The Knife Drawer

by Padrika Tarrant

  At any rate, the mother seems to have had the very same idea, for here she comes with a rotten old paintbrush and the ends of a tin of pink emulsion. She grins and shakes her fist at the astonished mice, pointing theatrically to the half-gallon can, which is of a colour called Princess Blush. The mother sways like an accident on a little coffee table and slathers the glass with paint until she is satisfied that the dining room has been rendered quite invisible.

  Their childling is gone. They saw her lose herself from them; the sound of that trap falling shut was the most awful noise that ever a living mouse has heard; now it stains their fur like marker pen. They beg one another to understand; they tried, all of them did, but she simply refused to listen. She ignored their warnings; snared by curiosity, she had crept off to see what strangeness the mother had been making. The mice knew better, of course, but the childling was growing ever more wilful with time and an impetuous mountain cannot be held in check by any means. They sigh and forgive one another as mice must; the fairy lights reflect brightly back at them; the window has become a massive pink mirror. And then, it seems that the light bulbs are gentle things, strong and gentle as mice are, for every mouse is a plague, broken easily but surrounded by friends. At that moment, it seems as if all is somehow well.

  The mice among the fairy lights pray to the god that does not wish to kill them, for if it truly lives then it will spare the colony, even if not their own selves. The glow from the skeleton Christmas tree seems to constitute a reply, one that is good enough for mice at any rate. They glitter with hope as they pray for the safety of their childling, and for the frailty of backbones. Underneath the piano, the cutlery is whispering like scalpels, like nightmares rolled extremely thin; but they have snicked-up half a dozen corpses already and they do not move as the mice begin to drop out of the tree and head for their chimney. They check on their homes to see if the world still stands; overnight they take stock of themselves; they count their mouselings, count their food. Secretly, every one thinking that he is the only disbeliever, mice sneak up to the dining room door in case the blocking up was only some dreadful imagining. But the gap is now as solid as can be and not even a razor blade could pass through. Each concedes that it is true.

  When the sun is up again, there are shreds of light straining through the window; the mice discover that there is a tiny fragment of garden still remaining: one mouse, with his face squashed sideways, can just squint through. This is what that mouse can see: the frizz-haired mother is glowering down the garden path towards the house, to where the grandmother is standing with her arms folded, giving orders, stern. The mother turns resentfully away, trying to hold a walking stick, a bread bag, a coffee flask and a shovel all at the same time. She struggles with them, drops the walking stick, retrieves it with the very tips of her fingers, straightens up, and finally makes it over to the vegetable patch beside the cherry tree, where her nasty daughter is planted like a root. Angrily, the mother flings the dirt away from the door with the spade, and then she prises it up with the stick, just a fraction as though she might be expecting a bomb to go off at any moment. There is no explosion, so the mother quickly shoves the food into the hole with her foot. Then, the mother ducks her head and flinches and grimaces as she hooks the old coffee flask from out of the hole with the walking stick’s crook. She throws the new one in quickly, and it seems as if she might have actually aimed it at something.

  The mouse at the window blinks and gazes as hard as ever he can, for there is no smell to see with, and he thinks that he can glimpse the blunt, round tip of a hand, of the childling’s clawless paw. The mouse turns to all the others, quivering.

  For as long as there is a childling, there will be mice; as long as there is a childling, there is a source and an outlet for compassion. It is ordained. For now, for the mice, the dining room has become their only home and prison. For generations, they will have no run of any other place, until it seems that the house and all its rooms are a myth that never existed, like some ancient doctrine. The garden, over weeks, will become an imagined thing, visible only through a mystical pink film. But the mice have faith and stored food to last them a few months; soon the childling will rise from beneath the garden soil, and she will come and save them all.

  17

  Child

  THE CHILD DISCOVERS that she is alone. There are no mice, none of the scratching feet that clamber up and down against her skin and leave a network of little bloody marks on her back, her arms, her neck. The flesh of the wrong child is a map of love, crisscrossed with the itchy lines where her thousand tiny parents care for and hurt her. In a few days they will all heal.

