Parental Love.
Alice exhaled, her smile weary yet content, as she buckled her children into the cab. Matilda was four, Harry just a toddling eighteen months. Their afternoon at Grandma and Grandads had been a carnival of custard creams, cwtches, bedtime tales, and delightfully more lenient rules than at home.
Alice too relished the visit. Parents, sisters, innumerable nieces and nephewsall the familiar charm of home cuddled her in, without questions or caveats. Mums Sunday roast, from which she simply could not abstain. The Christmas tree twinkling with fairy lights and a hodgepodge of long-loved baubles, unfashionable yet achingly dear. Dads toasts, perhaps a tad overlong but always bursting with affection. Mums giftspractical, chosen with devotion, brimming with care.
For a fleeting moment, Alice felt like a little girl again. She longed to blurt out:
Mummy, Daddy, thank you for being there.
Alice bundled her children into the black cab. The ride back was undisturbed; the children, sated and content, soon pressed tight together and drifted off into the gentle current of sleep.
As the city lights flickered past, Alice asked the driver to pull over by a small corner shop.
Just a moneed nappies and some water, she explained.
Five minutes later, she stepped out, returned to the cab and her heart pitched abruptly into the abyss.
Her children were gone.
The driver chattered away breezily to a strange woman occupying the front seat.
Sorry… what? Alice uttered, her voice thick and slow.
The woman wheeled round.
Who on earth are you? What are you doing in my cab?
The driver shrugged helplessly.
No idea, he replied, turning to Alice. Who are you? Do you need something?
Excuse me?! Where are my children?! Alice demanded, her voice rising.
Oh, you creep! the woman shrieked. Youve got kids now as well?! She began belabouring the hapless driver with her handbag.
Do you just let anyone into your car?! Alice now shouted as well. Im asking, where are my children?!
For a frantic span of three or five minutes, the cab turned tempestuouscries, indignant wails, wild gestures, a sensation of universal injustice.
Then, as suddenly as a scene change in a half-remembered dream, a door opened. A man leaned in, serenely and said, Excuse me, miss, I believe your car is just a bit further up the street.
The world held its breath. Alice, burning with embarrassment, slammed the cab door shut, dashed to a nearly identical pale taxi parked ahead.
She flung the door wide.
On the back seat, her children still dozed blissfully, angelic, wholly undisturbed.
Alice let out a whoosh of relief as though shed staggered back from some dreadful brink. She slid in, closed the door, and muttered to the driver,
Lets goplease.
Then laughter overtook herraw, trembling, almost giddy. The driver soon joined in, both nearly crying now, overcome by the knowledge that tragedy had been sidestepped and a story had just written itself into family legend.
Gazing at her sleeping children, a sudden, simple truth bloomed in Alices heart: in daily life, parents may be gentle, weary, daydreaming, or absent-minded. But at the first whiff of danger, they metamorphoselions defending their pride.
No pause, no hesitation, no fear. Only the thunderous need to shield.
Such is the architecture of love. Gentle beneath clear skies, yet unbreakable when shadows threaten our little ones.
