The tinsel-climbing mouse slows to stopping, listening in the hallway where the light is off. There is the sound of cutlery in the dining room; the sharp, slow-breeding lives of forks and knives, but the mouse believes she can make out something else besides. And suddenly it gels in the air. It is singing. It is a mouse, singing.
The tinsel-climbing mouse is reeling. She wants to turn her tail; she wants to flee, but her paws are placing themselves, the one before the others, until she is following the sound. There is singing; a mouse is singing, mournful and mad as a nightingale. And now there are other mice, pouring from every corner, shuddering and coiling forwards towards their terror. In a minute more there are hundreds, every one enthralled and horrified, come to take his place.
A little ghost is weaving in the flaming grate, drunkenly, as though it had nibbled rat poison. It is translucent, but white as talcum powder, streaked with berry-juice red. It is not the colour of mice, which are honest shades of filth: greys and browns and nearly-blacks. There are no white mice but one. The mouse that climbed the tinsel grinds her teeth and stares. Her joints have grown as fixed as matchsticks, rigid and impossible to bend. She can neither turn nor run away.
The albino’s ghost is singing, singing of fire and knives, of disaster and damnation. Everything shall burn, says the burning ghost; every thing shall be licked up by fire. And then it throws its head up as if about to laugh, but squeals instead, cries as it is devoured by flames. And then its eyes are no longer as red as injuries. Its tail and jawbone and forelimb are not broken, and nobody made its skin leak blood upon its fur.
And although it is gone now, this vision, the mice all turn to one another and know what they have done. For in their hearts, for a second only, each of them knows that he might have done anything to make that singing quiet. They are utterly horrified. They wring their paws and they shake. It seems as though the universe might end.
But they are mice, and mice are driven from guilt to love, for that is how they have lived for a trillion years. That alone is the means to atonement. Their love wells up in a rush, like blood from a hurt, like milk on a stove when it boils over. Love and hope and the desperate need to rescue, leaks through the house like a beautiful kind of stink.
In a trice it has filled every crevice, spread through the parlour and along the hall; drenched the kitchen, and made the frizz-haired mother feel very peculiar indeed. Before she knows what she has done, the mother abandons her soup and throws herself out of the back door, races to the pit where she has hidden her other child, claws and levers at the roof-door with her bare, claw-like hands. The mice feel the snap of her, the choke in her throat; and then the secret is out.
Before the mice have even got to the kitchen, before they have twiddled hurriedly along the high things, whilst Thomas yowls and swears from his table leg, before they have pressed their faces to the scullery window, they know. Their childling is beneath. She is beneath in the garden; beneath the garden, in that hellish half-real waste beyond the boundaries of home.
Marie is lying flat upstairs, hidden under thin layers of cloth, sleeping on her belly in her bed. Then the mice come, by tens and dozens, and they scamper on her pillow and the along the arch of her back. Their little sharp feet catch in the bedding and her unwound hair, and when she jolts upright she is afraid. Her eyes are round and bright as the mice scrabble around her, scratching for a way to make her understand.
The mice drag Marie’s dolly from underneath the bed, pull it until it is lying, plastic-hard, on the carpet beside her colossal feet. They all stare up.
The mice haul on the edge of the bed sheet, try to cover the doll, but the sheet is too big so they use a sweater instead. The dolly vanishes. They all stare up.
Then the mice all strain together, and wrench the jumper away again. The doll is dragged along a few inches, but they struggle it free. They stare up. Marie is confused, panicking; water is oozing down her cheeks like a dripping tap. They catch her eye again, hold her gaze steady, and then rush in a sea towards the window. When she comes along with them, the mice could die for sheer excitement.
When she looks through the pane, Marie does not see any sight she comprehends. The evening is seething with rain, and her mother is crouching under the cherry tree and smothered in mud. There is a sort of door in the ground, levered up; its dented brass handle catches the light from the kitchen. Then her eyes catch in the light too; Marie sees them flash, very white against the loam-black dirt. And, perhaps the mother perceives that she is being watched, for suddenly the hex is ruptured. She comes to her senses, out there in the freezing cold; she smacks the door down again, stamps it all flat again and stands there, mud-smeared in the vegetable patch until Marie cannot bear to look any more.
