The Knife Drawer

by Padrika Tarrant

  44

  Marie

  I DREAMED THAT night, dreamed long and deep. My dreams were deserted, or at least haunted by a kind of absence. There was nobody but me wherever I went, except for a gaze, some awareness that was not mine.

  I dreamed that I was a fat-armed baby with hands like starfish, like creatures with wills of their own. I opened my fingers, shut them again in wonder, grasped for the lampshade far above the crib. The world was all colours without pattern, and all I could make my sprawling fingers close upon was emptiness.

  I dreamed that I had lost one woollen boot; I had worked it loose over diligent hours of struggling, with marching against my blanket into air. However I stamped with the other foot, I could not get the second boot free, but still it was the great ambition of my life.

  And, even though in my dream I could not roll over, nor even turn my head, there was another beside me. I had not always been alone.

  And there again, in my dream I was a small child, a little curled thing in a vast single bed. I had been frightened because my grandmother did not hold with nightlights. I had whimpered and shivered in my cold old bedroom, with the wind in the chimney like the voices of owls.

  And then I dreamed that I slept, and I even dreamed that I had a dream; how strange. And in that kernel of a dream, another creature crawled into my bed beside me, and we slept together like kittens. But I dreamed that I awoke and was alone.

  I dreamed of my Young Christians’ Bible. I dreamed that I was making my way to Emmaeus in my nightdress, with no coat and my hair all undone and tangled. My oxblood shoes made no print on that white road, where the Bible soil is as lifeless as God is strong. And the path was very straight and my shadow very long; it seemed to me that there was another beside me; a treading at the corner of my eye. And yet, if I turned to look behind I was alone; always alone. I bent my knees to those burning stones and wept. And then I turned to lie upon my back and woke.

  The mice were still in my room, even though it had been hours; it was past the dawn already. There was an emptiness to the way in which they looked at me, a new coldness that I had never seen before. The mice were fierce, and dangerous as meat cans in the rubbish; sharp as ribboned tin. When they looked at me, they refused to see my eyes; would not raise their muzzles higher than my chin. Perhaps they were ashamed. Perhaps they were furious. Yes, I think the mice were angry. But really, I was only a child. Only a child. The mice did not move; they barely trembled their whiskers. They crouched still, like things already dead and grown solid. Eventually, they turned their backs on me and left me all alone in my bed. They vanished beneath the gap in the door without even a sound.

  I sat up slowly, rubbed my face and the corners of my eyes, and found my short-cropped hair with something like shock. I gathered my eiderdown around me, swathed myself as though it might save me, rescue me, offer some protection in this peculiar life. But it did no good, and so I stood up instead.

  As I stood, it dawned on me that I had slept in my clothes; that in the night and dreams of deserts, I had sweated right through my dress. It was creased against me like a shedding skin, clinging and soiled.

  I unpeeled it from my body, struggling with the button at the back of my neck. When naked I felt raw; I threw on new clothes in a panic. Without thinking, I put on a dress that I hated; a green velveteen thing with a noose of lace at the throat of it. My mother liked me in that dress. After that I held my breath and left the room.

  The house was frozen, brittle and bitten with anger. At the top of the stairs I came upon a mob of mice, pointed like scribbled arrows, glaring down their lengths at my mother. She stood down at the bottom, fixed as though she had stood there all night; as if she had gotten that far only, with that scream streaming from her mouth, when my mother was a monster who would have had me gone. Mother and mice were fixed, each on the other, suspicious and both quite insane.

  The mice parted resentfully as I went among them, let me through but only just, and I walked to where my mother stood staring and put both my arms around her. And perhaps her shoulder softened a little as I laid my forehead against it. For a second, I perceived the mice as my mother did; their glares a thousand cocktail sticks stabbing.

  I straightened, lifted my face to hers, but her attention was locked against the mice. Perhaps she would not have responded had I slapped her cheek. I had no desire to slap her cheek. I lowered my arms and stole away.

