Mice

by Gordon Reece

  ‘I could get it, Shelley,’ she said quietly.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I could borrow against the value of the house. I could take out a mortgage.’

  The thought of Mum paying all that money to the blackmailer made me feel physically sick. She worked hard enough and went without enough as it was. The thought of her carrying the extra burden of the blackmailer on her back was just too horrible to countenance. And it was naive to think this would be the blackmailer’s only demand for money. He’d keep coming back for more and more and more. We’d have to live the rest of our lives with this disgusting parasite feeding on us at will. It wouldn’t be any kind of life at all. It would be the most miserable servitude imaginable. There’d never be any closure to the traumatic events of April the eleventh. It was a wound the blackmailer would pick open again every time it began to heal.

  ‘It’ll never stop, Mum,’ I said. ‘Once we give him money he’ll just keep coming back for more.’

  ‘I know, Shelley, I know.’

  A stupid thought came into my mind and I gave it voice without thinking. ‘What about Dad? Would Dad give us the money?’

  Mum turned a face full of bitterness and hurt towards me.

  ‘I’d never ask him!’ she hissed. It was clear she would tolerate no further discussion.

  I felt my skin prickle with anger. She was dismissing Dad with such cold finality that it was as if he were dead. But he wasn’t dead to me. I struggled to swallow the words I wanted to shout at her. It was the wrong time, the wrong place, to have this argument.

  There was a long silence between us. Mum eyed the blackmailer’s note obsessively, as though still convinced the answer lay somewhere in those lines of biro block capitals.

  ‘So is that it?’ I said eventually, unable to believe that our road had run out so suddenly, so hopelessly.

  Mum was silent. She chewed at her bottom lip and played with the note, folding it into a thin strip and snaking it between the fingers of her right hand. She studiously avoided my eyes.

  I wanted to scream at her at the top of my voice. Is that it? Is that the best that your razor-sharp intellect can come up with? Is that the best that the super-brain, the woman- who-can-solve-any-problem can do?

  I glared at her with contempt as she sagged listlessly at the kitchen table, hardly able to keep her eyes open because she’d barely slept, because she’d drunk too much wine again the night before. If she hadn’t been so weak, if she hadn’t started to fall apart after we’d killed Paul Hannigan, she wouldn’t have been such a wreck that morning, she’d have been able to think of a way out of the mess we were in! If she hadn’t been so weak, maybe Dad would still be here to protect us! If she hadn’t been so weak, maybe I wouldn’t have been such a mouse – maybe I would have been able to stand up to the girls concerned and we’d never have found ourselves in this situation!

  The flood of anger I felt towards Mum also dragged with it the sour realization that in spite of my sixteen years, I still looked to her to act like a mother and keep me safe; I still looked to her to perform a maternal miracle that would dispel this danger, that would chase away the wolf circling our door. And I felt betrayed when I realized that there was going to be no maternal magic today, no miracle in the kitchen – just the too-bright sunlight and the silence, occasionally broken by a flurry of soft, feathered bodies in the eaves.

  After a long, long time Mum spoke again. ‘There is another way, Shelley.’

  ‘What?’ I grunted sullenly, expecting no more than some pathetic straw to clutch at. ‘What, for God’s sake? What?’

  Mum let the blackmailer’s note drop from her fingers onto the table and looked deep into my eyes, her face as ghastly as an alabaster death mask.

  ‘We kill him, Shelley,’ she said in barely more than a whisper. ‘When he comes here today, we kill him.’

  36

  It’s strange looking back on it now, but Mum’s words didn’t shock me. I wasn’t appalled as I suppose I should have been. Just two months earlier, I would have been stuttering in disbelief – Are you insane? Are you out of your mind? – but now I simply considered the idea, coldly, dispassionately, on its merits . . .

  And the first objection that sprang into my mind wasn’t moral, it was practical. I remembered Four-wheel-drive Man, I remembered his heavy bulldog build, the shaven head, the dagger-shaped goatee, the mean, penetrating little eyes.