37
Marie
I LAY IN bed for an awfully long time, lay with my eyes closed even though the light was on. I feigned sleep the way that smaller animals might feign death, pretended until I all but fell for my own false story. I imagined myself from above myself, crumpled on top of my eiderdown, nightdress rucked-up at one thigh, perched all over with mice; deeply and innocently unconscious. I pictured the scene to try and make it true; I breathed in long and slow, and out again, the embodiment of a creature asleep.
On my back, legs, the balls of my feet, the mice stood silently, gazing down. I felt the prickle of their faces looking, but I do not know what their expressions said. Perhaps they were disappointed in me; perhaps they were sad. I do not like to think that the mice were angry. I was only a child.
Whilst I lay on my bed, breathing against my grubby bedding, I heard the back door smack downstairs. And the mice all jumped; I felt the quiver of their feet against my skin, the spring and flex of so many fragile bodies. But I stood my ground, held my pose until those tiny weights hopped off me.
They brushed my ear and the down at the back of my neck with their whiskers; they snuffed and tutted and spent a while crowded round me, pulling gently at my hair and clothing in case they could heave me upright. Eventually they trickled away, and I was glad, for I was afraid and I could not face them.
It is no easy thing to determine when one is left alone by mice. They are terribly small; a mouse is made of brightness and cobwebs only, or so it seemed to me. I lay for an hour at least as my body grew greyish and cramped, trying to unpick the quietnesses of mice from a real absence of sound.
In the meantime, I heard my mother’s tread on the staircase. She paused outside my door. She must have been holding Thomas; I could just make out his growling, low and distant like an aeroplane heard from the garden. She hovered at the door, and I thought she was going to come in. For one dizzy second my mother was going to come in and talk to me, and make me comprehend my life; she even pushed the door ajar.
But all she did was slip her hand inside and turn the light out. She made a dithering sound, an Er sound as though she had been about to speak, but before I had opened my eyes she was gone. Her bedroom was next to mine; I heard her door close like a tomb.
I turned in the dark, pillowing the palm of one hand underneath my cheek, feeling the cold in my feet as though it gathered there in drips. The dark was paralysing until my sight adjusted. Some nights lasted very nearly forever, and I would drag myself about the next day like something half dead. There was too much need. It was like trying to sleep in a poorhouse. Some nights I felt like one of the passers-by in the parable of the Good Samaritan, hobbling quickly by with his face turned sideways, not daring to slow his pace. It was not because he was a bad man. It was because he could not bear it. He had only a silver coin in his purse, and nothing of his own to speak of. What else might he do?
I tried to fall asleep, tried to dream. I tried to make myself dream of flying, or of finding some new and beautiful thing. I wanted to dream of stars, of all the things that I had seen in books. But all there was in my soul was us: our lives, our house. My grandmother had given me an anatomists’
textbook, with glossy coloured pictures in red and grey and blue. That was the sort of dream for me, back then; intricate and forever bent in upon itself. I might dream of my own split self, or else my mother, organs trembling, stained with the rain and the garden mud. At that I sat up, opened my eyes wide. I would rather not sleep at all.
I did not want to wonder at my mother, wonder what she had been doing out there tonight. Perhaps I had always known, in truth. Yet still, I had a chance to scrape my ignorance together, use it to hide my head. She was gardening, planting those never planted seeds. She had lost her wedding ring, and was on her knees searching for it. My mother had been sleepwalking, doing something that meant nothing at all. She was burying a sparrow murdered by the cat. She was delirious. She was only mad. My mother was only a mad lady, grubbing in the dirt because she wanted to, nothing more.