  The anger gelled the air and turned it bitter, turned everything rotten. I sat in the kitchen for a telescopic day, watching as an apple turned from ruddy yellow-red to a satanic, pulpy brown. The skin withered around the stalk, puckered and shrunk the thing into a witch’s face.

  At eleven in the morning, it grew pregnant with worms; it caved in and rolled a little with their gay merrymaking. For a little time that apple was the most alive thing among us, until the worms grew wings and abandoned their nursery forever. By noon there was nothing of it remaining but the stalk, and a glossy patch against the draining board. I dared not look in the fridge.

  The day threaded away gradually, and I was glad to be rid of it. At six I persuaded my mother to come away from the staircase. I discovered her Crying Boy and carrier bags in the bathroom; I brought down knitting and lambskin from the base of the toilet, and bore them carefully to the red chair, arranging my mother a nest as I thought she would like it most.

  I took the picture last of all, and looked into the Crying Boy’s girlish, sentimental face. The Crying boy was dressed in rags; he had white gloves on, hands like a strangler who would leave no print at the scene. My grandmother once told my mother that the Crying Boy was a fire-maker. My mother had told her to ‘Shut up Shut up Shut up!’ and had begun to sing at the top of her voice until my grandmother finished laughing.

  I took him to the foot of the stairs and showed him to her very gently, the way that one might show a pet rabbit to a baby. Her glaze broke then, for just a minute; she opened her face as though startled, and looked at me with a febrile shine in her eyes. Then she put out her hands, slowly-slowly, and snatched the picture from me.

  My mother fled with her Crying Boy clenched against her chest and a sob in her neck. I followed her cautiously, noted with relief that she had found her way to the red armchair. I wondered about draping her with a blanket; decided that I dare not risk it.

  The mice all stared at me as though I had betrayed them. But she was my mother; I could have done nothing else. They stared at me as though I should have done something; shown them something, I don’t know. They had taught me that I was alone; I had nothing to reflect back at them. There was nothing. They would not sit upon my lap, nor polish their faces.

  I hunted for Thomas, longed to run my fingers through his tabby pelt. I would have died for the chance to hold him; to feel his heat and the chimney rumble of his purr. He was nowhere to be found, which was probably all to the good as the way things were he might have wrought a massacre on those stupefied mice.

  I went upstairs, and without much thinking, I poured myself a bath; when the water had all been run, I could hardly make myself climb into it. I stirred my fingers in it, until a sudden rashness overtook me and I plunged right in, even though the bath was my mother’s, even though she might be jealous. The water was hot and gorgeous, and for a time I was forgetful, almost content. But the water grew lukewarm and I had to come out.

  When I returned, the mice had left the stairs. My mother was sitting on her armchair like a heap of clothes, knitting with long mauve fingers. There was a strangeness to the look of her, almost a camouflage. The mice were all ranged round her in concentric circles, pointed like daggers, souring the air with a new sort of staring.

  45

  Knife

  THE CUTLERY WAS not fed tonight. Forks and butter knives cruise the carpet like fish, circle the floors and the arc around the door, shearing over the backs of each other in a stately kind of minuet. They flas
h and slither, but the door is never opened, nor dead things flung within for their supper.

  46

  The Mother

  THE MOTHER STANDS at the foot of the stairs, hardly even wondering how long she has been there; hardly even wondering a single thing. The mother stands and the wind clouts at the back door, filling the house with hollow airful smacks. It is like bursting paper bags that bang and bang, over and again. Each strike makes her screw her eyes and flinch, as the night noises and the draught stalk along the hallway runner and discover her there.

  She stands in bulb light, mad as a hare, transfixed and ever-so cold, and she cannot at that moment recall even her name. The house clucks and gasps around her as the pipes grow frigid, and it fills its lime-washed lungs with air. And it seems that there are echoes ringing flat in the hall: the genial chuckle of the rent man, and thundering shoes; of a long hoarse scream that might in truth be a snarl. There are ribbons of it through the hallway, parallel with the tortured tinsel, stretched out thin-wise; pinned.

