‘Maybe it wasn’t too hard to work out,’ Motl said quietly.
He retrieved the letter and smoothed it down with his fingertips. A bell jar of quiet fell over him. The rest of you gathered at the kitchen table, hushed. He smoothed down that letter long after he’d finished reading, smoothed and smoothed it, couldn’t stop. You knew his thinking. He’d seen it all coming. He was always going to get his family away, make you one hundred per cent safe, have you emigrate. To become refugees like his sister, the professor who one day had had enough of the raids on her history department and the falling student numbers because the new slogan was The More You Read The More Stupid You Become, so what, any more, was the point. The Great Leap Back, that’s what she dubbed it as she explained why she was pulling out. Her brother’s family was to follow. Next summer, winter, year. Ah yes. Your pottering, dreamy, boy of a man. Always so good at procrastinating and sleeping in and handing his papers in late. Brilliant, yes, but. Then one day ‘getting out’ was too late — the borders were closed off. You were trapped.
And not one of you around that kitchen table said a word as Motl smoothed that letter down, smoothed it and smoothed it until it ripped. The letter shrilling at you to abandon the magic house.
We are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels.
Night unfurls. A pow-wow abruptly halts. Fury hangs in the air. Soli keeps saying, ‘It’s going to be all right,’ in a silky mother tone but it doesn’t come out right, it just winds her little brothers up. Who gave her permission to be so knowing in this place?
‘Mummy-stealer!’ Tidge shouts. ‘Stop using that voice.’
‘It’s going to be all right.’
‘But the doorknob?’ Mouse fires at her, rat tat tat. ‘And this room? And the kick?’ He’s the expert at questions and you’re always encouraging it except when a migraine’s coming and then he has to stop. ‘Everything is so not okay,’ he flings. ‘I saw your face when that key came. You had no idea what it means and no idea what’s next. There was this flinch, in your eye, it told me. It was like a music counter going tic tic tic.’
‘Everything will be okay,’ she soothes again.
Mouse storms off to the room’s cupboard and curls inside, his notebook a teddy to his chest. His brother props his elbows at the window and stares out. Your girl is abandoned. She’s failed and she so rarely does that, she’s your high achiever who likes everything to be just right. She curls on her side on the bed. The flinch in her eye going tic tic tic.
However irritated you may feel, never speak harshly.
Eventually Soli unwraps her limbs and coaxes Tidge back to her. Finally he comes. She lies with him, her arm a seatbelt over his torso. She holds and holds until he’s soothed into the release of sleep, then gingerly extracts herself and pads to the cupboard.
‘Come on, you. It’s late.’
Mouse glares. Owl-awake. ‘I’m keeping guard. Someone has to. Thank God you’ve got me in this place. A bit of gratefulness wouldn’t go astray. Like, thanks, Mouse, for watching over us.’
No way is he getting back into that bed. You know why. There’s no grown-up to insist and it’s a room he doesn’t trust, ditto a sister with a secret and a brother too accepting, who’s fallen too easily into sleep. The moon outside is a sliver of a thumbnail. As bright as a bone. He’s staying up with it, all night if he must. It’s in the set of his mouth. Your worrier. Always thinking too much, everything cutting so deep. Too glary in his head is the enormity of navigating his way through life, he finds it so hard to shut off the fear. You’re anxious about the teenager he’ll become with all that complicated energy bottled up.
Your entire life, as a mother, is about anticipation. Of accidents, trip-ups, abductions, disasters. Second-guessing that walk to the corner shop, the crossing of the road, the swim at the beach, and God help them if they ever get near a motorbike. You’ll never stop the hovering. Motl says you have to, you must learn to let go. You retort that he doesn’t worry enough.
I alone dare not seek rest. The ordinances of heaven are inexplicable but I will not dare to follow my friends and leave my post.
Tidge is vastly asleep, dangling a leg off the bed and taunting his brother with his effortless flop. Soli told him to trust and that’s exactly what he’s doing. He’s always the one who falls instantly into sleep. Motl says it’s the mark of a contented soul.
Mouse writes with a staccato pen.
Look at him. God. Typical! SUCH a believer. NEVER thinking ENOUGH.
Unlike him. And you. All the thinking haranguing you awake, night after night.
Soli’s now curled tight and troubled in unsmooth sleep. That strange-tired finally won. You long to brush the hair from her forehead and unfold all her folded bits, long to stretch her beautiful limbs back into lightness. No child should ever sleep so … condensed. Her eyes suddenly shine like marbles in the dark, she’s awake. She looks around, trying to work out where she is. Sees Mouse. Remembers.
‘I need a cuddle,’ he says, quick, even though he’s still annoyed at that mother voice she stole. But you know him. A magnet of need is pulling him into skin and warmth, any he can get. She’ll do. They hold, and hold, in this unknown dark.
So small, alone, lost.
The cuddle works, stills them both. Because even though she’s all angles and elbows and coltish length she gives the most enveloping hugs. Like you’re a hot-water bottle warming her right through and she doesn’t want to let go, ever. She’s all-calming when she holds you and you’ve never told her the gift of it. So much you’ve never said. That you marvel at Mouse’s mind, the cogs of it, the singularity of his thought. And Tidge’s robust sunniness, his ability to weather turbulence. And the joy from all of them that floods you; that you feel stronger as a mother than you ever have in your life.
He who is unaffected by transiency can be called tranquil.
The soldiers came the afternoon the letter arrived. An aching bright day of air so scrubbed it hurt. There was so little time. Behind mirrored sunglasses you couldn’t read their faces. Not even Tidge could fillet something from them and he’s the heart-lifter of the family and his smile usually works. But these men didn’t seem properly human any more, with proper hearts; their faces were set. They went straight to the study with Motl and you. The kids sat on the sofa. Found hands when the quiet became too much. Your husband asked you to leave at one point. You joined the children and quietly found two palms. Only your trembling spoke. You had just been told the other members of your research team had disappeared. ‘Been disappeared, or vanished?’ you’d foolishly joked, in shock. No response. You were the only scientist left, that’s all you knew; you, alone, could activate it.
The door finally opened and the soldiers walked out. Their sunglasses were gone.
‘What’s happening?’ the kids asked. ‘What’s going on?’
The soldiers said nothing. They left. You