The Knife Drawer

by Padrika Tarrant

  By half past nine the gravy was mixed up with the blood from the turkey, the tablecloth had grown soggy from spills and ripped a little, and mother was feeling rather ill. The grandmother reached out suddenly, fast as a fox, and snatched up the last cracker. ‘You goose,’ said she, ‘there’s one too many!’ And showing her mouth, but hardly laughing, the grandmother shoved one end at the mother. The moment crystallised. And the mother took her end and yanked. The innards spilt out with a crack as the port glass went over and a plastic mouse dropped into the richly spreading stain. The grandmother picked it up by its long blue tail.

  Marie sat very still. The mother stared at the grandmother’s face in a flat panic. ‘Oh dear!’ said the latter, ‘I don’t think this was meant for you at all!’ And she laughed again. The mother very subtly, so as not to arouse suspicion, rose to her feet. Talking calmly all the while, she backed from the table and all along the hallway, before she bolted up the stairs and locked herself in the bathroom. And then, so as to have a valid excuse for being locked in the bathroom, the mother began to pour herself a bath.

  She stayed in the water until it was cold as a pond and then she sneaked back down to empty mousetraps and feed the cutlery.

  30

  Mice

  A MOUSETRAP IS irresistible. It’s an idiot’s death, a hero’s death, for curiosity is the noblest virtue that there is, next to love; next to rescuing. The mice are discovering the hundred different ways to die that are not deaths of despair or cutting. There is an odd kind of beauty to it, for every mouse should balance out his life upon a string of fear. This is how they are made; this is what makes them live their lives as flames do. The proper deaths for mice are ones that are swift and merciful, and the right kind of fear makes their lives a joy. This is a paradox.

  Now the mice are putting fear at their backs; even at this moment they are creating children in the cupboards and insulation spaces. They are feeding and fornicating and shoring up their lives against death. They are truly mice once more and are doing all the things that make them mice.

  But even so, in the left-hand side of every one of them is a little needle wound of guilt, pierced into their souls by the pain of the albino mouse, by his burning and screaming. No mouse can ever meet his death now without the others being sad, without them searching themselves to make sure that it is not their fault. In the beginning they were not sad at dying; this is the cost of guilt.

  No mouse admits this, that she will sometimes look at the draggles of mouse fur left by the cat, and feel a little sorry, for in some ways it is a wrong thing to feel. It makes their love well up in useless pools, with no thing there to rescue. And though they leap and scutter and make thousands of flick-whiskered mouselings, the unused love is hurting them, for what if they are damned?

  A tealeaf-brown mouse is considering this as she performs gymnastic tricks upon the curtain pole to tantalise the cat. Thomas is a damnable thing, with the brains and spite of a demon, and the frizz-haired mother would have him for a bodyguard if she could. She had wanted to name him Michael, but the grandmother would not hear of it. But a creature made out of spite might be led around by the nose with it, as mice are enslaved by curiosity. So it is that a single mouse can keep him busy all day and night, while the others get on with things. The mud-coloured mouse turns tricks and Thomas stares, just in case she falls. She might.

  Beneath, beneath, beneath. The childling, thing that must be rescued, thing that redeems mousehood by her need; the childling has been put beneath, and the mice cannot find her. They hunt; there are whole search parties that do nothing but look. The mice have already looked in the cupboard beneath the sink; they have searched beneath the furniture, in the fustish filthy gaps beneath the fridge and freezer; they have examined every beneath in the house, but they have found no childling. There is a panic evolving among them: stealthy, slow growing, a kind of tumour.

  But their fate is only half-completed; their redemption hangs upon the second half, for to be saved, the mice must be saviours. Truly, the god who does not wish to kill them must be testing them still, testing their will and worthiness for salvation. It is only faith that will find the childling to them.

  They looked beneath the rumpled bed sheets, but all they found was Marie, rubbing at her eyes as if she had been sleeping. She had stretched her arms to them, smiled very gently, shook her face from side to side as mice do when they are baffled. They had looked at her confused face and tiptoed dejectedly away.

