“Were you all planning to watch?” my mother’s voice echoes around the room. “We are a community who pride ourselves on our goodness, who declare it daily on our skin, and we are a people proud enough to enter eternity with bravado. But you would sit comfortably and watch a child be slaughtered? Oh, you weren’t holding the knife – but if you watch and do not shout ‘Stop’, you are sanctioning everything you see. You were sanctioning the slaughter of a child: my child. What were you afraid of? Why did not you call out your horror at what your leader was attempting to do? Had he succeeded, it would have been a sin forever etched upon your soul. But no, you are good people. You would have comforted yourself with that. Whereas these sinners in your midst, these so-called criminals,” she gestures to Obel and Connor, “were willing to stand and fight. They have saved you from blood-guilt and they have saved my girl, my Leora.” I think she will cry, but she puts her palm on her chest and controls herself. “I knew a man once who told me that what matters most is the life we live and not our death. The man who taught me all these things was my husband and Leora’s father. He was a forgotten and he is dead now. He did not want a skin book made, but I begged him to and he agreed. I was so afraid – afraid of life without him and scared of what being forgotten truly meant.” Mum reaches into her bag and pulls out Dad’s skin book. “This is not him, not truly.” She lifts his book. “But if he were here today he would be shocked to see that our divisions have only deepened; he would be astonished at the slavish way you follow your leaders. He would call out your preoccupation with the dead. We must now consider the living – and I include all the living when I say this, no matter what their skin says about their choices. We must consider the living and we ourselves must choose life.”

This is nothing like the quiet earlier – this is a quiet of peace, of holiness, of knowing that right here a sacred thing has occurred. It is in this beautiful silence that my mum steps forward and kisses my dad’s book.

And then she throws it into the fire.

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty