The mother was elated. She had no reason for disbelief, after all, and dates and numbers had never really been her thing. Even so . . . she glanced upwards and found greasy dusty tinsel pinned to the ceiling and pretend snow sprayed on the lampshade, and then she looked back at the slowly-nodding grandmother, and she knew for definite that it was a special day. Of course it was. She rushed out with Marie, leaving her in the parlour, awaiting her surprise.
In the next hour, the mother grew brittle with smiling, for her baby’s birthday, her very first, was cause for true and perfect joy. Her eyes glistened like someone running a fever, as she gathered piles of things for a birthday tea, spreading them among the smashings of stoneware on the table. She was plastering margarine on Mother’s Pride as the grandmother came back with a box of French fancies and cupcakes and Bakewell tarts, every one sealed with a toxic-red cherry.
The mother turned her cupboards out to find gifts for her perfect girl; she poured two different colours of shampoo together and they swirled like some thick and gorgeous cocktail. She found a pincushion in the shape of a tartan hedgehog, which she emptied of its spikes. Soap flakes are nice; so she filled a circle of cloth with a handful, and fastened it round with a hair band. There was a bedspread in the washing basket that made the perfect tablecloth.
Before very long, the floor was crunchy underfoot with plastic bottles and wrappers, and bits of paper and cake fingers and bread and the empty shells from tinned meat. In the middle of the clutter was the other child, the one that didn’t count, in her grey romper with a pony on the front, and half the poppers un-popped.
The day cantered merrily by in surprise-making; the mother even remembered to leave a saucer of bread and milk in front of Marie in the parlour. It was four o’clock when the special tea was ready, which is the perfect time for special teas. The last thing that the mother did was tidy the floor; as the cupboard beneath the sink was now empty, she swept up armfuls of rubbish and stuffed it all inside, shutting the door in a hurry, in case it should all come collapsing out again. She was confused to discover a broken chunk of china stuck into the heel of her hand. She straightened up, tugged it out and dropped it into the sink. This was momentarily upsetting as it left a slip of blood on her palm; she wiped it off against her hip and smiled, open mouthed, at her lovely tea.
As she passed the door, there was a scrittering from the dining room. Marie was in the parlour, lying on the hearthstone like a little cat, sleeping by the fire, drenched in milk. The mother picked her up, roughly, excited, and her eyes fought against opening. Before she had a chance to whimper, Marie found herself suspended above her surprise. The grandmother had reappeared with candles, and the baby’s face was a diagram of delight. The mother and the grandmother gave her the loveliest party that ever a little girl could have.
Long afterwards, after midnight, the mother sat on her red chair, knitting and warming her slippers by the fire. Amongst the tick and chitter of the fire, she became aware of something else, a stealthy, dry sliding, as of a sofa cushion against a carpet, and presently, slow and even breathing. She turned towards this noise and found the black haired-baby, lying on her back and staring at her, unsurprised, as a hundred mice or more strained and pushed and pulled her along, dropping her at last beside the mother’s ankle. Abandoned along the way, were bits and strewings from the rubbish cupboard; the child wore tealeaves on her face, as if she had lived for a week in a dustbin. The mice shoved at her shoulders until they had got her sitting up, then she put her mucky hands on her mucky knees and looked up at her mother. The mice loitered, in a bashful crowd.
The mother was furious, but they stood their ground, accusing, blinking up at her like a miniature jury. She scattered them with a murderous swipe of her foot, then jumped up and chased them out of the room. To a mouse, they swarmed out of reach, beneath the dining room door and then were gone. The mother stood there awhile, staring at the brush marks in the paint on the door, considering the cutlery noises that she had heard of late and the missingness of her husband’s body, and considering mice, with a queer guilty smile on her face, until she forgot why she was smiling and went to bed.
9
Mice
AFTER THE ALBINO, the mice all crouched in the parlour, horror-struck at what they had done. The house was mortified, too, and the lichen on its back crawled. They huddled their paws over their chests and were fearful of themselves, of each other. The very smallest of them went still like toys and would not move until the others scruffed their necks and pulled. Eventually, they made one another come away, and then they gazed at the lights on the Christmas tree and prayed, in case there might be a god who does not wish to kill them. After that, they had to carry on living.
Tonight is not market night and the dining room does not scrabble with motion and bodies. Although it is dark, the carpet is not crossed often, as most of the mice are busy doing their thing throughout the house; chewing the bindings of the paperbacks in the landing bookcase, and making lovely long gouges in the laundry soap with their teeth. There are mice creeping, Indian-file along the hallway wall, careful in case of people; there are mice drinking from the toilet bowl, and mice brawling over half a cream cracker; there are nine solemn mice packing a rodent corpse into a yogurt pot and hauling it off to the kitchen bin, whilst they wonder about the use of it all.
In the dining room, there are other mice that are doing none of these things. They have gathered in a little knot at the foot of the Christmas tree, and they are afraid. There is a new thing amongst them now, in the rotten weeks since the prophet burned; the knowledge of killing has grown claws and crept away, and it slinks and stinks out the house like an invisible cat. They are mice, and mice stave off death with every shiver and heartbeat, and each new squirming pup; and yet now they are also mice that know that they can find it in themselves to murder. They cannot, they cannot, believe it.
