The Book of Rapture

by Nikki Gemmell

  Motl looks around, shakes sleep from his head. Sees Pin. ‘What the—’

  ‘We’ll look after him,’ Soli says, ‘just go! She pushes her father to the door. ‘Come on,’ she yells into his resisting weight.

  ‘I can’t.’ He squats close to her face. Brushes her cheek, slowly, with his thumb; all the world’s tenderness in it. ‘I promised your mother I’d never abandon you.’

  She pummels him. ‘Just go,’ her voice choked.

  Tidge grabs the doll, throws it onto the trolley, pushes it against the door and locks the wheels.

  ‘It’s no use,’ Pin smirks, ‘it’s not keeping anyone out.’ His heart now closed whereas once — at flopping on their bed, at throwing a ball — it was open, full, soft.

  ‘You’ — your daughter turns on him — ‘what happened to the Getters? To no one gets left behind?’

  He bats her away.

  ‘We weren’t harming anyone. We just want our parents back. You have no idea what it’s like.’ She points at Motl. ‘He’s never hurt anyone, he’s good, he has a heart.’ She thumps her palm at her chest.

  ‘I do too,’ Pin yells back. ‘I trusted you.’

  ‘Well, if you do have a heart,’ Motl says evenly, ‘then show it.’

  And quick as a flash he’s behind him and whipping off his watch like a Fagin who’s perfected the technique through years of silky theft. It’s thrown onto the bed. Motl then places his hand firmly around the boy’s mouth and kicks the trolley away. Tidge grabs the doll. Mouse the memory box. Unlocks the door.

  They’re off. They have a chance.

  Guide our feet unto ways of peace.

  125

  The small wedge of dark under the stairs. Footsteps above, pounding. One set stops on the step above them, patrolling an escape route, the rest run to the deserted room. ‘What the …’ A frustrated shout. The door is kicked. Pin’s eyes shine a new hardness in the dark. Sweat trickles. Balances on the end of Tidge’s nose. He needs to sneeze. Reaches across to Mouse’s hand and wipes the sweat with it and does not let go as feet, so many, race along corridors and kick in doors. The last pair step out of the abandoned room. Slowly, trying to work them out. The footsteps stop. Silence. Too long. Mouse shuts his eyes and mouths go away go away and the footsteps move off with thinking in their steps.

  Unfurl the relief! Like a banner pluming into bright air! They are safe, they are safe.

  The footsteps brisk up the steps and the noises fade and your little group uncurls except for the hand still firmly around Pin’s mouth. Then Tidge steps back. Hard onto Mouse’s foot. Who swallows a yelp. But drops the memory box.

  It crashes to the ground.

  They can only watch.

  But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness.

  126

  So. This. The footsteps stopping, turning back. Your little group, your precious little group, cornered. Motl smiling his cheeky smile as the security forces, so many, gather around them. ‘You took your time.’ He checks his watch. ‘Six minutes. What do you reckon, team?’ He looks at the children, grabs Pin warmly by the shoulders. ‘See, it works.’

  The soldiers bristle. ‘Leave the boy alone,’ the commander says. ‘Move away’ A face that sinks your heart. Because it is like a fully human man is not there at all, the person inside has been lost.

  ‘It’s a game.’ Motl chuckles. ‘We wanted to see if that fancy watch of his really works.’

  The captain’s eyes peer hard at Pin then hard into the rest of them.

  ‘They’re all mates,’ Motl goes on. ‘The boy wanted some friends. He ordered them in. Takeout, if you like. ‘I’m with them. We’re just mucking about.’ A bubble of pink emerges from Motl’s mouth and is smartly popped and his eyes do not waver nor the calm in his voice.

  ‘Back, behind us,’ the leader barks and obediently Pin scuttles to the rear without looking at any of his friends and in his silence all your original suspicions are firmed: that he was going to do this all along, that he’s his father’s son, that the city will be rid of its rats, that they will win this.