  Marie is a dear thing really, but she does not understand beneath. They try and try to make her see, but she does not comprehend the question. She gazes at their signals, blinks her eyes, nods encouragement, but heaven only knows what goes through that great big skull. But beneath; surely beneath is some place close by? The love of mice has become a slow bleeding, that, if not clotted, might just drain them white.

  Now she comes into the parlour, carrying a too-full cup of tea. She sees the spitting, sneering cat and the mud-coloured mouse, and she sighs. Balancing her mug on the low table, she takes the tabby Satan by his scruff and turns him upside down, belly to the ceiling, paws folded together. She cradles him in the fashion; he is fuming, but passive as a mouseling as she bears him away.

  The parlour grows quiet; for a moment the mud-coloured mouse poises quite still as the cobwebs gather in the curtains like an evil spell. Night is falling in the parlour; she drops through the air and lands among the corner-shadows. The tealeaf-brown mouse is lithe as string as she threads the landscape of carpet through the hall. Thomas is cradled in Marie’s arms; she is sitting on the second-bottom step with her face against the warmth of his flank. He does not try to kill her. The mouse regards them, then streaks away in case the cat should get free, in case he should smash her with his feet and teeth. At any rate, the horror of the dining room door, even when closed, is enough to split the seal between the living and the mad.

  The mice have learnt a thing or two from their ordeal in there. The mice are making ghosts, in the gaps between rooms, in the cavities inside the floorboards, where the house is haunted by dust and tiny lost objects. The have practised on Marie, but though they can catch her attention easily enough, there is nothing to grasp hold of, nothing to twist. Marie is a vague creature, all made out of doubts and warmth; there is no sharp core inside her. All that they can do is make her look; all they can draw out of her is a kind of pity. She never seems to see what they are getting at; perhaps she is simple.

  Now, the frizz-haired mother is altogether another kettle of fish. She is all angles and knobs, just below the skin, below the fretting, below the shriek of her laugh. She has grown all kinds of spikes to protect her needle wound and they hurt and stab at her every minute of the day. That’s why she minces like she does, why she grimaces and snarls. The mice are quite sorry for her really, but they are dying for the answers: where is the childling? What is beneath? Why does she persecute the mice? Why does she hate them so? What did they ever do to her? They only want to make her listen, to make her stop.

  When the mice prayed and pled, they made Marie come to them, an angel in a nightgown, quivering and prophetic as a newborn. It was not quite the deliverance that they had been expecting. Perhaps they had been arrogant to second-guess the god that does not wish to kill them. Either way, the mice have discovered a little talent for scribbling their way into heads.

  The air coming from beneath the bathroom door reeks, of damp walls and steam and synthetic roses. The mother is inside, wallowing like a tuna steak in brine. With her fingers, she is gripping at the back of her head as she is sunk down in the water. Her body seems quite relaxed. Her eyes are wide open though, bright and frantic as light bulbs. The mice are doing it again.

  And they are. They are clogging up the turn in the landing, gritting their teeth and shaking their pelts and asking, asking so hard that it makes the house groan. Where is the childling? Where? The mother is developing a headache and it ma
kes her wish she were some other person.

  The mice are focussing on the mother, on her guilt and the jab-handled levers inside her. They are driving all of their questions, and their grief, and their fear of never having something to love, channelling it all into the blunt end of another arrow. This one is made from pampas stalks from the dusty vase on the bookcase. It is made of frayings from the bathmat. The point is agonising, made in jags of pins and soap shavings and a dressing gown cord, in frizzy hairbrush gleanings and the ivory stumps clipped off toenails, in hair slides and dental floss and Eucryl Smokers’ Toothpaste, spilt from the tin and denture-pink and hacking-strong.

  They pray, and think; they stare and demand and plead down the line of that arrow; they beam their accusation underneath the door and into the condensation and the microscopic noise of popping bubbles.

