The Knife Drawer

by Padrika Tarrant

  Marie is busy with fidgeting, and suddenly she begins to clean, although to the mice it seems like the very opposite, for she disturbs the dust, drags out the armchair from its place, upends the washing basket and folds the filthy clothes. She shows up patches of the floor that have not seen the light for a decade, where the pattern of the carpet is shockingly pristine. The mice all watch in disbelief flee as she scatters them with the push of the sweeper, and their numbness is broken.

  There is a mouse that is sixteen long months old, and his snout is grizzled with age; he has clambered up the bookcase, beyond the reach of poor Marie and her frenetic carpet sweeper. He is gazing down at all of creation, the sum and surfaces of Home, and he wonders about the land of the dead, where the soul might wander after Armageddon.

  Perhaps death is like the garden, vast and open and impossible to fathom. Perhaps death is a great cold place, black and burned right out, with neither crevice nor grate-fire; perhaps death is a nest so vast that one might never find rags enough to soften it. He holds his paws together and watches a spider scale the wallpaper like a living hieroglyph, and he wonders at it, the contents of its tiny scribbling mind.

  And still Marie bustles down below his tail, even though the sweeper will not work, even though the air is choking-full of dust and old uncovered guilts. She is brushing with her hands at the red armchair, pulling off the cushions and dragging sweet papers and bits from down the sides. Then suddenly, the frizz-mother is in her hand, the frizz-mother in her sad little voodoo effigy.

  The mouse upon the bookcase feels as though he is coming apart at the joints, as if he is floating in water, and he feels his own self twisted into finnicks of cotton and tags of dressing gown. He finds that his tail is a boneless flick of dishcloth thread, that he is made, is strung together by regret and cruelty and fear, that his heart is a tight little bundle of nail clippings.

  And every mouse alive is staring at that wretched thing, feeling the hurting of those lolly-stick legs, knowing in his whiskers the pain of victimhood and the agony of the murderer who is left behind. That moment is long; the only thing that moves is a spider, shambling towards heaven. Marie cradles her mother and the mice stare, and it seems that the whole of the universe dangles. The albino turns to see.

  Marie gazes at them all; they dare not meet her eyes, for suddenly she holds the fate of the world in her fingers. The air is jumping with gods and shadows, the ghost of the fairy lights, the prophet, the owl, the stoat, and the nameless leaping darkness.

  The mice are holding their breath, and around them their belief is formless, waiting for the moment to take shape, to coalesce into this or that. Truth hangs like a spider, waits for the first hint of comprehension to make the next thing true. The religions of mice are born anew every moment; gods take shape or change their form and ripple through generations like wind through net curtains.

  So the absent fairy lights, the spirit of Thomas, the childling cult and the fire itself all shiver in the atmosphere. But the moment passes and it is Mother Owl after all who has ordained this, for Marie is burning the witch’s figurine, and here is Mother Owl’s answer to the question of destruction.

  She lays the frizz-mother in the fire like a mouseling and the flames lick her up, kindly, unhurt her stiffness and her guilt and her wounds; to the old mouse on the bookcase it is a part of him burning too. Now his cruelty is gone forever and he will always be perfect, purified and a little holy, but humble also and low against the ground.

  Now Mother Owl is both killer and guide, for she is owl and fire together, and she strips away their impurities because they amuse her, but she loves them too. The next time that she circles past the window, her feathers are tinged with flame.

  And then, because this is the dawn of a new age, Marie gets up from her knees and prepares a feast for them all; they nibble at corn and potato salad and orange spaghetti in voluptuous shining loops.

  The fire is coming now; Mother Owl will take them to her wings before the sun rises again, and it seems that within their humility there might yet be a little room for rescue. Now the mice have learnt the error of meddling in the enormous affairs of humanity, but surely a tiny warning will not disturb the universe? So they take some little bits, and with hardly a speck of pretension in their souls they fashion one very small arrow and point it to the fire to prophecy the future for her.

