The Knife Drawer

by Padrika Tarrant

  I don’t think that I had ever been so sad as that evening, or so suddenly. Maybe if one listens at moss-forests, then any old sorrow can clang in one’s ears, for almost anything else is louder than moss. Tears made courses down my face and landed among the scrambled eggs. My mother paused for a forkful between her explaining; she pronounced me Overtired and told me to get into my bedclothes.

  I went obediently enough, but halfway up the stairs I paused, and gazed down between the banister-bones at the door to the dining room which, according to my mother, was also not there. Sometimes that door made me want to sob. I trailed up to my bedroom and put on my nightgown, white as soap with tats of lace at the throat and cuff. I untwisted my hair from its bits of ribbon, and began to brush it. As I brushed, the static made my fingers crackle, and my hair seemed to float ceiling-wards, as one’s hair does in dreams, or else like it does underwater. It clung against the back of the hairbrush and against the air, and in the mirror my reflection looked strange and witchy.

  Then the bedroom snapped. It was as if every thread that held every thing together broke all at once, like shoelaces do sometimes when you stretch them too tight. I lurched forwards, thrown against the dressing room table by nothing at all, with a splitting in my ears like a broken wineglass. Then I heard that pleading again, desperate and failing, and almost without hope. Please.

  And then I knew.

  I thundered down the stairs and stood shaking before the door that wasn’t there at all, that my mother had smothered all over with Concealer No 12 from Boots the Chemist so that nobody should be able to see it. Like a mad thing I began to shove, to batter at it, kicking my tender feet at the stuff that held it fast. I bruised my arm and shoulder down one side. I grazed my toes and knuckles, I discovered violence that I did not know I possessed, and I heaved the dining room door open.

  The bulb spat when I pushed the switch, made no light at all. In the darkness it was hard to understand what I was seeing, though my nose could comprehend it well enough. It stank of ammonia and misery, and all my eyes could register were the little frosted bulbs of a string of fairy lights. There was a Christmas tree, mummified to spine and branches, with rags of tinsel here and there like the stuff that infested the kitchen ceiling. I took in the room by degrees: the conker-tops of furniture, deep with scratching; mouse-eaten walls and a piano that I had never seen.

  In a moment more, I had discerned the form of a little mouse, frail as a cobweb and stiff with fear upon the picture rail. Then there were eyes, dozens, hundreds, all blinking, shining, driven crazy with wishing. Then, all of an instant, the room was leaping with mice, dashing headlong towards the door that I had left ajar. Faced with this frantic, scrabbling sea, I put my hands over my mouth and stared. It seemed to me as if every mouse that had ever been born was desperate to escape this one little room. I dared not move my feet an inch, for fear of crushing them.

  One brave creature made a leap from the branches of the Christmas tree and landed on the lace of my nightgown, whisking its thin, snapped-short tail. Its body was all but weightless, and it clung there with pinkish paws to my collar, trembling like a thing made from fine, over-wound clockwork. It stared into my face like a tiny soothsayer, breaths heaving out of its body as though it might die of breathing, as if it were struggling for the power of speech. We looked at one another for a long second.

  Then I heard my grandmother calling me from the top of the stairs. ‘Marie,’ she said, ‘Marie, come here!’ The enchantment dissolved; the mouse jumped sideways and streaked along the carpet towards the door, among the last few stragglers. Something happened, though, in the patch of shadow underneath a table; in the dark I could not tell what. There was a sound like scissors, and the watery grey mouse did not reappear.

  I stuttered backwards on naked feet, and then turned tail and fled, past my grandmother on the staircase, without even a single thought for politeness, and I hid in the airing cupboard all night as my mother wailed that she needed a cat this very minute. By the next morning, my grandmother had found one: an insolent tabby with yellow eyes and feet full of claws. My grandmother named him Thomas. ‘Thomas the doubter,’ said she, and laughed.

  23

  Mice

  THERE IS A fundamental nature to things. Chickens dream of flight. A yappy dog in his tartan jacket might fetch a painted wooden ball and beg for chocolate drops, but in his soul he is a killer, a pacer of ancient tundra wastes. So it is with mice; their nature is all mischief and chewing, a kind of gentle chaos. A heart that bolts along so rapidly does not take long to remember its form. Over hours, the mice creep out from their corners and they snap about the place like rubber bands. The universe is not one room after all, and they find that they always knew it, even if it was a thing only barely believed.

  There are maps within them, written in the curls of their ears; they almost remember every carpet pattern, this biscuit crumb or that delectable plug flex. The mother-god is in the kitchen among the brittle stacks of crockery, warming milk for Horlicks. There is noise from the hallway, quite a racket, but the mother is drinking it already with her imagination, tasting that sweet thickness. Horlicks is a refuge, gorgeous and beige and big enough to sink right into. As she is thinking, the milk rises up like a time-lapsed mushroom and spitters over the stove, but before she can swallow her thought, or even notice the milk pan, the place is overrun with mice.

  They come at the kitchen like a scrat-toed flood, scuttle over everything with their dirty feet. She points her face at the lighting strip and screams, and then the mother-god begins to stamp at them as though the kitchen was on fire. But mice are invincible; every one is fragile, broken easily but surrounded by friends. Although some are killed in this melee, there are still enough for a plague. After a little time, she stops her flapping and she marches out; furious slippers thump away up the stairs.

  The mice are hungry as fire, and here is food, actual food, not the wallpaper glue that the tellers of folklore drool over. There is half-eaten toast and scrambled eggs, and green-furred custard in a pot, and cold tea, and a larder full of everything besides. They eat and eat and eat; some even die of eating, which is a noble and magnificent way to end one’s life. They scamper and piddle over every surface their ancestors once trod.

  In the dead of night, the mice are manic, crazed with food. The milk pan, which was knocked half-off the hob, is burning black and billowing the kitchen with warm, sweet waves of smoke. The mouse-children are high on sugar and they begin to play jump-candle with the gas ring, flicking over it, daring each other, whisking their tails just clear of the flames, when the grandmother comes in. Pandemonium freezes to a tableau; every mouse hopes he is invisible as she stalks into the kitchen.

  ‘Ha,’ she says, as though the sight were shortly, curtly, funny, and she turns off the hob, dumping the milk pan in the greasy sink with a quench of steam. The handle is melted; it bears the shape of her fingers. She inspects her hand, as if interested by the sticky plastic left upon the palm. Then, she steps through the mice towards the hallway, making as if to close the door behind her. She seems to change her mind, however, and opens it out again. ‘Help yourselves,’ says she with an ironic bow. Then she is gone.

  The mice, of course, could leave the kitchen, open door or not; they are mystified, and gape after her; then they shake their scruffy faces and gaze at one another. What to do now, what would the childling have them do? They look around them, at the tinsel and the mess, and wonder. Here they are, come into their inheritance at last, with enough food that they might even die of it, and it must have been by their love; it must. Their culture is only ever as solid as chewed bread; there will be time enough to muddle through the doctrine.

  But the mother: this frizz-haired god, she who can belch out bleach fumes and reduce a mouse to dust with just one spiteful glance; did she not just stamp and shriek and then run cowering? Did she not seem just a monster, a thing made out of blood and tendons
after all, as mice are? Only a monster?

  They glance among themselves, and then they straighten their tails and scuttle from the kitchen, bathing amongst the spice and smells of sweat, and deodorant, and coal-tar soap, and wet coats and rotting woodwork. They have only ever known the reek of their own bodies, and the nickel-coin sourness of breeding metal. Yes, it is this, surely it is this beauty, this inhaled colour; surely this is their message from the god that does not wish to kill them. This is their reward for their loving, for their faith. The childling is still watching, twinkling like fairy lights, smiling and nodding.

