27.6

 

The child is the third and final lever of forever.

The handle of the knife is bigger than her hand as she lifts it, her heart pounding as she sends her best prayer up – she’s always been told that Heaven is up – to Jesus. Holding her breath, she turns the knife to face her body. The way it’s done in cartoons, except nobody really dies in cartoons, do they?

The tip of the blade slips easily through the cloth of the tee-shirt, but the rounded tip is slow to cut and merely depresses the skin of her stomach, causing more of a bruise than a cut. She presses harder, trying to ignore the pain and the voice in her head telling her: “This is not Okay.”

There was a school drama on the television a few weeks ago, where an older girl wanted to kill herself so she took lots and lots of pills, but pills get stuck in her throat and bedsides, tall the tablets are kept in the bathroom cabinet, and she’s not tall enough to open that, not even if she climbs onto the rim of the bath and takes the wide step across to the sink, but she only knows that because she was playing ‘The Floor is Lava.’

She remembers the book her aunt bought her. Horrible Histories: the Rotton Romans, and in there it said that Roman used to fall onto their sword when they were told to kill themselves. Since she wasn’t allowed to dig in the garden, and would get a right telling off if she tried to bury the best cutlery. Instead, she gathers enough Ladybird books to clamp the handle upright on the floor, then climbs onto the bed.

She doesn’t know exactly how one would fall on a sword, but she’s fallen off the bed several times in her short life so the first part of falling must be to roll off. She lies down and holds her breath again, hoping this doesn’t hurt as much as it did last time. At least her parents would go back to being happy again once she was in Heaven, and once they loved each other again, they would forgive her for being the cause of them falling apart.

Roisin feels her guilt like a sharp, bright thread; a thread that, if pulled, will bring Death riding into the house wielding his sword of bright souls.

The mantle pulses a third time: Here. Now.

Roisin lifts her hand. Not toward the child but to the air in the child’s room; air which thickens a little in one spot and thins slightly in another; enough to change the pressure on the floorboards so that one flexes by a miniscule amount, but enough to shift one side of the books enough to let the knife fall harmlessly into the gap between the piles.

Upstairs, the child takes a breath, tucks her arms in and rolls off the edge of the bed.

And lands with a thump upon the pile of Ladybird books of Nursery Tales. The third fracture closes.

Downstairs the crash of the fall and the creak of the floorboards is heard in the kitchen. Both the man and the woman look up, then at each other, only leaping into action as the child’s wailing begins. They race toward the stairs, the girl’s name upon their lips as they rush to find out what’s happened to their baby. The man reaches for the woman’s hands as they hurry upward, a single unit once more, at least for now.

The moment passes, the house exhales, the imbalance softens, and another tear in the fabric of a fragile world is sutured with an invisible thread. The world rights itself by a fraction.

Roisin feels the mantle settle inside her, warm and steady, and for the first time, Roisin understands what it means to be the Fifth. It isn’t her job any more to lead armies across the fractured hills or to spread famine through the darkened lands where once was sunlight before War and Pestilence walked across them. She is Justice, and her duty is not to punish the wicked or reward the devout, but to shepherd the smallest decisions from one side of the see-saw to the other and keep everything in balance; to intervene at the pivotal moments before the Four ever feel the tremor.

Roisin smiles, and if the mantle could, she would feel the warm pulse of its reciprocation. “…that was it.” Only then does she realise the Truth of the Fifth:  This was only the beginning.