by Neil Gaiman
She pointed to a stand-alone display of HUN-GREE-CAT MOUSE POISON sachets. A little rubber mouse lay on the top of the display, his legs in the air.
Regan experienced a sudden memory flash, unbidden: Gwen, extending an elegant pink hand, her fingers curled upward. “What’s that?” she said. It was the week before he had left for America.
“I don’t know,” said Regan. They were in the bar of a small hotel in the West Country, burgundy-coloured carpets, fawn-coloured wallpaper. He was nursing a gin and tonic, she was sipping her second glass of Chablis. Gwen had once told Regan that blondes should only drink white wine—it looked better. He laughed, until he realised she meant it.
“It’s a dead one of these,” she said, turning her hand over, so the fingers hung like the legs of a slow pink animal. He smiled. Later he paid the bill, and they went upstairs to Regan’s room . . .
“No. Not poison. You see, I don’t want to kill it,” he told the saleswoman, Becky.
She looked at him curiously, as if he had just begun to speak in a foreign tongue. “But you said you wanted mousetraps . . . ?”
“Look, what I want is a humane trap. It’s like a corridor. The mouse goes in, the door shuts behind it, it can’t get out.”
“So how do you kill it?”
“You don’t kill it. You drive a few miles away and let it go. And it doesn’t come back to bother you.”
Becky was smiling now, examining him as if he were just the most darling thing, just the sweetest, dumbest, cutest little thing. “You stay here,” she said. “I’ll check out back.”
She walked through a door marked Employees Only. She had a nice bottom, thought Regan, and was sort of attractive, in a dull Midwestern sort of way.
He glanced out the window. Janice was sitting in the car, reading her magazine: a red-haired woman in a dowdy housecoat. He waved at her, but she wasn’t looking at him.
Becky put her head back through the doorway. “Jackpot!” she said. “How many you want?”
“Two?”
“No problem.” She was gone again, and returned with two small green plastic containers. She rang them up on the till, and as he fumbled through his notes and coins, still unfamiliar, trying to put together the correct change, she examined the traps, smiling, turning the packets over in her hands.
“My lord,” she said. “Whatever will they think of next?”
The heat slammed Regan as he stepped out of the store.
He hurried over to the car. The metal door handle was hot in his hand; the engine was idling.
He climbed in. “I got two,” he said. The air-conditioning in the car was cool and pleasant.
“Seatbelt on,” said Janice. “You really got to learn to drive over here.” She put down her magazine.
“I will,” he said. “Eventually.”
Regan was scared of driving in America: it was like driving on the other side of a mirror.
They said nothing else, and Regan read the instructions on the back of the mousetrap boxes. According to the text, the main attraction of this type of trap was that you never needed to see, touch, or handle the mouse. The door would close behind it, and that would be that. The instructions said nothing about not killing the mouse.
When they got home he took the traps out of the boxes, put a little peanut butter in one, down at the far end, a lump of cooking chocolate in the other, and placed them on the floor of the pantry, one against the wall, the other near the hole that the mice seemed to be using to gain access to the pantry.
The traps were only corridors. A door at one end, a wall at the other.
§ § §
In bed that night, Regan reached out and touched Janice’s breasts as she slept; touched them gently, not wanting to wake her. They were perceptibly fuller. He wished he found large breasts erotic. He found himself wondering what it must be like to suck a woman’s breasts while she was lactating. He could imagine sweetness, but no specific taste.
Janice was sound asleep, but still she moved toward him.
He edged away; lay there in the dark, trying to remember how to sleep, hunting through alternatives in his mind. It was so hot, so stuffy. When they’d lived in Ealing he’d fallen asleep instantly, he was certain.
There was a sharp scream from the garden. Janice stirred and rolled away from him. It had sounded almost human. Foxes can sound like small children in pain—Regan had heard this long ago. Or perhaps it was a cat. Or a nightbird of some kind.
Something had died, anyway, in the night. Of that there was no doubt at all.
