Mice

by Gordon Reece

  I bought a little hand-held propeller fan, which I kept close to my face on those days when it seemed as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the house, when even the deepest breath seemed to bring no relief at all. The waspy buzzing of the fan irritated Mrs Harris intensely, but she was wary of saying anything to me now and tried her best to pretend it didn’t bother her. I put it on in her lessons, even when I didn’t need it, just to annoy her.

  The heatwave triggered the worst attack of hay fever I’d ever had. I couldn’t breathe through my nose and my eyes streamed constantly. I had a pounding headache by lunchtime every day. It was right at this time, when the heatwave and my hay fever were at their worst, that Roger and Mrs Harris decided to set me a week of mock exams.

  I tried to wriggle my way out of them, pleading my obvious symptoms, but they were both firm: my exams began on June the fifteenth and I needed to be tested under strict exam conditions. I didn’t give up easily – I felt sure that if I could hold them off for a week my concentration might start to improve, but Roger poohpoohed my concerns. ‘You’re an A student, Shelley. You’ll get As in everything standing on your head. A runny nose shouldn’t prove a major obstacle.’

  But as I’d feared, my results were disappointing. The flashbacks plagued me horribly during the week of tests, toppling my thoughts like a tower of children’s building blocks and forcing me to start constructing them all over again. Although I managed As in English language and history, I got Cs in maths and physics and Bs in everything else.

  Roger was surprised by my low grades for Mrs Harris, but as I’d earned either As or Bs in the subjects he taught me he wasn’t unduly concerned. In fact, he was thrilled by my answer to the question about Macbeth’s character on the literature paper.

  Pacing around the dining-room table, he excitedly read parts of my essay aloud:

  ‘ “Perhaps the most brilliant thing about Macbeth is that, in a way, he doesn’t have a character. He is loyal, he is treacherous; he loves his wife, he’s unconcerned when she dies; he’s fearless in battle, he’s a coward the night of the murder; he kills a defenceless woman and child, he dies like a hero . . . Shakespeare seems to be saying that real people are not characters, we are our actions. The brave turn out to be cowards, cowards turn out to be brave, the cruel can be kind, the kind cruel . . .” This is university level, Shelley, university level!’ he exclaimed, slapping the table with the flat of his hand.

  I felt his enlarged green eyes staring at me. And when he spoke again his tone was different, intimate. ‘How did you get such profound psychological insight so young?’

  I saw Mum dump a dark shovelful of soil over Paul Hannigan’s face and shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

  ‘I think I know,’ he said.

  I felt myself starting to blush and my chest cramp. What was he trying to say? I only exhaled the breath I was holding when he added softly, ‘The JETS.’

  Trying not to show my relief, I nodded and looked away, twisting the corner of my notebook.

  Apart from that one bright spot, there wasn’t much to celebrate. Mrs Harris was completely demoralized by my poor results. She seemed to think I’d done it deliberately to spite her and make her look incompetent. Fussily wiping the drips from the lid of her Thermos flask, she looked at me reproachfully and said, ‘I thought we were making progress, Shelley, in our work – and personally.’

  I left her comment hanging in the air without answering.

  Mum was disappointed too, very disappointed, but she did her best not to show it – she even tried to cheer me up, joking darkly, ‘The exam board gives students an extra half-hour if they have dyslexia – I wonder what they give you if you’re suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after killing someone?’

  I brooded on my poor results and even shed a few tears when I was alone in my bedroom. I was furious that Paul Hannigan – that worthless nothing! – was spoiling what should have been my moment of glory, the well-earned exam success that would brilliantly round off my time at school and propel me on my way to university. After all, if I wasn’t good at schoolwork, what was I good at?

  Yet at the same time, there was another part of me that thought: What the hell does it matter? The police will come any day now and it will all be over. There won’t be any more revision, there won’t be any exams – instead, there’ll be the forensic experts in the kitchen, the police cadets on their hands and knees searching every inch of the lawn, the scrum of shouting journalists, the hand on my head ducking me into the back seat of the police car . . .