  And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees.

  127

  Your body. Caving in upon itself. Because now they are lined up against the tiles. Spaced too far apart. Not allowed to touch. Your good man and each of your children so small and thin, as pale as bone, too young for this. Their shoulder blades where their angel’s wings once were are pressed hard into the cold and Mouse needs his father’s hand now, so much, he’s drumming his fingers in a nervous shake, reaching across, and now, and now, a gun is at each of them, each, all aimed straight into their huge racing hearts.

  So.

  It has come to this.

  What men do.

  To children.

  And good men.

  Mine hour is not yet come.

  Mine hour is not yet come.

  Mine hour is not yet come.

  Mine hour is not yet come.

  128

  ‘What’s really going on here?’

  There is a smallness about the captain, a terrible banality; he could have been an accountant in a former life. But he has a gun. And that, of course, changes everything. Your husband is elegantly calm, even daring another bubble-gum pop.

  ‘I haven’t a clue what their real names are. They’ve forgotten them. They could be anyone, from any side, any religion, they’re shell-shocked. Your boy’ — he indicates Pin — ‘saw them and snuck them in. They play together. I’ve come to get my lot out, I don’t want them here, I want them back on the streets.’ He sighs. ‘I like kids. I help them. They help me … forget.’

  ‘Who are you all?’

  ‘I found them on the street. They’ve been living rough. They have names, nicknames, that’s all I know.’ And he gives the secret family names that only the two of you use for them, to comfort, to cherish, to envelop, that are sewn deep into the fabric of this quilt and into your heart. And the captain raises his gun and your Motl grins his easy roguish smile and says, ‘Let them go; as for me, well, you can do what you want,’ and at that, the butt of the pistol is rammed hard at his face.

  His beautiful face.

  A rag doll, sliding into a stop, eyes rolling, so much blood so much blood so much blood. All the children rush to him but, ‘Don’t!’ the captain barks, whipping the pistol back. ‘Get him out,’ he says to a sidekick and your Motl’s weight is lifted by two soldiers like a sack of rubbish now and one soldier doesn’t have a proper grip and your man, your darling man, is slipping messily to the floor and is hauled up again and pulled along the corridor, with great effort, as if his entire body has sucked into it some enormous, unearthly weight, his final taunt, and his feet in their old green sneakers are dragged through the sticky wet, so much, smearing it in great red streaky tyre tracks and his rag doll slump follows the black pipes of the ceiling that disappear into the building’s dark humming heart and he raises his head, once, and that gives you hope, there is life, life, life, and then his sneakers bounce like a puppet’s and turn a corner and snag and are yanked free and are gone. Gone.

  Everything, suddenly, is very still. As if something has been blown out. A great goodness, a huge force.

  ‘Daddy!’ Tidge howls, ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.’

  The angels know you well.

  129

  So. Now this. Your three children. It is as if they have been suspended on an ocean liner docked by a wharf and have been holding their streamers tight and the crepe paper has been stretching and stretching but suddenly it has broken, fluttered off, and the ship is now pulling away and they are departing on a journey across a dark ocean to goodness knows what. Alone. The captain comes up close. Mouse’s lip shakes. The man tries wrenching the doll from Tidge but Mouse yells no and Soli lunges and they cling like animals possessed. ‘Interesting.’ The man steps back. He turns to the memory box. Mouse holds it tighter. The captain signals a soldier, the man grabs it, Mouse will not let go, the soldie
r wrenches. Mouse bites him.

  A blow. Across his head. He’s all right, okay, he’s trying to right himself, the boxer determined not to drop. A trickle slides like an egg down his head; he holds up his hand: it is blood. But the box he will not let go of and a man is prising his fingers from it and his knuckles are bone-white. A karate chop. The memory box is dropped. He presses his hands hard into his head as if he’s trying to stop bits coming out and his legs give way and from the ground he watches as fevery fingers tear through your box; hands fling earrings and rip apart the manicure set, flick your last spotty teacup at the wall and smash it to bits; all going, everything lost, every last bit of your Salt Cottage life. But you have prepared for this. Nothing can give them away; it is all anonymous.

