In half an hour, there were three-dozen mice busy in the house, hunting out scraps of cloth and discarded socks, and even a crocheted winter scarf, anything soft that they could carry between them. Before the sun came past the windowsill, the other child was swaddled in a cosy nest of bits, warm and sleeping, and perfectly content.
6
Mice
THE NOISE OF a teaspoon eating bones is a kind of scraping, a blunt, dull zith. The sounds of a whole cutlery service devouring a man, teeth and hair and buttons and all, is busy, relentless, like the seething sound of a nest of ants. There are days and nights when all that the mice can hear is the zith of chewing. Finally, as the body dwindles, the noises ebb into silence.
The mice in the chimney breast are hopelessly inbred, so it is a matter of course that mutants are born; sad, stunted creatures that are not quite the full shilling. These are the outcasts, the singing mice. Singing mice are happy and suicidal; they twitter constantly to themselves as though they have tiny songbirds stuck in their necks. To the mice, they are holy fools, closer to the gods of death than other mice; they are revered and shunned and sneered at. They do not cling to their skins as living things should. They want to be killed.
Singing mice have gentle, dense heads, and their eyes are much too glittery. They see the beauty in evil; they see it too much and it makes them die. Singing mice weave and stumble as though they have nibbled rat poison; they sing of the gorgeousness of bright lights and the holiness of owls. They sing about Death and her mercy, and the ivory architecture of the teeth of foxes.
Singing mice do not have long to live. They rarely survive forty days from nest to nothingness, so enthralled are they by the draw of the gods. They fling themselves at candles and jump upon unbaited traps, or else clamber up on garden walls and call for cats to come and make love to them. The lives of singing mice are all glory and joy, and the hopeless hope of an afterlife of breadcrumbs.
The albino is a singing mouse, but he is not a singing mouse like these. His eyes are the colour of meat, and his fur is ghastly white. His paws are like hands, slender and pink and his eyes blink at things that no mouse should witness. His mother sees it as he grows from struggling newborn to mouse, shovelling his face and paws against her, shouldering his place among the ghosts of his missing sisters. The albino mouse has whiskers as clear as spit, and the scales on his tail show the blood running underneath.
By the tenth day, his mother understands the monster he is, as his coat grows out of him like mould on bread. After fourteen days, the cutlery has finished eating and the quiet rings out in the dining room, making her skull ache. At fourteen days old, his eyes open; they are red and round as puncture wounds. And he whispers to his mother, this baby who has never seen the world. His song is grief itself, uncorked; his throat is full of it and he dribbles it out like music. She begs him; his mother begs that he’ll not sing, that he will hold his peace. She asks him, please, to close his eyes so the other mice may not see their wildness. But, in the daylight he cries like a nightingale and every mouse for yards around can hear him well enough already. One might even think that the sound of the knives had been better.
And now, long after, the albino is still living, and singing, not of the brightness of death, but its horror. He scurries between corners all day long and he carries fear in his paws like a hazelnut. He makes the flesh of other mice creep. He will not give any of them peace; he will not jump up on the gas hob, nor drown himself either. The prophet has wailed his song for six nerve-clawed months. The prophet sings of metal, metal, and he says the house will burn up like a firelighter; that the chimneybreast itself shall cave in like an egg box. The prophet yips and squeaks of more suffering than mice can guess at, of lives that are worse to live than deaths. They hate him.
But things have been almost quiet since the man was snip-snipped up. Nobody comes in here any more; the dining room belongs to mice alone, to their filth and their nests and children. The people get on with whatever people do in the parlour and the kitchen, and the cutlery is calm and sated, occupied with nests of its own.
The market is held in the bay of the window, every seventh night, between the veneered flanks of the piano and sideboard. During the snipping weeks, the mice sat tight and listened, but as time went on, they grew less afraid of the nickel silver slitherings. For these metal creatures had never done them harm, after all, and if one took the long view, had done them a positive favour in disposing of that big nasty corpse. They are simply a new thing. The washing machine had seemed to them like the sound of falling bricks when it first clicked into spin. The house had not collapsed then, nor would it now. Fear is only healthy, but the mice were no longer terrified. So, they groomed their faces and ruffled their fur, and set up the market.
Initially, the Christmas tree had been an inconvenience, to say the least, planted in plaster and strewn all over with shiny things. Still, in their new spirit of optimism, the mice resolved to make do. So, they climbed among the unlucky branches of Twelfth Night and made the tree into a gigantic hanger. They smashed up the glass baubles and ate the sugar candy. They bit the Christmas angel limb from limb. Every careless flick of tail or jump, made needles scatter down, until by the end of the third week the tree was bare, but for the tinsel, which they could find no use for, and the glowing ropes of fairy lights. After a couple of months, the very oldest mice will die off and the younger ones will not be able to imagine the dining room without their naked, twinkling tree.
Tonight, the dustbin had been splendid with gone-off food, for the mother had had a moment’s guilt and stripped the kitchen of all the rotten stuff. The mice spent hours hauling home their paper bags and greenish slices off the cheese, and then a long time more arranging their displays in the tree, to haggle and swindle each other. Now that nobody ever opens the door, the society of mice has begun to truly flourish, with such a lovely squalid house and a whole Christmas tree to name their own. This is a tiny golden age. And yet, in the middle of it, is this damnable white mouse with gore in his eyes, who will not kill himself as singing mice should, who sobs and chants about disaster. Tonight, he staggers about the foot of the market tree and he’s driving them mad and he will not, will not, shut up. The white mouse says they all will die and not by fear, but by dinner forks and fire. He will not quieten, not when threatened, or ignored, nor even when roughed-up by two-ounce heavies with long yellow teeth. Before anyone knows how it happened, tempers have been lost and his ear is torn and bleeding. And still he sings.
Now, mice are hardly given to murder, but a singing mouse is barely a mouse at all, having no wits to speak of and not a chance of making mouse children. This is what they will tell one another when the deed is done. Things happened; it was as though a wave moved among them; yes, a wave of evil, not one of them was quite to blame. It was a kind of insanity. They were provoked. He was begging them for it.
They will say that they really had no choice, with the monster screaming like a mad thing, loud enough to attract rats. He wailed like a seagull as they pulled him down; he wept and sang as they dragged him under the door; he filled his chest and he sang as they broke his tail and stained his bone-white fur. Even then they would have stopped, if he had only asked for mercy, they are sure they would have stopped. They carried him to the parlour fireplace and he sang of fire and catastrophe from the jumping evening flames, until the singing turned to crying and then to silence. They will hang their heads and recite this story in knots of two and three. He made them do it.
7
The Mother
THE MOTHER WAS feeling very hot by the time she got back home. She wasn’t used to the outside any more and tended to bundle on jumpers and cardigans and layered nylon tights, just as if she were bound for the Arctic. Her wish, on that false Christmas Day, had come alarmingly true, for the morning after she had made her voiceless plea to the garden, her own mother appeared in a cloud of feathers. Or, and now she frowned, s
weating with wool against her skin, this woman seemed to be her mother. It was hard to be sure. Still, at least there was now a grandmother for little Marie and (her vision clouded), the other one as well. Surely, though, the grandmother was a tad taller than she had any right to be, and was more assertive, more resolutely there than her own mother had been, especially as she was almost certain that she had attended her mother’s funeral many years previously.
The casket in the church had been an open one, and although she had been just a child at the time, she distinctly recalled there having been her mother’s body in it. Or a body, certainly. Perhaps she had been mistaken.
The mother unwound herself from her winter clothes and made a trail of them from front door to parlour, stopping in front of a fire stoked against the un-chill of June. The mother rummaged among her carrier bags and, retrieving shiny-dirty lumps of coal, she dropped them into the flames, one-by-one. When the blaze was positively raving, she mopped the water from her forehead and took brand new string and needles from her shopping. Then, chuckling with cleverness, she moved the big red armchair as close as she could to the grate without actually risking a blaze. The mother placed the knitting things on it, this lovely chair that was hers, now that she had no husband to hog it any longer.
Things might just be looking up at last. She could hear her daughter from the kitchen, and the happy clatter of kettle and spoon.
The very first morning had caught her by surprise, when she had come yawning down the stairs with Marie in her arms. She had taken her straight to the parlour to get the fire going, as it was only Boxing Day, even if there were daffodils in the garden. Lying, peaceful as clouds on the floor, she had discovered a black-haired baby, curled mouse-like in a nest of rags and mittens. When it dawned on her that the baby was hers, she had been annoyed and scooped both children up to feed and change them.
The grandmother was up before them and was discovered in the kitchen, scrubbing her way through a stack of dishes, digging the stuck bits off with a spoon handle. She looked up and smiled a greeting as they came through; the smile was not altogether friendly. The mother had been caught on the wrong foot, but the old woman was so familiar, so easy with the house, with her, with Marie, that she shook her head and thought that she must have lived here since forever. A week had passed before she concluded that she had not, and by then it seemed too late to do anything about it. At any rate, the thought of aloneness was too bleak to contemplate, so she had held her tongue and took to making cups of tea in multiples of two. And, since then, this woman, this grandmother or godmother, or whatever she was, had made her home with them, participating with life a little, but preferring on the whole to stand in doorways, practising her faint smile.
The mother carted her shopping bags through the parlour door, which she shut behind her to keep in the warm, and lugged them through the house. Marie and the other one were sitting on the lino, fat little legs splayed out on either side. Marie beamed up at her mother; the other child just looked at her and through, to the thick dripping core of her.
The grandmother handed her a steaming mug. Her hair was tied in a chignon, stuck through with quills. The mother gulped and looked away. She had, the mother conceded, been good for the household; she had forced a sort of order to the days. She had made her cash her Child Allowance and had even, mysteriously, produced a widow’s pension book in the correct name. The mother had been terrified, expecting some explosive discovery of her crime, but it became apparent that the grandmother was perfectly aware of the situation, and that moreover, she didn’t give a damn.
