The Knife Drawer

by Padrika Tarrant

  In her, the mouse-mother can see the spectrum of doubt, every colour within it, from the dawning hues of afterbirth to despair’s utter black. There is poetry in this, for the nature of Mouse is small and humble and low against the ground; there is no fate chosen for mice than the whim of bigger things, of gods.

  So here is another prophet, dropped from the sky’s talons: a second albino. This time there are no fairy lights to turn her fellows against her, no mouse-made religion to deny her truth. Even so, there is a thrill of fear clawing up the mother’s backbone, for what will the others think? Will they snatch her away, call her a monster, throw her to the fire?

  She cannot be a monster though, for she is so pretty. She is Arctic pure, white and soft as Andrex paper. Over hours her coat is showing through like soap-lather, as if all the weeks of her life are slipping by very quickly, as if she is growing as shrewd, as old and calm as an elderly yearling.

  If this snowy thing is a singing mouse, she makes no sign of it; neither does she murmur and squeak as a pup will. All that there is within this creature is silence and the reservoirs of love that keep a mouse’s hope afloat. Perhaps the desert wanderings, the forty years in the dining room and hallways were not all useless after all, for the mice have altered their essence a little; these days they seem strung together from fear and love both. Perhaps they could never kill again; perhaps their altered nature would make such a thing impossible.

  The cutlery eats and eats and eats, and the albino knows their fury and their hunger, their blind and thoughtless evil. Her mother looks and sees her terror reflected, the jittering fears of knives and fire and ruination. But it does not matter, for their fate lies upon a whim. In her pup’s beacon eyes, in the landscape of her face, the albino’s mother can read the million paths a creature might take, the hundred trillion damnations or savings of little lives.

  The rent man is dead. The mice hardly knew he existed, hardly cared, but now his meat, the rawness of him has made a stink in the house that will only clean away in the flames. Such a portent has not been known for long centuries, yet every mouse knows well his theology, whispered in his seashell ears from the first night of his life.

  This enormous human death, the awful joy of knives, tells of cosmic matters. Each mouse knows in his claws that the new albino is curled against the night; each can hear the throbbing silence of the song she is not singing.

  So they come. The space behind the skirting is very narrow and they do not seek to force their way inside, instead the colony gathers just beyond, amongst the sighs of the childling and Marie, who are dreaming of cutlery. They come by the hundreds and they wait, until the albino and her mother are ready to let them see.

  When she comes out to them she can barely crawl, for she is very young, and her paws are tiny and fine as fingers. She is perfect and strange; she is mouse and not-mouse; she is white as the wings of the owl; she is babe and old sage all at once.

  They see the sky in her; they see futures rise and fall in her little face; they see the very smallness of mouse. Suddenly the mice all comprehend themselves as the gods see them; they are silly things, exquisitely wrought. The albino clings to them as they lift her up, and they feel her frailty. They do not wish her harm; they bear this infant along with them and go to look at the night.

  From the scullery window the dark is billowing huge and the moon is obscured by the rain and smearing clouds. The mice set down the albino on the sill and she turns back to gaze at them with eyes like the garden, wild and magic and full of mercy and danger. And when Mother Owl comes out of the watery sky she circles only once around the house, for it seems that they do not need her after all.

  70

  House

  THE SUNRISE FLICKERS against the sky in shades of gore as the night is eaten away, scavenged clean by the cold and the circling rooks. The light is painful against window and roof-tile, for if there was any scrap of mercy in this old cold earth, the sun would not have risen again.

  The house sits on its crumbling haunches and stares into the atmosphere, where day and night is written and unwritten again. This eternal scrambling, the liquidness of every moment of air, is awfully cruel for creatures without joy; forever the atoms of the sky are dragged through patterns of weather; never still. The sky churns like food chewed in a mouth; it is making the house feel sick.