  The captain wheels around, grabs your girl and pulls her roughly to him. Hello hello, he says, this is what I was looking for, and holds out her chin in a savage V. Breathes hard into her and yanks back her hair exposing her lovely, pale, vulnerable neck and he stretches out an earlobe and rubs up close.

  But her ears.

  Of course.

  They’ve won.

  Suddenly cold, and tired, and extinguished. Because they now have their excuse to disappear the children too.

  Soli has pierced ears.

  She did it with her best friend when she was nine, with a needle and a potato and an icy pole to numb the pain, because she wanted to be a pop star when she was grown up. But the religion of these people teaches them that to change God’s gift of a body in any way, to prick it or pierce it or colour it, is a sin. Ear piercings always give you away; and tattoos, and face lifts, and dyed hair. It was why the screw-on earrings were the only ones you’d put into the memory box.

  The contempt in the man’s face, and something else — as he rubs up close to your beautiful, vivid, enchanting girl — the dirt in it.

  Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.

  130

  Raw, open to the bitter wind, skinned. You drop to your knees. You shut your eyes.

  Who is on my side? Who?

  131

  ‘The Collection Room. Now.’ The Collection Room. The Collection Room. And what, pray, do they collect in it? Tears, confessions, blood? The shift of his men tells you it is not a place for children. The yell of Mouse’s thinking. He can’t take it any more, it’s too hard; he shivers, it consumes his tiny frame; his lips are shaky like he’s just come out of a freezing pool and there’s no towel and the wind’s hurting and he’s going to cry because it’s the only thing left and he looks across to Soli and sobs, now, it’s all coming out.

  ‘Wait.’

  A tiny voice. Somewhere up the back.

  ‘You can’t.’

  Pin. Stepping strongly through his men. ‘Not the Collection Room. Not that.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ The captain smiles, incredulous.

  Pin takes a deep breath. ‘That man. He was right.’

  Everything, suddenly, is very quiet. As if the world has caught its breath.

  ‘They’re just kids. From the street. I wanted to play. I saw them. I brought them in. This is all my fault.’ He wipes his palms on his trousers. ‘I want it stopped now. Please.’

  ‘What would your father make of this?’

  Pin lifts his chin. ‘My father. Yes. He’ll deal with it.’

  A tic in the leader’s eyelid begins to jump. ‘Yes, he will, absolutely.’ He nods.

  So, the doctor. You knew it would one day come to this. From the moment that boy stepped into their lives. There is only one conclusion; you can hardly bear to think of it. For you know that man better than his son. For you are an adult.

  And after the fire a still small voice.

  132

  Now, a room long gone from your country’s life.

  The walls jade. The floor jade. The ceiling jade.

  Your children bunch back, spooked, then like horses at water hesitantly step in. Disbelieving, wondrous, for it is like walking underwater in a shimmering light. Your elder boy laughs out loud despite himself, at the outrageous beauty before him; he forgets himself and runs to a wall and smooths a hand along it in amazement: such secret gorgeousness, in a city so smashed. How? Enormous jade panels have been peeled away from some palace long lost and meticulously pieced back together, from some time long ago when beauty was seen as the pinnacle of human life and the supreme manifestation of godliness and your poor broken country was so good at that once. Beauty, to soar people’s hearts. But now. A land where gardeners and flower beds have been abolished as frivolous, along with galleries of antiquities and the film industry and multiple channels on television sets.

  But this. A room flooded with sunlight. Three tall windows standing like sentinels across from your children. Outside, a beckoning blue. The three of them step further into this room, open-mouthed, closer, closer to out.

  Babylon is fallen, fallen, that great city.

  133

  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.

  134

  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 hur
t and ill.

  135

  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.

  136

  ‘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.’