It was useless. I discovered that I was going to cry, so I shrugged myself and picked among the clothes on the floor for socks to warm my feet. I put them on, although they did not match, and then I sat back on my bed, straight-spined, and I pushed my hair past my shoulders so that it flowed down my back. I tucked it behind my ears on either side; made myself calm; made myself ready. I dried my tears and my nose against my nightdress, and folded my self inside me, tidily. Then I crept from my room.
My calmness dissolved at one; I found my chest jamming before I even met the unlit stairs. Even so, I was brave; this was unlike me. I never left my room at night; I was terrified by the house without lights on, without people in it. I did not even dare sneak to the loo at night time: the toilet flushing became a roar that made me quail with nerves. Even the wauling of Thomas from my mother’s room made me afraid before the dawn came.
So I astonished myself. I did not even have a reason for being out here where the shadows crawled the walls. I did not want to find the mice; I did not want my curiosity satisfied. The mice were surprised to see me; they all began forward, but caught each other’s eye and halted, gazing at me with their whiskers jittering, hanging back. I hung my head, turned my face from them, and found there was a dim light in the kitchen. Gasping, relieved and nauseous, I rushed towards it.
There was a reek of boiling, like the stink of my mother’s chicken soup, boiled up for days from the bones of the roast. The storm lamp was lit on the kitchen table, spreading out a hard white circle of light, highlighting every wound in the varnish.
My grandmother had taken off her glasses, was holding a needle very close to her face. It was curved. She had a wiry thread in her other fingers, an egg-white clear filament, like catgut or fishing line. She wet the tip in her mouth, prodded the end at the needle’s eye. She missed, tried again. I stared, fascinated, wanting to scream.
My grandmother spoke without looking up. ‘Well, come in, do, if you are coming in,’ she said. She was not the slightest bit surprised to see me there. Obedient, I came close, did not know what to do; I sat at the table.
My grandmother had tailors’ pins spread out on the table, hundreds of them in spike-tipped drifts. There were scissors laid out too, blades open, still as still. I jumped at the sight; my grandmother glanced towards me, blind-eyed, unfocussed without her spectacles. ‘Don’t worry dear. They wouldn’t dare.’
And it seemed that my grandmother could read my face, glasses or not; eyes or not, even. My grandmother could have read my face even if I were not there. I began to shake; perhaps I was cold. The garden was a black square at the window. I could not see a thing; not even the sky; not even a moon. I began to pick at a fingernail.
There was a bottle beside my elbow, a tiny bottle like the ones vanilla essence comes in; picked too early, not ripe but small and sour. There was a noise coming from it, a bird noise, a high, hysterical trilling. As secretly as I could, I dropped my head towards it, cocking my ear, listening intently. It appeared to be entirely empty; the essence label had been steamed off and replaced with another in my grandmother’s scratchy writing. ‘REGULUS IGNICAPILLA’. It meant little to me.
My grandmother threaded her needle and pulled through an arm’s length of line. Then she impaled her pin cushion and turned to me. There were wings laid out in front of her, put together liker hands at prayer, heartbreakingly small. I stood up, backed from the table, and filled the kettle so as to have a purpose for getting up. I do not think that my grandmother was fooled. As the water heated, I sauntered to the window, as casually as I could. I tried to see the garden, see the spot my mother had been in; then I cursed myself, reminded myself that I did not want to know. My grandmother got up too and went to the chopping board.
‘Marie,’ said my grandmother, ‘Marie, make a wish!’ She came right to my face then, and held out a tiny wishbone, glistening with fat. I put my hands behind my back for safety. The thought of snapping that poor fragile thing, still ragged with meat, horrified me. And yet, my grandmother smiled me a warning, proffered it at me once again. A gift is something one must never refuse. A gift is a test of gratitude. I forgot all about the window.
Gingerly, I grasped the pathetic little bone in my fingers, whilst my grandmother twisted and pulled. I had never seen a wishbone so minute. I could barely hold it. It broke.
