I used to sit in the hallway a lot, or rather on the second-bottom step. I would sit in the cold and think, as though I had forgotten something, as though I had come into a room and then couldn’t recall what I had come in for. I often thought that, if only I could clear my head, I should understand things more. I often thought that.
In winter, the hallway was like an empty fridge, compared with the parlour with its great big fire, or the kitchen and its stove. Sometimes the air even had weather of its own: one November, the banisters grew icicles, long and grey and shining. That winter, they clung for weeks; one or two snapped off with the banging of doors. They shot like brittle javelins, frightening the house, impaling the carpet, and once, a luckless mouse on a quest for crumbs.
My grandmother was upstairs the afternoon that this latter happened. She must have heard the sound of it, or else felt the ice slicing through the air. Either way, she appeared at the foot of the stairs where I was standing, staring at that tiny tragedy, with my hand over my mouth. She darted forward, unhesitating, and plucked a glassy splinter between her finger and thumb. Then, grinning like an undiscovered crime, she stalked off up the stairs, with my wrist pinched in her other hand.
On the landing bookcase, her workbox lay open like a gin-trap; my grandmother drove that spike of ice deep into her pin cushion. It lingered among the needles for just a second, before it melted away. ‘Well,’ said my grandmother, turning to me, ‘that’s one in the eye for the Devil!’ My face must have been a picture, for then she laughed.
My grandmother was a tall creature of grey and lavender, and I never did feel as though I knew her. She lived at the top of the house, in the attic rooms that were locked by a key. She loved the attic, close as it was to the skies. My grandmother would open the skylights and entice the garden birds to come and visit with her. Sometimes, from the garden, you could see her fingers sticking out against the slanted roof, with a reluctant blackbird or wren perched upon the knuckle.
People worked hard to teach me gratefulness. Whenever I was given a boiled sweet or a bottle of scent, my mother would lean into me and tell me that I was a ‘lucky little girl’. I would blink at her and try to look as lucky, as happy as I possibly could, to make it shine out like sweat from my face. At moments like this, my grandmother would rest her hand on the top of my hair, hard and solid as a shovel, and she would say something like, ‘Oh yes, my girl, there are people on this earth worse off than you are, who would die for a chance at the life that little Marie has got.’ And my mother would give her a dreadful little smile, with lots of teeth; she would button up my cardigan then, or spit on her hankie and scrub at the corners of my eyes. She would grin all the while, and mutter under her breath, over and over: ‘Mind your own business, Mind your own business,’ even though I had not made a single sound.
In our house, gratefulness was a strange and complicated thing, a song with too many words to learn. My grandmother used to give me presents sometimes, to make sure that I was thankful. I think that must have been why. ‘Marie,’ she would say, with a perilous expression on her face, ‘Marie, see what I have made for you!’ And then she would unwrap her gift.
One winter day, she gave me a brand-new pair of gloves. They were made out of magpie skins, barely tanned and meat-smelling, with long, piebald feathers that ran the length of the fingers. My grandmother stared at me very hard so that I could not move, and she slid them onto me and tied them tightly at the wrists. My hands became beautiful then, but held as stiff as splints by the glossy plumage. As I tried to bend my hands, I realised that I was trapped by them, just as if I had been born this way, with stunted wings where my fingers should have grown.
There was a watery sound, a gushing in my ears, as I realised that my hands were lost. With one feathered paw, I tried to make a fist, to close a grip on the leather knot that held the glove against my skin, but all that happened was that the quills began to buckle and snap like breaking fingernails. I began to panic, knifing the air with my two useless wings, with a metal whirring like pigeons flying.
My grandmother nodded to me as if I was a shop assistant, and stumped away, back up to her eyrie. I cried my heart out in the hallway until I had run out of sobbing, and then I sat down on the second step with my handless hands on my lap. I sat there for hours, my face coursing with tears. I was a piteous little thing, when I was a child.