§ § §
The next morning one of the traps had been sprung, although when Regan opened it, carefully, it proved to be empty. The chocolate bait had been nibbled. He opened the door to the trap once more and replaced it by the wall.
Janice was crying to herself in the lounge. Regan stood beside her; she reached out her hand, and he held it, tightly. Her fingers were cold. She was still wearing her nightgown, and she had put on no makeup.
Later, she made a telephone call.
A package arrived for Regan shortly before noon, by Federal Express, containing a dozen floppy disks; each filled with numbers for Regan to inspect and sort and classify.
He worked at the computer until six, sitting in front of a small metal fan which whirred and rattled, and moved the hot air around.
§ § §
He turned on the radio that evening, while he cooked.
“. . . what my book tells everyone. What the liberals don’t want us to know.” The voice was high, nervous, arrogant.
“Yeah. Some of it was, well, kinda hard to believe.” The host was encouraging; a deep radio voice, reassuring and easy on the ears.
“Of course it’s hard to believe. It runs against everything they want you to believe. The liberals and the how-mo-sexuals in the media, they don’t let you know the truth.”
“Well, we all know that, friend. We’ll be right back after this song.”
It was a Country and Western song. Regan kept the radio tuned to the local National Public Radio station; sometimes they broadcast the BBC World Service News. Someone must have retuned it, he supposed, although he couldn’t imagine who.
He took a sharp knife and cut through the chicken breast with care, parting the pink flesh, slicing it into strips all ready to stir-fry, listening to the song.
Somebody’s heart was broken; somebody no longer cared. The song ended. There was a commercial for beer. Then the men began to talk again.
“Thing is, nobody believes it at first. But I got the documents. I got the photographs. You read my book. You’ll see. It’s the unholy alliance, and I do mean unholy, between the so called pro-choice lobby, the medical community and the how-mo-sexuals. The how-mos need these murders because that’s where they get the little children they use to experiment with to find a cure for AIDS.
“I mean, those liberals talk about Nazi atrocities, but nothing those Nazis did comes in even close to what they’re doing even as we speak. They take these human foetuses and they graft them onto little mice, to create these human-mouse hybrid creatures for their experiments. Then they inject them with AIDS . . .”
Regan found himself thinking of Mengele’s wall of strung eyeballs. Blue eyes and brown eyes and hazel . . .
“Shit!” He’d sliced into his thumb. He pushed it into his mouth, bit down on it to stop the bleeding, ran into the bathroom and began to hunt for a band-aid.
“Remember, I’ll need to be out of the house by ten tomorrow.” Janice was standing behind him. He looked at her blue eyes in the bathroom mirror. She looked calm.
“Fine.” He pulled the band-aid onto his thumb, hiding and binding the wound, and turned to face her.
“I saw a cat in the garden today,” she said. “A big grey one. Maybe it’s a stray.”
“Maybe.”
“Did you think any more about getting a pet?”
“Not really. It’d just be something else to worry about. I thought we agreed, no pets.”
She shrugged.
They went back into the kitchen. He poured oil into the frying pan, and lit the gas. He dropped the strips of pink flesh into the pan and watched them shrink and discolour and change.
§ § §
Janice drove herself to the bus station early the next morning. It was a long drive into Omaha, and she’d be in no condition to drive when she was ready to return. She took five hundred dollars with her, in cash.
Regan checked the traps. Neither of them had been touched. Then he prowled the corridors of the house.
Eventually, he phoned Gwen. The first time he misdialled, his fingers slipping on the buttons of the phone, the long string of digits confusing him. He tried again.
A ringing, then her voice on the line. “Allied Accountancy Associates. Good afternoon.”
“Gwenny? It’s me.”
“Regan? It’s you, isn’t it? I was hoping you’d call eventually. I missed you.” Her voice was distant; transatlantic crackle and hum taking her further away from him.
“It’s expensive.”
“Any more thoughts about coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
“So how’s wifeykins?”
