The Knife Drawer

by Padrika Tarrant

  Here and there are flecks of brightness, where the meagre light catches tine or spoon-edge; these patches are quite bleached and the fish knife can barely make them out. Cutlery is not made for daytime. Knives do not give a damn for the life-giving sun, and when it has burned itself to a throbbing crimson eye they will not mourn it for a second.

  There is no colour in the universe but red. There are argent greys and the dullness of lead; there are a trillion notes of white and black, but red is the only colour. Red is the glory of bloody things; the poetry of flesh and warm skin tearing. Red is the only colour; red is delicious and hot and liquid; red is the sunset of the old order.

  There is no red to be seen; no red to taste in this old rank air; there has been no red for long famished months. And it seems that the cutlery has found a taste for it, this ruinous life beyond dormancy; they might have bided their time for twenty thousand years, but now they know the lick of meat they will never rest again. The hunger of a carving fork is the agony of worlds; is long as a nuclear winter, and the cutlery seethes amongst itself like boiling.

  The fish-knife has not smelt red for savage ages and it is hungry, screeking and aching and starving for redness. But there is no colour, not a trace but the sterile shine of metal, and they cannot eat each other. They cross and cross each other’s paths like sharks in shallow waters, and the carpet pile is shaved to canvas string and fluff. The fish knife flats its blade again and tumbles to the floor; it has no thinking in its nerves but the high scream of starvation.

  There is no jot of intelligence in it, any more than a cockroach is wise, yet a fork or spoon is all made out of nerves, nerves and little more, nerves that conduct in massive flattened sheets. Where a blooded thing has nerves in fragile threads, where a houseish thing has nerves in lumbering brick and lath, a fish-knife has nerves of nickel, layers and layers of them, razor sharp at the edges. They conduct at half the speed of sound, unimpeded by synapse or autonomy, knowing no sensation but feeding and hunger and the pain of corrosion.

  They are not bright enough for fear; they hardly know themselves to be living, but the leap of impulse makes them fleet as flies. A bluebottle will twirl into the air an age, a century before the hand swiped at it, seeking to smatter it against a windowpane. Such creatures are made differently, swift and precise of movement, brainless and unkillable and very much faster than soft-fleshed things of meat.

  The wall is wearing very thin, so thin that odd molecules of red are beginning to percolate through from the parlour. The fish-knife slithers towards the eaten parts and knows that there is red behind it. The other side of the wall is gorgeously warm; betrays itself with the sounds of living blood, with the scuffs and voices and lung-wet exhalations. The prisoners of the dining room will feed; if they had to, they would carve a channel in a mountain for a taste of red, but now the wall is nearly through.

  Then there are shoes beyond the door and the dining room grows deadly silent. The wood is thinner than a wall by inches and might have been screwed through weeks ago, but a knife cannot easily wield itself. If they could jump, lift off the floor, then they might have murdered the household a long time since. If they could jump, they might have cleared the metal barricades underneath the door, might have twisted like corkscrews and broken out in a trice.

  But they can only scrape or cut a thing by bracing on the ground, by forcing point or blade or digging edge against the leverage of handle and floor. When the cutlery makes war with flesh, comes out to possess the universe, the revolution will come at floor level with torn feet and splitting arteries; in time whole cities shall fall as low as the knives; the knives will finish them off when their throats are flat against carpet and tarmac.

  The footsteps die away and the cutlery returns to munching at the wall; to the house it is like having a peptic ulcer, an endless chewing bellyache. But house meat is not red, and the fish knife does not care a toss about its pain.

  65

  Marie

  THE NEXT MORNING the rent man jattered the letterbox before six; he came like a burst water pipe, or food poisoning. He was catastrophic; he filled our ears and made us crawl at the skin.

  He tried very hard; he shoved his shoulder at the front door and seemed astounded that it was secured. The rent man called, ‘I say! I say!’ though the sunburst window as if he were trying to hail a cab, as if some fellow had stolen the cap from his head. Then he scraped his way past the blackberry bushes to the back door, trailing filthy language from his mouth as he went.