The dining room has become sheathed with dust in every place where mice do not run; the ceilings are webbed with dirt and spiders’ threads, filling the gaps in everything, connecting paper chains to yellowing paint and dampness like a skin disease. The house is contagious.
Now that they know killing, the mice by the Christmas tree have resolved to try compassion, to nibble at it, discover its taste. For the screaming of the singing mouse as he burned is stuck in their chests, and the prophecies of metal and fire have driven them half mad with fear. They are afraid of death, of course, but every mouse balances out his life upon a string of that; no, it is the notion of destruction that horrifies them. The thought that every mouse, every last mouse, might lose his life in one disastrous moment, is beyond ugliness. It is a thing never thought before; a thing not invented; a thing as new as the murder of a mouse by his own kin. They are staring at the fairy lights on the tree, feeling their strange new lives, and thinking.
So it was that odd mice, in secretive twos and ones, began to try to atone for themselves, to repay murder with saving. Without meaning to, they have invented for themselves a new religion. The gods that they have are all made out of death, of foxes and weasels and rat traps, of blinding lights and snapping jaws. The mice know that their gods do not love them; that godhood’s greatest and only power is in the snapping of bones.
The mice beside the Christmas tree are a sect of sorts; they are turning from the old ways, to suck out the rubber-taste of murder from their throats. The childling, the mouseling of humans, has come to their lives like a challenge, like the question of a new god, the one they think they have discovered among the fairy lights. The childling, shaking with the cold, had simply lain on the floor, vast and unfurred, like some stranded leviathan. She had embodied the opposite of prophecy, in a way; the childling with black hair is an unfinished idea, to be completed by disaster or hope. It is in these things that new religions unfold.
The coffee-brown mouse had not thought any of this as he watched her shiver from under the sofa, not at first. He acted wi
th his whiskers, with his budding soul. The others who snuck in to help him wrap the baby had not been asked either; they had caught the mood in whispers, each finding a tiny way to make the vast infant stay living. In time, they had infected other mice, like some new kind of rot, a better kind. The childling has killed nothing and is without hate, so between them, they make sure that she does not die; they cover her when she is cold, and they try to keep her close to the frizz-haired woman who forgets her pup and leaves her around the house like a dropped slipper. And, when they have acted kindly, these secret few will gaze up at the fairy lights and wonder if they have done enough.
Since then, they have checked on the childling every night, as if making religious observance. For, at the very least, a childling grows into a human in time, a human being with a loud voice and big shoes. And, if anything is strong enough to keep a mouse safe, it must be one of those. And she is sweet; there is trust in her face. She knows that they are trying to love her. She is grateful.
It has rained, on and off, in the weeks since the prophet; outside, the windowsills have made gorgeous cushions of moss like the skin of a mole. Last night the dining room door opened, suddenly, yanked on its hinges. The mice all stiffened where they stood in the branches of the tree or milling round it, as that new woman strode into the middle of the floor. She was not the frizz-haired mother, and she had about her the scent of nest-robbers, of crows and rooks. She only stayed a moment, swept the room with her eyes, smiled with long false teeth, and nodded, as though all was as she had surmised. Then she had gone. The mice had been badly frightened, but over the hours they went back about their business, as the rain bled down the window glass and dripped in the chimneystack.
It is late, and everywhere the mice are doing the things that they must: mating in dark alleys, and mountaineering on the bookcase, and breeding and dying and everything else besides. A few of them have developed the habit of standing, just here by the tree, moving nothing but their whiskers, staring at the little coloured stars that float in the sky between the carpet and the ceiling. They pray beneath their breath, embarrassed in case another should hear them, trying to muster a new god from the glass bulbs.
In time, the mice by the Christmas tree are joined by others, until there are dozens of them, fully one-third of the colony. Their eyes are wild with hope. They exchange glances, then creep out under the door to check on the childling. She is nowhere. The loving mice fan out and search the house, flailing their tails as they clamber up the banister railings, leaping like fools, making the other mice stare at them, astonished. She is not with the blond-haired child in her cot; that child senses them watching, flutters her eyelids, but does not wake.
The childling is not anywhere they look; now others have joined the search, cascading through the shadows, hunting and listening. A few creep into the parlour, where a light bulb is burning; the mother is in there, but the childling is not. And then the mice in the kitchen hear a scuff from the cupboard beneath the sink, the rustle of boxes and a stretched-out foot. They heave on the door and squeal in frustration, but mice are little things and they are not strong. As they listen, they find that the breathing sounds of the poor childling are becoming difficult, thickening with the clumsy wheeze of suffocation.
The mice are frantic now; they plead with each other, and with the gods, to save this poor helpless thing, and all the other mice from over the house have come running to find the source of the commotion, and the atmosphere is as dangerous as a Revivalist meeting. Then there is a sound behind them and they all flinch quite still, none daring to turn. The grandmother has come into the kitchen, and she steps forward, smartly, and making no effort at all, she flicks the cupboard door open. Enough food for a month tumbles out, and plastic, and packets, and a margarine tub. When the avalanche is over, the mice surge forward to where the childling is half-wedged against the sink trap. She is filling her lungs with sobs of sallow kitchen air.
