The Book of Rapture. Nikki Gemmell

fat to fly, who opened doors and stood on buses and wrote thank you notes. You married him for all that. He attracted extreme people like a magnet because of his core of stability and quiet. But those types of men now seemed soft and naïve and weak. In this new, sour-spirited world, people like Motl were swallowed up. And he knew it.

       Ask your heart to decide; righteousness is what the soul and the heart feel tranquil about; and sinfulness is what is fixed in the soul, and roams about in the breast.

       25

      Mouse makes another expedition and another back to his sleeping brother and sister. He slips his arm over them both and burrows close. A skin diver, diving in, cupping his brother’s serenely heaving chest and breathing in his slumbering deep, deep, wanting some of that trust to rub off. Tidge’s crossed his fingers and Mouse unlocks them and they wait for a beat then spring back. Mouse chuckles. His would never do that, you’d need pliers to pull them apart.

      Hey. Mum talked to us about pale rooms like this. Once.

      You did, yes. Creamy rooms from your college days. After you’d drunk a bottle of champagne Motl had smuggled home because he knew it would soar your heart and perhaps, with luck, turn you into the woman he remembered once. He burst through the door holding high his prize and you smiled with your eyes just slits like a cat with the warmest sill of sun. Then you summonsed them all to your high wide bed and were transformed into someone else. Young again, light, loose. And Motl was all cackly with glee as he handed across your last, cherished, bone china teacup, the one with the red spots, but it was full of champagne.

      Then the stories came. Of university days when your country was something else. Of houses with roaring fires whose heat made your face go tight. Of windows three storeys high looking over oceans of green. Of carpets so soft you could sleep on them. And you did, long ago, at parties that began at midnight and lasted until dawn where you’d dance barefoot and dance until the softness of the floor pulled you down. And you’d wake beside people who were astonished to learn there were two ten o’clocks in the day, who never knew the meaning of grubbily grey clothes that had been white once or of plates crazed with cracks. Because those kinds of people lived lives of a delicate shade of cream. Which is exactly this waiting place.

      But no, not exactly.

      Because back then there was always a way out. A spider of fear picks its way up your spine. Those were days before Project Indigo, before all Motl’s wariness over the direction it was heading in and where it was dragging your family let alone yourself.

      ‘I’m just not comfortable with what you’re doing any more. Religion gives you a framework to work in, and you scientists are creating this new priestly caste which seems every bit as arrogant and condescending as the old lot. Eh?’ He poked you in the stomach for affirmation. ‘I’m just not sure that humans are capable of a morality outside religion. Who, madam, is fencing you in? Anyone?’

      ‘So you’ve found God, my love, after decades of intelligent rationalism?’

      ‘Look, as a scientist, I’ve come across no evidence of a God existing. But I haven’t come across any evidence of he or she not existing, and I’m intrigued by that. We have to understand that there are things in this world we cannot understand.’

      You snorted your disgust.

      Motl laughed. ‘You lefty liberals are the most narrow-minded of the lot. So judgemental and indignant, bursting with all your pompous, righteous certainty. Extremely vulnerable, Missy, to your sheep-like opinions, don’t you think? Urgh. All rattly and hollow and … un-calm … yes.’

      ‘You believe in superstition, mate, I believe in fact.’

      ‘I just can’t quite believe that order came out of chaos, that’s all.’ He shrugged. ‘The idea that God has created human beings makes more sense to me than he hasn’t. Science isn’t the only way to truth, my love. It can’t actually explain how our world came into being. All the extraordinary complexity of it.’

      ‘So you’ve found religion.’

      ‘Not quite. Let’s just say I’m surrendering to the mystery. There’s a lot of solace I’m finding in my books. And I’m loving the journey, Mrs,’ and he padded off to his study, full of chuff.

       Let your diet be spare, your wants moderate, your needs few. So, living modestly, with no distracting desires, you will find content.

       26

      A thud. Outside their door. Mouse gasps. Eyes wide, rabbit-still. Until he was five he’d pad into your room when the terrors of night became too much. You’d open out the duvet and sling him in close and he’d nestle against you like a door jamb to a door and you’d smile at the hot firm wedge of him and wish it would go on forever and want it now, so much. Everything’s worse after dark when the fear crowds in. Those strange bumps and scrapes outside their door are like secrets being shifted in the dead of night and your boy is rigid with fear.

      You long for rest. That moment of grace every night in Salt Cottage when you’d tiptoe into their bedroom and the short, sharp shock would come; alone, every night, standing in that room that was filled with the sleep of your children. Just … breathing them in. Then a great warmth would flood through you, an enormous, glittery, heart-swelling gratitude, and you’d find yourself closing your eyes in unstoppable thanks. Prayer is gratitude, oh yes. You never told Motl of those luminous moments, can’t understand what combusted within him, resolutely do not believe yet want to, need to, at times. Religion may be a delusion but it’s a delusion of solace and there’s something to be said for that. Yes, it may be all lies and creaky myth but what is this stillness that steals through you in moments, what? The short, sharp shock of it.

       There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple.

       27

      You drove that last afternoon at Salt Cottage. The five of you. Not too far because there would be roadblocks up ahead and none of you was completely convinced about that former student’s heart. But far enough. A brisk breeze buffeted the car like a boat in a wind-tossed sea and you said to Motl to stop, you were going to be sick, and stumbled out and straightened and stood there tall with the stiff wind skating off the plain but flinch you would not, break you would not. Breathing in the spite of it but not bending, not giving an inch, tears streaming down your cheeks. That was the core of you then, holding your face to that sting and that hurt. Fury had become your glowing nub. The embers were intense and they would never soften out.