Everything ahead, wide open, like a bull on the loose.
Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
When they woke up they were in another world entirely. A room pale all over as if a big milky tongue had licked it into stillness. With a hush like all the silence of the world had gathered in it. A congregation of quiet. As if the space had been waiting patiently, just for them, its breath held like a morning frost.
‘This room doesn’t like us,’ Mouse whispered.
‘We have to get out,’ Tidge.
‘We can’t.’ Soli. Miss Practical, raising her eyebrows at the door.
‘It doesn’t like us,’ Mouse repeated.
As fear tiptoed up your spine like a daddy-long-legs.
These are the unbelievers, the impure.
Salt Cottage. That was its name. The little house purchased in the name of a friend who would never be traced back to you. Dirt roads faltered to it, lost their will and almost petered out. ‘No, no, no,’ Mouse protested on first seeing it, twisting his head as if possessed. He didn’t do rural, didn’t get it. But the land had kidnapped your heart. It was near to where you’d grown up and the sanctuary of home, the thought of its embrace as the world darkened around you,