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The Knife Drawer

Page 11

by Padrika Tarrant


  My mother always plaited my hair before bed; she always did on the days that she took a notion to, and would be fondly scornful if I did not come to her before being asked. Why, she would say, did I actually want to have my hair all tatted up in knots by morning? On the other days, she did not always plait my hair before bedtime and would wave me away in annoyance for being such a demanding child. This was the way that we were.

  More than anything, I was merely glad that my mother would speak to me at all, without closing doors in my face, or spraying me with Haze Alpine Fresh, as though I were an unpleasant household odour. Perhaps by then she had forgiven me for raining the mice down upon her, like some scuttling Biblical plague. I had not meant to, after all; I had not done it to tease her. At least I was a kind-hearted child.

  The mice harried my mother constantly. Sometimes, she was so anxious that it zigzagged off her in acrid, angular waves. It used to burn at my face, the way that one is burned by holding things straight out of the freezer, so cold that they stick against the skin. Sometimes my mother flinched about the house, raw, as though every surface had been peeled off her in shreds, as if it stung her just to walk in air. Sometimes, my mother cried like a wet tea towel against a wet glass tumbler. Wherever she went she drove mice before her; wherever she went they followed her like assassins.

  I must have moved. My mother clucked her tongue, and with a handful of hair she pulled my head up straight. I felt her fingernails as she scraped the handful into three and began to make a braid. There was a savage draught through the back door; the air smelled dark green, smelled of ice-cold rain. I pulled forwards, just a little, making a counter pressure to help my mother do my hair, keeping things taut.

  The cat had been asleep under the table; now he rose, and with a kind of idle haste, made his way into the scullery. Although he had warmed towards me, Thomas did not care for my grandmother at all. There was the sound of the twisted handle and my grandmother’s weight braced against the swollen wood. The back door always stuck a little in the damp. She came into the kitchen warmth like a prophet of the coming snow; I had a glimpse of the garden, with its wide black sky, before the door was shoved to. My grandmother had been picking thorns again. In the crook of her arm was a flat basket, dark with wet and evil with spikes. She would stand for hours in the garden, face knuckled into a frown, snapping the thorns off the roses, her fingers stabbing in and out with her hard white fingers. When her basket was full, or when the poor bushes were naked, she would bear them indoors and dry them out on the floor of the oven. I never did know quite what she wanted them for. Still, the roses did manage to exact their small revenge.

  My grandmother’s hands were patterned with blood from hundreds of little jags: some were a whole day old and were scabbed over, blackish, washed with rainwater. Others, the most recent, were fresh as butcher’s meat, draining scarlet down her fingers, collecting around her white-gold wedding ring in clots. She was quite oblivious. The sight of it made me catch my lip between my teeth and shake with horror.

  My mother reached the very end of my hair, where the braid was as thin as a stem. I turned slightly, so as to gaze back at her. She was holding the plait in her fist; suddenly it looked very fragile. My mother wound a cotton ribbon twice around the hair above her thumb; then, with one end gripped in her free hand, she snatched up the other with her mouth and dragged it hard with her small yellow teeth. The gesture frightened me; there was a moment when I discovered that I did not know my mother at all. Then, the loop brought good and tight, she let it go and finished it off in a pretty bow. I kept my jumping skin as still as I could until she tied up the other plait. Then I crouched away on my fingers and feet, leaving my mother smiling at her hair-snagged comb, raking her thumbnail up and down its teeth, whilst my grandmother leaned into the oven with a match. I only stood properly when I was safely out of the door, but in the hallway the dark was haunted by The Crying Boy and my lungs filled with shadows. I couldn’t bear to stand there. I closed my eyes and rushed towards the parlour and its lovely fire.

  The mice were there, trembling bravely, as though come Thomas or apocalypse, they were going to see me, to say their piece or die speaking. But I did not speak the language of mice. Still, with our eyes, we met. I did not run this time, but stroked the paintbrush-end of my pigtail against my cheek. Then I stepped forwards into the fragile crowds and stood there amongst them. A channel opened for each footstep and closed behind each one; in this way, the mice shepherded me along the carpet to my mother’s armchair. Then I gasped. They had made my mother, laid her out on the chair, like a sort of empty effigy.

  On top of the lambskin was a wig of dishcloth string, balanced and held in place by hairpins. Her second-favourite slippers were planted together on the floor, firmly, hysterically chaste. Between the two was my whole mother, with her knitting on an apron lap, grasped by two tense mittens. Where a face would have been there was a withering scowl of orange peel, and two myopic Polos that could not find their spectacles. Everything was held in place by needles. It was uncanny.

  The mice all blinked at me, excited. ‘Do you see?’ they seemed to say. ‘Do you see?’ I nodded slowly, slightly alarmed. I did not know if the mice understood nodding, whether the gesture meant anything to them; still I nodded all the same. Yes, it was my mother.

  I cocked my head towards the door, listening, growing sweaty with nerves, making the mice afraid for a moment, but it was fine, my mother was not coming. Then the seething paws herded me backwards until I found myself sitting on the hearthstone, with the fire at my back, hot against my nightdress. And the pantomime began.

  The mice sniffed up to the slippers, innocently going about their business, and then dived back as though terrified. One mouse, brown as garden mud, tiptoed up onto my knee. ‘Do you see?’ she seemed to say. ‘Do you see?’ I was not sure. I nodded, uncertain. Some of the mice lay sprawled as if killed; others fled almost out of sight and then peeped out. They held still, like the figures in a Nativity set. The dead mice got up and went away to the wings. Then one mouse, a large mouse, fat as a ping-pong ball from dustbin robbing, came and stood before me, guiltless and calm, gazing frankly into my face. Then a dozen others dragged something in from the side, a cloth that flowed like liquid, rippling over the bits on the carpet. It was black. After a minute’s frowning, I recognised it as my mother’s silk scarf, the one she bought to wear over her hair when she did housework. She hardly ever wore it; she could not figure out how to tie it up properly. The mice swept it along the floor to the large mouse, who carried on looking into my face, even as they approached. They covered her right up, leaving only a bulge beneath the folds. The mouse on my knee glared up at my face, desperate. ‘Do you see? Do you see?’ I didn’t think that I did.

  I nodded, hopelessly, and stroked her mossy fur with my fingertip. She was soft and fragile as mould, and I cried for her. I cried for all the mice and their love as they climbed onto my shoulders and the fire at my back began to hurt. I had nothing to offer them, it seemed. Still, I sneaked into the kitchen and laid out bottle tops of milk and a Jacob’s cracker underneath the cooker.

  My mother did not notice; she was happy with her comb. When I had seen to the mice, I walked up to her, knelt, and put my arms around her and my head in her lap. She gathered around me like a blanket, and she did not tell me to mind my own business.

  ‘Oh Marie,’ my mother said, very softly. I could not tell if she was smiling.

  28

  Knife

  BEHIND THE PINK window, the cutlery is breeding, multiplying very slowly. They are not quickly fertile, like mice. The dining room is a church for knives; they have slid out and possessed it all, for there is no use left for ambush.

  They have the souls of scorpions. They are stealthy; the plink-plink of their nickel joints make a noise like music. It is rather pretty; it sounds exactly like the teeth of a musical box as they are plucked by the comb. They scar and stab a
t every wooden surface, they scissor-scratch the French polish, they write everything over with unreadable runes. There are scrages in circles, all round the voodoo-shrine of the mice; not because they are interested, but simply because it is a place they cannot walk through. Knives are not curious by nature; they walk up to things and turn away again, unless there is some use to breaking through. They are brainless; there is no thought in them, no head to keep them in. All the cutlery has is will; they seek out soft matter to slice and scrape, hungry and relentless as a plant wrenching upwards into light. In the eaten-out cavity of the piano, the pinking shears are about to give birth.

