The Book of Rapture Read Online Free Page A

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! Soperhaps … 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.

17
    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 to think carefully of the consequences. To consider fleeing Salt Cottage. Disappearing, fast, to somewhere you’d never be found out.
    ‘Who let on we were here?’ You scrunched up the paper and flung it into the bin.
    ‘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, boyof 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.

18
    Night unfurls. A pow-wow abruptly