  And yet that hateful sun climbs, infests the garden, insists on itself, and the slates on the house are spiky like hackles, itching and bristling and letting in the dew. The house would snarl if it could, would howl at the sky and thrash in its prison of foundation pit.

  Instead it rumbles and groans; it lets its stare become catatonic, fixed and dangerous. The morning is raw and gusty; wind picks at the branches of the cherry tree, lifts each leaf and lets it go, as if testing its nerve, testing its zeal for living. The tree hangs onto them, morosely, ill with sympathy for the house and its wound.

  It has been a whole day since the rent man’s life parted with his skin; at this exact moment the knives are tussling for his tendons, hacking at the bones to joint them. His polyester trousers lie in playful ribbons like a kind of awful bunting, and his comb-over is ruined forever. There is even a lollipop, lying abandoned on the black-soaked carpet, the stalk of it bitten into little sections.

  The rent man’s teeth are growing loose, and he has mislaid his car keys in the recess beneath the sideboard; a cheeky family of nail scissors have snipped out a chunk of torso and dragged it under there to liquefy in privacy.

  If they were to sneer their points, to look upwards, they would have a view of the knife drawer and its dug out belly, of the gouged-through path from drawer bottom to floor; they might even make out the green rags of baize that once swaddled them warm. They are much too busy to look up.

  The rent man’s soggy remains have slicked the floorboards, have collected amongst the trillion residues of sacrificed mice, of that other severed man from years ago. The rent man clogs the indentations where the nails are hammered in; he tastes of metal and grease. He is vile; he is utterly vile and the house has not any means for spitting.

  The house has hardened now; its sadness is transforming. That pain, the colossal exhaustion has developed into a sort of rage, has become a solidness like gallstones, and it will never sleep now, not ever again.

  Instead it grinds its joists to stumps and measures the aching in the scullery window, the decaying mortar between chimney bricks and the tickle of the wasps’ nest down its throat. The cherry tree would make some gesture if it could, but it is rooted in the earth and has no language for things that are not cherry pips or wood.

  The time flags around them both, boils in fast-motion; in the afternoon there appears an owl, out against its nature in the broad daylight. The house stares at it for a little while, for it somehow seems familiar, but its heart is beyond caring what it sees now.

  All the house can comprehend is its own affliction, and the murderous creatures that infect its innards like worms. All life is hateful, it seems; bloodish animals, things of metal, live only to cause pain, to grieve each other. They have no regard for houses at all. And the lot of a house is the worst, for what is a house’s purpose but to stand as witness, victim to every bloody whim? There is no use to being a house; it would be better to be reduced to rubble, to be the sand on a beach, shed into forgetful grains on the bottom of some peaceful sea.

  71

  Marie

  I WOKE VERY late with gluey eyes and a throbbing in my chest; I woke feeling like I did the time that my mother gave me too much Benylin. I had been coughing for days, hacking until I was sick, hanging on to the backs of chairs and door handles. My mother had grown cross with it; perhaps she thought I was coughing on purpose, just to spite her.

  She woke me in the middle of the night with a huge wooden spoon in her hand and a sort of aggressive kindness on her face. She had filled the spoon with half a bottle of syrup. I ha
ve a recollection as if from a dream, of a dark-pink lake, glossy and rolling-thick, oozing off the side of a gritty slab of wood. It would not fit into my mouth, not quite, but I tried my best anyway.

  I woke up the next day, well past noon, my cheek stuck against the pillowcase, with Benylin sloshing slowly in my head, thicker than sardine oil. I daren’t lift my face for fear that I might disturb that vile meniscus, reel myself to liquid or topple my head from my shoulders.

  My grandmother came to look at me in the evening; the coldness of her palm against my face made me struggle and whine and fight for sleep. ‘You’ll live,’ she had said, simply, as though this had been a question in some doubt.

  The day after the rent man, I felt like that again, raw and sweet and nauseous. My head was so full I daren’t move my jaw, in case everything that had happened should tip out of me in a rush. I sat up carefully, straightened out my back, rubbed my eyes with the pads of my thumbs.

