Then I edged around the corner and found the glow from the kitchen window. I hobbled towards it without looking down, with my eyes fixed to the light as if it were the only thing that might save me. Perhaps that is the way that the moths feel as they break themselves against bulbs. I wonder.
The mice were there already. I did not know if they were waiting for me, or whether they were just sad too, and gazing for something to do. They seemed like toys running down lately, more apt to sit and stare than play their crazy mousey games. They made their arrows; they stared at my mother, with nothing moving but their whiskers.
And right now they gazed at me, crowded on each other’s shoulders to get a better view. I was taken aback, until they began to crane their little necks sideways, and then I understood. The mice were not looking at me at all. They were looking at the garden, fixed on the dark and the whiteness of the spring. I turned to look too, and heard a frantic, excited scrabble against the glass.
The mice saw me glance at them, and they urged me outwards again, planted their tiny paws against the glass, bade me look with them. I tried; tried to look like the mice, see what they were staring at, until it dawned on me that they could not see a thing either. They nearly killed themselves with wanting to see. But wanting did no good.
Suddenly the mice all toppled away from the window as if they had all been stacked there and then unbalanced. My grandmother rounded the corner of the house and came to stand on the concrete patio. I had been wary of her since the other day, when the songbirds had all told on me for treading on the soil. She had not shouted at me about it; she had told me to mind my own business, and then laughed; laughed and laughed like a jackdaw until I had begun to cry. I do not think she told my mother what I had done.
She was dressed in feathers; swathed in feathers; magnificent and regal and shining in feathers. She was wearing an garment that I had only seen once before, when there had been the most awful thunderstorm and she had come home so exhausted that she slept for three whole weeks.
With a curious bobbing motion of her head, my grandmother turned towards the house, and then I found that she knew I was there. She gave me a queer look, an almost loving look, and then my grandmother opened her wings and flew away.
35
The Mother
THE MOTHER STRUGGLED into the kitchen and shoved the door shut with the weight of her backside. Thomas had burrowed down inside her embrace, so hard he might have sloughed right out, left her holding on to a glove of pelt, punctuated by claws.
If he could, Thomas would abandon her, drop through himself and slink away, skinless, like a rabbit for the pot. The thought of it made the mother sad; she heaved him up in her arms, paws pointing outwards for safety’s sake, and placed a kiss upon his flat-eared head. He rumbled deep inside himself, like a car that will not start, and tried to get a purchase on her cardigan.
The mother resembled Saint Francis as she arranged dear Thomas on his own little bed, holding his pretty mackerel-striped back down with her knee whilst she made him secure. A single thread of string was no good, for the daft old thing would scrabble and kick until he was almost murdered by it, the string slicing a line in his skin as though it might dig all the way through, like wire through cheese.
He really did not have a sense of self-preservation, bless him. The mother slowed, rolled her fingers through his fur whilst he rolled his eyes at her and wished her every misfortune. She smiled indulgently, and tied him to the table leg by fifteen different strands, and cut him a slice of cheese, which he completely refused to inspect, much less eat. Silly old thing.
The mother liked to have old Tom with her of an evening, her boxer-faced companion, a kind of fly repellent for mice. The mother knew, or rather suspected, that the mice did not keep all that much of a distance, but it was better than nothing. If she did not tie him down, Thomas could actually pursue them, kill them. If she did not tie him down, Thomas would get as far away from the mother as he possibly could. It was a quandary. But the world was alright if she kept her eyes a bit crossed.
It was rather like considering a painting-by-numbers painting. Those patches of colour, the jagged borders; if one didn’t quite look properly, one could choose to see a harvest scene, with children among the black and red poppies. The mother smoothed her skirt over her knees, and discovered that she was still squatting on the floor. No, she could not see a single mouse. Not a one.
After a little time, she perceived that the scene really did have a child in it; for an instant her heart convulsed with a feeling like choking. The mother lived and died at once, possessed with horror and hope, and the relief that is was over. For here, after all, was her other child. There had been a dreadful mix-up: the mother (silly her!) had somehow convinced herself that this child was in a hole in the garden, but no, here she was!
She started forwards, bashful, eager, wondering where to begin, but suddenly it dawned on her that this was actually Marie. She threw her arms around her anyhow, but her intestines were heaving as that knowledge sank through her again. She rested her weight against the top of Marie’s shoulder, and stayed there until she felt her daughter sway against the pressure.
Reluctantly, the mother stood up. Marie smiled. She had a nice smile. The mother put her fingers against it, very lightly, then lost her train of thought. Marie vanished among the jagged edges, the patches of colour. The mother sat down again, and then stood up. Marie knelt on the lino, began to stroke the cat.
The mother trailed through the kitchen to the scullery, and opened the pantry door. It was evening, and convention dictated that one ate food in the evenings. The mother paused, momentarily, wondered about Marie. No, she had not looked particularly hungry.
Before her there were banks of tin cans; the mother braced herself and plucked one out, more or less at random. After the grandmother’s initial forced start, the mother had quite gotten into the habit of shopping on a regular basis, and she tended to hoard tins of food like a squirrel in autumn. She turned the label towards her face. Heinz. Cream of Mushroom. She nodded, briskly, like the grandmother. Very well, it would be cream of mushroom.
