And the naughty thing deserved no such explanation anyhow, having left her light burning at this time of night. The mother scolded her in her mind, but found her face softening almost at once. She turned off the light very quietly, so as not to wake her. Perhaps she would think it all a dream. The mother risked a nervous smile. Perhaps she would. She closed the door.
It might be best to lie low for a little while, so that Marie did not think anything untoward had occurred. The mother furrowed her brow. If everything continued in a perfectly natural manner, then she must surely conclude that the mother had nothing at all to hide, to explain. This made sense.
Yes. She would lie low. The mother renewed her grip on Thomas, who had begun to shift inside her grasp, and then she turned and limped to the bathroom with him. She felt very much better with the door locked, at least until she looked in the mirror and saw her smeared face.
She remembered what had happened then, for she was plastered in guilt and night-time mud on her arms, neck, in her hair. The mother remembered that she was injured as well, and her foot suddenly hurt terribly. She would most likely contract tetanus.
The mother removed all her clothes as the cat glowered at her from the windowsill. She poured an enormously full bath, scented and bubbled and salted and oiled with fragrances of almond blossom, and wild rose, and wild musk, and Head and Shoulders, and Lifebuoy soap and Ajax. It overflowed a little as she lowered her scalding body in. In the water the mother became much more innocent, more wronged than sinner; blood clouded the water for a time, until the fork-bite clotted.
When she was clean and sneezing from the talcum powder, the mother sat upon the toilet, naked as a newborn, and decided that she did not care to face the world. At any rate, her dressing gown was ruined, and her poor slippers looked as is they might never be the same again. So she wound her heel with bandage, which she tied in a knot as there wasn’t any safety pin, and she crept from the bathroom with the air against her flesh. She had to kick Thomas back inside, and then she dumped her dirty clothes in the bottom landing.
Then, bare-naked and secretive, the mother flitted from room to room, gathering things. She had to make several trips. By the time she was done, the talcum powder was gathering into a kind of paste from the sweat at her armpits and back.
Half an hour later, and after a protracted struggle with an extension lead, the mother stood in the bathroom and arranged her little home amid a fading fug of steam. The bath became a lovely snug bed, padded with an eiderdown and an armful of bedspreads.
The plug flex ran beneath the door and attached at her end to a kettle. Her knitting lay like abandoned spaghetti in the corner, and the mother balanced her print of The Crying Boy on top of the medicine cabinet.
The collection of carrier bags from the base of the red chair was installed beside the toilet. The mother even draped the lambskin over the cistern but it kept dropping off. She tried to sit Thomas upon her knee, and managed for a time, until his clawing got too much for her naked skin. But it was fine, for then she remembered the project that she had planned some weeks ago and then not carried through.
The mother rummaged among her bags until she found a packet of fags. It was wrapped in shiny cellophane; beneath it was a block of sumptuous cardboard gold. She marvelled at it, pushed her fingertips against the embossed letters. B&H. It seemed such a comfort to the women at the post office. She was sure that she would like smoking.
The mother balanced a cigarette between her lips, and lit it with a cough that brought her close to sickness. But she persevered; over days she ate cold beans from cans and drank black tea after the milk turned solid. And in the meantime, she learned to smoke like a professional, sleeping in her very own rhythms of day and night, and sitting very quietly when the door handle was tried.
There were knockings that reached a peak on the first and second days, but after that things turned blissfully quiet, until a strongly worded note from the grandmother was rammed beneath the door. There was a period of bluff and counterbluff, during which the mother realised that the cat was looking rather thin. The death blow came when the extension lead was pulled out of the wall. The mother knew very well that a life without tea is not worth living, and so she was finally levered out of her beautiful cocoon.
She realised as she crept into the landing that the rent man was here.
39
Knives
THE CAKE FORK turns slowly round and round as it suffocates. Perhaps corrosion makes it feel a kind of pain. The tines curl up and then unfurl like metal tendrils.
They respire as lungless things do, with their keen edges, with their very sharpness. Rusted scissors are corpses. This is how such creatures are made: they live through their surface, through their shine; they are a little like trees, whose only life is found in the skin, the wood of the trunk being dead at heart.
The carbon dioxide that cutlery lives upon is inhaled at the glittering parts, the dangerous parts, at the microscopic pits in their surface that might be mistaken for flaws of manufacture.
These spiracles take in air, and allow feeding as well, through a complex process of absorption. It is blood that keeps a blade edge or fork point sharp. Cutlery chops and slices prey to mush, to a poor sad soup of what it once was; and when it is liquid, they drink it up.
The cake fork is whining, a skinny, inaudible shriek that gives the house the horrors. It will take some little while to die, until every pore is rotted up with corrosion. The others do not care two pins.
40
Mice
A CONURBATION IS developing on the high places of the kitchen, a shantytown of mice, a cosy slum. They scuttle along the picture rails and turn the emulsion grubby with the rubbings of their fur. They sprinkle the cooker hood with piddle and their tiny neat droppings speckle the sugar bowl. They thieve the mother’s dishcloths to furnish nests; this is cruelty beyond the poor mother’s endurance, and so she ignores it altogether.
Up on the high shelves, the frizz-haired mother stores her cookery books. They are thumbprint stained and gummed together with batter from drop-scones and mock béchamel sauce. When the recipes escaped their bindings, she covered them with flower patterned Fablon that is now itself lifting off in cracks. The pages are a brandy-snap yellow, and brittle like the wrappings off a mummy. They have not been leafed through for many years.
Behind their splitting spines there is a nest of children, pink as sugar mice, each spooning his way among his siblings for his mother’s colossal warmth. Their mother is a dark mouse, all but black, and she has just come juttering back to her offspring, having heard the laughing and pain of a mouse as white as icing sugar. The mother shivers and inspects her mouselings, nuzzles and tastes each one to see if he is a monster; she stares very hard at the brush of fur that each is beginning to make with his skin. They are browns, greys, the bluish tones of dust-fleece. None of them is albino.
They are unhappy; their mother left them all alone in an empty world. They cry a little, whimper like mouse-children will, for they have not yet mastered the language of mice, the etiquette of squeak and small gesture. Mother and young comfort each other.
The heart of the dark mouse is stammering with love and apprehension. She nurses her young, promises herself that she could never murder. Mice could never murder. Never but once. The mouselings drop asleep and she curls around them, forms the eternal circle of the mouse. She is pregnant; already she can feel the fidget of the embryos inside her. The mice in her womb are full of her own adrenaline, fearful and half formed. In time they grow still.
One little foetus, at once a mouse and not a mouse, for she is hardly made at all, flickers her spine and sees with her great budding eyes, sees the whole world without the slightest comprehension. And understanding nothing at all, this almost-mouse is gazing at the house, at the other mice who are standing around in groups, wondering. She sees the mousetraps and the awful tear of cutlery as i
t gorges on the broken mice from traps.
She sees the frizz-haired mother in the bath, wincing in water so hot that it makes her eyes stream, and Marie who is sitting up slowly in bed, wiping her cheeks with her fingers. She sees the whole world, for the house is the world; she even has a glimpse of the nowhere beyond it, the land past the carpet pile and the homely stink of home.
This almost-mouse can all but see the garden, but house mice are not made for such things any more, and the more she is formed, the less these visions intrude. Infants in the house are born with an inkling of their destiny, for the childling has made her way into their very DNA. But the worlds of mice are soft as toothpaste; as the childling has evolved her way into them, the world beyond home has petered away. Gardens belong to some other kind of mouse, a lesser, older, braver sort.
Mice fear open spaces almost as much as death. An open space equals death, or it might as well; without their corners and scurry-holes, a mouse is as good as killed already. The almost-mouse sees the garden and flails at it, these wastes of mud and green.
There have been mice in this house for a hundred years and more; a pregnant mother stowed away in the first sack of barley that came, back when the house was a new-created being, with distemper walls and servants in the attic.
The mice here are descended from that ancient Eve, who herself came from medieval stock that thrived and thieved in the village. House mice dwell in houses; this is what they are for. They creep and scrat beside the feet of people, and the outside fades in their minds to a nowhere.
The almost-mouse drifts now, not quite sleeping, for she is too young to sleep or wake, but in her slippery nest she is content. The mouselings that nestle up against their mother are content among their tatters of string and toilet roll. Their mother is not content. The dark mouse dare not close her eyes.
Those living in the high places all sit in this manner, neither sleeping nor feeding nor mating. They have found their childling at last, but she might as well be on the moon. They have shown Marie, have made her see, and now she has turned her face to the side and will not look at them.
So they came away from her, with their heads down low and their souls too full to bear. And yet. And yet they have found her, their only one, but oh, what a finding; their joy is tinged with futility, until it tastes like a gnawed penny. Everything is fused with the singing mouse, with his bitter chanting. ‘The house will burn,’ he says, ‘and there shall be nothing remaining.’ But they may be saved through the childling, if only they might save her. This is a huge and baffling night.
As they sit and fret, the back door is heaved open and the grandmother stalks inside with a child’s rock pool net in one hand and a storm lamp in the other.
Now, the mice are usually indifferent to the grandmother and her doings from the garden, as a person might be largely indifferent to the substance of the ground beneath their feet. Unless one actually stops to consider it, such things seem hardly relevant to everyday existence.
Now it is relevant. Their lives and deaths, the fate of the whole world rests beneath the vegetable patch. Only rescuing might stave off judgment. Only the childling. They start, as the grandmother bustles around the kitchen, and they breathe at the scents of witchery and feather. They gawp in horror as she divides up a firecrest, piece by tiny struggling piece.
It is real. The garden must be a true place of a sort, for this poor bird is surely a real creature. They see it bared quite naked, until nothing remains of it but fear. And it seems as real as they are, all nerves and knots and jumping blood. For a long while the mice in the high places stare, as the mice that are in the parlour and the hall freeze still and let Marie pass silently between them.
For a time she stands, and sits, and stands again and looks about her, and she is so hugely small and sad that the mice feel bad for her, sorry that they have made her suffer so. But their need, the childling’s need, are so very great. What else might they do? Presently she goes away, and then even the grandmother packs her jars and boxes on the top of the fridge, marches outside.