  Her reaction is queer, for she hides herself in her arms, as though she were burrowing the flank of some long-dead dam; the mice all sway with her pain, for she is motherless and has no teat to suckle on. Perhaps Mother Owl will make this one her own.

  And the childling, who has remained all this time as watchful, as familiar and alien as a cat, sits in her place with Heinz Ravioli on the bib of her nightgown. Suddenly, as if at some divine calling, the albino breaks away from the warmth of her mother and tries to walk upon her baby paws although she is not a week old yet. The mice and the childling all fix their eyes upon her as she struggles on the carpet, and then the most astonishing thing happens.

  The childling herself stretches out her arm, which is long as a branch, and she actually picks up the albino in her big blunt fingers. She is colossal and gentle as she carries that tiny thing through the air, lifts her to her face, and the mice all gasp, in case she means to eat her. She does not; she simply gazes into the eyes of the white mouse. The albino gazes back at her, and they discover that each knows the other very well indeed. Then she lays the baby mouse upon her lap and tips back her head and seems to spend a long time thinking.

  73

  Marie

  THE BIBLE CLAY was dry as delirium and I was trying to walk in big high-heeled shoes. I tripped right over as I ran and fell out flat, cut my knees and the palms of my hands; even though I called out for her to wait for me, my grandmother carried on stalking away.

  I wanted to catch her up, knew that it was vital that I did so, but she did not care a bit whether I could follow her, so I cried like a little girl, ‘Grandmother!’ and my voice surprised me, for I was a little girl after all.

  The very air was gnawing; my ears were full of sky and the sky was full of little teeth, biting and biting like the jaws of locusts. Although there was nothing to be seen, the sound was immense, as of a whale being nibbled to nothing by a thousand little fishes.

  I shook and shook my head to rid me of the din, but it was no use at all, for the sky was full of nibbling teeth and that was an end to it. The noise was like a bent-back fingernail, and I cried for the death of the silence, the quiet that I remembered from the old days.

  And somehow I spent so much time then, just crying, with gritty blood-grazed knees, that whole days and nights fell right there on the road to Emmaeus; plunging suns rose and collapsed beyond the hills before I remembered my grandmother. ‘Grandmother!’ I called, and I think that I might have almost spotted her, half turned towards me, half smiling and not really there at all.

  So I clambered to my feet amongst the sound of gnawing, and I stuck my feet into my shoes and tottered after her, and the desert track was lined with streetlamps. Then I remembered all the little things that I should have brought with me, and I panicked, hobbling down the desert tarmac and digging in my pockets as I went, for the little things were lost and I should have had them in my purse.

  I clutched at my coat as I chased along the road, groped at the seams in case my little things had dropped inside through a tear, and nearly stumbled into an oncoming stream of cars, all lurching from a stop as the traffic lights turned green.

  When I woke up the air was full of gnawing, for the mice were fixing their jaws on every surface of the parlour, as though they had entirely lost their wits. As I found my waking self, the child was pulling at my sleeve, wordless and sparkly with fear.

  In the dim of the fire, the nervous flicker of tails and whiskers caused the darkness to seethe, as the mice chewed madly on anything there was to chew. Some were occu
pied meaninglessly on biting the mantelpiece, the sofa and the feet of the red armchair, but most of them seemed to be trying to escape the parlour. They swarmed the sash windows, gnawing the frames and wrecking their jaws against the putty that stuck glass to frame, frantic, beside themselves with busyness. I knew then that we were in danger.

  The child stared into my face and then shied her head away, covering her ears with the flats of her hands. There was a sound in the room that rumbled lower than the staccato grinding of mouse against wood. One had to hold one’s head at certain angle to make it out, but then it clattered like a slap against my ear. The chimneys were howling, swelling to cracking with the black night air.

  I sprang to my feet and stumbled, struck my cheek against the skirting board and tried to stand up again, but the carpet was not still. The very floors were bucking as the house filled up its mighty lungs, braced itself for a long scream. I clung against the wall, found my way to my feet again and looked around for the child. She was squatting beside the window.

