Underneath the bobbled pile of her woollen tights, the childling can feel the dig and pullings of splinters. Slowly she shifts her legs, finds another way to sit. Them she spreads out her clever paws and runs them lightly against the sacking and the floorboards, brailing through the cobwebs as if she were fishing. Her fingers light on little things: a metal car, corroded with rust and rodent urine; and a cotton reel that is pale like a plastic vertebra. She finds a brownish clothes peg that is thready at the ends where baby teeth once chewed the wood to fibres, and she seems to start at it; the mice all sniff hard and sway a little as she fits it to her mouth. The childling, beloved of mice, lifts her face and gazes at the ceiling, the lumpy ceiling that cradles the staircase.
She discovers that she loves every fat bulge, every craze and stain of wet and age and soaked-in guilt. And then, for some reason, and the first time in forever, she dips her head again and her eyes begin to pour with salty water. Beyond the door, they can hear Marie, plodding along the hallway, then up above them, fitting a shoe into every stair tread.
The mice are concerned, and perplexed also; they crowd closer still and they catch the drops as they fall, try to drink them or absorb them in their fur, lest any of this moment be lost. Now she is here, come at last as if in some reply to their repentance; Mother Owl has at last released the childling to them, that they might prove themselves humble. In the failing light, it seems to the mice that they can hear Mother Owl outside the window even now, her silence, the absence that she is, and the darkness.
The childling sits on her haunches and cries as Mother Owl sweeps past the house, enfolds all of them in her queer comfort. The mice all close their eyes and empty their tiny lungs, for here at least is their blessing; Mother Owl has seen them there with her light bulb eyes; she has caused the face of the childling to rain and she has given mousehood its little grey doubt at last.
They have no huge redemption to make after all; no new fate to create, no false god to scribble across the empty spaces in the air. There is simply this massive and beautiful creature, and the sweet rot of this ancient playroom, and the fate that Mother Owl shall pick for them all. Perhaps they will burn, or sleep for a hundred years.
They shall shred up the fate that is given to them, and with it they will line their nests, whether it be so sharp as to ribbon their skin, or soft enough to bear a litter into. So they climb up over the childling, and they taste her raining and they try to make it stop. In time she seems to grow calm, and then she reaches out again and gathers up another toy with her fingertips.
This one is a little bear, the twin of a teddy that was owned by the other child, by Marie. This bear is blanket blue, or rather it was at one time; the childling can smell the blueness on it, the sweat and the love that has leached into the softness. This thing here is a half-forgotten picture book, with pork rind for its cover and poetry of smells inside. The childling takes this as well, gathers a little heap of toys onto her lap as the mice all splay their fragile paws, and hold her as best they can. Mother Owl sweeps past and past the house; they can feel her emptiness and her tender wings.
It is in this that at last the lesson is learnt, in this silent hour in the cupboard under the stairs; they are only mice. They are small, and humble and low against the ground. Mice are for dying, for doubting, for making a little beauty, a little love. The childling is returned to them only at the end of an age of strife, only when they finally understand that in her is embodied no great work of mice. She is just a sad thing, a poor thing as they are. She is come that they might love her, nothing more.
As the mice are thinking, the feet of the other human creature come back down the stairs and wander this way and that; there is a great commotion in the kitchen that makes them all freeze like dead things and listen, as Marie smashes up a dining chair. Then everything becomes quiet again and the child clambers to her feet.
For a few minutes the mice all watch as the childling gathers things, bobbins and cup-handle teethers and a rattle that is half a tin of sugar cubes. She frowns as her hands become too full, and squats to her knees again, as if trying to puzzle this out.
There is a sudden cough from the parlour then, a sort of sobbing, throaty noise, and the childling leaps at it, scattering toys and mice. They flee for their lives as she crashes through the door, teddy bear still in her fist, to find her sister.
63
Marie
SINCE MY GRANDMOTHER soaked back into the garden, everything was much too strong, over-coloured like neat orange squash. And I, who was so accustomed to a dilute world, was overcome with it, the too-sweet wind gusts; the slimy lawn and the clouds in the sky that coated the tongue and the back of the throat. I could hardly stand it, and was dogged by pains in the head and a ringing in my skull from the clashing air.
Even the house, with its uncertain corners and yellowish paintwork, seemed a little affected, forced a little realer by her melting. There was a licking of pink in the wallpaper, where before I had seen only mauve, and I discovered the scent of my own self, animal-like and woody. The curtains finicked in new draughts and the thinking nerves of the bricks themselves seemed throbbingly loud. Right then, I could feel its heavy mind drowsing, lifting and sinking, muttering silently; the house was falling asleep.
It seemed that my grandmother had been made out of us, wrenched out of everything like a kind of essence, the unknowable soul of our household. It was only after she had gone that I think I truly understood the puzzle that she was; for even as I had feared her, she had made me safe. I had not realised, either, just how much of the world that she contained; how grey things had become with every passing night.
I am not sure why she came apart as she did, nor why she should have grown so very strong. There was a kind of sense to her demise, though; it seemed fit that she should end her days with electrical spikes and rain and thunder. I missed her solidness, and the tread of her feet against the stairs.
