not a cook. Give me a Bunsen burner and you’d really see something bubble up.’ Cue Motl, cowering under the table, ‘No, no, anything but that!’).
And gradually the whining stopped because each of you knew that Salt Cottage meant one thing above anything else — survival. You were safe here, you were safe. And it was enough.
He who is an alien to grace seeks and finds naught but disgrace and adversity: if thorny brambles grow, it is the requital of his sowing.
‘Hey, I remember something now.’ Mouse presses his knuckles to his temples. ‘It’s coming … from last night…’ He’s screwing up his eyes as if trying to squeeze memory out. You lean.
‘Okay I was lying in my bed. Trying to fall to sleep. Then Dad came in. He lay down next to me and put his hand over my mouth. There was a hanky on it. He was whispering, "Sssh, little man, sssh," but his voice was full… like, like there was crying in it. And I was breathing in but feeling funny and then Dad was holding me and clamping me tight and then he was sealing off my talking and then, and then, this is the really scary bit, it was like I was slipping into this sea of the inkiest, scariest black, like some body in a coffin being slid from a ship and then the dark was crowding over me and just before I was completely under Dad was curling around me and clinging on, tight, like I was some life buoy in this vast ocean of fear …’ Your little boy looks straight at his brother and sister. Frightened eyes. A blink. ‘Then no dreams. Nothing. Just this enormous blank …’
‘Like being dead.’ Tidge, quiet.
The brothers look at each other. Pins and needles take over their eyes. They’re both blinking like two ships sending out distress signals and the crying’s coming now, a great dumping wave of it; young, so young, too young for this.
Verily every soul has as a surety a guardian over it.
On a clear still night your neighbour, Ulla Ween, came around. A man of the book, flinty and devout. His house was a mile away. He was the only neighbour close. It was a Monday. He often popped in on a Monday for a meal; he lived by himself. He’d supervised your building work with heavy eyelids and weirdly bobbed hair and lips always wet. On this particular Monday Ulla Ween sat at your kitchen table and ate a meal as he always did then licked his plate clean which he never did, and placed it carefully down. He said you’d soon be informed that Salt Cottage belonged to someone else. With a peculiar smile on his face. Like he was trying to hold in the delight. You snorted a laugh. Motl stood. Because in an instant your neighbour had become someone else. He told you that it was a correcting of past iniquities. ‘Pardon?’ You laughed again, unsure, your face not getting the joke. Without another word he tucked the dinner plate under his arm and walked out, that peculiar smile still on his face. You stood in shock. Threw your own plate after him with more physical fury than you’d ever shown in your life. The china smashed and gravy dribbled down. You had finally got the joke.
‘That is a man completely untroubled by compassion,’ you declared as you wiped your hands of him smartly on your hips.
And from that evening onward the future darkened around you, you could all feel it contract. History was close on that night; the world was pushing against the windows, beating the glass with its hungry palms; wanting in. And in the early hours you slipped into Mouse’s bottom-bunk bed and curled your arm over him and burrowed into his lovely warmth. You need to do that whenever the thinking flurries in your head too much, when you can’t hook on to sleep no matter how hard you try and there’s only one thing guaranteed to work: your children. Only they can distract you enough, balm you down into it.
Now now now. Strapped to the guilt of what you did once.
The small man builds cages for everyone he knows.
‘You know, nothing looks like it’s going to hurt us.’ Soli assesses the creamy serenity of their room. ‘It looks, actually, kind of … posh. Eh?’
‘Mum?’ Mouse asks the quiet. ‘Dad?’
Silence, as vast as a desert.
His sister gnaws at a sliver of skin on her finger. There’s blood; she pops it in her mouth. Fingers the doorknob, worrying about so much, you can tell: the rattling that’ll be back with the consistency of a playground bully and she’s meant to be the mother here and how will she get the boys through the night? Hardwired into her is caring, giving, pleasing, the female lot; as a baby she’d offer the milk bottle back to you, place it insistently in your mouth. The boys never did that. Womanhood is a condition of giving, continually, and it astounds you how early it manifests itself.
‘Maybe the rattler has left for the evening,’ she says brightly. ‘For twelve hours. At least. Until daytime.’ But her voice grows wobblier as she speaks.
Mouse hrumphs away. Scrunches his hands under his armpits. Feels his pyjama pocket. Finds Motl’s old silver pen with his name in a flourish along it. Your husband had slipped it to him as he curled around him on the final night because he knows that writing will give him solace, will firm him up. A smile opens his face. The pen he’s not meant to touch! That makes his writing come out neat! ‘Guys, look.’ He holds it high, along with a tiny notebook. ‘They were in my pocket! So perhaps … there’s a plan here.’ Tidge flops onto the bed with relief. Mouse lies belly-down on the floor and feverishly writes. ‘Tell our story, tell the truth,’ you’d whispered to your little scribe as he was deeply caught by unnatural sleep. Tell our story because erasure is what this new government is so effective at now and children have to be just as slippery as adults, they have to be wily, to think. Like grown-ups.
WE WILL GET OUT!!!!
His words shout with all the certainty of childhood.
Tidge leaps up, glee in his eyes. Tugs at the curtains. Yep, they’ll hold, they’ll do for a Tarzan rope. ‘Come on, guys!’ he rallies.
You laugh. God help this careful room. Motl and you haven’t dubbed them the Ferals for nothing. Your three vivid-hearted kids, so brimming with life. The rapture of them, the rapture; you feel haloed by light as you watch.
And now back to your own words. To stoke up your own fire, to nurture the blaze, the warmth. Back to all your husband’s books and his scribbles crowded irreverently into every sacred volume, into margins and the front of them and the back. Quotes, arguments, provocations, thoughts. Once, long ago, it was compilation cassettes; now this. What did he tell you near the end? You were barely listening, you’d tuned out. ‘Ageing has become this process of retreating from certainty, but not in a terrifying way, a wondrous way. Listen, you. In mystery lies the sublime, that’s the only way I can describe it, and it’s a shocking, transforming journey and I’m absolutely loving it. I can finally be myself. The relief of it, lovely. The relief He’d gone on some momentous journey, and you had little idea of it, had zoned out.
When I am painting I feel happy and I let the feeling take hold of my hand.
A letter arrived the day after your neighbour’s visit. A scrawl. No name attached. Someone helping out. You’d been tracked down. Would be recalled to Project Indigo. You were the missing piece of the jigsaw and it could proceed no further without you. And they were close, so close to completion. The letter urged you