The mother was feeling rather off-colour. It had been rent day; rent day never agreed with her constitution. The rent man had smiled at her, and had thrust his hand at her. The mother took it, thinking he meant to shake her hand. Instead, the rent man had planted a kiss upon it, luscious as mud. The mother had gone weak-kneed and vomity, even though the grandmother had been there too, and had sent him packing.
The mother turned the can sideways, turned her hand in case there should be a mark behind the fingers, before the back of the wrist: some greasy splurge, possibly oil coloured; possibly black. There was no lip print there, however, so bearing the can before her, she returned to the kitchen.
It rained past the kitchen window, patiently and without the slightest pause. The mother found herself distracted by it, gazing at the down motion of the drips, feeling the gravity drag on her eyes. The mother felt all of the pressures inside herself, that ambivalent force that kept her alive even though it was raining, even though she was a bad woman. The garden was drenched black, without stars.
The mother wondered at it, at the garden; that wilderness beyond the back door, where she pegged out grey flapping laundry; where the lawn was scrub and green-brown; where the gushing singing of the garden birds always made her afraid. She frowned at the thought of it, tried to connect that hollow patch of green and mud with the memory, when the grass had been seeded and mown; when deadheads were pinched away from any sign of illness. Her husband had been very proud of his garden and its spade-cut borders. He had grown monstrous green beans like arthritic fingers. The mother glanced at her own fingers then, as if to make a comparison, and discovered that they were wrapped around a tin of soup.
There were so many filthy plates in the sink that it took an age to acquire a spoon. There was no soup plate to find, not even one of
the water stained melamine things they put the cat food in. Eventually, the mother wrenched the lid off with a tin opener, and sat at the table intending to eat it from the can. The surface was grey. It was glossy and unpleasantly thick. She pushed at it with the belly of her spoon and it bulged at the edges, more jelly than liquid. The mother could not bring herself to taste it, but sat still all the same, waiting to see if she would change her mind.
Suddenly, Marie went to bed. That child could sit so still. It was like owning one of those lizards that turns into the background and makes out it isn’t there. The mother dipped her spoon into the can, pulled it back out, thickly coated. A slow drip bled down the outside.
It was so hard to think any more. The mice had taken the whole house over, treated her appallingly. They stared and hated and worked out their evil vengeance upon her every living second. She could hear them even when she was not listening, the itch and scritter of their lives, the merry dance they made. They wanted her to go mad. She was certain.
And there was the dining room. The cutlery skulked inside like a bad fairy’s curse, ground its metal teeth from in there, scraped and grated through her nerves and frightened the mother half to death. These days she had to travel down the hallway with her fingers in her ears, just to preserve a little sanity. Sometimes she stopped them up with Andrex, but that only made the ghosts worse.
Yes, the ghosts. She was plagued by them. The mother saw rodent ghosts by the millions, stamped flat or mousetrap-snapped or bitten in half by Thomas. Her husband’s ghost was a proper menace; she was sure to break her neck on it one of these days. She often tripped right over him, arms and tea mug flying.
But the worst ghost of all was not dead, but planted out where the runner beans once crawled up bamboo sticks. That ghost did not skulk with the mice, with those staring, accusing hordes, or lie in a rigor mortis heap to trip unwary slippers. The other child’s ghost hid from her; the mother remembered her licking up the washing up water, or rustling fearfully out of the way as the mother entered a room. There were times when the poor mother hardly knew what to do with herself.
The kitchen gathered dust around the mother, and the table mustered grease to itself in thin, miraculous waves. The filth took shape there, painted itself in microscopic layers; grew tacky, developed bogus tea stains that stopped where her elbows leaned.
She gasped to herself of her pain, a tiny unsurprised gasp, and then the mother played with her soup can again, revealing a clean circle where it had been masking the table. A very small patch experimented with texture, as though there had been sugar scattered in the wet. It worked rather well. The mother began to seep tears, and the grief welled up inside her until it seemed that her bones might just dissolve.
The mother’s misery became complete for just a little time; for that moment she discovered what she was, beneath the carapace of dressing gown and cardigan and wrinkled woollen tights. She stared though herself in horror, and before she dropped dead at the sight, the queerest thing happened.
There was a rustling, like hundreds of consciences pressing together, and then love spread in through the door like the scent of a baking sponge cake. It was a panicky love, fervent and overblown and desperate. And though the love was not her own, it entered the mother’s living tissues and skin pores and the soft capillary beds behind her nose. Love seeped through the mother’s petticoat and the strangled roots of her hair. For love, like guilt, is of a muchness, and varies little between creatures.
There was a second of true glory as the mother threw her chair out behind her with a falling smack. She leaped from her misery into the perfect sinless rain and it cleansed her through and through with its coldness. The mother cantered like a foal along the broken garden path, with wordless sounds of joy and redemption streaming from her lips.
She bounded to the pit, to where her other child lay waiting to forgive her. A word, and it would be all done; the child (what was her name?), the child would beam into her face, and the mother would explain that it had all been a silly misunderstanding. They would embrace, and she would bear her joyfully indoors, and make tea and crumpets, and they would laugh over the little mishaps of yesterday.