  I had been expecting him, of course. Last night I had even managed to shut the back door fast, though it half finished me to heave on it so hard; by the time I managed to drag it past the stick in the frame, I was sweating and trembling like a person in a fever. It must have taken me twenty tries, every one an act of such hugeness I surprised my own self.

  It was clear that that door would never open again, and I think that the house itself was pleased that I had shut it properly after all that time, as though a dislocated joint had been forced back in place at last. I could hear it that night, testing at the hinge and catch, humming and hahring to itself in absentminded approval. That made me smile, even in the midst of all that unease.

  When the rent man had found his way to the concrete patio, he was probably very hot himself; there was a redness in his voice, a kind of flush that I could see with my mind, plain as a nosebleed. The rent man was scarlet in the face, and creased all the way from brow to brow; I expect there were little veins standing out against his head, and his scalp was probably uncomfortably damp. He rattled at the door handle, then beat at it with the heel of his hand.

  ‘I know you are in there,’ said the rent man, red and loud and we could hear it from the parlour. ‘I know you are in there,’ said he, and then he seemed to change his mind, or at least alter tack, for he suddenly brightened his tone and called out, ‘Mrs Ashkin? Are you there?’

  ‘Marie, dear,’ called the rent man and I closed my eyes, ‘Marie dear, is your mummy home? I have some lovely lollipops in my jacket you know!’ Then he opened his palm and slapped the wood once, as one might a face. The poor house blinked, quite astonished.

  By the time the rent man found his way to the front of the house again I was so giddy that I could not tell if I were still sitting upright. The child and I held each other’s wrists and huddled against the wall, comforting ourselves, the windowsill above our heads offering some mean protection. The rent man smeared the glass with his fingers and the smear of his lip as he held his face and tried to see us through the parlour window.

  I grit my teeth and quaked as the rent man spat the landlord’s name through the pane, invoked him like some mediaeval Satan. The landlord would hear of this. We should all be evicted, thrown out on our filthy ears. The rent man told my long-gone mother that he would return with the master keys, and perhaps the police too, for it was all that she deserved. And then he turned and cursed and swaggered off to his car, which he scratched against the fencepost with a horrible screech.

  The child stared at my face with dumb terror; when he had finally gone from earshot she undug her fingernails from my arm and left me with three half-moon welts where she had gripped so hard. I stroked her face, said, ‘Shush, shush,’ under my breath, for an explanation would have been entirely useless, and I hadn’t the heart for one anyhow.

  As the pounding of our nerves subsided, I began to hear something else, far nastier than any rent man. The scritch of metal could be heard again, digging and cutting at the adjoining wall, relentless, brainlessly persistent. There was a busy quality to it this time, a new kind of urgency, a disaster waiting for its birth.

  The cutlery was starving. Of course it was; any fool could have guessed that; and now that I had seen them with the house’s poor consciousness I could imagine them with the most awful clarity. I knew for sure about the mice, the man that my mother stabbed, the snippy fate of every poor corpse that was dumpe
d in there. The cutlery was famished and it would eat the very brickwork. We should be dissected in our sleep.

  I tossed my head and jumped to my feet, for I fancied then that I could see light through the wallpaper, as though the breakthrough would come at any moment. The child cowered at my haste, as I fled for the scullery, as I dug around for tin cans in the rubbish, and a handful of rusty clout-nails from the box beneath the sink. I even unearthed a few bits of zinc sheeting, and I sandwiched these between vinegary tea towels and nailed them along the skirting boards, blacking one thumbnail, grunting and whimpering to myself as though fending off a nightmare. Then I stood back to examine my handiwork, and wondered whether it would all prove useless.

  At the end of it I was tired to the death, and I crawled to the red armchair with my head aching and a pulling at my belly where I had strained a muscle, and fell asleep without a single thought. I did not dream, only listened with sleeping ears to the echoes of my hammer and the curious nibbling of knives.

