‘He’s gone to find the secret room controlling the hidden camera in the telly. I know him. He’s gone to get Mum and Dad. He thinks they’re … close. He wants to rescue them. He’ll climb the crow’s-nest of this city to search them out. I know him, he’ll never stop.’
A white balloon scoots across the pavement and gusts into the air, tumbles like washing in a dryer, shrinks to a tadpole speck, a black dot, is nearly to heaven, gone.
Four little hands, splayed flat on the glass.
An enormous rush of love so fierce it hurts. When you were working in the lab you’d run, run up the driveway each night, needing to hold their hot squirmy bodies close, to smell them, bundle them up, all that bursting lovely life. How to bottle it? Oh, for that morning again when you were leaving for work and your lovely elder boy farewelled you at the door and called you back for another kiss and then another and instructed you gravely to buy a sandwich before you got to the office then kissed you again and you felt weighted with grace.
‘He’s petrified of being broken,’ Mouse murmurs.
‘I know.’ We all do. Am I broken? he panics whenever he trips or knocks his head, quick, am I broken? And you have to check for blood and tell him it’s not so bad because he’s terrified of the sight. ‘I have this vision of him out there somewhere, broken,’ Mouse says. And there’s no one to help. No one to say, hey, it’s nothing. Even though it is, I bet, I bet.’
Forty minutes. Your daughter’s shaking. No words any more. Air taut.
Forty-nine. She’s just yelled, ‘I hate this, hate being grown up,’ with her fingers clawed frozen at her head and the bones in her hands little rakes. ‘I can’t do this any more, can’t live like this.’ You stare in wonder, at yourself. At what she has turned into in this place.
You squeeze your eyes shut.
I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say this to the mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move.