  The house was moaning to itself, clearing its throat again and again, rocking and cracking and slowly dislocating its bones from the sockets, testing the pain of it, hurting itself as if it wanted to. There was a fixity to the gesture, as of pushing and pulling a loose tooth, worrying at the root until it would come away with a surge of broken nerves and blood.

  The room was full of mice, each one busy, washing their faces or whispering in corners, tending to squeaking infants or gazing about. They looked expectant, as if they were up to something, some private business known to mice alone. They looked up when they saw me stir, and then glanced away quickly, considered each other’s faces as if wondering.

  The child was standing very still, her ear against the ruined wall, fingers spread against it and her teeth bared. There was daylight to be seen through the holes, and in places it seemed the plaster was not there at all, the illusion of a barrier being made only by the thickness of the wallpaper. Suddenly the sight of her little tender feet and holey tights terrified me, and I jumped to my feet with a gasp and pulled her away from the wall.

  There was probably not the slightest risk to her standing there. There was nothing to be seen of the forks and knives, nothing but the sounds of them, seething beyond the wall like ants, slithering and scissoring the rent man, sawing against bones and trouser buttons.

  She could probably have sat down in the dining room quite naked; they were busy with feeding and had no interest in catching prey. Even so, I did not want her there; the very thought of knives made me want to scream, to lift the whole world up in my arms and hold it out of danger’s way.

  So I grabbed her; she looked at me with incomprehension as I dragged her away. I found myself embarrassed, let her go again, stroked her hair out of her eyes. For a moment I thought that I might be about to vomit.

  Then I raised my head and faced the parlour and a sudden urge rose out of me, to be safe, to make safe our queer little household. We were so many, so easily hurt, and here was I in my mother’s clothes, the biggest one of all. I felt like a saint for a moment, a dead martyr that must comfort the souls of millions, pacing heaven with her fingers in her ears, frantic not to hear the prayers of the desperate living. Then the second passed like a giddy spell and I found myself laughing.

  I spent a useless hour trying to clean the house; somehow it seemed the only thing that I could do. I pushed the carpet sweeper up and down in the parlour, but it jammed right up with little silky hairs. The child and the mice all looked on, amazed as I smeared at the windows with vinegar and screwings of newspaper from the scullery.

  I pulled out the sofa and the red chair and swept beneath them; I rediscovered my mother’s Crying Boy and found that I felt a little sorry for him after all. I picked up every last sock and underslip and I piled them atop the washing basket, and the dust that I kicked up everywhere made me wheeze. Everywhere were morsels of dust-fleece; little stranded, broken objects. The house began to hum to itself.

  I even found a tiny model of a mouse, all made in bits and pieces; the mice all started at the sight of it, quite horrified. I knew what it was, I think, or at least I almost knew, but there was nothing to be done, not now. I went down to my knees and looked it over, saw all the little things it was woven from; I recognised my mother’s dressing gown, her brown dyed hair and the silver chain from around her neck. I picked it up and turned to the mice, but not a single one would meet my eyes; so I fed it to the fire, very gently, and then began to weep.

  The child came and sat with me as my shoulders shook, whilst the mice all loitered, shamefaced in the corners. When I was done with crying, the child smiled at me, pushed my own hair away from my eyes. Then we went along the mantelpiece, choosing things to burn: silk poppies, a Palm Sunday cross, and a tartan pincushion that had once belonged to me.

  By the time the light was waning we were hungry, despite the horrible noises that rumbled the whole house, the eating and eating and eating of the knives. So I crept through the kitchen and came back with a lapful of cans, as many as I could carry, as many as did not roll from the hammock of my frock as I came. The mice all fled at the sight of me, lest a can of pineapple chunks should crush a little life to nothing.