  The noise of mice as they jump up from one step to the next is a small, flicking sound, like hail on a shed roof. The mother, in her bed, has left off lamenting her misfortune and aborted Horlicks, and has even finished complaining to anyone who might listen, that the whole thing would definitely put her in an early grave. She is lying on her eiderdown like a tomb carving, hands as flat as spatulas. Her lips are quivering as she almost dreams, until her eyes flap open. Mice creep onto her bed from every direction, and they stand in a shoving, shouldering ring, and they stare; they accuse. She fixes her eyes on the lightshade that hangs above her head. It is blue. For one, blinding second she thinks of her husband in his stripy blue pyjamas, soaking scarlet through the tear in the cloth.

  She gawps like a baked fish and shudders, bites her lip and wonders if she will meet her death, as one mouse nips her toe very hard, not to hurt, certainly not to eat, but to discover, to see if she tastes like a god.

  The mother lies very still and begins to wail, as the mice dance slowly about her in circles, clambering and scratching at her ankles every time they climb over them.

  24

  Marie

  MY MOTHER DID not speak to me for weeks; barely spoke, rather, for if I asked her a question, any question at all, her reply would always be the same. If I asked my mother if she would like a cup of tea, she would drain white and press her fingers together, so hard I feared that they might fracture. ‘Mind your own business,’ was all that would grit out of her mouth. ‘Mind your own business.’

  Sometimes I would catch her looking at me from among the safety of her knitting, as though she might hold me at bay with gauge nine needles and grey string. If I caught her eye, she would hold my glance for just a splinter of time, chin quivering, and then she would stare away. She would show her displeasure by snatching all the stitches off her needles and unravelling them, savagely, the way one strips feathers from a duck.

  She did come round, but it took months, and in the meantime, I grew dreadfully lonely. March lasted forever that year; the weeks were lionish; translucent; fitful; terribly cold. We kept the fire going in the parlour; it warmed the damp and made the walls give off a kind of soggy comfort, like the heat inside a compost heap. It was lovely, but it thickened the chest and made one cough. The household sagged, stealthily, so that nobody would notice.

  On the first morning after the mice, I came downstairs and discovered the cat. He had been firmly installed in the home before I was even out of bed. When I found him he was in the hallway, purring and chewing with the side of his face at something small and gristly that lay half-out of a saucer. I was glad, I suppose, to have suddenly acquired a pet; I ran my hand along his fur-stole back and felt the muscles tauten beneath my hand. He did not look up, nor pause his eating.

  I straightened up, awkwardly as I had trodden on the hem of my nightie, and I recalled in a rush what had happened the night before. It was only three paces to the dining room door, but I crept up to it as though I hardly dared. It was almost as if it had never been open at all, except that the blocking at the bottom was loose from scraping open and scraping shut. My mother had covered it up with wrapping paper. Do not open until Xmas.

  There followed a long and guilty day of minding my own business, without even my grandmother paying me any mind. That day I would have been glad for anything, even of one of her presents or her demonstrations.

  I stood on the concrete patio until my fingers ached with cold, as though I might redeem myself by shivering there. I hunted the garden for snowdrops or leaf buds on the plants, but there weren’t even those. The garden hunkered in the wind the way that pigeons do when they are stuck in bad weather; it would not speak to me. I was miserable; I even went back to the cat, but all he did was to narrow his eyes and turn his cheek away.

  It was dark by five, as though the day could not be bothered. I went to my room and played with my magnetic fishes, but in the musty air the cardboard was turning soft, unpeeling cardboard heads from metal chins. The house was dragging out a heartbeat, lowering and hard and lower than bones. It was a noise that always made my ears trill, and it made my grandmother spiteful for days.

  That evening I was at a loose end, poking in cupboards and leaning against the tabletop for the want of something to do. In the course of my rummaging, I unearthed a candle-stump and I stole a long Cook’s match from the box that my mother hid in the fridge. Then, brimming with defiance, I went exploring.

  The entrance to the back stairs, where servant girls once scurried, out of the sight of some grand lady of the house, had been blocked up with a bookcase since forever. I did not even know quite where the stairs ended; probably in the rooftop labyrinth that my grandmother haunted. Still, between the bathroom and the box room door was a tiny landing where the stairs ran above; slant-ceilinged, wide enough to admit one body. The nose of that wedge of space was sliced off by a bolted cupboard. When I pulled both doors shut, that little square was perfectly black. It was a good place in which to sulk.