  It gave way all of an instant. The glass fell inwards because of the wind beyond it, and many little souls were crushed beneath. At the same instant, the air was smashing with leaping bodies the colour of dust, all flinging towards the garden and its fragile skies.

  Half a minute, and the child and I were alone in the parlour, watching the warmth from the fire grate fog the freezing air from outside. I wondered where Thomas was. Now that there was no competing noise of mice to mask it, the holler of air in the chimney made a sound like pouring taps. There was no whisper from the dining room; perhaps the knives were listening too. The fire roared in the grate.

  The house gasped hard and bellowed. The chimney breast burst right out as the fire spilt like amber beads upon the hearthstone, upon the carpet and the old red chair. The child lurched towards me, pulled me away as the flames jumped over the fabric of it and licked at the wallpaper. The air began to fatten with smoke, piling in lovely folds towards the ceiling, obscuring the stains of damp and the cracking.

  I stood still and watched, entranced by the beauty of it. In another minute, my mother’s chair was a glowing staccato of bones and splinters, translucent and glorious like a message from a god, the flocking and the foam reduced to poison gas and flames. Then I realised that this was what it had always wanted, after all.

  The inside wall was writhing in pain as the door to the hallway dropped in, with such a rush that the whole world exploded into flame. I found myself once more against my face, aware of the intricacy of the carpet’s weaving, of the tiny hugeness of the universe an inch from the floor, of the lazy pressure of suffocation against my back.

  With a scream of frustration, the child grabbed my hand, heaved at it, forced me to roll up to my knees again with something like disappointment. As I got to the empty window, she was already leaping through, the soles of her tights black and bloody and worn into holes.

  The ceiling was collapsing in tatters as I followed suit. My knees snagged the glass in the frame, and I landed heavily against my shoulder. I found a milk bottle from centuries ago, rolled away from its old wire basket, a rain-ruined note still jammed down the neck. Soon afterwards, the red velour curtains caught.

  The house coughed and coughed, thrashed in its stone bed, blazed as hard and as quickly as it possibly could, more beautiful than anything I had ever seen. With a splash, the windows in my mother’s room shattered. Before long there were lights streaming between the tiles of the roof.

  I thought of old clothes burning, of the toys from my childhood, of the dining room, of the rent man’s lollipops turning liquid in the heat; the tears dried against my face as quickly as they came. My face grew raw; the child came to catch my arms again, to drag me away as far as the low wall, and we held each other as fire engines wailed against the wind with their strange, hollow voices.

  We shivered together as the upper storey collapsed, as the house gave up its great slow ghost, as the night twirled flashing blue. The child put her little filthy hand in mine, and asked me a question with her eyes; I did not know the answer, so I let her lead me to the fields beyond the garden, to where the air was silent except for the barking of foxes.

  74

  Mice

  THEN CAME THE great Unhoming. The Unhoming followed the time of Echoing. It marked the rupture of the old ways, the start of mousehood’s long pull through the birth canal, to the terror and the wonder of the real world.

  Until mousehood was Unhomed, he was as an unmade creature in the curl of the womb, floating and dreaming all of time away, with yet not a lungful of breath in his chest. Before the time of Unhoming, mousehood lived among wallpaper and banisters, which are a flat kind of flower, and a queer straight tree.

  They were not wallpapers like these, whispers the mouse-mother to her children, for these walls do not grow plants within them, only tree roots and cracks, and there are no banisters here but the scrub beyond the gate. It is said that in the very olden times, the sun was not one great circle, but a good many small suns, one for the centre of every ceiling-sky, but this last might be a tale too far, for it was an ancient legend even in the days of Unhoming.

  In the very olden times there were lots of little worlds; there was a great number of square rooms, connected together by doors, every one of them different. There was a kitchen world, where the shelves were huge as clouds; where food spilled from the cupboards in massive, clattering cans of metal that could only be opened with the teeth or the will of Mother Owl herself.

