Nutshell(45)

‘Four of them,’ he says, more to himself.

We contemplate this. It’s over. It’s not a good end. It was never going to be.

My mother moves me so we can exchange a long look. The moment I’ve waited for. My father was right, it is a lovely face. The hair darker than I thought, the eyes a paler green, the cheeks still flushed with recent effort, the nose indeed a tiny thing. I think I see the entire world in this face. Beautiful. Loving. Murderous. I hear Claude cross the room with resigned tread to go downstairs. No ready phrase. Even in this moment of repose, during this long, greedy stare into my mother’s eyes, I’m thinking about the taxi waiting outside. A waste. Time to send it away. And I’m thinking about our prison cell – I hope it’s not too small – and beyond its heavy door, worn steps ascending: first sorrow, then justice, then meaning. The rest is chaos.