  But the weeks went by and still the police didn’t come.

  Every weekend I scoured the papers to see if there was an article about Paul Hannigan. I knew exactly what I expected to come across; I’d almost written the article in my own mind. Under a headline like police hunt for missing man it would begin:

  Police are increasingly concerned by the mysterious disappearance of twenty-four-year-old Paul Hannigan. Mr Hannigan was last seen on Monday the tenth of April. His car was later found abandoned in the car park of the Farmer’s Harvest eatery . . .

  There’d be a quote from a relative (his mother? his wife?) asking him to make contact as they were ‘worried sick about him’, and adding, ‘It’s not like Paul to disappear without telling anyone where he was going.’ And then would come the devastating sentence that would make my blood run cold, the sentence that would spell the beginning of the end for Mum and me: ‘Mr Hannigan’s car was seen badly parked in a country lane on the twelfth of April and reported to the police by a local farmer . . .’

  Or even worse:

  Police are looking for two women, possibly a mother and daughter, who were seen leaving Mr Hannigan’s car in the car park of the Farmer’s Harvest two days after his disappearance; an eyewitness who spoke to them has given police a detailed description of the women . . . the police investigation is continuing.

  They’d only have to interview the taxi driver who brought us home that night to know exactly where to find us.

  But there was nothing in the papers about Paul Hannigan, absolutely nothing.

  I was relieved, of course. I didn’t want to see that weasel face smiling back at me from some blurry family snapshot, I didn’t want to be caught. Yet, at the same time, I found the silence strangely disconcerting.

  It was as if a terrible earthquake had struck Honeysuckle Cottage in the early hours of my sixteenth birthday, collapsing the ceiling and bringing the walls down on top of us. But when we’d staggered shell-shocked from the house, we’d found the rest of the world completely unaffected, everyone going about their business as usual. It was impossible to accept that the shockwaves from that night hadn’t been felt anywhere else, that it had only been our earthquake – our secret earthquake.

  And there was something else about this silence that was even more disturbing. That Paul Hannigan could disappear from the face of the earth without apparently arousing the slightest interest or concern seemed to go against everything I’d been taught to believe about the sanctity of human life.

  Surely it wasn’t meant to be like that? The loss of just one person, one individual, no matter how worthless their existence had been, was meant to matter. Our religious education teacher had asked us once: Imagine that you could end the life of some stranger by simply pressing a button on your armchair. You could never be found out, never punished. Would you do it? Would you press the button? I’d answered with an emphatic ‘no’ because I was convinced that the loss of just one individual mattered, that in some subtle but profound way the fabric of the universe would be changed for the worse if that hypothetical stranger died.

  Yet Paul Hannigan had vanished off the face of the earth, and, as far as I could see, nothing whatsoever had changed. Life carried on just as it always had. His disappearance hadn’t been reported in the national papers. It hadn’t even been reported in the local paper – Paul Hannigan hadn’t merited so much as two lines amid the council’s plans to extend the local library
or the success of the Rotary Club raffle or the opening of two high-class takeaway outlets in the shopping precinct.

  For the first time in my life I began to think that perhaps the loss of an individual wasn’t of very much significance after all. Perhaps it was as meaningless as the casual crushing of a fly against a windowpane. Perhaps the fabric of the universe didn’t change one iota.

  When I thought about the religious education teacher’s question now, I found myself thinking: Why not press the button? What difference would it really make?

  32

  Time lived up to its reputation as the great healer, and our life in Honeysuckle Cottage slowly returned to normal.

  It began with small things, such as going back to eating our meals on the pine table in the kitchen, and re-establishing our old morning routine – two kisses in the hallway and the reminder to drive carefully, Mum’s glance back and wave as she drove away. We took the garden furniture out of the shed and sat out on the patio again. Over our evening meals we – cautiously at first – started to describe our daily highs and lows to one another like we used to. We ate spaghetti bolognese again. One Sunday morning we picked cherries in the back garden and made a gorgeous pie, which we ate with vanilla ice-cream – just as we’d planned to do before our uninvited guest arrived. We began to rent DVDs again and one Saturday night watched two George Clooney movies (O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Leatherheads) back to back as we munched our way through an enormous bowl of buttered popcorn.

  On our weekly shopping trips into town, we gradually replaced everything that had been tainted that night and had ended up at the bottom of the mine shaft: we bought new curtains for the kitchen, new tea towels, a new mop and bucket. In response to an instinct too strong to resist, we often sought replacements that were markedly different from what we’d had before: a thin rubber doormat instead of another coir fibre one: brightly coloured – almost garish – wellington boots instead of black ones. And Mum didn’t look for another marble chopping board – she insisted on getting a cheap plastic one from a discount store.

  As each tiny gap in the jigsaw was filled in – new bath towels, new nighties, new dressing gowns – I felt as if our home was being reconstituted, made whole again, and it surprised me how much this made me feel whole again. I’d never realized until then how important these small things were in our lives. The puzzle was finally complete when Mum found the miniature thatched cottage’s chimney in the bowl of potpourri and sat at the dining-room table one night and patiently superglued it back in place.

  The bruises on my neck gradually faded away to nothing, and at last I was able to put away the scarves I’d had to wear whenever I was with Roger and Mrs Harris. The bruise on my coccyx also lost its angry red halo and shrank in size until it was no bigger than a charcoal-grey coin, and eventually disappeared altogether. Strangely, as my bruises went, my scars started to show real signs of improvement too. The burns to my left hand and right ear were invisible in all but the brightest lights, and even then showed as nothing more than sheeny patches on the skin. And the scars on my forehead and neck lightened from a dirty coffee colour to more of a honey tone, and were far less noticeable than before.

  As my physical injuries healed, so too did my mental wounds. The flashbacks’ grip on me grew weaker and weaker. They didn’t stop (they’ve never stopped altogether), but they became less frequent. It was as if my mind had slowly begun to absorb, to accept, what had happened. The periods when I didn’t think about that night grew longer and longer – ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour, a whole hour. My ability to concentrate began to return. I could write a good essay at one sitting rather than in broken snatches over several days; I could lose myself in a movie; for long periods of time I could actually forget who I was, where I was and – miracle of miracles – what I’d done.

  To my immense relief, the recurring nightmare eventually stopped too. After one final chilling performance it never came back again. I still had dark dreams (sitting astride Emma Townley on the floor of the school toilets, pounding her head into a red jelly with the marble chopping board), but the important thing was that I began to have normal dreams as well. I had anxiety dreams about my approaching exams (I couldn’t read the exam questions because the print was so minuscule; I’d been set the medieval history paper instead of the modern history paper I’d revised for); comic, surreal dreams (walking across the desert on stilts with a litter of baby hamsters squirming around down my shirt front; Mum turning into a giant hen able to lay eggs the size of cars). I had romantic dreams again too: flirting with George Clooney on the back seat of a New York cab after Mum and I had watched One Fine Day for the fifth time. (We were both talking on mobiles – ostensibly to other people, but really to each other. He said into his phone, ‘Do you want me to kiss you?’ and I said into mine, ‘I’d like that very much.’) I even had a romantic dream – I suppose erotic would be more honest – about Roger, of all people, a dream whose explicitness shocked me and left me feeling a little shamefaced around him for several days.

  Another sign of my recovery was that my interest in the laptop began to reawaken.

  I hadn’t gone near it since that night. I hadn’t wanted to touch it; I hadn’t even wanted to look at it. It was so caught up in all the horror (in some ways I even blamed it for everything that had happened) that the thought of taking it out of the sideboard was almost as repulsive as the thought of disinterring the burglar’s body.

