Читать книгу The Book of Rapture - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 23

A letter arrived the day after your neighbour’s visit. A scrawl. No name attached. Someone helping out. You’d been tracked down. Would be recalled to Project Indigo. You were the missing piece of the jigsaw and it could proceed no further without you. And they were close, so close to completion. The letter urged you to think carefully of the consequences. To consider fleeing Salt Cottage. Disappearing, fast, to somewhere you’d never be found out.

‘Who let on we were here?’ You scrunched up the paper and flung it into the bin.

‘Maybe it wasn’t too hard to work out,’ Motl said quietly.

He retrieved the letter and smoothed it down with his fingertips. A bell jar of quiet fell over him. The rest of you gathered at the kitchen table, hushed. He smoothed down that letter long after he’d finished reading, smoothed and smoothed it, couldn’t stop. You knew his thinking. He’d seen it all coming. He was always going to get his family away, make you one hundred per cent safe, have you emigrate. To become refugees like his sister, the professor who one day had had enough of the raids on her history department and the falling student numbers because the new slogan was The More You Read The More Stupid You Become, so what, any more, was the point. The Great Leap Back, that’s what she dubbed it as she explained why she was pulling out. Her brother’s family was to follow. Next summer, winter, year. Ah yes. Your pottering, dreamy, boy of a man. Always so good at procrastinating and sleeping in and handing his papers in late. Brilliant, yes, but. Then one day ‘getting out’ was too late — the borders were closed off. You were trapped.

And not one of you around that kitchen table said a word as Motl smoothed that letter down, smoothed it and smoothed it until it ripped. The letter shrilling at you to abandon the magic house.

We are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels.