The Knife Drawer

by Padrika Tarrant

  The wrong child creeps forwards, watching every molecule of the night as it evolves into the grey of nearly-dawn. Before the sun has risen, she is gone, past the lawn and over the blown-down fence and off between the trees and scrub beyond.

  42

  Mice

  OUR HOUSE TRIED to warm its skin in the sudden sunshine of spring. I could feel its low grumble of pleasure, but at night the joists would click and groan as heat leached into the clear, star-infested skies.

  Today, I basked like a cat on the front doorstep, absorbing the light with my face, protected from the wind by the low stone wall. That wall was studded with ammonite fossils, their gentle shells trapped between mortar and stone like some cruel joke.

  I had avoided the back garden for days, even the concrete patio, even the backwards facing windows. I kept my eyes downcast as I poked in cupboards for food, or boiled pans of water for drinks.

  My mother was in the bathroom and she would not come out. She had taken the kettle and the teapot with her, but somehow forgotten the strainer; the old leaves in that did not last long. After a few brews they would not stain the water, not even a little bit, not even if boiled right up. So I took to drinking Oxo cubes, dissolved in a mug, because there was nothing else. I crept about the house as though someone had died, and kept every single light burning at night, for the darkness made me timorous.

  And during the day I often came out here. It was my new habit, for at the front door I was largely free of mice. It was a risk; if the door was to snap shut behind me I should be trapped as I hadn’t a key. Then I might have had to slink around to the back door. At the thought of the garden with its churned mud I swallowed hard, held my belly in my arms.

  The poor mice. They followed me everywhere I went like lost things, tense and quivering and desperate. When I slept at night they watched me; they dogged my moments and hours, not with malice, not even with accusation in their faces. They grew haggard, their fur all rumpled as though they had been drenched with dishwater. When I moved, even a little, they would all leap cowering to their feet, ready to follow me. Never would I move towards the back door; the disappointment hollowed the mice.

  I had come out with a book of my grandmother’s. It was written over with some strange Cyrillic script that I could not read, but the illustrations were mesmerising. A pretty, flower clad child danced in the arms of a man with wings; he was as lean as the girl was beautiful. She was plucking a feather from his finger, with a queer expression as though she balanced between innocence and a fearsome kind of knowledge. I gazed at her in the caustic light; could not tell if she was happy.

  At any rate, it was too bright for reading. Beneath the sun, the pages were transfigured, so intense a white that text and line vanished as I watched, scattered my vision with purple oblongs. I blinked rapidly, and they reproduced against my eyelids like germs, dozens of them, slowly fading.

  The track from our house to the main road was steep and pitted, almost too narrow for a car. I heard the sneer of an engine and a magpie went shouting up the lane, then the rent man drove up the gate and inched his way between gatepost and thorns. I watched him hunch his face with concentration, saw him wince his way inside. And then he looked up and caught my eye; he slapped on a friendly-uncle smile and winked.

  The rent man was a round, red-faced man in his forties, and he exuded a sort of abnormal jollity. When I was very small I had looked forward to his visits for the lollipops that he kept in his pockets.

  I clambered warily to my feet as he approached, the book in my hand, and I squinted up at him through that blinding morning. He was perspiring as he walked toward me, and he came up very close.

  ‘Why, hello there young lady.’ For a second he rested his huge meaty hand on top of my head. Sweat pricked out on my scalp. I kept my face composed and did not move from the door. He shaded his eyes to look, first at me and then into the dark chink of hallway beyond the front door. ‘Is Mummy home?’ There was a silence.

  ‘My mother,’ I said with deliberation, ‘is in the bath.’ No, I did not care to disturb her. No, my grandmother was not in right now. The rent man said that, oh, she did talk after all, and that he was afraid that little Marie wasn’t his friend any more, and that as she was such a good girl, perhaps she would like a wee sweetie. He leaned back to rummage in his pocket, and a soft roll of fat sank underneath his chin.

  I panicked, glanced behind me and heard the rustle of mice. I said that I would go and check. The rent man shucked my cheek as I spoke and ran one pigtail loosely through his hand before I could turn away. The rent man told me that I had lovely long hair, and the blondes most definitely had more fun. At that he winked again. I caught a glimpse of a very odd look on his face before I got away.

  The rent man followed behind, so close that he bumped into me when I stopped at the parlour door. I caught a flash of movement, and then it banged shut. At the same time, Thomas tore down the hall and between my legs, and I had to throw my weight sideways to avoid treading on him.

  Before either of us could quite recover, my mother came beaming out of the parlour, wearing nothing but a winter coat that she seemed to have just snatched off the rack. She did up the buttons without looking at them with her eyes fixed against his, startled as a deer’s.

  The rent man walked past her and spread himself in an armchair without being invited, and I bolted upstairs as though I had just escaped with my life. On the landing bookcase my grandmother’s workbasket lay open, and with a sort of anger I grabbed up the big steel scissors that she kept there.

  When I got to my room I closed the door to block out the voice of the rent man from the parlour. My mother’s replied were inaudible, so it was as though he just sat in there talking to himself. He laughed a lot.

  I am not sure why I cut off my hair. It was almost an act of defiance, although I was not a child given to defiance. I suppose I must have been angry, or afraid; looking back this way it is not always easy to tell.

  On the spur, facing away from the mirror, I lifted the scissors to the line of my jaw with a dark thrill of nerves. The plaits took some time to munch through, and then they fell away, one and then two, like dead things.

  All that there was in my head at that moment was to free myself, the way a cat is left with a mouthful of feathers as the bird flags into the air, safe. It struck me too, that they would make a fine gift for the rent man. I might have even smiled. I wrapped the coils around the scissors and left them in the workbasket for my grandmother instead. And then my defiance deserted me and I hardly knew what to feel.

  I wandered back to my room slowly, raking at my shorn head, feeling the thickness and spike of the hair. It was an odd coming of age; at the time it passed in a blur, barely comprehended at all. I stood a while without aim, and then I sank to my backside and sat on the carpet, palms braced to the dirty pile of it.

  Then the mice came. They came on careful feet, gently, as though they came with a painful thing to say. Mice crept slowly up to my feet, my sitting knees; the mice climbed into my lap and marvelled at my hair. In the end, I bent myself to the floor to let them see. They rummaged their paws in it, sniffed and whispered. When they had finished, I raised myself to them and looked at the mice, looked properly, face to face to face. I opened my arms to the mice and they clambered to my shoulders, to the cup of my lap. We were sad; we were all terribly sad.

  And then it was as though they planted a thought in my head; a thought like a thorn, small and brown and sharp as sharp. And as I caught their eyes again, I found something in those mice that I had never seen, something ruthless, where love becomes so needful that it finds itself able to wound. I was afraid of the mice then, just a little, but suddenly I was dragged along by a memory, or else it was dragged out of me, with a hurt that left me gasping.

  I was lonely. I was so, so alone. I was a little child and I had lived my life all by myself when I should not have done. A pa
rt of me had been torn right away, and I knew it only right then, I think. The mice all made me suffer, scraped at that raw patch, bit at it and made me suffer. ‘Do you see?’ they seemed to say, ‘Do you see?’ And they twisted my head towards the stairs, and they made me see my mother through the floor and the wall, standing before the rent man with her painted-lady smile.

  This is what the mice showed me. There was a child once, I had seen her right where I sat now; not my mother or grandmother but another child, me almost, drawn as if with the left hand, the outlines webbed and tangled. I grasped at the glimpse of her, for this memory was very old and dim as cellophane, splitting as I pulled at it, creasing and tearing and turning to nothing. And when the image faded I was so lonely that I could have died. And the mice, the mice were actually pleased, jumping up and down in glee.

