Tidge flops on the bed. ‘Food glorious food,’ he cackles.
Mouse looks across in despair: he’s not getting it. G rattles the key and he swivels at the efficient click and spins and spins the doorknob then stalks to the one person who may, just may, know something about what’s going on. ‘What is happening?’
But Soli’s face is closed for business, the shutters are down, it can’t be read. Her shoulders are tight like she’s battening down an explosive force, some fearful secret she’ll never let out. She turns to the vaulting sky, to the stately migration of clouds and sucks a stem of hair furiously, as if it holds the taste of home; of certainty and parents and a rightful childhood when everything was all right and she didn’t have to do this.
‘Tell us!’ her brother commands.
Soli leans further to the sky.
He holds his palms to his head and begins to yell in frustration.
‘Be patient, you,’ she says calmly, ‘we’ve made it. We’re safe. Be grateful for what you’ve got.’
Mouse covers his ears trying to shut the know-it-all out because his sister’s not in the habit of saying be patient, you, in that silky mummy voice, she’s not entitled to it yet. He grabs a chunk of her hair with an explosion of savage intent. Pulls. She screams. Strands break. ‘Well, that’s the split ends dealt with,’ he declares in triumph.
His sister punches him, equally as violent, yelling that their father wanted them to stay put and listen to B and that’s all she knows, all she was told and you know why? ‘Because he didn’t want us doing anything we shouldn’t. Like running away. Or not listening. Or pulling hair. Brat’
Mouse comes back for more, kicking and punching his sister, all feralled up. ‘Tell us what’s going on, tell us.’
She’s had enough. ‘That’s all you’re good for, isn’t it? Biting and scratching. Nothing useful. You, you … thing. You weren’t meant to be born. You weren’t meant to be with us. The doctor said you weren’t worth it. Never forget that.’
Silence, as if the air itself has flinched.
Your three children stare at each other in horror, at the words coming out, at everything soured up so fast. Oh, girl girl girl. She always has that arrow-aim of swift, attacking talk. And she’s right. You were told to abort the second twin in utero, it was feeding off the healthy child’s food supply, it would save the bigger one; ‘it was for the best.’ You couldn’t. That tiny heart, beating so fast, that fierce little life. The insistence of it. You’d had a miscarriage two months before their conception and you’ll never forget the swamping, crippling grief of it. ‘Cry, and cry again,’ the nurse told you gently as your womb was being scraped out. ‘It’s a bereavement, love.’ Oh yes.
The boys were never supposed to know but your daughter found out, and let it slip. And in the howl of the learning you rocked your younger boy and kissed the beautiful double cream of the back of his neck, you nuzzled that warm, soft nape and told him he was wanted so fiercely, so much. But he wailed over and over, ‘Mummy doesn’t love me.’
‘No, darling, sssh, you’re here because we love you so much.’
But from that day onwards your daughter’s words have been like a splinter under his skin that can never be pulled out, a hurt that will never stop. And what do you know, it’s all been freshened up.
‘Where are they?’ Mouse wails to her now, defeated, the only question left he can push out.
‘I don’t know,’ she replies, exhausted.
The boys know she’s speaking the truth.
A new silence, thick.
As they take it in.
The enormousness of the alone.
In this parent-bleached place.
What we sneak becomes the house we live in.