Now in their room a new dance begins.
Your children’s aim is to ensnare this child from the other side, so he’ll never betray them, never give them up. Ensnare him with friendship and trust.
The doctor’s boy loves the television. They let him perform a series of operations. He manages, miraculously, a scratch of jittery lines and as he hums away, absorbed, you can sense him revelling in this secret new life. Does he have his own TV? ‘Dad doesn’t allow it.’ Of course. Devout. Walled up. A life rigidly censored, controlled. The path mapped out: a religious school until he was placed under quarantine, an impressionable young mind corralled by holy books. Dependent thought, oh yes.
Yet here he is now, diving deep. As if he’s heard about these people but has never seen one up close. Examining the tattoos drawn in pen on arms, your daughter’s earrings, the feral hair, clothes, examining the TV like an eighteenth-century surgeon learning from a corpse.
Smart, and you hate that. Always want your kids to be the best. He wears glasses. Talks fast. Uses complicated words, must be often among adults. Can’t quite get his head around Soli’s vibrant, unknowing ripeness; reddens, often, at her glance.
‘This place doesn’t let in the sky,’ he declares, annoyed, patting the walls of their room like a horse’s flank. Perhaps he craves, just like your lot, out; all of them trapped by the adults in their lives. Some people are a force of nature but he’s the opposite, he looks like he’s spent his entire life in a van with the windows blacked out. All gangly legs and arms, pale, bereft of muscle and tone, watchful, hungry for experience, vividly alone. Just like your childhood once.
You pray as you watch this taut, careful ballet unfolding that his edges have been softened, somewhere, that he’s been mellowed by sorrow at some point. Because that will give him compassion. And will give your kids a chance. It’s too early to call. You worry about your elder son the most, his enormous, open-hearted trust. Because with that comes loose talk.
What went ye out into the wilderness to see?