  I woke later, hours or minutes later; for the clock said half past six and it was still dim, or else night was falling, and I could not tell which. I fed the fire with the Motorists’ Atlas of the British Isles and handfuls of pot pourri, and then I went in search of the child. I found that the scullery window was wide open, and with a jolt of fear, I clambered through and into the garden, praying that I had not lost her.

  She was on the back step; she turned to me, cautiously, and then raised her feral head to snuff at the air. Her hair hung black over her eyes. I smiled at her, rushed with relief that I was not abandoned, and it was almost with a chuckle that I hurried over the patio towards her.

  She narrowed her eyes, seemed to warn me off. I stopped, half turned away, almost embarrassed. Perhaps I should busy myself elsewhere, pretend that I was not watching her like a spy. I decided to gather sticks. I walked out to the cherry tree and beyond it, to a sapling of scraggy plum, thumb-thick at the branches, wondering if I might be able to fell it with my blunt little hatchet. Meditatively, I rubbed at the new hardness that was developing along my forearm. Perhaps I could at that. I felt capable, then, like a grown-up would feel.

  I turned my hand, palm uppermost. It was not the little pale thing that I remembered. Grained with dirt, callused from breaking wooden things, this hand may as well have belonged to someone else, I thought. A long splinter was visible, stuck in the skin of my index finger. I put my hand to my mouth to nibble through the top layer, to get it out. The sensation of skin between my teeth was so repulsive, that although it did not hurt, I could not bear to continue. My grandmother used to take out splinters by picking and picking with the point of a leatherworking needle. I could never do that to the child, even if she had let me.

  With a pang, I looked up to see if she was still here. There she was, on all fours on the vegetable patch in my tartan dress and holed tights. She wore no shoes, and would push them off with her toes if I tried to force them upon her.

  I put up my hand to shield my eyes, for the sun seemed to be rising; I watched the child inch forward, sinuous as a snare. There was something foreboding in her manner, something so very wild, that I merely stood, almost afraid, watching. The child tilted her head, very slowly, so as to free a lock of hair from her staring eye.

  Her little body hunkered down to earth, soil showing black between her outspread fingers. Then she moved forward again, slow as paralysis. Her hands curled until the fingers were dug right into the mud, and the child drew back her lip, uncovered her milk teeth. She seemed to be glaring at the cherry tree. I put my finger into my mouth and waited. She did not move.

  And then, the child leaped like a flame. She surged up the horrified tree in an instant; the cherry tree exploded with wings and the cries of small birds. She had jumped so hard that she landed on the second branch, high as my head. Lightly she dropped to the ground again, the long body of a squirrel caught in her jaws. I stood, stiff and stranded as a scarecrow.

  There was a long hush in the garden. The birds had settled on the guttering and trees again, and it took a time for the wind to remember to blow, for the sun to continue its stunted dawn. The birds began to sing again; my finger held the imprint of my bite.

  The child sat at the foot of the cherry tree with a fresh bright scratch on her brow. She smeared at it with the flat of one wrist, and then she bit into her squirrel. I pushed my hands through my hair, and the movement made the child look up; for a moment her eyes were baleful and she uttered a long growl that showed the red in her teeth.

  I shivered for an hour or two in the garden, pretending not to watch the child as she devoured every inch of that squirrel, snapping at the spine with the sides of her teeth like a dog at a marrowbone. After an age, the fury in her seemed to die back and she sniffed and licked at her fingers and arms, polished her face with them and looked over at me again. Then the child crept over to the open window and climbed back inside. I followed carefully.

  66

  Mice

  THE NIGHT BELONGS to Mother Owl; the woollen-scarf darkness and the fear. The night belongs to Mother Owl because it is the time of birth-making, of shadows and secret things. When the night comes there is nothing but her, the nothingness of her, and the light from the grate is made only to see the blackness by.

  The whimpers of newborns make a joy to see the silence by. The love of Mouse for its own, for the strange huge children that they adore, this love is to show them the quiet that comes after love is at an end, the empty pulse of a torpid heart, the enormity of everything that is larger than a mouse.