12
The Mother
THE HOUSE, IT seemed, had taken against the mother. So she thought, on the odd days that the mother had a notion to try and smarten things up. It was as though her husband, when he was still alive, had been a kind of metronome to set the days to. By the curl of a lip, or the back of a hand, whole orchestras of housework were set into motion; bed-making here, cleaning there. After he was gone, the whole of life became a Sunday: shapeless, without routine. So things went, by and large, to rack and ruin; the house grew deathly and sacred like a pharaoh’s tomb. Patterns of mouldy stuff crept up from the floors, gave the plaster the appearance of eczema, and broke the paint into tiny bits and flaked them away. Everything white evolved a yellowness in time, like billiard balls, or the bones from a roast chicken. Nothing was ever entirely dry.
And the mice, the bloody mice, were marching around as if they owned the place, interfering in her business, dragging things around the house. They even seemed to be stealing her washing from the clothes-horse on the bathtub, and all the while they stared at her, like laser beams, like X-rays, as though the mother was anything to do with them. So, she made the house bristle with mousetraps and every night she would empty them, one by one, and take each ruined victim by the tail, until she had a handful, a whole limp posy that dangled in the air. The mother was, after all, wholly within her rights; at least, she always knew it at the time. Every night she gathered up her horrible little bouquet, and then walked up and down, mustering her anger, waiting until she dared, and then finally, the right moment arrived. Then the mother would gallop down the hallway, throw open the dining room door and she hurl the little corpses inside, because dead bodies always vanished in the dining room; because the things in the dining room seemed to need dead bodies; because, she had begun to fret of late, what might happen if those things were not fed?
This is what the mother would know for certain, every night, as she threw the sacrifice to the cutlery. This is what she knew, for certain: she was firm, aware, in control, justified. By the time the door thumped shut, she was never quite so sure, and she would hold her own hand, and take herself away, kindly.
And yet, amongst all these things, was Marie, growing like a flower, drawing pictures and skipping on the concrete patio as any six-year-old should. Her hair was long and spirally and nearly white, and she was beautiful, translucent as candle wax, full of singing. The grandmother must have taught her to read, for the house filled up with picture books and toys and things that the mother supposed she must have bought for her and then forgotten. Marie was light and air, and the fragile sort of creature that a careless touch might snap. And she loved her mother, praise be, she looked up at her with a calm acceptance; she made the mother good.
And finally, after forever, it was spring in the garden; the wind was like a scalpel, but at last the sun was shining, and it set the mother off on a cleaning spree. She had put her apron on and rolled up the sleeves of her dress, and had put a silk scarf on her head that she couldn’t tie up quite right. Passing the landing mirror, she found herself to be the image of the perfect woman: bright; efficient; motherly yet brisk. She smiled at herself, and then got on with things.
There is no point in cleaning if your labour is spread too thinly. There is no point in cleaning if you can’t see the good you have done. And, as the mother was rather given to distraction or loss of enthusiasm, she tended to concentrate on small things, ones that she could definitely finish. Today, in celebration of the fading of winter, it was going to be the skirting boards. The mother filled a plastic bucket wit
h lovely hot water and soapflakes. She found an old pair of tights, as it seemed a shame to waste a nice dishcloth, and then she got on her knees and began.
The lino was sticky underneath her legs, and the hand that she was not wiping with was braced against the floor and soon grew greasy-black. But the skirtings! They shone like teeth, like glory in domestic form. The mother wiped and wiped, and wept with joy at the sight of them, as she moved in slow horizontal procession through the house. She travelled on her knees up the kitchen step and then, snail-wise, she moved along the hallway with her brown scummy water, past Marie, who did not look up. She was staring, dumbfounded at her new dolly with chicken feet for hands. On she went, as far as the door to the box room that they used for storing junk. Then she had to stop, sadly, as there were no more skirting boards left.