  ‘How, Mum? How are we going to kill him? Four-wheel-drive Man’s huge – he’s built like a wrestler. What are we going to do to a man like that? The burglar was drunk, he hardly knew what he was doing. Four-wheel-drive Man will be a different proposition altogether.’

  ‘We don’t know that it is Four-wheel-drive Man, Shelley. You’re jumping to conclusions again.’

  ‘But what if it is him?’ I persisted, refusing to be fobbed off. ‘What if it is him? One hard punch in the face from a man like that could kill you. You won’t be just covering the bruise with make-up and going off to work the next day, that’s for sure. How are we going to kill a man like that, for God’s sake?’

  Mum said nothing. She just stared down at her large, awkward hands, which sat on the table like two sunbleached crabs washed up by the tide. She seemed to be weighing something up in her mind; weighing, balancing, slowly coming to a conclusion that she reached only with the greatest reluctance.

  ‘There is a way,’ she said finally, looking up at me with a strange expression on her face, perplexed, a little shamefaced. ‘I know how.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Wait here.’

  With a great effort she raised herself wearily from her chair and left the kitchen. I heard her boots clomping up the stairs, the groaning of the floorboards in her bedroom somewhere above my head, and then a prolonged silence.

  Finding myself alone in the kitchen, I began to feel uncomfortably exposed and vulnerable. What if Four-wheel-drive Man came to the house now while I was downstairs all alone? What if his face suddenly appeared at the kitchen window? This last thought was so terrifying that I squeezed my eyes shut so that I couldn’t see the kitchen window any more. There was only one thought running through my head while I waited impatiently for Mum’s return: HurryupMum hurryupMum – hurryupMum!

  The plaintive squeak of the fourth stair told me that she was on her way back down, and I opened my eyes.

  I was surprised to see that she’d put her beige fleece on over her blouse, as it was clear it was going to be another scorching hot day. Both her hands were buried inside the large pouch-like pocket, which bulged strangely.

  When Mum reached the table, she turned to face me and drew something slowly out of the fleece pocket. At that instant, a starburst of bright white sunlight flooded through the kitchen window behind her, momentarily blinding me, and it was only when I shifted position and put my hand up to shield my eyes that I saw what she was holding in her outstretched hand.

  ‘You didn’t get rid of the gun?’ I gasped, astonished to see the loathsome object again. ‘You didn’t take it to the mine?’

  Mum gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said shrugging her shoulders. ‘I felt so insecure after the burglar broke in that, when the time came, I just couldn’t part with it.’

  After a long pause she went on. ‘Maybe some part of me knew all along that we were going to need it . . .’

  She placed it carefully on the kitchen table and sat down. I’d got to my feet, but my knees had turned to jelly and I sank back down into my chair.

  The gun squatted on the table like some metallic scorpion, its deadly sting secreted at the end of its bluegrey tail. I contemplated it with a mixture of revulsion and fascination. It looked so alien in the kitchen among the green glass pasta jars, the cookery books, the puppy calendar from Gran, the corkboard covered with photos of Mum and me and my Hello Kitty stickers – it was jarringly out of place, jarringly male.

  ‘Is it loaded?
’

  ‘Yes. Six bullets.’

  ‘Do you know how to use it?’

  ‘It’s not difficult, Shelley. You take the safety catch off and pull the trigger.’

  I shook my head, numb, disbelieving, the physical reality of the gun starting to bring home the enormity of what we were considering.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d kept it?’

  Mum shifted uncomfortably in her seat and looked away. ‘I – I didn’t want to unsettle you.’

  ‘Unsettle me?’

  It wasn’t difficult to see through her delicate evasion: she hadn’t told me the gun was in the house because she didn’t trust me any more. Since the night I’d snatched the knife from the dining-room table and run out into the garden after Paul Hannigan, she no longer knew what I was capable of. She no longer knew what I might do if I was put under extreme stress again. Was she worried that I might shoot myself or that I might shoot her?