  She cocks her head and forces her ears, seeking for noises: the creak of stairs; whoof of the boiler; voices of mice and of people. There are none of these. The child is bewildered by silence and the empty rush of sky among the air holes in her den. Slowly, she sinks to her haunches, thumb in mouth, and she puzzles at what has happened. The thoughts of the child are not expressed in words, or even in squeaking; she makes sense of the world with patches of colour, stinks and flavours. She does not make much sense of the world at all.

  The child is wearing a nightie of Marie’s, and the hair against her shoulders is black and twisted into tangled pigtails, fastened with bows made from the mother’s dishcloth string. She has a necklace to match her sister’s, except that the beads are made of old macaroni, cooked and rescued from the bin; they are dried out and pretty with the scent of old cheese sauce. Her feet are hard as hooves and perfectly dirty. As she sits, she gnaws on her thumb and begins to rock very gently, as if she were sitting on a dining chair with one short leg. She cannot smell the perfume of mice, or the mother’s violet scent, or even the dustbin. And there is nothing to see but the wonky walls of her cell. She frowns at the plastic sheeting, where the heat of the day and the water from her breath are already fattening into dew. The child blinks, rapidly, emptily. She cannot remember how to cry, nor even what crying is supposed to be for. She wraps her arms around her knees and rests her chin upon them. There is no picture for what she feels.

  The mice must be coming. They must be just now on their way, because that is what the mice and she are made for: each the thing that the other needs. The child waits, in a now that lasts for hours, moving hardly at all, until the air holes turn blue-grey and the door that is her roof begins to thud with rain.

  Gradually, the child discovers that the silence of under ground is not just some flatness after all, but layered and rich. With the pads of her fingers, she detects the vibrations of living things; discovers the aching rumble of the house as it breathes with its lime-washed lungs. The house is grumbling, testing at the blockage on the dining room door, irritated. The child can discern its annoyance, even from so many feet away, but she does not know what it means.

  Then, in a few more hours, she is hungry and anyhow, the house has fallen asleep, so the child rolls her shoulders and dares to explore her prison. There is soft stuff aplenty, more nesting material than she has ever seen; she opens up the eiderdown with her teeth and heaps out feathers by the fistful. There is a bucket made of red plastic and it tastes of Ajax liquid and dirt. Then her nose uncovers a square parcel with a sandwich in it, and she paws at that for a long time, trying to find a way inside the cling film. It squidges and bends underneath her fingers, buckles and buckles, but will not tear in half. There is meat inside, pink and ghastly, out of a tin.

  The child is wary of the taste of canned luncheon meat, because such cans are opened with a key and the thin rolls of metal are likely as not to cut the tongue and fill one’s mouth with blood. Even so, hunger is hunger, and with a whine of frustration, the child begins to tear lumps off the sandwich with her teeth, gagging down the cling film along with the bread. Soon, she discovers how to sort the mess in her mouth, and to spit out the plastic like grape pips. Her mouth does not fill with blood after all, which is good.

  The child sneaks to the tarpa
ulin walls and licks at the dripping condensation until the sky beyond the holes is black. Then she scuffs in circles, mousing a nest out of feathers and the eiderdown’s raggy skin. In the middle of it, she huddles, dark eyes open in the darkness, trying to conjure mice up with the pictures in her head. And her hole is so small that she daren’t grow another inch for fear of crushing herself to death against the walls. In all the months that follow, and the years after that, although her hair and fingernails grow just the same as ever, her bones and skin stay carefully small, like a Bonsai.

  18

  Marie

  I SPENT THE whole winter on the concrete patio behind the back door, with my jacks and a fragment of chalk, playing hopscotch by myself as the autumn drained white and there was nothing in the garden but the rooks. One morning, back then, was just like another, but today I had jumped so much that my ankles felt like snapping, and the drizzle was smearing my hopscotch squares to nothing. Eventually I rubbed my icy fist across my face and concluded that I would be better off indoors.

