I.
I should like it to snow.
To exist in the hope of newly fallen snow and feel the apple-crunch of it settle under my feet. For it to be both fleeting and everlasting; to be both feather-light and solid. I should like to watch snow explode from the night sky then compose itself to rest, layer upon layer, like the fluttering pages of a book.
Instead, I am swallowed in night. I can’t see my body for looking for it. The dark is so porous it is tar, it is suffocation, it is time itself. The absence of sound is viscous in the air around me.
I should like to read. To open the glue-cracked spines and lose myself in the perforated edges of my childhood. I should like to feel the safety of words imprinted on my soul, because to know a book is not to hold it in one’s hand, it is to breathe within it.
I should like many things, I think.
Instead, I am imprisoned in waiting.
Until there are footsteps.
I try to calm my heart as it beats in my throat. I dig my nails into my thighs. I want to cover myself, clothe myself, hide from myself.
There is a pause outside the door.
Waiting.
I know what’s coming.
My stomach tightens, contracts, and my legs give way. My body holds memory in its muscles. It gives my fear a name.
A scratch of the key in the lock.
And I crawl into the farthest corner.
A sharp slice of light enters as the door is pushed open. I recoil, make myself small, and hide into the dark.
THEN
FRIDAY 6TH JANUARY 1989
EPIPHANIE – EPIPHANY
He woke with a gentle shake to the shoulder, Mama’s morning breath at his ear. Before he could say anything, she placed a warning finger to her lips.
Rune kicked the covers off and saw Lotte sitting at the end of his bed, watchful as a cat. Her thumb was firmly clamped in her mouth. Her Care Bear wellies on the wrong feet, the motif facing inwards rather than out.
Mama’s enormous rucksack was leaning against the back of the closed door.
This was it.
A knot of marble settled in his chest as Mama walked to the window and peered through a crack in the curtains.
He was as still as Lotte was silent, both watching Mama. Lotte held out her hand. It was cool and small in his.
Finally Mama turned to them.
‘Ready?’
Rune’s gaze settled on Moo Bunny, grey, lifeless, propped up among the magazines and sketches that covered the desk in the corner of his room. Moo Bunny was being left behind.
Mama lifted Lotte onto her hip and went back to check the window again. Lotte’s hands wound themselves in Mama’s loose dark hair as they both looked out into the night.
‘Can I go for a pee?’ His newly awoken voice was low and made Mama jump.
‘Do you have to?’
The stab in his belly told him that yes, he probably did, but he said, ‘No.’
Mama put Lotte down and came over to him. They both watched as Lotte wandered over to Rune’s desk and he stood, tempted to stop her with his usual yell of Don’t touch my things. He said nothing as Lotte looked over his drawings. When Mama’s arms wrapped him up tight, he was caught off guard. She hugged him and instead of pushing her away, his arms wove around her too. Mama’s chest rose with her breath and forced him to breathe. He breathed her in. Her hug was warm-gold and he felt small and safe inside it.
Lotte’s voice jumped in: ‘Moo Bunny can leave home too?’
Mama shushed her, quickly letting go of Rune. Lotte was cradling Moo Bunny in her arms.
‘Look at his little bunchy face,’ she said, and whispered to Moo Bunny, ‘You are now my best bestest and most favourite.’
Mama whispered to Lotte and he realised that maybe, just maybe . . . this really was it.
She placed her fingers to her lips once more and eased herself out onto the landing. Walking softly in socks, she made no noise.
Rune picked up his school bag and sank under the weight of it, heavy with expectation as he and Lotte waited for Mama.
Last summer, Mama had taken him out of school. Just like that. One day she appeared early, a purple bruise on her neck, her arm busted up, with Lotte’s hand held tight in hers, and told him they were leaving.
They had walked in the itchy hot sun to the hostel in the centre of Berlin, in a church hall that smelled of old soup, sweat and damp clothes.
The hostel staff apologised to him for not having anything suitable for eight-year-old boys. Rune had to wash with soap that smelled of old ladies.
For a week, they lived on a small army cot in the corner of a large hall.
Then they went home.
With Mama’s arm in a cast and her bruise turned green.
That had been a year ago. Since then, Rune stored away things in his school bag he thought he might need if they ever ended up there again.
He looked around at the room, unseeing, as Mama returned. She picked Lotte up, Lotte’s arms wrapping around Mama like a scarf.
Mama then threw her bag over her shoulder and nodded to him to go.
‘Will Papa come too,’ Lotte whispered, ‘or will he meet us wherever we are holiday-going?’
Neither Mama nor Rune answered.
The hallway was as black as silence. It stretched long into the night, until all he could hear was his heart pumping into his ears.
Away and now.
Together.
For the last time?
Maybe.
He paused.
Mama moved past him and he followed her. Placing his feet exactly where Mama placed hers, he followed her through the dark hallway.
NOW
MONDAY 8TH NOVEMBER 1999
RUNE
The walls were blank: no posters, no pictures, not even a photograph. Yet in his head they were alive with his sketches. He imagined the contents of his portfolio covering every white surface including his bed, tucked into the corner of the room. Had his portfolio not been declined, lying abandoned on an old professor’s desk at the Berlin Art Institute, he might well have thumbed through some of his prints and placed them against the wall, stood back from them to look at them anew.
Afresh.
He might then have spotted a flaw, a drift where his pencil had gone too far, or not far enough. Picked holes in what he’d done.
But, alas, his work was not around to be dissected and torn apart. Therefore, he folded himself into his childhood desk and placed his larger sketchbook, a recent gift from Lotte, on its surface. It still had the crayon ‘L’ across the centre of the first page.
From her to him.
With Papa’s bluebottle laugh still humming hot in his ears, he pulled out his pencils and Sharpies, turned the page round to landscape format, and imagined how he’d want to paint it. Eventually. When he could.
He knew the spray paint he would use: Molotow. The cap: fat. He imagined how it would land on the glass. Imagining his sketch as a finished piece, sprayed onto the glass enclosure of the tigers at Berlin Zoo. He imagined holding his breath, waiting for the paint to drip.
Imagining.
He started with the pencil. Lines too far here, too short there. Change that, add this. He imagined shaking cans and changing caps with speed and accuracy. His can control wasn’t up to much these days, but he’d get better. He needed practice, that’s all. He needed the space to practise. He needed many things, but there was no point to his needing.