  They are so quietly deafening that the tealeaf-coloured mouse can hear it from downstairs. Marie stands up now; she is getting a headache as well. Holding the cat, she trails away into the kitchen as the mouse scales the staircase, flinging skywards like a thing with no weight of her own. Thomas hears the tap of her claws against the nylon carpet and cranes sideways to see. His eyes are mean as teeth, and he says ki-ki-ki, as cats do when they see an animal that they want to split right open. The mud-coloured mouse itches off up the last three steps before she meets another mouse, this one a lesser hue of dirt, heading down towards her. They pass, momentarily pausing to each polish their face; then the replacement cat-tormentor is off on his way.

  The mice outside the bathroom door are incredibly busy; the dark is labouring as they heave at the levers inside the frizz-haired mother. But before she turns the bend in the corridor, the tealeaf-coloured mouse sees something that must be looked at. There’s wire and wood and a thick metal piece that the mother has decorated with a ribbon.

  Ribbon? She sniffles closer. It is the colour of a glowering sky and tied up in a gorgeous, loopish bow, each trailing end the length of a whole mouse by itself. Ah! But here’s a stain on one tip, black and red, with a snuff like the end of a life. It is blood, of course; this is the last thought of the mud-coloured mouse as her skin abandons her. The snap of the mechanism bites down, very quick, and it is all done with.

  31

  Marie

  IN FEBRUARY, MY mother resolved to take long lie-ins. For, she told me, with her face as earnest as a doctor’s, she worked her fingers to the bone to keep this place so nice. And with that, she would hold them aloft for me to scrutinise as if the bones were showing through already, like brittle white twigs. Perhaps they were; I could never bring myself to look. Oh yes, my mother worked hard to put good food on the table, so why, she would demand, why did I begrudge her this one small allowance?

  I did not begrudge my mother a thing. I would look back at her, grateful, demure, whatever she seemed to need, and wait for the moment to pass. I would concentrate very hard, so as not to be called inattentive. I would count in nines, or else see if I could remember all the ingredients in a block of Rowntree’s Raspberry Jelly. Afterwards I would go and see if I was right.

  My mother did not seem to enjoy her lie-ins very much, for all she seemed to do was talk to herself, or bump and clatter around in her room as though there was something she had lost, something that had rolled under the bed or down the back of the drawers.

  In fairness, it must have been terribly hard to sleep with Thomas wailing to be let out, clawing the carpet by the door to miserable tatters. He could not hold onto himself for so many hours; poor Thomas would be forced to pee on the floor, and my mother’s bedroom soon stank of cats. But at least he kept out the mice, which was an issue that obsessed my mother more every day.

  The house did not sleep well at night and would often lie in late too. It suffered terribly with nightmares, would fight against sleep for hours, and give into it just before dawn. As often as the dew fell, it would scrabble and fret like a dreaming dog, disturbing great sad flakes of plaster, making new cracks in the ceiling. It was still dreaming, still wrecking itself this morning at nine. Cold air hung in the chimney, and our poor old house snored its throat sore as deep as the dripping cellar.

  I laid my cheek against its dampish flank, skinned with layers of wallpaper, and wondered what it was that ailed our house so badly. Perhaps the stone had visions of dynamite and workmen, perhaps it was only afraid of the dark. In retrospect, I wonder if the problem was not more fundamental. Maybe it was the limestone itself, every tiny fossil shellfish straining to break free and swim back to some primordial sea. Perhaps that is just the lot of sedimentary things. Some creatures are born to be unhappy, as if that is what they are for. I pressed my hands to the wall, but there was no soothing it. Houses breathe so very slowly that it would have been an hour before its calcified nerves even noticed my touch. Back then I did not know these things. At least I was a kind-hearted child.

  I sighed, and turned upon my back, gazing sidelong at the heavy curtains and the sulky daylight poking at the space between them. There was a special melancholy to morning lie-ins when I was small, a feeling of being alone, the only one left.

  Thomas yowled relentlessly; almost patiently. He yowled like a sticky hinge, as though someone was opening a cupboard door and then closing it, over and over, just for the rusty sound. I held my little body still as a whisker, tried to hear my grandmother’s feet downstairs. There were none. Perhaps she was already out; perhaps she had not come in.