  I rested my elbows on the windowsill and waited to give my mother a fright, but she was skinning carrots with a peeler and did not notice the monster breathing smoke at her through the glass. There was something awkward in the way that she held her wrist, as though she were holding the peeler at bay, as though she could not quite trust it. Her fingers worked very hard to grip it; I could see her knucklebones glistening through the skin.

  In a moment more, I gave up, and tramped into the cooking fug, the steam and smell of boiling. My mother was emptying the fridge again, dicing together vegetables, cheese and half a Victoria sponge cake, and hurling them into a seething pot of meat. I sighed. It would be lunchtime soon. I snaked out my fingers towards the table, and stole a square of Dairy Milk before it turned into stew. As it found its way into my mouth, my grandmother came into the room. She was smiling, blinkless.

  My mother slid her eyes sideways and saw that she was there. Then she renewed her chopping with an evangelical vigour, five times as fast. My grandmother trod forwards at her, holding a folded paper bag that was translucent with grease like brown stained glass. She shook it out, one-handed, for the other was cupped against her chest, as though she were cradling something very small.

  My mother was defiant; in desperation she scurried around the table in a half-circle, hunting out fresh ingredients for the stew. She snatched up a candle and began to dice it rapidly, separating out the wick like a spinal cord. She shook her head and her lips moved.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ My grandmother stood over my mother, friendly and menacing.

  ‘No,’ repeated my mother, but she made it sound more like a question than a refusal. She accepted the bag, which smelled like an old lunchbox, and sulkily began to gather potato peelings and carrot tops, as well as the raw ends of the meat that she had forgotten to finish cutting up. When it was full she crumpled the top and held it up to my grandmother for inspection. My grandmother nodded slowly. The bag was wet, and splitting already, dripping on the table and then on her toes. My mother shuffled off her slippers and ground her feet into her shoes. She looked down at me then, and from me to my grandmother again. ‘What about. . . ?’

  My grandmother looked down at me too, and winked like a secret agent. ‘I will deal with that,’ said she, and then she pointed her chin at the garden until my mother began to move away. Before I could ask what was going on, my grandmother had a grip on the back of my neck and was steering me out into the hallway. My mother muttered to herself, until her words trailed out of the back door. The hall was like a grave compared with the kitchen. ‘Marie,’ said my grandmother, ‘Marie, look at this!’ And with a flash of her teeth, she opened her hand.

  It was a pair of tiny wings, stolen from a wren, split from its body and joined in small, neat sutures. She lifted this miserable thing into the air and then she threw it at my head. I flinched backwards, ducked as the wings fell towards me, but before they struck my cheek, they were off and flapping around the bottom landing like a heavy feathered moth.

  I composed my face, tried hard to smile as the wings plunged crazily past me, doubling back and forth between the kitchen and the front door, coming unstitched with every small collision against wall or banister. I beamed at my grandmother, earnestly as I could, to show that I was grateful, although I was not quite sure what for. I had entirely forgotten to wonder what my mother was doing in the garden with a paper bag.

  And, when my smile was done, I inched past, as politely as possible, and fled upstairs to hide. I went to sit with the towels in the airing cupboard, for in the dark and closeness I always felt a little less alone. In the linen cupboard, I used to feel as though I might understand my life at any minute. Sometimes, it seemed as if I almost did; once, nearly sleeping in the warm, I had a sense of pleading, as if there were hundreds of little grey voices begging me for something, if I could only have heard what.

  I closed my eyes and tried to put my grandmother’s demonstration out of my mind. It must have worked; I must have begun to drowse because for a second I had a vision that left me bucking my legs against the cupboard walls. It seemed to me that there was a glare of light, a blinding rectangle above my head, and the terror and hope of it made me mad, I think, just for that instant. I tore one fingernail right off against the inside of the door; if it had not been for the jacket on the water tank, I might have knocked myself out.

