Midnight. Mouse thudding into Soli’s warmth in the dark, curving round her back and clinging on, mutual hot-water bottles in the clustering cold. It is as if the chill wants to slip straight through them tonight, into their bones, to curl up and nest. Tidge hasn’t emerged from the bathroom. He’s locked himself in, hasn’t said a peep. His brother’s in the bed vividly awake. Hating who he is. All the scatter-gun words that come out.
Okay it’s official, Dad. THE RETREAT FROM WONDER. I’m sorry. It’s gone. Kaput.
Motl dreaded it would ever come to this. Their world glooming down like a fish tank clouding over with a lack of light. Hope lost.
The air is thin here. Breathing is hard. And sleeping. It’s like being stranded up a rocky mountain in some high altitude of despair and you can’t go forward or back. How much longer will we be here? Where is G? We can’t leave, even though we should. Can’t have him returning to an empty room and reporting to Mum and Dad that we’ve vanished and the thread to them is cut. And we’re out in the world somewhere, lost.
No stars tonight. The orange glow from the street lights has bled them away. You never see stars in this place. Your city nieces told you once that they only happen in movies, and how you laughed at the time, at what their world had become. That was before your nieces went. ‘They’ve gone to another country,’ you’d say abruptly, to the endless enquiries, ‘they got out, before it’s too late,’ and then you’d glance across at Motl with something like hate. You couldn’t bear to read their letters in the end, their missives from exile shouting of a new life.
You need a real sky tonight. Something dark and weighty and rich, a sky you can read not this weak orange glow.
It feels like the world is shutting down. That one by one all the rooms are being locked up and the sheets thrown over furniture and the lights turned off.
Your Soli’s crying. She hardly ever cries; it’s a shock. She’s doing it quietly pretending she isn’t. Her whole body’s shuddering in tiny spasms as she tries to hold it in but can’t. Mouse looks at her in panic. Glances across at the bathroom. Each sob is a little hook into your heart. Eventually your little boy curls around his sister and tucks his hand firmly under her arm and soothes, ‘Sssh, it’s all right, sssh.’
Do the dead help? IS ANYONE OUT THERE?
Where is your man? Where? You have no sense of him, no certainty. Is he with B, are they planning a rescue, is he lost, fighting this, fired up? The unknowing is a black hole of grief. You shut your eyes, he’s holding you again in sleep, his arm slinging around your waist in a belt of warmth. He’s scraping back your hair as you’re crouching over the toilet bowl and vomiting in the first flush of pregnancy, he’s putting his head to your stomach and telling his tadpole child not to make Mummy sick. He taught you that good sex is a spiritual experience and the best sex profound, he taught you that at the height of ecstasy you’re taken to another place and that place is above all transcendent, God’s gift perhaps, his lure, his little chuckle. Because of course from sex comes that most magnificent decision in all of life: to create it. Which together you did. Three times, with the most solemn and sanctified intent.
Nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of God.