  This is what makes them so very beautiful, the brilliance and dancingness of tiny lives. This is a thing that they know with their guts and whiskers. They are Mouse; small and humble and low against the ground, and any pretension to greatness is futile at best.

  For its part the parlour is paradise at three o’clock in the morning. The fire is sinking into itself in the grate, casting the room with a colour like the inside of some colossal womb. And the odour is mystifying and glorious, making poetry of the universe of Home; here are burning cushion covers, dust turned into smoke. There are lavender bags in the fire, and the stink of their purple burning is a magic spell recited in air.

  It is sumptuous and gorgeous and perfectly terrifying, for this is how the house shall smell when it is licked up in flames, when fire climbs out from his sooty ironwork cradle to claim his black and red inheritance. He will make the beauty of this house complete; this is the way of life and death. This is the will of Mother Owl.

  Marie and the childling are huddled together like littermates; like sleeping continents, crouched side by side in the frizz-mother’s ragged armchair. They do not even know that they are embracing so, for the childling had remained by herself for hours, waiting like a fox in the quiet of the scullery.

  Even the mice had not dared sit with her, for she smelled dangerous to them today, bloody like a creature fed upon killed things. All afternoon she had seemed more like owl than mouse to them; some unknowable creature from the leaf-smelling space beyond the back door. This too is the will of Mother Owl; she reveals the nature of beings, reminds the mice that no thing alive is uncomplicated.

  She is so familiar to them, yet she teaches a lesson of wildness, of safety and the danger of things taken for granted. So she sat by herself like a moonless sky, with blood in her teeth and a terrible sadness to her that could rupture the heart. She sat and held her knees against her chest, and slowly the smells of wind and death sank away from her; slowly the tension in her bones grew looser and she turned her head to see the mice, to snuff the fire smoke from the parlour. When finally she was the childling that they knew again, she released her smile and crept to the parlour.

  By then Marie was asleep, cold despite the warmth. She was sleeping the way in which she had hunched all evening; as stiff and uncomfortable as a coat hanger, and she never even stirred when the childling crawled up under her arm and
clambered onto her lap. But the mice all saw, and in their small grey way, they were happy.

  Since then they have watched them both as the night time threw her great cold feathers against the flanks of the house. They have sighed like microscopic draughts as Marie found her twin in her sleep, as they folded their limbs together and slept amongst each other, and grew cosy.

  Now it is the holy time, which belongs alone to the silences of mice. And somehow there collects in the air a sense of the sacred, a kind of frightened reverence, for the mice plan to make a sacrifice to Mother Owl. They have saved a gift of immense wealth. Behind the washing basket, fluff-studded and glistening gold, there is a whole slice of Prince’s cling peach.

  The mice all tip their noses, each to each, and the shadows on the wall leap and play like demons in a forest, and the parlour is as eldritch as can be. The breathing of the girls is a rise and falling in the atmosphere, which is fragrant with the killing magic of burning shoes, so they gather up their terror and their slice of peach and begin the journey to the attic.

  It makes a luscious sticky trail along the carpet, as wonderful a moving thing as any holy procession. Instead of flower carts there are little globs of syrup, and the aromatic glory of it is purer than the rarest incense. A brownish mouse is shoving with his paws, with the push of his forehead, doing his best to move that slice along before him. Before the red chair is even passed he is soaked with it, the sweetness of his burden. Juice coats him, stings his eyes as he pushes, as his claws sink into that yellow flesh. It takes super-mouse effort to shove it beyond the gap beneath the door.

  Thomas is waiting in the dank hallway, waiting with his muzzleful of teeth, with his eyes playful-bright and the end of his tail lashing. The peach slips through first, with the brownish mouse behind it, pushing and squishing. He is a sugar mouse now, syrup anointed, and when he unflattens his back, he finds himself gazing at the cat’s hypnotic eyes, which are golden and a little like those of an owl.