“Janice is. . . .” He paused. Sighed. “Janice is just fine.”
“I’ve started fucking our new sales director,” said Gwen. “After your time. You don’t know him. You’ve been gone for six months now. I mean, what’s a girl to do?”
It occurred then to Regan that that was what he hated most about women: their practicality. Gwen had always made him use a condom, although he disliked condoms, while she had also used a diaphragm and a spermicide. Regan felt that somewhere in all there a level of spontaneity, of romance, of passion, was lost. He liked sex to be something that just happened, half in his head, half out of it. Something sudden and dirty and powerful.
His forehead began to throb.
“So what’s the weather like out there?” Gwen asked, brightly.
“It’s hot,” said Regan.
“Wish it was here. It’s been raining for weeks.”
He said something about it being lovely to hear her voice again. Then he put the phone down.
§ § §
Regan checked the traps. Still empty.
He wandered into his office and flipped on the TV.
“. . . this is a little one. That’s what foetus means. And one day she’ll grow up to be a big one. She’s got little fingers, little toes—she’s even got little toenails.”
A picture on the screen: red and pulsing and indistinct.
It cut to a woman with a huge smile, cuddling a baby.
“Some little ones like her will grow up to be nurses, or teachers, or musicians. One day one of them may even be president.”
Back to the pink thing, filling the screen.
“But this little one will never grow up to be a big one. She’s going to be killed tomorrow. And her mother says it isn’t murder.”
He flipped channels until he found I Love Lucy, the perfect background nothing, then he turned on the computer and got down to work.
After two hours spent chasing an error of under a hundred dollars through seemingly endless columns of figures his head began to ache. He got up and walked into the garden.
He missed having a garden; missed proper English lawns, with proper English grass. The grass out here was withered, brown and sparse, the trees bearded with Spanish moss like a something from a science fiction movie. He followed a track out into the woods behind the house. Something grey and sleek slipped from behind one tree to another.
“Here, kitty kitty,” called Regan. “Here puss puss puss.”
He walked over to the tree and looked behind it. The cat, or whatever it had been, was gone.
Something stung his cheek. He slapped at it without thought, lowered his hand to find it stained with blood, a mosquito, half-squashed, still twitching in his palm.
He went back into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. He missed tea, but it just didn’t taste the same out here.
§ § §
Janice got home about six.
“How was it?”
She shrugged. “Fine.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I have to go back next week,” she said. “For a checkup.”
“To make sure they didn’t leave any instruments inside you?”
“Whatever,” she said.
“I’ve made a spaghetti bolognese,” said Regan.
“I’m not hungry,” said Janice. “I’m going to bed.”
She went upstairs.
Regan worked until the numbers no longer added up. He went upstairs, and walked quietly into the darkened bedroom. He slipped off his clothes in the moonlight, dropped them onto the carpet and slid between the sheets.
He could feel Janice next to him. Her body was shaking, and the pillow was wet.
“Jan?”
She had her back to him.
“It was horrible,” she whispered into her pillow. “It hurt so much. And they wouldn’t give me a proper anaesthetic or anything. They said I could have a shot of Valium if I wanted one, but they didn’t have an anaesthetist there any more. The lady said he couldn’t stand the pressure and anyway it would have cost another two hundred dollars and nobody wanted to pay . . .
“It hurt so much.” She was sobbing now, gasping the words as if they were being tugged out of her. “So much.”
Regan got out of bed.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t have to listen to this,” said Regan. “I really don’t have to listen to this.”
§ § §
It was too hot in the house. Regan walked downstairs in only his underpants. He walked into the kitchen, bare feet making sticking noises on the vinyl.
One of the mousetrap doors was closed.
He picked up the trap. The door was closed, and it felt a trifle heavier than before. He opened the door carefully, a little way. Two beady black eyes stored up at him. Light brown fur. He pushed the door shut again, and heard a scrabbling from inside the trap.
Now what?
He couldn’t kill it. He couldn’t kill anything.