  It piqued me, but not so much that I couldn’t appreciate the irony of the situation: while I’d felt that Mum had changed since the night we’d killed Paul Hannigan, that in some ways she’d become a stranger whose behaviour I could no longer predict, she’d been feeling exactly the same way about me.

  ‘You should have told me,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t keep secrets from me. I’m not a child any more. And I’m not a weirdo, you know.’

  Mum pulled a pained face and I could see that she regretted her dark suspicions. She placed her hand on top of mine and smiled apologetically. ‘You’re right, Shelley. I should have told you.’

  I let her go on holding my hand, but steadfastly denied her a smile of forgiveness – until I remembered the secret I was keeping from her. Paul Hannigan’s driver’s licence, hidden upstairs in the bottom of my secrets box. My conscience pricked me hard, and guiltily I gave her the smile that she wanted. (It’s OK, everything’s OK between us.)

  My attention returned to the gun, whose obscene black hole of a mouth was pointing directly at my heart.

  ‘Are you sure you know how to use it?’ I pressed her.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  I imagined Four-wheel-drive Man again, but this time he wasn’t ordering us around. This time he was kneeling in a corner of the kitchen, blubbering and snivelling, begging for mercy as I aimed the gun at his head. What would happen if I pulled the trigger? Would it be like the movies? Would a blob of strawberry jam suddenly appear in the middle of his forehead? Would his eyes slowly empty as his soul fled? Would he crumple to the floor in a lifeless heap?

  When he comes here today, we kill him . . .

  Were we really thinking of putting ourselves through all that searing trauma again (the blood, the body, the fear)? Were we really thinking of committing murder? Because there was no doubt that that’s what it would be. Last time, with Paul Hannigan, we’d been fighting for our lives, we’d been acting in self-defence – but this time it would be calculated, cold-blooded murder.

  When he comes here today, we kill him . . .

  But why did it have to be we? Why wasn’t Mum taking this responsibility on herself like she did when she disinterred Paul Hannigan’s body or took the bin bags to the national park? Why wasn’t she telling me to go upstairs and hide in my room until it was all over? I shouldn’t have to be there. I shouldn’t have to see it. Hadn’t I seen enough? Shouldn’t she be protecting me?

  But the longer she sat there lost in thought, saying nothing, the clearer it became that she wasn’t going to say anything of the sort. She wasn’t going to sacrifice herself for me. Whatever we were about to go through, she seemed to have made up her mind that we would go through it together.

  ‘Are you really serious about this, Mum?’ I croaked, my throat suddenly dry.

  Mum didn’t look at me. She reached out a hand towards the gun and cautiously – as if frightened it might suddenly bite her – turned the barrel with the tip of her index finger as she considered my question. When she stopped and looked up at me again, the gun was pointing down the hallway towards the front door. The direction in which the blackmailer would come.

  ‘If he goes to the police, it’s all over for us,’ she said flatly.

  We lapsed into an uneasy, agitated silence. This had all come at the wrong time! I’d been planning to spend the whole day revising global warming, my French vocabulary, the Treaty of Versailles. I couldn’t suddenly switch now to the contemplation of this real-life problem. I didn’t have the mental energy to scale such an enormous peak, not today, not now, it was just too much. I wanted to return to the manageable, finite problems that my exams posed.

  ‘But kill him? Really kill him, Mum?’

  ‘It’s zugzwang,’ she said with a bitter smile.

  ‘What’s zug—?’ I couldn’t even remember the rest of the word.

  ‘Zugzwang. It’s an expression from chess. When it’s your turn to move but there’s no move you can make that won’t be disadvantageous to you.’

  I thought about it. She was absolutely right. Whatever we decided – to give ourselves up, hand over the money or kill the blackmailer – we were going to suffer. All of our options were equally hellish. But we had to do something. It was our move.

  ‘We’re in so deep now, Shelley,’ Mum said, ‘we’ve come so far down this path that we might as well keep going. Giving ourselves up would be every bit as awful as – ’ she clearly didn’t want to say murder – ‘carrying on.’

