The Book of Rapture by Nikki Gemmell

hollers for the three of them to get out. Outside the window a plastic bag turns cartwheels on the street, joy riding on the breeze. People hurry about in their too-busy-for-stopping way that city feet do. The doorknob spins and spins catching on nothing. They’ve all had a go and everything is too quiet in this pale cocoon of a room but not in a calm way, a birds-hushed-before-an-earth-quake way.
    ‘I wonder what happened in this place. You know, before,’ Tidge wonders aloud.
    Mouse still can’t talk. Thinking too much.
         Our turn will come. And all we can do is stand here and stand here waiting for goodness knows what .
        Because of what you did once.
Then said I. Lord, how Ions?

38
    Okay What I’ve heard because no one’s telling me, are they? Dad saying this regime stops people being human but Mum saying it doesn’t stop people being human it brings out the worst in them, what lies buried in everyone underneath. That we all have this animal inside us, every single human being, and Dad says, no, Mrs, not everyone, and then it’s a fight. Mum all shouty that everyone has this capacity to be inventively, viciously cruel, to any person who’s the outsider — the threat — and it’s been like that since humankind began and it will never stop and then the stories come and I crouch under the stairs winded by the listening. What grown-ups do. New-born babies put outside a mother’s cell in a bag with a starving cat. Jumping on a back until it breaks. Pigeons stuffed into mouths. Eyes gouged out with spoons. Drilled flesh. Villages gassed. Families holding tight in the centre of a room and single people at the edges by themselves. Parents forced to shoot their children as punishment. Parents forced to watch as their children’s throats are slit. Parents forced to watch as their children are starved to death. Mothers beaten by their babies until the babies are dead. Right. What grown-ups do. All of this. MUM? DAD? Are you out there? CAN YOU COME? Please come .
        So. All those scraps of late-night conversation that he’s caught in Salt Cottage when he should be asleep but he’s been listening from his cupboard under the stairs and his scream is his penand you’re being filleted as he writes, everything that is beating and warm within you because childhood, any childhood, is not meant to be this and how does it get to this point.
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

39
    They’re all awake. In a line, contemplating a television with legs in the corner. ‘It means it’s really, really old,’ Tidge says solemnly. None of them can get it to work. Your TV junkie can’t understand the cruelty of one blank. ‘Maybe there’s a hidden camera in it.’ Tidge comes up close. ‘Maybe the three of us are in some freaky experiment and Mum and Dad are watching, to see how we cope. You know, a reality TV kind of thing.’ He flashes his smile that melts everyone but his family and holds a hand flat to his heart. ‘I must stop saying I’m hungry all the time. I must be kind to my sister and brother. I must share all my chocolate. I must blow the TV kisses. A lot.’ He gives it a big smooch.
    ‘I don’t think so,’ Mouse says. He lies in front of the screen staring in. ‘Maybe they’re dead,’ he says softly, and you shut your eyes and hover your love, in the vivid air; imagine lying along the length of their backs, pressing into them calm and strength.
    ‘The dead help, Dad says so,’ your daughter responds, in that strangely dispassionate way kids sometimes have when talking about death; as if so what.
    ‘No!’ Tidge cries. ‘They are not, they are not . Maybe they’re being tormented by us here. Imagine that? And there’ll be no food ever and they’ll be watching us as we turn on each otherand then get quieter and quieter, and close our eyes, and … stop … finally. Maybe it’s the way to get them to talk.’
    Everyone quiet. Thinking of