  When I was sitting they returned, sniffing and tutting at our ankles as I doled out Spam and pear quarters, laid little piles and puddles of food against the sooty hearthstone. Then we devoured a week’s worth of food, as if there was no tomorrow. We ate, and then we watched the fire as the house jittered; as the rent man spread his remains against the floor; as the draughts beyond the door grew cold.

  It took a long time for me to register the fidgeting behind my elbow, the furtive gathering of bits and the respectful nodding of mice. When I finally turned from the flames to see, the mice had made a message for me, from a lolly stick and half a hair slide and a darning needle that must have been stuck in the carpet.

  They had made an arrow that pointed at the fire, and the sight of it made me feel betrayed by trusted friends, as if the mice were making jokes about my mother, as if all of this were not sadness enough. I hid my face in my hands and would not come out, like a sulking child, knowing all the time that I was being ridiculous. I hid my face in my hands until my arms lost all their nerves and I felt as though there was no moving blood left in me at all. After an age, I moved a little, and the cramp crawled through my muscles and I had to let my arms drop.

  The mice all shuddered; perhaps they had been waiting for me. When they saw that I was looking, they all swept their eyes from me to the fire and back again. I saw that the arrow had been dismantled, and felt vertigo collecting inside my skull. Then I saw the child; she was sitting a little way off, leaning her flank against the chimney breast. She blinked at me, seemed to purse her lips before her gaze sank again to her lap.

  She had a mouse perched on her knee. It was a tiny thing, the length of a thumb-joint, tail and all, like the work of some fiendish toymaker, made with copper wires and glue. It was pure white, and when I met its eyes I felt as though I were tumbling through air.

  72

  Mice

  THE EYES OF the albino, which were watching before her birth, which have seen the inside of the womb, even as she was forming there in secret; the eyes of the albino are red and straining in the gloom.

  She is a fragile thing, almost an idea only, clad in a coat of mouldy white. Her little tail is wrapped like string along the curve of her haunch, and she is not curled face-first against the flank of her mother, as mouse-children ought, but pointing the other way, staring into the parlour.

  Her mother would rather have her hidden, safe from the cat, from the gods and prying muzzles, but the silence of her singing is far too loud. If she were snuggled with her infant in the hollow of her nest then the quiet would echo terribly, would thrum and throb and make the mother die of love.

  It is a beautiful song, all the same, this strange not-music that cannot be heard, that vibrates against the backbone and the soul. It is perfect; it rings
in the parlour like a saucepan lid struck at with a fork; bell clear; dangerous; pure.

  And somehow the unmusic chimes with the cutlery’s frenzy, with the zip and slide of metal over metal, makes it exquisite. There is glory in the end of life, no less than at its dawning, and the eyes of the albino are like light from the grate, are a prophecy of fire. The albino is a dream of death, beautiful and skeletal and just the same as a dream of hope.

  She closes her eyes for a moment, and the parlour is the poorer for it; the mice all feel the loss of her gaze. They start and shudder and glance towards the mouse-mother and child, but then she looks again at them and they know they are not lost, even if all is destroyed after all, for the albino understands their glory.

  The parlour smells like the end of the world, for so many house things are burning in the grate already, for the fury and misery of the house is a wheeze in the draughts. The rent man has become a colossal stink, and with every breath the albino draws in, scents of his blood and innards, of the sort of spite that could poison a whole watercourse overwhelm her. All of creation is quivering, ready for the apocalypse, lying carefully still. The childling just cocks her head and listens.

  Yet Marie is sleeping like an infant atop a bomb; the albino is watching her, washing her in love and pity, for she is only a silly precious creature, as mice are. She wakens, jars the air with her fear and her darting movements, and every shudder disturbs the balance of the world. The end will happen very soon.

  Hours tremble past. The albino and her mother watch the universe teeter, and the mouse-mother studies the curtains, the shuddering air beyond the windowpanes, and wonders what how it shall be for them. The albino turns to her dam to feed; her mother gives her the substance of her body, the milk that flows with her own blood.