  As the weeks passed, however, I slowly started to overcome my aversion. I began to feel excited again by the thought of writing my essays on it, and being able to use the Internet without all the torturous delays and inexplicable glitches I had to endure with the beast. I was convinced the laptop would help drag my work out of the malaise it had fallen into. And my writing ambition, which had become so caught up with the whole idea of the computer, started to twitch back into life. I caught myself thinking with a callous egoism that even I found shocking: After everything I’ve lived through, surely I’ll be able to write something truly great? After all, how many writers actually know what it’s like to kill somebody?

  Eventually I took the laptop out of the sideboard, where it had lain untouched since my birthday, and with Mum’s help, set it up on the dining-room table. At first I was worried it wouldn’t work, remembering how heavily it had fallen to the ground when I’d struck the knife between Paul Hannigan’s shoulder blades, but it flickered into electronic life at the first click of the switch on its side.

  As I’d hoped, the laptop gave my revision a muchneeded boost. I stopped writing in longhand altogether and wrote notes, essays, everything, on it. I think I was actually able to type faster than I could write with the swirly girly hand I’d developed over the years at school. When Mum’s printer went on the blink, Roger was happy to take my memory stick home each day and print everything out for me on his computer. He refused to take any money for the paper or the ink that he used and I felt a huge gratitude towards him – more than gratitude, in fact, more like a warmth – and it reassured me to think that my capacity for friendship hadn’t been poisoned by what had happened with the JETS.

  33

  On the surface, Mum seemed to be making an excellent recovery too. Her eye healed up quickly and she was delighted when she didn’t have to wear make-up to work any more to camouflage the bruising.

  She carried on in the office as if nothing had happened; she settled several small claims and even won a case that unexpectedly went to trial. This win gave her an enormous amount of pleasure, partly because the circumstances of the accident – a fall on some stairs in a restaurant – had been difficult to prove, but mainly because the losing defendant, the Love Shack Rib House, was represented by Everson’s, her old employer. It was the closest she’d ever come to scoring a victory over Dad and she was absolutely ecstatic about it.

  But there were signs that, behind the facade, Mum wasn’t finding things anywhere near as easy as she made out.

  The slee
ping pills that cured my insomnia had little effect on Mum’s. Although she still went up to bed at around eleven, she was rarely able to fall asleep. She tossed and turned for hours, but sleep evaded her desperate pursuit. Eventually, unable to bear the futility of it any more, she’d get up and go downstairs. I often heard the sound of the television drifting faintly up the stairwell when I got up to go to the bathroom in the night, as she whiled away the long sleepless hours. For someone like Mum, insomnia was the worst type of problem she could face because it couldn’t be solved intellectually: the harder you try to sleep, the less likely you are to sleep. She tried to out-think it instead of just not thinking about it at all. And so the insomnia utterly defeated her.

  She’d go back up to bed around three o’clock in the morning and finally succeed in falling asleep as dawn was breaking. When her alarm beeped urgently an hour later, she’d wake up more exhausted than if she’d had no sleep at all. At breakfast her eyes would be puffy and watery, her face pale, her brow furrowed – a furrow that didn’t disappear even when she smiled. I’d ask if she’d slept badly again and she’d just shrug it off. ‘It’ll pass,’ she’d say, ‘it’ll pass,’ or else she’d quote a line from Dorothy Parker – ‘How do people sleep? I seem to have lost the knack.’ But she didn’t want to talk about it, and if I kept on, she’d quickly grow short-tempered and snappy.

  Mum drank every night now, something she never used to do. Often the very first thing she did when she got in from work was to pour herself a glass of wine, before she’d even taken off her jacket or kicked off her shoes. I don’t think she drank because she liked it. She drank, at first, to anaesthetize herself. The wine dispelled the demons that were haunting her, or at least rendered them more manageable. After all, she was the one who had actually killed Paul Hannigan with that second deadly blow of the chopping board; she was the one who had dug up his corpse and searched through his blood-soaked pockets. Later on, I think she drank in the hope that the alcohol would bring her the undisturbed night’s rest she craved so much; and which, of course, that false friend never did.