  I lit my match, and then my candle, and I hid in the dark. The air was rich with spores and cobwebs, and when I sat down the floor was bald and splintery. A very old mousetrap was wedged in the corner, adorned with the bones of some long-dead victim, tiny and perfect as jewellery. I hadn’t the heart to touch it. A spider tickled over my forearm and made me jump. I brushed her off my skin and put her safely out of the way of my feet. I spent a while playing with fire, sweeping my finger through and through the candle flame, trusting it not to bite.

  In time I grew bored with sitting and I twisted round to face the cupboard door. Kneeling in the dark, my knees studded with square-headed nails, I began to fight with the tarnished slide-bolt. I hurt my fingers getting it undone.

  When I heaved it open, I found no interesting junk for sorting through, just a graveyard for moulding, brownish things, things that smelled old and dead. I was disappointed and held the candle aloft, making the bulging lath above my head leap in the shadows. Downstairs, my mother coughed and said something to herself out loud. Warily, I lifted up a potato sack with the toe of my shoe, uncovering shapeless things like the relics of some rotten history.

  Suddenly, though, I found that I recognised an outline, and I reached down, horrified and curious, and I picked up a brown-blue teddy bear.

  It was crude, more a silhouette, really, carved out of blanket, as if with nail clippers or something blunt. I turned it over in my hands as the hairs on my neck prickled. There were two friendly holes in the place of eyes. Then it was if my eyes adjusted to what they were staring at, for then I perceived myself to be in a playroom, sunless and dank as a cell. I found a cardboard dress-up doll, with a gown of newspaper curling off her shoulders. I found a telephone, like something I think I remembered, not Fisher Price this one, but modelled out of bread. There were no wheels to pull it along, and the bread had desiccated, hard as a fossil. Then, I saw a little book, and I seized it up, almost triumphantly, expecting a diary full of secrets, some key to make me understand.

  I found myself aware of movement, and craned behind me: a seethe of mice had followed me in. They must have been watching me trespassing, nosey and tantalised, flesh creeping off my shoulders. I felt ashamed, caught out. They all gazed at me with bated breath.

  I was cowed and looked slowly down at the book in my hands. The texture of it was so odd, s
o revolting, that I had to fight an impulse to fling it right away from me. It was a rough-made thing, as if it had been put together by children; it seemed to have been stitched out of skin. The jacket was covered in tiny pores and hairs, the same sallow stuff that my grandmother’s winter gloves were made from. At the front, where one might expect to find a title, was a smeared brown-red stamp. ‘DANISH’.

  My fingers turned greasy as I bent it open. After the thick, half-elastic cover, the pages inside were shockingly dry, linty almost, and blue. It dawned on me that they were made of floor cloths, the ones that we used so as not to spoil the nice homemade ones that my mother knitted. I leaned over, peered hard, trying to make out writing. The mice all gazed too, leaning forward. There was not one word, just a horrible smell, and my stomach heaved without warning.

  The mice were staring, all pointing like arrows, expectant, as if were supposed to do something, say something, be some special thing, just for them. I looked back at them all, needled by the jabbing of their need, by the hundreds of tiny questions that I could not answer, nor even comprehend.

  I was just a child; I began to cry, and I crawled backwards, scattering mice; blowing out my candle, I returned to the parlour. The mice all crept out after me and slipped through the parlour like water down a draining board; the cat saw, but he was already quite busy.

  My mother was clearly planning to have an early night; she was gathering up armfuls of Thomas, trying to cajole and force him to come upstairs with her. He was having none of this and bucked and yowled and clawed at her. They went from the parlour and up to bed in this fashion; the one spitting and scratching his feet, and the other soothing and threatening, and occasionally yelping in pain.

  25

  The Mother

  FLOWERS ARE NICE. Kneeling at the coffee table in one’s parlour is nice, and arranging a bouquet is nicer still. And it was May, and these are things that one does in the month of May.