Then an idea struck the mother and she opened the little cupboard between the rooms, in case the skirtings extended inside. There was a jumble of rubbish within, and her other child as well, but she didn’t really notice as this was not what she was seeking. She dropped her head, disappointed, and came back out, then caught sight of her beautiful paintwork: a stripe of hygiene in that filthy old house. She was very proud.
The mother permitted herself a rest at last, and made a nice fresh cup of tea, and then she sat in her red armchair, drinking it and savouring the ache in her knees, as if she had won a race, or bravely scaled a cliff. It was evening before she got up again as she needed to spend a penny; the windows were dulling as she went up and came back down the stairs, and the mother realised that she would need to cook something. She pottered off to look in the fridge, wondering what Marie liked to eat.
She remembered about baby rusks, but discovered that they seemed to have run out of these; now that she thought about it, Marie was probably rather too old anyway, and that even if there had been any, they wouldn’t have been kept in the refrigerator. The mother was very tired. She frowned and, straightening up, had the fright of her life when she closed the fridge, for the black-haired child was on the other side of it. The ghastly little thing was covered in muck, only as clean as mice’s tongues can groom, and dressed in the weirdest assortment of clothes: the grandmother’s big pants, and a petticoat, and a cardigan that belonged to Marie gaping, unbuttoned, because mice do not understand buttons.
The child that was not Marie, flinched as the mother jumped backwards, shying, waiting to judge the danger. The mother realised that she must have disturbed her out from the cupboard and that this was probably where the horrid thing had been living, these past couple of months. A door closed upstairs and the mother recognised Marie’s hopping footfalls above her head and panic seized her by the arm. Marie had not seen her sister for well over two years and by now she did not even seem to remember that she had been a twin.
The wrong child gazed frankly at the mother, as though staring out a dangerous dog, ready to throw herself to one side if the other were to pounce. The mother regarded her likewise as she reached behind herself to the draining board for a weapon. The child dipped her face and growled, then turned tail and ran as the mother lunged at her with a saucepan in her fist, angry as a speeding lorry. The black-haired child fled like a cat, up on the table and down again, clattering cups and clutter, streaking through the kitchen and then through the scullery, finally escaping through the window at the very back.
A moment later, Marie came in, innocently curious, rubbing her runny nose on her sleeve and wanting to know what the noise was about. ‘Nothing,’ said the mother, and she folded her daughter close to her, but awkwardly, as one hand was holding a saucepan by the handle.
Later, lying in bed, the mother thought that she could hear the black-haired child again, creeping though the house like a burglar. It made her skin crawl.
13
Mice
A FEW YEARS for human beings creep by in generations for mice. They have grown old and died, and mothered thousands, scampering along their own bloodlines, along the hopes and despairs that connect a mouse to his backbone.
In this house, there is always mess, so there is always food; the mice have evolved a fraction larger, on average, and their coats are thick and lush like oily velvet. They are fecund, as only mice can be, and their numbers might easily have over-run the house, but for the dozens of mousetraps that lurked in their running places and holes. It seems to the mice that there are ever and ever more of the things; the elderly ones with grey in their fur swear that there had not been so many last month. They sigh over the loss of whatever season had passed most recently; now it is March, the winter was the good old days.
Their lives are not bad, although most often snapped off short by traps. The cutlery has become a normal part of their lives, another hazard to live between; another hardship for their fragile little lives. They do their best and gnaw their teeth short and live in their ancestral home as they ever have. At daybreak, the cutlery slides out for its grisly meal of broken, mouse-trapped mice. At daybreak, the dining room is treacherous with knives and forks, and the mice all huddle in their shacks and houses, and they wish that they could not hear the scissor-sounds of eating. But they are mice, and mice die of being killed; that is to say, that they do not expect to grow old. The gap underneath the door is vast as an underpass and there is a whole house to scurry in; they make do.
The mice now have a focus, anyhow, one that extends beyond the earthly affairs of their own troubles. The childling, pup of humans, is as much a part of their universe as the moon and sky and ceiling and Christmas tree, and her welfare is of desperate, of religious importance.