The green mousetrap smelled acrid, and the bottom of it was sticky with mouse-piss. Regan carried it gingerly out into the garden.
A gentle breeze had sprung up. The moon was almost full. He knelt the ground, placed the trap carefully on the dry grass.
He, opened the door of the small green corridor.
“Run away,” he whispered, feeling embarrassed at the sound of has voice in the open air. “Run away, little mouse.”
The mouse didn’t move. He could see its nose at the door of the trap.
“Come on,” said Regan. Bright moonlight; he could see everything, sharply lit and shadowed, if lacking in colour.
He nudged the trap with his foot.
The mouse made a dash for it, then. It ran out from the trap, then stopped, turned, and began to hop into the woods.
Then it stopped again. The mouse looked up in Regan’s direction. Regan was convinced that it was staring at him. It had tiny pink hands. Regan felt almost paternal, then. He smiled, wistfully.
A streak of grey in the night, and the mouse hung, struggling uselessly, from the mouth of a large grey cat, its eyes burning green in the night. Then the cat bounded into the undergrowth.
He thought briefly of pursuing the cat, of freeing the mouse from its jaws . . .
There was a sharp scream from the woods; just a night-sound, but for a moment Regan thought it sounded almost human, like a woman in pain.
He threw the little plastic mousetrap as far from him as he could. He was hoping for a satisfying crash as it hit something, but it fell soundlessly in the bushes.
Then Regan walked back inside, and he closed the door of the house behind him.
GUMSHOE
PUNCH BOOK REVIEW OF JOSIAH THOMPSON’S GUMSHOE
I NEVER ACTUALLY WORKED
for the old regime. But I can’t see them behaving like that; I mean, I’ve heard that nice Mister Coren on Gardeners’ Question Time, or whatever that programme is, (“Ah, this is the story about the lady in Luton with the ferrets down her knickers.” “No, I’m afraid not.” “Then it’s Sir Geoffrey Howe?” “Hoohoo, that’s the one,”) and he always sounded very nice. Not a man who’d resort to cheap threats, at any rate.
Not like the current bunch.
One of them rings me up, says he wants a review. This week. Fair enough, I say, when this week? Tuesday, he says. That’s tomorrow, I point out. He says yes, that’s tomorrow. Tuesday.
What if I can’t get it done in time? I ask, all innocent.
There’s a pause at the other end of the line; you can hear him looking up at the Men in Black Suits in the Punch offices, and getting the nod.
Well, he says calmly, then we’d have a blank page. And we’d print your photograph on it. Possibly your address. And we’d tell the Punch readership exactly whose fault it was that they had a blank page this week.
I wouldn’t be able to enter a dentist’s waiting room ever again.
Right, I said. Tomorrow. Put down the phone and describe him out loud. One word. Rhymes with custard, almost.
Okay. Write a review.
Only trouble is, tidied the office last week. Know I had the book somewhere, been tripping over it for a month, called Gumshoe, by some American philosophy professor who gave it all up to become a private eye. Gold cover. Unique. Put it somewhere safe. Tidied it up. Very careful. Somewhere. Somewhere tidy and safe. Probably on a bookshelf. One of the bookshelves, anyway.
Only other trouble is, awful lot of books in here. No problem, just look for the gold cover. Up there on the top of top shelf, climb on the desk, reach up, nearly overbalance, pull it out: Great Sex.
Bugger.
Wonder briefly whether Punch would notice if review of Great Sex arrived tomorrow morning. Men in Black Suits in Punch offices. Suspicious bulges in jacket pockets. No sense of humour . . .
Forget Great Sex.
Review Gumshoe. Remember the title, anyway. Can’t go too far wrong if you remember the title.
Don’t have the book of course. Just Great Sex, funny there being two books with gold covers, flip it open, hope it’ll be Gumshoe when I look at the pages. It isn’t. “She has a magnificent polished body, the globes of her buttocks round and smooth like summer fruit, her breasts high and proud.”