The grandmother makes a Hm noise and she leaves, as the childling and the mice gaze at each other in shock. She keeps very still as they fix on her clothing with their teeth and begin to drag her out of the cupboard under the sink. She is heavy as a whale and the job is hard. But the mice, all of them now, for the sect has overtaken every one, they keep death at bay by making that huge baby not die. They set off with her to the parlour, to reunite the childling with her mother. Later that night they will harvest the food that the childling brought out with her like a dowry, and they will stuff the chimneybreast with riches.
10
House
THERE WERE WINTERS and summers; there have been heartbeats, heavy and hard as childbirth. The house grew a little older, a little more rasped by the rain; little by little, it became sadder, more long-lived. A wasps’ nest swelled like a boil under the eaves, and the bad tempered thrumming of it kept the house on edge until a sudden frost killed its inmates. After that it just hung there, trapped like food between teeth, annoying and impossible to dislodge.
There was a thunderstorm, which threw bullets of water against the roof tiles and fingernailed one slate back like a scab. The cherry tree lost a bough as well that night; the house cracked all along one wall as it tried to shuffle close to it, to put its great heavy arms around the hurt on its trunk. It failed, but the house was sure it saw a flicker of gratitude amongst the branches.
There was also a day, one curious day, nineteen heartbeats ago, when the house saw the garden make a woman. It was a spring morning, dripping and early-green, and the house had been clearing its throat and thinking, when she appeared. She was a strange thing, frightening, oddly comforting; houseish in a way, constructed not born, all in conjoined bits.
The mother had been standing at the window – but the house did not know that, for she was moving quite gently – and when she had wished her wish, there was an instant of perfect loudness, glutted and pretty with singing. The noise was like a whole year in birds; all the nestling cheeps and courting doves and sparring robins who will kill over territory. The house sat fascinated, as it saw a summer’s worth of life and growth heave and twist together like a knot in the sky and the grass and hedgerow leaves of the garden. There was a wrench, as if a piece was pinched right out of the weather, and the massive clatter of little wings. The whole world was a mite less there, for just a second, until it healed over and sorted itself out. After that, straightening her coat, and glancing skywards in case of rain, a woman came striding out of the flatness of the lawn; a houseish woman, odd as unseasonal hail.
The house, poor house, just gawped at her as she marched up the path. She stopped, seven feet from the front door, and she looked up at its blank face. ‘Hello,’ she said. The house said nothing. The houseish woman smiled, rigidly, as if at a rude child. ‘I said, “Hello”. Suit yourself,’ said she, and walked round the back, powerful and blunt as a wrecking-ball.
She spent the day and the night in the garden, holding court to thousands of birds, finding out their names and demanding a feather from each. They were enthralled, terrified, as if she were telling them spells. When eventually she went indoors, they remained there for hours, shivering on the lawn, until finally a magpie shrugged his wings and flew away. In a trice, he was followed by all the others, spilling up through the sky towards their perches and roosts.
Since the day that the grandmother told the house, ‘Hello’, things went on in their own way. When she stood on the lawn, however, the house would study her back, the quarry-edges of her, the ancient things of which she was made. It sank into its foundations and its feet grew wet with the drip in the cellar, and the lintels softened, oh-so slowly. It tried to sleep, from time to time, and its dreaming was haunted. Every biting mousetrap, every shout or stamp of temper, every trip on the staircase, every little violence the house had ever witnessed, was counted out and recited. It fretted and shuddered and remembered every last one, played it against its wallpapered insides like a ghastly slide show.
Most of all, it dreamed of the dead man, skewered on a steak knife and dragged through its innocent hallways. It dreamed of the sickening, spreading blood and fluids, and the spite in him that drained out like a blister when the blade went in. It dreamed of its own wet carpets, and the digging and scraping that gouged against them as the corpse soaked the floorboards and was sliced to mush by cutlery. Years later and that floor was still raw, grazed like a knee, black-stained and violated and vile. And its heart pounded on, resentfully.
PART TWO
11
Marie
MY NAME IS Marie. The house where we lived when I was a child was an uncertain place, a mildewing, ramshackle cottage at the top of a steep track. We were not far from the town, but for years I did not know it; I did not leave my house for a long time. We were uncertain people; we lived out our lives uncertainly, as if waiting for instructions that never came.
The house that we used to live in was a poor old thing, raddled with dry-rot and wet-rot and sadness. Looking back, I often wonder if our house made us to be the way we were, or if we had imposed our own troubles onto it. Perhaps we each weakened the other.
Our house was festooned with dust-rolls and Christmas decorations; knotted paper chains that bleached with the years, until nobody could remember the colours they were supposed to be. I didn’t think this was odd. I had nothing to hold my life against; no pattern to compare. The trimmings made the hallway festive and dark, even in June. During the winter, the light barely stood a chance; even with the bulbs burning it was dim as gloaming, as if all the paleness of the lights and the sun were just absorbed by those colourless links.
The Knife Drawer Page 4