There have been no more white mice, but the legend of the albino endures, solidifying in the telling: the evil one sent by the frizz-haired mother, sent to tempt them to murder, to tempt them to cowardice and denial of the fairy light god. And, doctrine has it that mousehood failed in those cold days. They gave into the disaster, to that awful bloody moment of killing; that slaughter demanded by the jeering, sneering, red-eyed Satan. That day they discovered their own frozen hearts; the prophet, false prophet, enacted his own bloody doom and smeared the whole of mousehood with his gore. Such were the bleak and desperate aeons before the dusk of the fairy light god. Ah, but they bettered themselves, repented of the violence that he forced from them; they refused his gospel of fear.
And then, on the holy night that they all saved the childling from suffocating, they knew that they had done the fairy lights’ bidding. Thus it was that they were redeemed from murder by love, in those ancient days when it is said that the Christmas tree was clothed in pointed, perfumed needles. The mice in the dining room are transcending mouseishness; they are learning the tree-trunk ways of people, for the childling, test of their loving, is ever in need of humanness, and so they must work to gain this.
Luckily, the fairy light god wills it that there is another childling in the house, mirror of their own, and possession of the frizz-haired mother; by studying this one, the mice can determine how they should care for their own. So, the elite, the chosen priesthood and elders, are ordained to creep about the house by daylight, to spy and research, and to explain their findings.
They dress her, as best they can, and they trim her fringe from her face with their teeth. They keep her warm, keep her safe. They cherish their childling, their own huge pup. But, try as they might, they cannot show her how to speak; she can neither squeak like a mouse, nor shout and clap her mouth as the humans do. She makes no talking at all. It is a shame. Still, they have pleased themselves and their god by keeping her so kindly.
These are the toys that mice make: they are plagiarisms, copied from the human beings, remade as well as mice know how, a cup handle for a teething ring, and a teddy bear bitten out of blanket. When the childling was a baby, they had played peek-a-boo with curtain scraps, and gave her a salt pot to shake in her little fist. Now, as time goes on, it is getting harder, for the toys of a child are more complex than the toys of an infant. They
have made a skipping rope, but it is only six-inches long, and throwing jacks, but none of them understand why they must be thrown. Still, they are ambitious, and because today is before the market night, they have made her a special present. They have made her a picture book.
The cover is made from pork rind, unpeeled from a ham in the pantry; the mother was speechless with rage when she found it, skinned and ravaged on the floor. They dried it out on the branches of the Christmas tree, with a sentry guarding it, and when it was rubber-hard, they sewed it into a story, with J-cloth pages in between. But they had no words to put inside, and the pictures are made out of smells.
The child will be left alone tonight, because nobody could teach her how to turn handles, and she might never fit beneath the dining room door, no matter how flat she squeezes. The mice are sorry for her and so every market night, they make her a present. The mice have gotten up especially early this afternoon to present their childling with her gift. The scouts run ahead and check that the way is clear; the hall is empty. They can hear the mother in the kitchen, thundering water into a bucket and humming. They give the signal and the mice drag their gift along the floor towards the back stairs.
There is a cupboard underneath them, and the door is ajar. The mice troop shyly inside their childling’s playroom. She beams at their appearance and mimes as if to groom her whiskers, as if the dear silly thing had any whiskers for grooming. She is sitting on a Hessian carpet with her things, stacking a tower from tea-packet building blocks, beside a ball that they stole from Marie. She sees the look on their faces and is a little sad, for it will be a lonely night.
The mice begin to shove at the door, so the child leans over and helps them open it; she has the strength of a monster, and as she opens it she sees her brand-new book. She is delighted; she snatches it up and sniffs deeply. Then, not sure of what to do, she turns the pages one by one, nibbling like a wine taster; nibbling like a mouse, not hard enough to destroy, and certainly not enough to eat; but sufficient to taste, discover, comprehend. It is beautiful.
The Knife Drawer Page 5