The garden was like unwatered Kia Ora as I stood at the step and flinched at the afternoon. It was harsh enough to suffocate. I had wandered here again without quite considering why; as if I might somehow discover her in the garden, pinching the thorns off rosebushes, or stalking through the spraddled flowerbeds with blackish vials of blood.
My grandmother was nowhere to be found; she was everywhere. I could breathe her; I turned my head away from the sky, after-images colliding in my eyes. She left me seven days ago. I hoped it was seven; I would have made a note, counted out the time, except that the only biro I could find was dried out and useless, splitting the paper but making no mark.
It was probably seven days. When it came to eight days since she shattered, the rent man would come again and I was terrified. I would owe him double. He would be very angry. And however was I to protect myself now; protect this other child? I was the provider now, and my grandmother’s rooms were locked, secure as a tomb. I crept up the stairs to look; the door might as well have been nailed.
Even as rent day loomed I dared not think of it; instead I busied my head with the worries of fuel. There was no coal left to burn, so with what might I make a fire? Already the cold was collecting in my fingers, and I had come to fear darkness like a cave dweller. So I pulled the door shut behind me and I pondered the notion of burning.
With what could I bear to part? What objects need I burn to keep my creatures alive? Like a clockwork thing I made my way upstairs and found myself in my old bedroom. I swept my gaze across my musty bed, and peeled off an armful of sheets that smelled of mushrooms.
The books were almost gone already, eaten to spines of gluey string by mice, dragged into skirting holes and crevices. I found the skeleton of my Young Christians’ Bible and tucked what remained of it underneath my arm for the fire. Everywhere there were neat little droppings and scraps of this and that.
I dragged my feet towards the heap of my toys, and found myself a Ludo board and a broken plastic boat. A drif
t of dolls and stuffed animals stared from the floor like some stupid audience, politely admiring dust motes and cracks in the plaster.
I picked up a few, but then I had a glimpse of their future, smiling through the fire, splitting threadbare fur until they were only kapok and brand-hot glass eyes. My skin crawled; I threw their little bodies back towards the corner with my heart pounding. I had better not burn my old frocks either, for the child must have something to wear.
She crept from the parlour this morning, had laid her hot little hand against my cheek and walked away. I had been horrified, but the mice all got up to go with her and so I felt a little eased. They all trooped into the hall together and I eavesdropped with my fist in my mouth until I heard them all pattering up the stairs. I suppose I could not begrudge her the right to explore.
That first night and the day after, the child had stayed with me, hardly moving, sharing my air and holding my fingers in her hands. All that time the mice had held their peace, even as they clung against her skin. I had dominated her attention, kept her selfishly close, that I might stroke her like a cat, make her burrow her head into the gap between my collarbone and chin. And she let me; that little wild thing from the garden patiently bore me and my hysterical cuddles. She gazed into my face with her back very straight, and her face not quite smiling.
But now (I stood outside my old room and listened), she sat nearby, communing with mice. I could feel them; hear their whispered thinking. The house heaved within its dreaming, groaned with its rafters, making my teeth hurt. I shook my head at the state of us all and bore my strange kindling downstairs.
Evening dropped like a cloth and I began to panic, hunting in the gloaming light for something solid to burn. Plastic and paper was all very well, but we had to have wood, something to burn slow, keep us alive all night. I needed fire, needed light to push away the blackness, make safe my child, my mice, my own trembling self. There was not fuel enough in all the world for a darkness like ours.
I should have gone outside and gathered sticks. I should have thought of what to do before. I daren’t now, I thought, daren’t leave the back door’s gloomy refuge, for the garden was mutating to a hugeness of black, new and solid since my grandmother had shed herself into it. I stood at the scullery window, gulping and counting out my fear, and then jumped as a massive pale owl drifted from the cherry tree like some unspeakable power.
Its eyes were puddles of nothing and it threw itself at the window, talons arched in front of it. I ducked my head and hid my face, as if it might break the glass with its claws, but at the last instant it wheeled away and was off through the night. The house must have felt my flinch, for it moaned again, this time in real distress. I put my fingers against the sweating plaster, but then my eyes lit on a dullish gleam underneath the stone sink.
It was the head of a little hatchet; it had lain there for so many years that I had never quite noticed it. When I crouched down to see, there was a whole tool box, ruined and rusty, swaddled with spider webs. I lifted things out one by one; I had never really examined such objects, much less seen them put to any use; their weight and tactless edges made me think of the rent man.
Nonetheless, the hatchet was a thing that I knew, for the woodcutters of my storybooks had brandished these at tree and wolf, and so I took it with me into the kitchen. It was a sudden inspiration, or else a kind of sudden fury, that caused me to take that axe to a dining chair; it broke beneath my hammering and chopping, until of a sudden I had wood enough for a fire, for a few days even, if only I was careful to save it.
I staggered with all my bits to the parlour and dropped them on the floor with a clatter. I made a little blaze with one of the very last matches; then I sat and watched the baby flames as the house ground its old brown jaws and whimpered. I could feel its hurt with the pains in my head; it was doubled up around the dining room like an animal curled around a wound.