That first week, after the mother had ventured to the post office, the book money had mounted such that there was a huge wad of cash. The grandmother had taken it all, every penny, and had made the boy from the grocer’s bring round a whole larderful of tin cans. The rest she packed in envelopes for the rent man. Afterwards she poached a goose from the duck pond and plucked it on the kitchen table, making spiky drifts of feather and down.
She had watched the mother’s mothering, the favouring of the one, and the neglect of the other, and barely raised an eyebrow, although she did see to it that the black-haired child did not starve. Over the months, the mother found her presence comforting, if a little unpredictable.
There were chicken joints boiling in a pan on the stove, turning over in water that was foaming and greyish. The mother found a jar of Hellman’s in the fridge, along with a dish of cold potatoes that she sniffed at, warily. The grandmother laughed and stood in the middle of the floor, as Marie was slotted into a high chair, and the mother tried to mash up chicken with a fork. The other child, abandoned on the floor, did not seem surprised, nor even to care that she had been left there; instead she sat, impassive, whilst her grandmother tore up meat in her hands and dropped it underneath the table. The mother was busy with Marie and did not notice. The other child glanced quickly up at the old woman, then tipped onto her knees and hands, and squirmed towards her dinner.
Marie was a long time eating, turning every morsel in her fingers, delicately, as if astounded by it; her twin had a full set of teeth already and she choked the food back like a fox. The grandmother marched off into the scullery without a word. She must have climbed out of the back window, because after half an hour, the mother wondered where she had gone, and went to see. The window was ajar, moving on its hinge in the warm air, and the cherry tree was full of little birds, none of them singing. The mother closed the window against draughts and pulled her shawl close.
It was late when the mother took Marie up to her cot. It was almost dark, and the mother had been carrying her child towards the staircase when she heard a noise from the dining room like a fork against a cheese grater. Marie was all but sleeping, her fist wound up in her own hair, and the shudder that went through the mother was enough to make the baby open her eyes for a moment. The mother quickened her pace, and jittered up the stairs just as fast as she could, turning left before the bare-wood steps that led to the attic rooms, where the air that came out from the keyhole stank faintly of ammonia and the feather-dust of crows.
8
The Mother
IT SEEMED TO the mother that Marie was growing right before her eyes. She had even managed to scrape enough of her hair together for two stumpy pigtails. They made her adorable, like a little doll. The mother would forget them, sometimes for a few days, and then remember with a guilty jump. Then they’d be all knots, tangled round the hair bands, and the poor mite would howl when she unwound them and brushed the hair through.
But the mother was a good mother; she whispered it, over and over, like a memorised Bible verse. She reminded herself often, to make it true; she muttered it to herself as she waited for the kettle, or when she was sitting on the loo. And she was, in her way; she would make up long and complicated stories to tell her little one. These were strange fuddling tales that began with princesses and unicorns and dark woods, but that always wandered off along the way, until by the end they were other stories altogether, with completely different characters and settings, and endings that seemed to be the poached beginnings of something else, or shopping lists and laments about the piling laundry.
So, even if Marie was not entirely clean, she would always have on a pretty dress, and if the mother forgot to feed her, at least she would have sung her nice songs, and the next day she would feed her twice as much to make up for it. Marie began to lose the softness of babyhood, becoming more fragile, with tender hands like white stars, and a questionless, guileless smile that made the mother know for certain that she was good. Marie gazed at her mother’s face, the loving thing she tried to be, and not at the dripping gooey part.
When her first word came, she was sitting on the kitchen table, in a sea of dirty cups, banging the china against the wood, as the mother pottered around her. Holding a dishcloth that she had knitted all by herself, the mother dithered cheerfully. She opened cupboards and drawers, one by one, and closed them
again, wondering where best to store it, ready for its first use. She decided that she wouldn’t dirty it up straight away, not until she had made a couple more, made a nice little stock of them. In the end, she decided to leave it neatly on the floor until she had decided. Then she picked it up.
Marie had been rolling syllables around her mouth, like grapes, for months, beginning with musical cooing to proper, measured-out-saying, the Lego bricks of talking. Her first word, which she spoke from the table-top, was ‘Mouse.’ Her mother was looking at the dishcloth, perfectly, perfectly, happy, and so she didn’t notice. The grandmother came in just after, holding the black-haired baby like a puppy, before she plonked her down on the sticky floor.
It’s a fact that every day, we evolve a little more into what other people expect. The other child had become mute, she didn’t bother to cry anymore, which made things much easier. Whilst Marie was learning to balance against table legs, and to sometimes risk stumping into the middle of the floor, precarious as a pencil balanced on its point, the other child spent her time warily, low to the ground. Marie chattered happy baby-talk all day long; the other, who was never asked her opinion anyway, said only as much as could be uttered by her hard, dark eyes.
Marie bumped her cup a bit harder, smashing thick, blue, white-edged fragments over herself. The mother smiled, and began to pick the bits off her; the grandmother spoke. ‘It’s her birthday, you know. The twins are a year old today. You are going to have a special day.’ She beamed at the mother. The grandmother had a smile like a razor.
The Knife Drawer Page 3