  Yes, such was the magic of that ancient Home that the god herself had her nest there, higher than treetops, ringing and ringing with the flailing souls of little birds. Mother Owl had clad herself in human skin and cloth, or else in feathers and mighty rushing winds, or else the astounding moon of bed sheet white that smiles upon the face of mousehood even now.

  There was a hell in the house, a real and certain hell, which was populated with demons far crueller than stoats. These were agents of the frizz-mother, but they outgrew her with their wit and keenness; in their way they were holy too, for they knew the evil in the hearts of all flesh.

  The knives had a song like the sun against a broken bottle; they would streak out in the dark and slice the unclean to slivers, fearing no thing, even people. There were great big men before the Unhoming that existed only for harm and wrongdoing; any one of these was as big as the door of a barn, as violent and vile as a terrier. Imagine such a thing! But they had fallen at the snipping of the knives, for they had insulted Mother Owl in their hearts and done many secret sinful things besides, of which only Mother Owl may know.

  The air beyond the nest is lean and cold and full of the stink of cows and diesel and the wicked trotting fox, to whom prayers are made at the ebbing of the daylight. The little mother, who is grey like a cobweb full of dust, pauses for a moment, feels the tremble of her heart and the magic of it.

  She, her family, the whole race of Mouse, are just a mouthful on the edge of this glorious world. The black sky is richer than molasses, more exquisite than broken coal. Mice are the most beautiful thing upon it as they leap from shadow to shadow, or feed or fornicate or make their rituals to please Mother Owl in her trillion aspects.

  The parlour was the cradle of fire, which was a gigantic orange thing that spat like cats, that was fierce and kind together like a summer all burned out at once. Before the Unhoming, mousehood had never perished with the cold, nor understood the perfect fear of the naked sky. They had never seen the stars or flinched at the prophetic singing of the bats at dusk, as they cry out their music and charm the felt-winged moths. They were poor things then.

  Then the Owl called unto them, and the house began howl and to burn, and the dear Albino showed them the way that they must go. And the mice of the old times thought that their lives must all be spent, for that baby’s wisdom sent them beyond the window, which was a sheet of ice encased in wood. The Albino’s dam bore her in her
teeth, as she was yet too small to scurry, and together they followed the path in the garden that the Owl marked out for them.

  The way was terrible hard, for those were hardly mice at all, having never picked their way through blades of grass, having never felt the night against their fur. But the eyes of Mother Owl, the snowy pelt of the Albino, bore them on into the darkness, and they travelled a thousand inches or more with the blazing house at their tails. They toiled among the plants and tinfoil moonlight, and the Albino knew the way in which they must go, even as the garden bawled and crashed with disaster. It is said that the house itself cried for its pain, wailed to itself and shed its soul in a great blue light.

  The Albino made no singing, and the sweetness of her silence made a trail through that chaos, and her mother carried her as she was bidden, and so it came that they were directed according to Mother Owl’s whim, to the great muddy country beyond the concrete patio. And, though the way was a path of pure terror, they found their way at last to a great wooden doorway in the very soil.

  The mice were filled with doubt, and they wondered among themselves what such a thing might be, but the Albino was not afraid and she struggled from the mouth of her dam until she was set down upon her tiny paws. Then all of mousehood gazed into her puddle-bright eyes and knew that all would yet be well. And she crawled before the others until she was atop that hollow space, and when she came upon a hole drilled into it, she pushed her body through.

  Then every mouse alive was filled with courage and dropped in after her like furry drops of rain; Mother Owl had prepared that pit before the dawn of time itself, and so it was a perfect refuge for all that were afraid and close to abandoning their skins.

  It was a fine hole, deep and almost dry, and padded like a featherbed with tangles of dishcloth string, with old clothing and handkerchiefs and plastic bags. The mice breathed in the scent of it and wondered, for it smelled so familiar to them and yet they could not quite determine where they had encountered such a thing before.