  I was frightened, and my finger was dripping and hideously painful. I crept out of the bathroom like some little creature, bumping silently down the stairs on my backside until I reached the second-bottom step. Then the back door banged open and slammed, and my mother’s voice came screeching down the hallway. ‘I don’t know why you make me do it. I don’t. Look what it’s gone and done this time! Next time, I am going to knock it out with the spade, see if I don’t.’ And my mother came storming past me, tracking mud along the floor. She was holding a bloody bitten wrist aloft as though it were smeared in pure germs, hissing about rabies and where was the first aid kit. She all but squashed me as she ran up the stairs, so urgent was she in her quest for Savlon and plasters.

  19

  Mice

  THESE ARE STARVING times in which to be a mouse. A mouse, a dishwater-grey one, an undertaker of sorts, is watching the smudge of garden with her face squashed sideways, cheek flat. This is what has become of the eldership, the leaders of mice. The grey mouse is cursed with priesthood, passed through one litter each generation. They pity their leaders, these days. She must watch, for that is the rule; the mice cannot remember why now, nor quite what they are watching for.

  They know of the childling, of course, in a kind of mythic way. She is the fairy-light one, fully mouse and fully human, the only creature that might protect them. She will save them, it is said, from the mother-god with frizzy dyed hair.

  The mice have no other gods left to fear, and no doom but the one that the mother has condemned them to; this long death of knives and hunger. They do not know about cats any more, nor stoats and crows. They do have an inkling left of mousetraps. The hell that the mother-god sprang from was all made out of them.

  The mouse who is watching blinks her eyes, which are black and without reflection. By now the mice live only in the daytime, when the mother-god and the garden may be glimpsed; the dawn they must leave for the cutlery. The sunlight hurts their eyes and it bleaches the sheen from their fur. Then the water-grey mouse turns from the window to the dining room and for a moment she is blinded by it. It is real; it is like some horrible after-life. Mouse filth is piled against the edges of everything, at the sides of every running place, so that the tracks seem as though they are carved into it like a maze. They very busiest are trodden clean by feet, and here and there are flashes of the carpet and its colours. Cockroaches might have helped: if there had been a few inside at the time of the great imprisonment, they might have made an eco-system with the mice; the one eating the guano, the other
subsisting on the insects. But not even a germ could pass the gap beneath the door, and there is no thing present that had not been there first.

  The floors are bristling too, with shed fur and the snippy shards of rib and thighbone that the cutlery has not bothered to finish. It is into this that the water-grey mouse jumps; air that is so sharp with ammonia that it makes ulcers on her feet. It might be better not to be a mouse at all than to exist in this manner. But, mousehood is strong, earnest, fanatical even, and it is a sin not to preserve life; a sin not to make it. Even so, odd females have tried to disguise their oestrus from time to time, to make a few less pups to run along these rancid streets. This is an evil deed, and close to killing.

  Mousehood must never murder again, for it was in part the death of the prophet that caused this misery, that gave the mothergod her throat-grip on their lives. But, praise be, these days are but a test, for the childling watches their every move from the lights in the Christmas tree, and if they are worthy, why then, she will rise up from the ground and save them all. Perhaps there is hope. There must be hope.

  The mice are plodding from place to place, climbing into the Christmas tree for a place to sit that is out of the guano. The water-grey mouse treads past the tree to the alcove, where the wallpaper’s ripped off as far as the bricks. She is thin as a clothes peg as she shins up the mortar cracks to where the sentries are guarding the bookshelves.

  Their ancestors were pups when the food ran out. Since then, every scrap of every thing is edible if it is not poison. They have eaten the shoes that were kicked underneath the sideboard; they have eaten the candles from the top of the piano. Six generations subsisted on the glue from the wallpaper; the glue was a little toxic and it gave them awful nightmares. It was in this era that most of their doctrine was devised. There are only books left, and not many of those either; every book thins slowly to the spine; every word is fed upon and stains the mouth black. The water-grey mouse has a special concession, an extra ration, in light of her unpleasant duties.