The mice flip floorwards, and then they scale the table legs and sweep its flat square top with their whiskers. Nothing remains of the firecrest but the terror in the kitchen air.
They look from the kitchen and the scullery windows; the mice gaze through the dwindling rain at the space beyond home; they shudder. Then one brave mouse finds that the hope and futility overpowers him, and without a glance behind, he forces his body beneath the draught-bitten door. The others hold their paws, grind their jaws, stare desperately at him from the windows; he is dwarfed to nothingness by that brutal patio. He is a tiny trail of bones and hope, scurrying towards darkness as the ceiling-sky, too high up and quite bizarre, throws water down at him.
He scurries six feet before the rain blinds him, before the blackness of outdoors blinds him. And then he is soaked and chattering with fear, and it seems to him that the whiteness and the talons and the saucer-eyes of the owl belong to the night and the garden’s own body. He sits up at the very last moment, sits up on his haunches and lifts up his paws to the ancient god of field mice. Then he learns what it is to fly with owls.
The almost-mouse flinches in her warm orb of water and the dark mouse, her mothers, blinks from behind the Farmhouse Cookbook. The others, stark-eyed at what they have seen, turn to one another. They must ask Marie again. They must make her care. They will make her help them.
41
Child
THAT DOOR DID not seal the pit; not quite. There is a long, slant-sided gap that is open to the raw sky. It continues to rain until it rains itself right out, until the clouds clot and thicken and then heal right over. And the flowers that should have been growing all this while, seem to find a sudden springtime, a nocturnal, secret springtime in the dark.
And somehow it is May. The calendars had told the truth after all, for here are all the flowers at once, wisteria and daisies and peonies and Love-in-a-Mist in its cloud of uncertain green. There are even roses of sleepy-headed velvet, woken too early.
While there is yet no eye to witness, the fragrance of flowers turns the night luscious, scented and rich enough to induce amnesia. The air becomes very still. The cherry tree holds its breath, grips the soil very tightly.
Inside her nest of roots, the wrong child is awake, has woken as cherry stones do before they sprout. She lies on her side, but she has turned her face to the sky, and it seems to her as though the world is blinding-bright. She has lived under earth so long that all she can make out at first is the dazzle of the moon, which is straining through the cloud now, which is silvering the garden and the violated soil.
The cherry tree is mourning, for the wrong child is germinating; for it had grown to love her and it knows that their long quietness has ended, or changed at least. The wrong child, who is childling to mice, feels the air above her body and finds that she remembers it a little, the way that dreams linger a minute in the mind before one truly wakes.
And her eyes, which had been fused quite shut have opened, and her pupils have found out how to contract, to allow the brilliance to come to her gradually. She blinks slow and licks her lips, tastes mud and sweat there, recalls that she has a face, a mouth. The wrong child smiles, and her teeth glisten like treasure.
It takes a long time for the wrong child to sit, for every limb and finger must uncurl like ferns, must stretch gently, find their proper place and shape. All this while, the flowers flower, and their fragrance is as rich as rot, warm and dark and beautiful.
The wrong child has a throat, and lungs that fill with air and let it out. She flats her palm upon her chest, feels her little ribcage push and pull. She is lithe and slight as a stem, as a small creature, as a mouse perhaps. She blinks and blinks and wonders at the sky above her head, at the mouth of this pit that was once her tomb, her dreadful prison, before it became her home; nest; the cherry tree’s womb.
T
he garden birds, which sleep at night, are woken by the silence, by the lowering fragrance of lilies, by the sudden lushness of air. They are confused by it; they toss their wings and watch each other’s faces. They chitter each to each, and although it is the law that the songbirds report each new or unusual thing, somehow none of them moves. They are ashamed of themselves for their betrayal of Marie. Moreover, they are fascinated, for here is something not seen before, not for many generations of birds. The secret beneath the ground has woken, and this is what she has turned out to be.
For a time the wrong child feels balanced oddly, head skyward; the blood in her swirls in a different patterns, for she has not sat upright in years. But she adjusts, and in a little while longer the wrong child struggles to her feet like a tender shoot, like a newborn creature, and lifts her head to try and see more than the sky, for she is still in her hole. How does she climb out? The birds all crane their necks to see, as the wrong child wraps her fingers in the cherry tree’s roots and finds the surface of the earth by inches. In a long slow minute she is there, puddled in the moonlight, resting among the gorgeous breath of flowers. Perhaps they bloom for her only.
The birds edge towards her, until she is surrounded by a nodding ring of faces. They shall not betray her, though the consequence may be very hard. She is an innocent creature.
The skin of the wrong child grows warm, and her clothes, such as they are, begin to rag away from her in tatters. Her hair clothes her back and shoulders, as did the hair of the very first girl in the first imperfect garden.
Last of all, the wrong child’s mind unfurls. The thoughts inside her are vague, unfocussed; she does not seek in corners for memory because she has forgotten how to do so. For now, the surface of the earth, the springtime and the moon are plenty enough.
The Knife Drawer Page 16