  We’re in so deep now. Her words reminded me of something else. One of the quotes from Macbeth I’d learned just a few days before. I tried to remember how it had gone:

  I am in blood

  Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more,

  Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

  Recalling where the quote came in the play discomfited me even more than the words themselves. Just before Macbeth orders the murder of Macduff’s wife and child. Just before he commits his worst atrocity.

  ‘You’d better go up and get dressed,’ Mum said, gently cupping my elbow. ‘He could be here any minute.’

  ‘OK.’ I sighed. ‘But when I come down we’ve got to talk this all through properly. We can’t just rush into something like this on the spur of the moment – we’ve got to think about it more, we’ve got to talk more. Maybe it isn’t zugzwang. Maybe there’s something else we can do that we just haven’t thought of yet.’

  I’d pushed back my chair and was beginning to stand up when I heard a noise outside.

  I froze. Mum started to ask me what was wrong, but I thrust my hand abruptly into her face to silence her. She understood and turned her head to listen, the tendons in her neck standing out thin and taut like piano wire. He can’t come now, I thought, he can’t possibly come now! We’re not ready for him! I’m not dressed! We haven’t decided what we’re going to do! Please, God, let me have imagined it!

  But the snapping and crackling of gravel, the squealing of unhealthy brakes, the spitting and panting of exhausted metal wasn’t in my imagination – a car was coming up the drive towards the house.

  Mum heard it too and her eyes widened with fear, the unhealthy yellow sclera disfigured by a red graffiti of broken veins.

  ‘It’s him!’ she whispered, and her whisper was as loud as a scream. ‘He’s here already!’

  37

  ‘What are we going to do, Mum?’ I cried, but she was already on her feet, snatching up the gun and hurriedly secreting it in the fleece’s front pouch.

  She turned on me fiercely, bringing her face close to mine and clutched my wrist hard in her right hand. ‘Leave everything to me, Shelley! Don’t do anything, don’t say anything! Let me do all the talking!’

  The arrival of the blackmailer had transformed her. She was suddenly wired, suffused with a hard, determined energy. Every vestige of her jaded torpor was thrown off in an instant. She swept her hair impatiently out of her eyes and strode into the lounge. Slavishly I staggered to my feet and followed her.

  The dining room and lounge were m
uch darker than the kitchen, deprived as they were of sun until the afternoon. The fireplace, the piano, the armchairs and sofa, appeared dark, solid, funereal, and it took a few moments for my eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom. Mum, who was standing directly in front of the window, was just a silhouette. I felt the sudden need to be physically close to her as this unknown danger neared the house, and I walked towards her on legs as faltering and uncertain as a toddler’s.

  The crunching of gravel, the dry whining of the brakes grew louder and louder until a car suddenly lunged into sight across the lounge window.

  I stopped dead in my tracks, unable at first to comprehend what I was seeing, unable to believe the evidence of my own eyes – almost, almost convinced by the physical impossibility of this apparition that I wasn’t really awake at all, but wrestling in the coils of another monstrous nightmare.

  The battered turquoise car, the car we’d got rid of weeks before in the car park of the Farmer’s Harvest – Paul Hannigan’s car – was coming slowly to a halt behind our Ford Escort.

  The floor seemed to tilt suddenly beneath my feet and I had to put out a foot so as not to fall, like a gymnast who’s mistimed her landing. It didn’t make any sense! It wasn’t possible! We’d got rid of the car! Paul Hannigan was dead! How on earth had the car found its way back here to Honeysuckle Cottage? How on earth had it found its way back to us?

  So it was true, after all. The dead don’t stay dead. Paul Hannigan had come back to take revenge on us for what we did to him.

  Mum turned away from the window, her face grim, terrible, as white as bone. She started towards the front door, but I blocked her way and seized her hands.

  ‘What is it, Mum? What’s going on?’

  She didn’t answer me. A car door clunked shut outside.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I moaned. ‘We got rid of his car! We got rid of his car! What’s it doing back here?’