‘What’s going on?’ Soli asked with a new maturity, a brother in each hand.
Your knuckles were little snow-capped mountains as you gripped your husband tight. Dread in your stomach like sickness. What to tell them? Yes, you were being recalled. A matter of national urgency. And the kids, the kids were to be ‘relocated’ whatever that meant. What not to tell them? That you knew these people in command. Men who had lost their light hearts. Knew the cruellest thing they could do to a woman, to get her to talk, was to hurt the children in some way and have the mother witness it. The shredded state of your country now felt like an offence against the natural order of things and by God you would not give these people the chance, you would not.
And then the extraordinary part, and you can still scarcely believe it. Motl had wheedled one last night at home. Alone, with just the family. Because he had once tutored the soldier-in-command and had made him laugh and had given him an extension on his final paper when his mother was dying of cancer and had even written a condolence note and it was all remembered, that. His gentleness was trusted. He’s that kind of person. He shines goodness and people are drawn to it.
But so little time. A night, one night to reconfigure your life. What to tell the kids? What not? That their wind-licked little house would now be someone else’s. A start, yes, they would have to face it, this was how your country now worked. ‘Pardon?’ Mouse yelled in disbelief. An enormous rage at the unfairness of it all took over him and he slid down a wall, and became a howl. Roared great choking sobs. As abandoned as a toddler in a crowd.
‘This is the magic house. We’re safe here, we’re safe. You said.’
You looked wildly around at your family and put your hands over your ears and ran outside, couldn’t bear it any more, the news or the noise, ran down to the beach, to the kelp-heavy waves heaving their load, to a gull that didn’t move on the sand as the water rushed hungrily around its legs and didn’t move as you stood there breathing deep, didn’t move as you sucked in the sharpness of the air as if you were filling up your body. This land was your cathedral. Its yowling hurting ringing light. It held your heart hostage; you dreamed of being slipped into its soil like a sacrament upon death. And now you were being ripped from it. And every one of your little family. Because of your past catching up.
God’s beauty has split me wide open.
Behind you on that beach, Motl’s voice. ‘Stay back, leave her alone.’ You turned just in time to catch Soli — a flinty ball of fury — punching her father hard in the stomach. Ramming into him all her rage at his hesitation and mildness, all her rage at the teasing little boy inside him that sometimes riles you both so much.
‘Who says to leave her alone? If it wasn’t for you we’d be out of this country by now. You were going to do it but you never got around to it. If it wasn’t for you we’d be safe.’
He didn’t say, no, actually, it was your mother who got us into this. Have you ever loved him so fiercely? But suddenly, an old man. Without any words. Who did only this.
He bent down. Held Soli tight. Clamped her furious churn in his arms and stilled it and stilled it until all the sobbing was gone and she went limp.
Where is he now? Your good, gentle man who you never valued enough. You shut your eyes at the memory of him pushing into your skin. Resolve melting like water thrown over ice in a sink. Opening out like a flower as he unlocked you into life. Your want is unsinkable, undrownable; like a bottle corked it will travel the world searching for him, for shelter and shore, for vast rest. The man who brewed happiness into your life. When a marriage works there’s nothing more soldering and you were given the gift of it. You were so different yet it worked; if you didn’t have him there’d be no one else you’d want. He’d endured so much throughout the years, been battered again and again, but you know now that there are people who teach with their quiet grace. How to endure. By their courage and evenness. They help us to find our own strength.
And now you are alone.
Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.
Mouse writes to stay awake deep into this vulnerable night.
1. Door. QUIET LIKE SOME TOMB when I press my ear into it. Why? Soundproofed?
2. Walls. THICK AND COLD. Okay. Like they’re collecting all the chill of all the nights into them and holding it in tight like the cold in some COFFIN down deep in the ground.
3. Bathroom. Hmm. FRESHLY PAINTED. Who was here before us? What went on?
Thinking too much. Because the room they’re in is a basement and basements are where things happen. They’re not used to half-below-ground level. They live up close to a huge clean sky, a big dramatic one, under the thumb of the weather. The sun in their bones. Your daughter’s had a dream, for years now, of being trapped under the earth; of hearing close above her a child’s thudding running and a distant bird and squeaky needles of grass being pulled up and the deep breathing of someone who’s flopped belly down and is soaking up the warm lovely sunshine, completely oblivious to her underneath, scrambling and panicking and unable to get out. It never fails to whoosh her into waking with a pounding heart.
4. Window. Glass that’s NEVER going to break.
They tried. The three of them tested it with a chair after the rattling doorknob came but it wouldn’t smash, bend, give one bit.
The kind of glass you can see out of but not into. CREEPY.
Two layers of it with dead flies in between. Their feet twined like ballerinas.
Who was here before us? Did they get out? HOW?
Your lair of lost children under the earth. And all you can do is watch.
Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.
Motl became someone else after the soldiers left. He appeared in the kitchen with pyjamas poking from trouser legs and his old green sneakers without socks. He spray-painted I BET YOU MISS above the basketball hoop on the garage. He strode around the house with a book by Kafka like a vicar with a Bible clutched at his chest. He chopped onions while wearing swimming goggles and muttered under his breath.
‘Don’t worry,’ you said breezily to the kids, ‘Dad’s just sorting things out.’
‘Yay!’ the boys squealed. Because to them, he’s the champion at that. The chief surgeon at the toy hospital where patients are checked in overnight and by morning limbs are secured and remote controls have sprung into life.
But as you watched those onions being methodically attacked you couldn’t help throw across, ‘I prefer to cry, mate.’
‘Be quiet, be quiet, I’m thinking,’ your husband exploded.
You all went quiet. For the depth of Motl’s anger was shocking. You’d never seen it before and you thought you knew him so well. Thought, suddenly, my God, who is this man? You didn’t recognise him at all, he was someone new.
A person who the world had caught out, yes. A man whose finely crafted code of goodness, that had spined his whole life, had been overturned in the blink of an eye. He used to say that a gentleman always does the