Its sadness felt like my own somehow, and I resolved to do my best to comfort the great miserable thing; a flea comforting an elephant, but a loving flea at least. I reached behind the red armchair for my eiderdown and then I lugged it like a corpse along the floor; at the chimneybreast I swathed myself inside it, leaving my back bare against the plaster.
I sat as still as anything, as a mother with four little mouse-children used my shoulder for a lookout post. Scrapings from the other side of the wall made them freeze, then scatter suddenly. The cutlery was nosing at the brickwork again, hunting for a way through, singing their thin serrated music and flipping their sinuous blades.
The house continued to thrash; infrasonic bellows coughed up from the cellars. I laid my face against the plaster, stroked that cold old wall like the flank of a carthorse. It was huddled thus, cheek against cheek, that I shared the house’s dream.
I saw it as it saw itself: clear skinned, without the pits of weather and the lichen that now itched one whole side. A heavy-rumped parlour maid scurried from the attic to the lower floors, which rang with the bickering of children. Their motion was so rapid that it was shocking to see; it was only when the figures were still that I could hope to observe them.
The girl held a top to her chest, refusing to give it up; a boy in a sailor suit struck her with the whip, cutting at her bare shin. I gasped, heaved with the violence of it. Then there was a jumble, an awful tangle of years and lives and meanness, and I realised the liquid evil of creatures that are not made as houses are. These things of meat did nothing but hurt, jagger and wound each other and the house with their fists and boots and electric drills. I was aghast at it, but rooted by the feet. I might never escape them.
Then it seemed that some of the trillion moments that I dreamed of were familiar. I dreamed of fairy lights, and paper chains that noosed up the corners of ceiling and wall, of the hundred nasty nicks from drawing pins.
I saw a younger woman, and a man that I did not know. I was puzzling at this when the woman made a gesture, a hugging of herself that made me recognise her. It was my mother; it must have been, but then I lost her again amidst the clutter of images, the tiny killings and scrapings and sofas dragged along my floors.
My mother was in the kitchen, murdering trifle sponges, fracturing them in her finger bones amidst a chaos of kitchen things: Paxo boxes, Birds mix; a great frozen turkey carcass. The man was wobbling atop a kitchen chair, jabbing and jabbing with a thumbtack at the wall, a string of tinsel impaled against it. However much he hurt the distemper it would not stay in, and presently the point squashed out sideways, quite flat.
They were talking together all the while, speaking and speaking, louder and louder still. She upset a jug full of boiling jelly, scalded the carpet with it. He trod awkwardly from the chair, fell sideways and blamed her. The kettle began to scream.
I did not understand what happened after that, only that hours rattled by and voices rose and fell, that a baby began to wail upstairs and nobody came. The voices of people are a rapid kind of trilling, like the singing of flesh-eating birds, and I tried to look away, to focus my mind elsewhere.
But all that I could really see were the violences, and so I watched the poor baby for a long while, the boiling rage of her crying, her little face red and hot and streaming tears like an overflow pipe. She cried a long time, until she seemed to grow exhausted and I saw her dark eyes glisten in the light from the hall.
But there was a sickness in me, a new and catastrophic sickness, and I hunted from room to room as one might search through pockets, although I already knew perfectly well where the malady was. I felt the copper taste of blood in my floors, and I shuddered so hard that my foundations broke. Sore as a scree slope, I turned to look at the slime trail of red between the kitchen and the dining room.
There was a scraping from the sideboard, a metal whine that sounded like the end of every living thing. I heard the music that follows Armageddon, when the knives shall wake and lick up all the gore; when the knives shall inh
erit the whole earth, with no creature left to witness but the stones and ruined houses. Nausea soaked inside me as the inmates of the knife drawer turned from one thing to another; from dormant to savage, from needless to starving. I was terrified; I was terrified.
I woke to find that I was sitting up, sobbing at the darkness with the child shaking my shoulders. She had a soggy blue teddy bear in her hand, bitten out of blanket by lots of little teeth. I saw the black in her eyes and then I knew utterly who she was. She was my sister, my twin; she had cried and then listened in the night as my mother killed a man. Forcefully, I perceived the welt around the dining room, the thickened air that held it removed like a canker from the rest of the building.
The child knelt down and placed herself in my arms; I held her close and tried to calm myself. For a long time, I could not.
64
Knife
THERE IS NOT much light to see by, and there is hardly any colour. As the rain spats the painted window, as the chimney wails, the tones of everything are shades of steel and tarnish. From an inch above the carpet floor, the world is wide and stark; a fish knife flips its back and rears right up against its ivory handle.
Perhaps that ivory remembers being an animal, once; perhaps its brittle flexion calls to itself a trace of the plains, of the ancient plodding wisdom of the elephant. But if there is some tiny relic left inside of the world of things with souls, there is no sign. The fish knife quivers, twists this way and then the other, watching through its edges, scanning the waste-grounds of carpet. It does not look up to see the ceilings.
The Knife Drawer Page 25