‘Did you make a wish?’ she asked. I nodded, my eyes full of tears, but I lied. At the edges of the room, the mice had drifted in; as I noticed them, they nodded. Perhaps they had got it, caught that wish as it wrenched from the bone. My grandmother turned away to poke in her saucepan. It probably continued to rain, but for the moment I had forgotten what I was doing. I made a cup of tea and plodded back to bed with it, leaving it to go stone cold and filmy by morning.
38
The Mother
THE MOTHER LEANED on the doorjamb, drenched right through and filthy. She sighed and looked back down the garden, at the shabby lawn and the vegetable patch beyond. The soil at the cherry tree’s feet was churned and trodden as though it had been mauled with a mechanical earthmover; as though it had been mauled by grave robbers.
The mother’s heart was jamming; she lingered for a little while, over-breathing and twitchy. The grandmother appeared in the doorway with her lizard smile, and the mother staggered past her.
It was too much. The mother wrung her fingers and threw herself into finding mice. The bloody mice. It always came down to them, the long tailed wretches, and now they had turned Marie’s head against her. Lord knows what her daughter had seen from the window. It was always their fault. The mother found herself revived by anger and almost laughed as she raced through the house, finding traps, unpeeling each tiny body for her bundle.
When the traps were all empty and reset again, the mother went to feed the cutlery. After such a trying evening, she was a little distracted and actually stepped inside the dining room door, staring in numb wonder as if she had never seen the world with her own eyes before.
She had to hold her breath as she did so, for the smell of mice was as strong as turpentine; the mother gazed at the dining room where her husband had used to play his piano at three in the morning; where he used to keep his whisky locked up with a key. She gazed at the floor, at the soiled carpet, at the blood-black stain against it, the outlines muzzied by the droppings and skin snips of mice.
She regarded that silhouette, the leavings of that man; she tried to hate him. But lord, there was nothing there to hate, not a scrap, not even shoe leather. The mother pressed at her cheekbone, then her belly and the old crack of her ribs, tried to feel a hurt, some little trace of his fist, but there was nothing left to pain her, not even a residual ache. She wished there was, some small proof that she was not a bad lady. If only he had left her a scar, then she would definitely have been justified. She had been justified. Really she had. The mother held her face in her hands and tried to believe herself.
All this time, the cutlery had been sensing her there, sniffing with their sharp edges and points at the scent of her body; the honeysuckle soap stuck under her wedding ring; the
gorgeous smell of her carpet slippers.
The mother jumped right into the air at the first snip. A lucky dig by a cake fork jutted right through the rubber edge of the sole, bit the flesh and bit it very deep. She howled, danced in the air and threw herself back towards the door, kicking and flinging her feet as though she had stood on a fire.
She was lucky; most of the cutlery had closed in on the mice, which were killed already and no bother to catch. She hollered like a trodden cat and leaped to safety, wrenched the door shut, shoved the barricade back and stared at the blood seeping through the side of her slipper. The cake fork took some force to dislodge; all of this seemed to make the colours about her go dangerously bright, and the mother was forced to sit awhile on the stairs until the giddiness passed.
The grandmother appeared at the mouth of the kitchen and gave her a look that was entirely without sympathy. She vanished back inside as the mother wobbled to her feet and limped off to find where she had last placed Thomas. In the kitchen, the grandmother nodded, snatched up a bottle of vinegar from the fridge and stalked back to the hall where the cake fork was turning slowly in circles, tasting the air. The grandmother poured it with vinegar and nodded once more in satisfaction as it began to whine. Then she opened the door and shoved it back into the dining room with her foot, and replaced the barricade. She crossed the mother in the hallway, who had remembered that the cat had been last attached to the cold tap in the scullery sink.
The poor mother found herself in floods of despair as she untied him, as she limped through the grey-blue fields of ghosts on the staircase. She hesitated outside her bedroom door, beside Marie’s, but it was hopeless trying to explain, she thought. What could she do but lie, but talk herself in knots?
The Knife Drawer Page 15