  I stood up very gradually so as to allow them time to scramble off, or else cling on tight to my clothes, and finally, reluctant and down at heart, I went to the window and looked out down the back yard, towards that hole in the garden, towards some secret that I had no stomach for unmasking. I was very old that day.

  43

  Mice

  WHEN THE MICE rush up to find Marie, they discover her looking strange, different, as though she had been attacked. She sits upon the floor in the room where she sleeps, and she is shaking, quivering like a balloon whisk. When they discover her first, they are aghast as though she were a mouse that had lost her tail.

  They crowd around in sympathy; nuzzle at the stumps of her hair, checking for wounds, checking that it is clean, that all will heal correctly. There is no blood, but even so her pain is swirling in the air around her and it grates on their whiskers.

  The mice regard Marie and they think of their childling, their beautiful giant, who is hidden, who is beneath in the garden. True, Marie’s eyes are only blue, and her hair does not resemble broken coal for its blackness and shine, but still there is a beauty to her. They are fond of this one.

  And yet. Their childling is in that hole, and mousehood must be redeemed at any cost. So it is that cruel and ashamed, the mice muster themselves one last time and pray, plead with the god that does not wish to kill them. The fairy lights are quite forgotten now, but in their hearts and among the cobwebs in corners, the god that does not hate them watches still.

  The faith of the mice, their love and pleading, and even their desperate, reluctant unkindness, all this they hold like pawsful of currants and then they push it at Marie.

  When the memory comes to her it is very cruel, and the mice are no better at that moment than cats, for Marie has no sharpness within her, no malice to justify such violence. And when it comes, the mice feel it too; they have their first true glimpse of their childling for a hundred billion years. They can only focus it for a second, this projection, but Marie sees it, stretches her fingers toward it, flinches at it, recalls everything that she knows. The mice all urge her on, beg and cajole and whimper her on, and they see as Marie recognises that long-ago child.

  As do the mice. They see her, as beautiful as the day they lost her, her mouth that is not made for speaking, her massive fragile back. The mice remember the birthmark on her neck, and the warmth of her beneath their small clawed feet. They see her and find that they know her every inch.

  Their fur crackles with love; they see the embryo of knowledge in Marie’s face and their joy is strung like tendons in a joint, tight. They gaze at her, will her not to be afraid; not to be afraid as they are.

  The mice hang on with their toes as Marie gets to her feet, almost the size of a whole sofa, and they find that they remember this also, and how to twirl their tails in the air so as to balance. And they go to the window and look together at the garden, at its fearful openness, haunted with owl gods and stoat gods and cats.

  Last night, the owl dropped from the sky; it scalded the minds of the mice. When the watchers at the scullery window saw it, white as a saucer, white as a moon, the mice were shaken to the bones. They had gazed, unable to flinch, as death herself fell like a lampshade through that ghastly air and taught a mouse to fly.

  There are deaths of traps and Thomas; there is a kind of shining death with metal points and scraping edges, but there are is also a new death, the death of the garden. And surely this death is worse, for where does it strike but in nowhere itself?

  To die in the house, to die at home, why this is a natural thing, a proper thing, as mice are made for dying. But what of being carried away by a bird, of flying into emptiness on pale and whispering wings? To where might his soul scurry; into what eternal corner or skirting-hole? Perhaps he is unmade by it, an unhomed thing, a piteous thing, floating in a heaven without a ceiling or walls or curtain pole.

  The mice that sit upon Marie’s shoulders stare through the sunlight, strain and gaze in case they might see him in the sky, in case they might even now rescue his poor dead self. He is lost.

  Now, one mouse who is hanging off the sleeve of Marie’s dress, alters her grip and shins right up her arm to the collarbone. Then she points her nose up, stares at the vast foreshortened jaw line, the underside of chin, the soft lobe of Marie’s ear. And she wonders as she stares, if this great creature is enough to walk in the garden. She might be colossal, but even she is made tiny by the scale of the outside, by the tree, by the desert-land of patio. The mice wish that they had paid better attention, watched and studied this child before it came to matter so dearly.

