Roz Dineen
She knew that there were other parents in the streets nearby silently planning their terror runs, just like her, just then. This was reassuring, like a superstition, or a community.
Hot magic-blue night. She said, ‘Whisper.’
‘What if I’m scared?’ whispered Vito, who was eight. ‘Of the insects, maybe?’
‘There is nothing to be scared of, Vi,’ she told him.
‘There is something.’
‘There is nothing. Just. Close’ (and she kissed) ‘your’ (each) ‘eyes’ (of his eyelids).
For a moment he lay very still on top of the old, sweet-smelling sheets, with his eyelids kissed shut.
She took a band from her wrist and held it in her teeth while she pulled back her hair.
Then she took the band from her teeth, and her fingers looped it into her hair, through and up, in a way that was both unthinking and complicated. She came to lie down beside him on the bed, propping herself up on an elbow. She rubbed sandy dirt off one of her feet with the other.
She waited. His profile was immaculate. Ten seconds passed. Fifteen seconds.
His eyes sprang open and he let out a great, worldly sigh.
‘I have just checked,’ he informed her, solemnly, ‘and I cannot sleep.’ ‘Don’t think about sleep,’ she said, rolling onto her back, disturbing the old photos that he’d taped up along the wall. There were soft toy rabbits bending their heads over notebooks on the floor. The rabbits were held inside a protective circle made from the belt of her dressing gown. Beside them: a flowering branch from the back garden’s tree, and her bra, the dust off crackers. ‘Don’t think about sleep. Just close your eyes, and breathe.’
‘I am. So. Hot,’ he said.
She inhaled loudly and deeply for him, so that he might copy. The girls were asleep already in the room. Maggs, who was four, went down first, and then the baby, Daisy. You couldn’t say that they always went down like this, went to sleep in this order, for they would have nothing about themselves committed to stone, not yet. But it was something they had been trying out between them for a while: Maggs first to sleep, then Daisy-Baby, leaving time for Vi, who was, she must not forget, only eight.
‘What’s it like to be nine?’ he asked, sounding so grown-up.
‘Shhhhhhhh …’ She smiled.
As each of the children fell asleep, one by one, she liked to picture an anchor, dropping from their soft warm bodies with a whirr, into the night’s deep seabed.
Maggs’s anchor plumbed down straight, quick and true. Daisy’s needed a bit more guidance. Daisy didn’t seem to trust yet, didn’t know that she wouldn’t be carried down with the dark weight of sleep to the bottom, and never rise again. How could Daisy be sure that this awake world was for keeps? That it couldn’t be all changed once more, as it had been ten months ago when she’d slipped out of the womb world, slick in a bag, while the sun was a full white circle in the sky. When Daisy’s anchor set out for sleep, her panicked eyes would ask, Is this it? Is this life? Am I here? Will you stay?
This is it. This is it. You are here. I will stay.
And Vi? It could take Vi an hour to get to sleep. It could take him two. Each time his anchor eased down a little he wanted to check, to see if he could roll it back up again at will. It was his agency, his power in this process that troubled him the most, and kept him all the more awake.
The electricity surged and went out for the night. Fridges for miles around ceased their collective back-chat. The fans in the room began to slow down. Outside, in neighbouring gardens, the music coming from speakers died, and a group of nearby people moaned about the death, affectionately. The lights in the hallway, the lights on the street, vanished. Then the fans stopped.
‘It’s dark!’ said Vi.
‘One minute,’ she replied. She pulled herself from the bed and went downstairs for a new candle.
They’d left the back door propped open with a brick, and so the kitchen, lit by a door’s breadth of moonlight, was alive with winged things, with half-forming doubled things, with what Maggs – their coiner of terms – called ‘creature crawlies’.
She tossed stale water from a cup, refilled it, and carried it back upstairs with two pink candles.
‘Thanks,’ said Vi, sitting up in bed at an awkward angle to take a gulp from the cup, thirsty like he’d been at work, toiling, mining, for days. ‘You’re a lightsaber.’
When he was finished with it, she took the cup from him and placed it down on the floor. She fished a broken pen from under the bed and used it to scour out the old wax in the candlesticks; she added the new pink fellows with force, and lit them using the lighter kept on top of the wardrobe. Then she sat cross-legged on the end of Vi’s bed.
There was a small piece of plastic film stuck to the sole of her foot. The wick of one of the new candles popped in its flame. And in the inner ear, like in the deep, whaling night sea, another pop, which was followed by a silence, this time so all-encompassing. The boy turned on his side and pulled his knees up to his chest. The night grew deeper. The anchors settled in. The children’s dreams began to move them slightly further out and away from her.
Apparently alone, with her thoughts, for the first time that day, she tipped back her head, stretched out her neck.
Other parents in the streets nearby silently rehearsing their terror runs. Just like her, just then.
She started rehearsing.
Rehearsing. Rehearsing how she’d get the children out. Rehearsing the paths she’d make silently across the rooms to find the items she needed as quickly as possible. Exactly how, at night, she’d fill the car boot with this much water, in the deeper part, on the left, leaving space for that much food, the nappies, the particular clothes, the medicine bag, the green rucksack into which she’d stuff handfuls of precious children’s objects and Maggs’s crew of pirate dolls. She mentally practiced how she would get the sleeping children into the car one by one; the way each small head would loll against her shoulder, the order she would do this in – oldest first – how she would lock the car after she put each child in, and go back to the house for another. All of this had to exist, prearranged. She explored herself in this projected future, and made contingencies for whatever disturbances to her nature came up there. Taking, finally, the plastic folder of documents that she kept on the high painted shelf, she’d let the cats out to fend. Lock the front door. Pour some water over the wind-screen. Clear off the sticky creature crawlies. Get in the car, put a boiled sweet in her mouth to mix with the adrenaline. Suck. Pause. Clutch. Brake. Engine.
Vi stirred.
You had to be two, with kids.
She took a deeper breath. Calmed herself.
You had to be two: you had to separate your inelegant thoughts from your body as much as possible, rub out the connection between them. If you did not, you ran the risk of conveying your panicked mind to your young accidentally; it could beat out of you on your heightened pulse, or be carried out in your pheromones, on sweat.
The body could do things for the children that the mind could not, like birth them, or take impact on their behalf; you had to leave it alone to do its work, and not let the mind interfere with it too much.
Her legs moved into a shape of more comfort. She watched the sleeping boy. She watched for the heat that felt visible in the room. She watched the open window, which was covered with a mesh screen. She had lied to her son when she’d said there was nothing to be scared of. He knew.
She watched as, outside, an extremely large moth fluttered itself violently against the mesh. It was drawn, she suspected, not just to the candlelight, but to the particularly heady golden smell of her children’s slumber. It was making sounds like it was breaking itself up. The moon was nearing full. The sky was yellowing black now, moulding itself subtly to the earth. How was she going to understand everything tonight?
Before everything became awful, it was briefly very beautiful.
Extracted from Briefly Very Beautiful, published by Bloomsbury. Roz Dineen was an editor at the TLS for 13 years. Her writing has appeared in the TLS, ArtReview and the Wall Street Journal. Briefly Very Beautiful is her debut novel.