  The mother is grinding her teeth, is listening to the creak of molars against each other, and she cannot place the noise. A filling at the back is coming loose, wearing to amalgam grit in her mouth. The mother’s fingers are knitted right together, but her fag end is still jutting between them, burnt right past the filter and then gone out.

  The mother is stared at by her ghosts, but it is a different kind of staring now. The questions have gone; the pleading has dried up. The ghosts are angry. They have stitched the mother to the empty space around her and she has forgotten how to move.

  When the rent man finally went, the mother pushed shut the front door, just as she would have like to push him out: firmly, assertively, with both hands and all her force. And then she breathed his sweaty air and aftershave and she hated him.

  The mother had sighed like a martyr and ditched her carapace of raincoat, donned in a hurry to protect her from the rent man’s crawling eyes. Now she discovered an abandoned laundry basket at the side of the alcove, so familiar as to be entirely lost. The mother fished out a sour woollen dressing gown and pulled it over her body. She had become rather thinner over these past few days, and it hung off her like a paper dress against a paper doll.

  And when she was decent, the mother had wandered to the kitchen in a daze, shedding tears as if they might rinse the rent man away. She wondered to herself, wondered very sadly, if everything might just be her fault. She had not really laid eyes on Marie since her week in the bathroom, so afraid was she of her daughter. When their eyes had met the last time, with window glass and lashing rain between them, the mother had found that her daughter was a woman now.

  That gaze had grown beyond unquestioning childhood. The mother and she had exchanged a certain glance, and she had seen that Marie would never believe her again. Finally, at last Marie had seen right through, to that dripping core that the mother had worked so hard to contain with her cardigans and enamelled smiles. It was over.

  The mother, at the foot of the stairs, sees that moment slide past her now and she cannot will herself to look away. And in only a few hours, the sun begins to collect in the sky like the cream from a shaken milk bottle. The ghosts are staring still, staring like that other child always did. The ghosts are so many and so thick now, more than the bubbles in a washing up bowl, more than the feathers off a chicken, and as drifting, as weightless. The dawn strains through them. With an effort, the mother manages to blink.

  She had even had a change of heart; the mother had nearly tried this time; she nearly had. With the rent man gone and a dreadful thirst papering her tongue, the mother had stood at the kitchen window and wondered if life was at an end. The household, the universe, seemed to be thinning beneath her fingers, splitting into filaments, fragile and useless as candyfloss.

  And she was unwinding worst of all, for if Marie did not think her a good lady, why then she must not be one. But, the mother gripped at her own wrist, might not something be salvaged? Perhaps, perhaps she might be guilty, just be and acknowledge and apologise for being guilty? Before there was nothing left, nothing at all?

  And so it was that the mother found her slippers, and crumbled mud from them, and then crept into the garden, like a child towards a hiding. The mother approached the pit, braced this time, knowing about those black and liquid eyes, knowing all that she might face. She had no speech prepared, no guessings or dreams of instant resolution. The mother, for a moment, was just a mother, gone to find her child.

  The mice have begun to populate the stairs, to take their places among the ghosts, cold and hard as carpet tacks. The mother stands and breathes. The bones of her fingers show through at the joints of her hands.

  But she had not been there! There was only an empty hole. The mother had gazed at the sky in a panic, wracking her head. She had been there? Surely she was? The mother saw her there, just days ago; oh, but was she sure? Because, a week was a dreadfully long time, and she found herself confused, struggling to think. Concentrating was so hard these days, especially with the sun so bright.

  Or (the mother clawed her throat), had she been mistaken? The mother began to sway. Had she done something? What had she done? If the child was not here then what on earth had the mother done with her? ‘God, oh God.’ Had she murdered accidentally, the way in which a person spills tea? The mother tried to remember, began to wail; silenced herself.

  Surely, if she had killed her then it would be obvious. One cannot hide such a large thing as a corpse. The mother knew this thought to be a downright lie, and she lifted her gaze to the dining room window, then followed her eyes with her feet.