  They have seen her on the front doorstep. They have seen her jumping her skipping rope on the concrete patch, but what of the distance beyond it? Perhaps they are coaxing her towards her death. Perhaps she will be taught to fly by owls. What if she is taught to fly by owls? What of her fate, or that of the mice upon her shoulders?

  But after that it does not matter, or else it is a fear that is beyond them, for the giant is walking. They crowd into her sleeves, her pockets and the short thicket of her hair. They nestle against the gap of air between her collar and throat, and they ride in strange procession from the room, followed by a shivering cascade of mice.

  They flick and thud right down the staircase, past the parlour door where the frizz-haired mother is crying. Marie gasps at the sound; they feel the swell of her ribcage, the heaviness of a thoraxful of air. And then they all turn, slowly, through the kitchen and then to the back door.

  The mice are thrilled and petrified; they cower and peep as she heaves the door open. Those upon the floor hang behind and crowd to the window. The sky is warm as a water tank and deafening with the reeks of hundreds of flowers; with the alien scent of mud, and the fluidness of the wind that stirs it all together. They hold themselves steady. They do not faint.

  Marie does not faint either, but beneath the mice she sways and slows, glances from ground to sky. At that, the mice all start upwards in terror, but there are no owls. They close their eyes and pray.

  Marie is sweating, making water stand out against her skin. It tastes like salt; they lick her like a newborn, try to make her safe. And she treads with weary pace from concrete to weedy grass, towards the place that is beneath. Before beneath, the earth is churned right up; her feet sink a little with every step.

  Oh, but the hole is empty! Marie stops, dwindles to stopping before it, silenced and astounded. It is empty. It is just a pit in the earth, and a door from a house, on its face and half pushed sideways. There is a little rain puddle in the bottom; there are knots and networks of roots; there are rags of plastic and a cocoa flask.

  There is nothing more. There is no childling. She is not there at all. She has abandoned beneath. She has been taught to fly by owls, or else the mother has devoured her. Marie crouches down then, and the mice all teeter, balance, cannot believe what they see. The mother has done this. Marie stretches up again, five feet into the sky, and she plods away towards home where the world is real.

  At the house, the door is still open. Marie starts to go through
it, but then that sharp-eared demon makes a dash past her with a half-alive mouseling squealing in his jaws. Thomas is free of the mother and her lengths of string, and he is off to the garden to tear his victim into fragments.

  As they tread into the kitchen, girl and mice and all, the frizz-haired mother is there already, arms crossed in front of her, each hand gripping the opposite elbow. There is a cigarette jammed between two fingers, stripping a thread of smoke to the ceiling. Her eyes are the gaps between worlds. Her mouth is clamped quite shut; the lips invisible.

  Marie stands before her; the mother opens her arms, sucks on the cigarette and lowers her eyelids as the smoke billows from her nose. The mother is on fire. Marie stands, blinks, and makes a break for it, clattering up the stairs as the mice hang on for dear life.

  The mother makes a kind of roar and pounds along the hallway after them, but halts at the foot of the staircase. Marie slams the door and throws herself upon her bed; if it were not for the quick wits of mice, some might have been squashed. But mice are fast as fleas, and Marie is slower than a cat.

  They lurk on the mattress as her shoulders heave. The mice are concerned for her; for the moment they shut out what they have seen; what they have not found in the garden.

  The mice all fix their teeth against the edge of a blanket and heave, try and try to pull it over her gigantic body. They do manage to wrap up one foot; it is hard to tell if this makes her feel better. They comfort her as best they can, with sniffs and nuzzles and laid-on paws, until her shoulders unknit and she begins to sleep.

  The mice watch over her all night, a miniature defending army. The mother shall not devour this one, nor feed her to owls. In the dining room, observed by nothing that gives a damn, the fairy lights blink out.