  It was no use sleeping. After a time I sat up, the mattress complaining under me, and I put my toes on the floor. The carpet was thin in that patch; I always had a sense of the floorboards underneath my toes, the way that I would sometimes be aware of my own skeleton, the sticks that stiffened my flesh. There were bits on the floor and mounds of dirty clothes. Most of them had been there forever, grown out of before they were ever washed.

  I turned on my lamp and slid forwards until I was sitting on the floor; then I looked up and gazed at my room. It did not ever seem to be entirely mine, as though I were sharing it with an invisible person. My eyes lit upon my Young Christian’s Illustrated Bible. It had been a gift from my grandmother; she had underlined in red every Old Testament reference to birds. There was a thick chunk of colour plates in the centre: the Lord caused ravens to feed Elijah, and there he was, there they were, bearing gouts of meat in their claws, as though just a moment ago they had wrenched the lumps off a raw, glistening steak. My throat pushed upwards and I turned the page over quickly.

  Next came the Prodigal’s Return. I liked that picture. The father stood on one leg like a man falling over, arms flailing, as though the engraving had been taken like a photograph as he whooped for joy. And flying into his arms came the Prodigal, dressed in rags, blood-footed from such a walk, unclean from feeding swine and with sin tangled in his hair. He was about to be embraced by his father, clinging against his chest as his father’s arms came round him, as the father finished his jumping and put his feet on the ground. The soil was Bible soil, where there is no vegetation and not one drop of moisture anywhere. His brother, the dutiful one, stood disregarded in the background, staring at that soil and his sandals, at his inked-in feet. I would look from one son to another, wonder which one might be me. I could never tell.

  I closed my eyes for a second, held the picture in my head and wondered what such an embrace must feel like. It must be a wonderful feeling, I thought, or else terrifying. I thought of my mother, of running a long way to find her, of her looking up and seeing that it was me and running too, of our arms meeting, of her absorbing me. Perhaps she would pick me up. Perhaps she would spin me round and round. I did try once, to recreate that hug; ran through the garden towards my mother, for a joyous embrace. She had a shovel in her hand, and when she turned to me her face was not enraptured. Instead, I slowed, stood before her, and placed a kiss against her cheek, almost defiantly. My mother had blushed, her neck went all blotches as though I had done something quite
obscene.

  I closed the book, pushing my thumb at the corner where the leatherette was flaying off, showing up the cardboard inside. I laid it aside, carefully, as if it were explosive-charged, and stood up. I hated the house with nobody in it. The mice were company of a sort, but they scared me a little too; they made our home a foreign country, governed by customs that were not our own. The cat was sweet, but my mother got terribly jealous if I petted him. She was afraid, I think, that he might turn into my cat and not hers. She would snatch him away from me, eyes baleful, fingers sunk so far into his fur that her nails were quite lost. Then my mother would cart him away like a teddy bear and lock herself in the bathroom with him.

  When I came out of my room, the mice all froze like a guilty, fragile-boned conspiracy. They had made another of their arrows, out of potpourri bits and broken clothes pegs. I sighed. They stood around as if ashamed as I gathered up the pieces and the red-dyed petals and put them in the potpourri basket, upset and downside-up on the landing runner.

  Downstairs, I opened all the curtains, for the house was dim and hushed as if someone had died. And it was cold, too. I was forbidden to light the fire. I padded off to make some tea; at least I was allowed to use the kettle. When I had a scalding mug of leaves and water, I went to the fridge, but someone had emptied out all the milk and filled the bottle with vinegar. At that, I trod into my mother’s wellingtons and heaved a coat over my nightgown and I went to the front door.

  The milkman could not get his float all the way up the track as it was so narrow, so he always left the milk at the foot of the garden. As I strode across the icy path I was brave and guilty as a poacher. The foot of the garden was the furthest that I had ever been from home. By the time I got back to the house, I was frightened and breathing too hard, and my hands were cold to hurting from the bottles. The contents were frozen; the layer of cream on top was an unhealthy yellow, compared to the bluish waterish stuff underneath. It was completely solid and no use at all. I left them, abandoned on the doorstep, and clomped miserably around the back of the house.