The mother thought all this as the mud cleansed her skin and her slippers sucked on the wet ground. The love that surged inside her made her strong as she heaved that ancient door up from the mouth of the hole. The mother laughed aloud, for here was atonement: the meeting point of restitution and forgiveness.
Inside the pit was the wrong child, tiny and nasty in a dress of rotted threads. She was as small as the day she was buried, and knotted in a network of tendon-white roots. Initially, the mother had thought her dead, but then she turned her back a little, opened her eyes. Her hair was as black as her father’s had been, and the mother remembered that she could see him in her, some hint of her husband in that jaw and chin. And when she turned her face towards her mother, she did not gaze enraptured, nor with delight, but just into her and through, at the wound in her, at the sin; the tar-thick treacle-thick creosote-thick glop inside her. The wrong child blinked her great dark eyes, and she knew her, knew it all.
How quickly the euphoria dwindled. In a minute more, the mother was just a silly, silly woman, grubbing in the dirt of the garden. She saw a movement from the house, and found Marie there, framed by the window and an avalanche of mice, and a howl of fury did no good at all.
The mother heaved and stamped and cursed until that wretched child was hidden again, then limped back inside to try and eat soup. After that she gave up on that too, and tramped muck all through the house, harvesting mousetraps.
36
Mice
THIS IS HOW the mice discover beneath. One night and a whole eternal year and more after the great exodus, the mice have scurried and poked and searched the whole house loose. Every beneath has been explored, interrogated a thousand times; the mice cannot find their childling.
Beneath, the mouselings say, beneath is the place that she is, but there are no beneaths left from roof tiles to foundations. And yet, is it not ordained that the quest for the childling is the key to salvation? Generations have devoted their life spans to the endless quest for beneath. The god that does not wish to kill them will save saviours only.
The voodoo that the mice make is driving the frizz-haired mother quite spare. They are ever improving their techniques; they dig the bins for fingernails, for kitchen roll covered in sneezings, for Elastoplast strips that are stiff from sticking on cut fingers.
They can make the mother’s guilt a solid thing; it crouches in the corners and smiles at her. Every jump of her nerves brings her closer to confession; the mice will wring out the hiding place of their childling, twist it out of her like juice from half an orange. They do not do it for cruelty. Their damnation balances, hangs like a mouse from a lampshade; it hangs on the childling’s safety.
The mice have made their arrows everywhere: in the crawlspaces under the floors; among the hairs and lost coins inside the red armchair; under the mattress of the mother’s bed. There is an arrow that points at her through the side panels of the bathtub; one that prods her as she fidgets and gnaws her nails on the loo. There is even a very small arrow glued to the underside of the kitchen table with strawberry jam. Wherever the mother goes, to sit, to knit, to cower, there is an arrow elbowing at her dripping insides, at the jagged extra skeleton she uses to hold her guilt in place.
Marie is watching the mice as they cascade along the tops of everything in the kitchen. They can see her too, the top of her head, the fragile crown of white-blond hair, the foreshortened trail of pigtails down her back.
From the sky, the kitchen is another prospect altogether, fat with greasy dust and littered with the flies that die on every unreachable surface. The top of the freezer, the curtain pole and the thick rim of the wall clock, all these bear a blackish film of muck. It is a universe of squares from up here, squares at different heights:
the table, the hob and fridge and sink, and the padless seats of dining chairs.
The mother is down below them, trying to eat soup from the tin with a teaspoon. Directly above her, a mouse is dangling off the tinsel, feet stretched out, tail swirling. She inches along it, precarious, tiptoeing just this side of death.
Then it all goes wrong; one of the drawing pins slides out of a ceiling tile. The mouse flails against the empty air, desperate, wild with terror and the joy of all but dying. Then gravity makes a joke, pretends it cannot see her, and she flicks back onto the tinsel rope that is swaying loosely now, pinless at its middle. She streaks like a point of light, right along until she is safe among the cookbooks on the high shelf.
Meanwhile, the drawing pin, which is cheap and gone greenish with years of steam, falls slowly through the kitchen, turning as it falls. It plops among the mushroom fragments, and floats for just a second. Although the mother is gazing at it, her thoughts are in the garden, covered in mud, and the pin sinks in with nobody to notice it.
Marie sighs very heavily, and gets out of her chair. She flaps her mouth at the mother, makes some human speaking noises, and pecks a kiss at her face. She is going to bed. The mother gets a frantic look for a moment, but the cat is right next to her. He is a much more constant companion these days, since she took to securing him to the chair legs with string. He makes her feel secure. She has never glanced above her head to see the mice. She does not glance, just in case there are mice to see.
The tinsel-climbing mouse nips along the high things until she balances on the very top of the door. She drops to the floor on the other side. The tinsel-climbing mouse is feeling odd as she runs over the hugely patterned carpet. It seems that guilt, between creatures, is much of a muchness, one sort like another. And the greater the mother’s suffering, the more the smaller guilts of mice are drawn out as well. The ghosts do not walk for her alone.
The Knife Drawer Page 14