  The fairy lights are twinkling in the bones of the Christmas tree, twinkling with one bulb snapped right off, twinkling even though they shouldn’t work at all. They give the mounds of guano a wonderland cast; they turn it into a filthy snowscape. The dinner forks grind away like some remote machine, every part disconnected, somehow all moving. Then the door opens. There are a few seconds of stillness as their nerves compute, readjust. Then the cutlery turns itself round towards the space where the light is coming from and begins its various pincer journeys toward it.

  There is the scent of breathing from beyond; they can taste the carbon dioxide and water, the richness of it as it is pushed from firm warm lungs. At the very last moment the exhalation becomes a gasp and a handful of mice are flung inside. They are spoiled mice already, killed by something else; they neither run nor flinch as the sharp things and spoons make their three-point turns and close in.

  The pinking shears have not moved to feed, they are far too busy. They are all strange anyway: wrong-ended; spiked in funny places, with multiple handles like some weird invention. They are writhing, heaving rhythmically, greeting like a nail against a slate tile.

  Metal things do not give birth, not quite. They tear themselves up, as bacteria do. They do not grow old like blooded things, but useless; they turn bloated and blunted, only good for cutting paper. And then they split.

  There’s a screech and the tangle splits, resolves. Now there are three of them: bright pairs of nail scissors, tiny and silvery and murderous, licking at themselves and at each other. They are slickish, oilish; ready to feed and grow up into pinking shears themselves, or else tailors’ scissors, or kitchen ones for slicing the fat from meat. Their voices are shrill as glass, the house can hear them. It is a sound that cuts.

  29

  The Mother

  THE MOTHER BOILED gently among her bubbles, like a blanching almond. The bathroom fugged with steam; it heavied the paper lantern that hung from the ceiling, just above the tub. The cardboard softened every bath time, sagged against the pin that snagged it in place.

  When the bath was full, everything relaxed, slackened. The grouting around the taps luxuriated in its mildew, slick as the underneath of stones. The windowpane, which was frosted with a motif of water drops, dripped water, and the house’s poor cheeks ached.

  Radox salts are pleasantly gritty underneath one’s body; they line the base of the water like the sand on a beach. They make it into ass’s milk, almost; opaque and delicious. But they do not produce bubbles; this is why they must be supplemented with Matey. The water was much too hot, a horizontal tide-line was developing along her body, the lower half scalded red. It seemed fitting, when becoming clean, to suffer a little. She had not considered the notion particularly, it just seemed fitting. The mother was feeling a bit queasy. The turkey had not been quite right, perhaps she should have cooked it less rare?

  She was sick of Christmas. The mother took a wad from the loo roll and began to scrub at herself with it, gasping in despair as it melted into mush and worm-thin rolls and filled her nice water with horrid little bits. She used the flats of her hands instead, as she hadn’t a flannel.

  The mother’s body was a strange combination of angular and loose; the flesh dangled off her bones. The mother’s clavicle was like some complicated apparatus, with the meat of breast and tummy hanging from it as though from a flagpole. She was yellowish in colour, decorated with fine silver trails where the skin had grown fat and tight, and then shrunk down again.

  The mother smoothed her fingers over her belly. It was elastic, softly giving, and empty. Sometimes this surprised her. It was as if her body remembered her children better than she did: that waddling hugeness of pregnancy, the kicking dome that bulged out of the bathwater like an island in ass’s milk. She used to watch her whole body heave; it was as though they had been playing in there. The two of them. There had been two. The mother put her head back and sighed, suddenly gaspingly sad.

  It was Christmas again this morning, and she had remembered. And she had tried, she had really tried. She rose in the middle of the night to dust the paper chains, to make mince pies, to fold paper napkins in complicated and beautiful ways, to make everything especially nice.

  The house was sulking, woken up and wan with light bulbs that morning, for it was hardly even morning at all yet. The mother cleaned her spectacles and made presents: washing fishes, with soap inside and sponge flanks stretched over and trailing sponge tails. She decorated them with felt tip pens, one eye open, one eye shut, with long bovine eyelashes and a mournful smile. Of course, if one used them to wash with the ink would run, but that was not the point. They were for keeping. They were for evidence. It was the thought that counted, and here was the proof. She really was good.

