So. The three of them here. Staying because they have to. Because it can’t be just two of them escaping, because no one’s being left behind. Waiting in this room of shimmering light as two enormous wills do battle in the corridor outside and as Pin walks through the door his face tells you what you never thought you’d see: he has won.
Brim your heart.
Pin gives them the thumbs up, his eyes dance, Soli runs to the waiting blue. Holds out her palms and laughs, holds them flat to the light; drinks up the sky for it’s theirs now, soon, back. The beautiful repairing sun, any moment. The doctor comes into the room and brisks to the desk. He picks up the phone, drumming his fingers impatiently on a book.
‘How did you do it? What did you say?’ Your children fire questions as the doctor concentrates on his call, a hand shielding his forehead as if holding in an enormous headache.
‘I know something I’m not meant to,’ Pin sings in a whisper.
‘What? What?’
‘Something a lot of people want to know. And will pay a lot of money for.’
‘What?
‘I know where__________is. The exact location.’
Your children suck in their breaths. Where, exactly, the man at the heart of this endless fear plague is; the puppet master with the sad speaking eyes who has kept their world under his thumb, for years now, by a masterful manipulation of paranoia and mystery and fret, by an audacious sense of grandeur and theatrical cunning, by an unholy lust for death. The world has been searching for him for decades now; it’s not known if he’s still alive, he’s morphed into myth.
‘There was a note. A map’ — Pin grins — ‘in Dad’s pocket. I found it by mistake. I copied it. I was looking for Tic Tacs. And I’ve said to Dad that I’ve told several people who I trust where I’ve hidden the information. They don’t know exactly what’s in the envelope, but it’s somewhere in this building, and it’s to be sent on my behalf if ever I give the signal. Or if something ever happens to me. And I’ve just told Dad that if you’re set free — all of you, the four of you’ — your children gasp in joy — ‘yes, every one’ — he pokes Tidge playfully in the chest — ‘then he can have his envelope back. You’re nothing to him. And the information is priceless.’
Pin smiles a smile that in an afternoon has grown up. ‘The things I do to get you off. And those crazy siblings of yours.’ He steps back and assesses them. ‘I’m not sure it’s worth it, you know.’
You want to hold that boy for a very long time, hold him and hold him, in this crackly air, for he has sanctified himself.
A faithful friend is the medicine of life.