  The mice are arranged in ranks, each stair bristling with whiskers, but here comes Marie from her room with silent, wary steps. They do not look up as she nears them. For now the mice are fixed, jammed against the mother, possessed with outrage, more furious than any beast that ever walked the earth. The mice know her to be a killer. She has stolen their childling, made the owls come and have her. She has murdered the childling and all of mousehood with her; all is lost.

  In the garden, the mother had neared the pink window and put her face against it, trying to see, trying to discover a body, in case she had killed her own poor child. But the emulsion was all but opaque, unless one knew exactly where to look. The mother filled her fingernails with paint as she scraped madly at the glass, quite frantic. And then she pushed her eye at the hatch marks she had made; all the mother could see was the dining room, scratched and gouged and dug at by points and blades.

  As she looked, a pudding spoon squirmed from armchair to piano like a legless scorpion, and she startled away with a cry. Perhaps she had done it. Who might tell? There would be nothing left anyhow, nothing but scrapings. The nasty child was dead and she herself had done this thing. The mother scurried back inside, slammed the door, fidgeted a cigarette out of the box and lit it on the stove. Then she ran to the parlour and sat in her red chair and sobbed.

  Suddenly, Marie is before her and holding her around the ribs. The mother blinks at this, confused. The mother feels her face against her shoulder, the side of her neck, and she cannot imagine how Marie sneaked up on her so quietly. But she is not dead, not this child, and her arms are warm. Then she vanishes again.

  When the back door had opened and shut again, the mother had recoiled as if at a slap. For there was no resolution after all; there was nothing to save, nothing to offer in mitigation; nothing to make to make Marie love her again. The mice had ruined her, washed out her brain like a sock in a sink. And now the mice would expose this extra crime and Marie would know of this too. Life was over. The mother trod back to the kitchen, full up with nothing, capable of anything, as though some man had blacked her eye.

  When Marie came back inside, her head was shorn and her face was a secret and she wore mice around her neck. When the mother threw herself at Marie it was purely in self defence, to unmake the knowledge in her head, to sile
nce the guilt and the doubt and the singing in her ears. But her feet got mired in the shadows of the hallway, until she found herself fixed like a scarecrow before the very first stair.

  The mice are looking at the mother like battery acid. Whilst they are corroding her it turns into night time, and here is Marie again with her warm cradling arm. She has a flat square in her hand.

  For a moment it seems to be her lost child, but these eyes are green and different, and it seems that the tears on that cheek are her own, that call to the mother’s own grief. The image focuses. It is the Crying Boy. The mother loves her Crying Boy. He looks at her in this oddly static moment, and the mother gropes towards him and escapes, finds her chair, quivers upon it with her carrier bags at her ankles. Her fingers stumble across her knitting and so the mother begins to knit.

  47

  Marie

  DAYS CRAWLED PAST, softly, the way that fruit turns rotten, and I was alone. I dreamed of the shadow at my side when I slept, and when I woke I crept about the house like a thief, gazing dumbly at closed drawers and at my mother’s wardrobe. I dared not open them, nor rummage among papers for secrets. My grandmother seemed to be constantly on her errands and the sky slid past the window, grey. It seemed as if the riot of summer was burnt out already. My bones grew cold.

  The plaster in my bedroom wall developed a crack, wide enough to admit the thickness of a penny piece. I began to eye it warily, frightened that the side of the house might pick off like a scab, topple me and my unmade bed into a grave of rubble in the garden. Eventually the worry got too much and I resolved to sleep elsewhere in the room, in the hope that might be safer.

  It took me half the afternoon; that was the day that I packed away my toys, useless things they were. They belonged to some other childhood. I dumped them in the corner and covered them with dirty linen to hide them from my sight. I dragged my bed to the opposite side of the room with a massive effort; points of blood showed through my skin where I had worked so hard, and I developed a slicing pain in my head.