  The mother gazed at the paper lantern, watching the crepe glutting with steam. Any moment now it might tip its balance, plop into the water. Perhaps the dye would leach out of that as well, stain the ass’s milk pink. When the fish were done and hemmed all round with blanket stitch, the mother made them into neat little parcels with newspaper wrappings, and Christmas cards that had cornflake packet print on one side. But that would not be a problem, surely? Surely not! She shook her head, hard enough to make herself feel sick and jumped up, gathering up her gifts with gluey hands. Now, what was next? The fire! It needed stockings; it needed reindeer hoof prints. She trotted out of the kitchen door, tripped over her husband’s corpse and splayed out, face first on the carpet.

  Her toe had caught underneath the joint of his knee, which was cold and stiff as an ironing board. His eyes were jellied, more brainless than a sponge fish with a chest full of soap. He was, of course, not there at all. The mother explained this to herself, gently and at length. Eventually she discovered that she had told herself the truth. Of course he was not there. No, he was gone. Long gone. For a second, she beamed, opened her face to the floor and smiled, liberated, free of him. And then, as it always did, the knowledge sank through her, of what had happened. Of what she had done. Then it seemed to the mother, as she braced her fingers on the carpet to stand, that there were other ghosts in the hallway. There were hundreds, too many to reason with, little quivering ghosts with eyes like the opposites of stars. And even though she told them that they were not there, they did not vanish, not right away, they only blinked.

  The wallpaper was replaced by them; lavender grey outlines like some paranoid motif, so crowded that they stood upon, against, through each other. From a very great distance they might have resembled frogspawn. The mother shook herself and fled to the parlour, only returning for her parcels when she was certain that they had disappeared. Just to be sure she kept her eyes closed for the first few minutes, and arranged a bowl of nuts by touch alone.

  Before the sun came up there were sprouts bobbing in a boiling pan and a red-and-green paper tablecloth and places set with shiny holly and crackers, for there was a scheme with the milkman whereby a few pence a week bought stamps for a savings card. The hamper had been enormous and even contained a special Christmas-scented air freshener. After that, the mother laid her hands upon her lap and waited, waited in that awful squeeze between dread and excitement, for her little Marie to discover her. Oh Marie. The mother wrung a silk poinsettia between her hands.

  Her girl was so grown-up, they did grow up so
fast these days. She was sure that she had not been so grown-up at twelve-years-old. There was a knowingness to her that was frightening. No, that was not quite right. It was not a knowingness, but a watchfulness that clouded her face sometimes, as though she might ask a question at any moment.

  Sometimes it was as if she just saw through it all. The mother wondered if she only smiled, called her Mother, to be polite. She got a queer look sometimes, as though a sudden movement from either of them might be enough to rupture everything. Sometimes the mother had to choke silence into her throat, stuff all her confessions back with a swallow of air.

  As she waited, at five in the morning on Christmas Day, the mother missed her Marie horribly, the baby she had been, the time when she had believed every word that the mother had said. And she knew as well, knew with the hollow of her belly, that she had two children.

  The other one (what was her name?) the other one curled up in her empty womb like a shell, or else stole up and down the stairs on frightened feet and robbed at the dustbin. The mother heard the sounds, or thought she did, and was almost pleased. Twice she leapt up to find her other child, to explain, to make it all well again. She was not there.

  And then, thank God, Marie came, dredging sleep from her eyes, and the grandmother came from the garden smelling of frost, and they all sat down to Christmas dinner in their nightdresses or great coat. They were surprised to have a roast at eight in the morning, but seemed grateful enough. They gasped appreciatively at the gift-wrapped fishes; the mother had made one too many, it seemed, but she made a big joke of presenting one to herself. They all laughed. They chewed their food, wore paper crowns and sipped at port diligently as though it were cough mixture.

 

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