The guards bend low to her and she bows in return; each polishes their whiskers politely. Then, pleasantries over, the sentries release her allowance: a quarter-page of The Pilgrim’s Progress. She sits up there, discreet, and she eats it quickly, so as not to taunt the others with her feast. Afterwards she nods to the guards; she cannot look them in the eye, and creeps away like a criminal.
Then they hear a knocking from the chimneybreast: a rhythmical tap, a mournful sound. The water-grey mouse jerks upright and clambers down to the hearthstone. A mouse is dead; his skin has abandoned him, and the others are dragging him out by the fur, by the tail. He is beyond hurting now. The knocking continues as the mice all come to watch, shivering or biting on their fingers; all of their eyes are black and without reflection. The water-grey mouse looks up at the window; a new lookout is there, another of the cursed priesthood.
He is watching the window, where the frizz-haired mother-god is acting out her life as if on a screen. She has a shovel and a foul expression. She cannot see the mice. The new watcher will not turn towards the dining room; he keeps his face sideways, is glad not to be involved.
The mice drag their corpse along the floor, where the carpet is cleanest, accompanied by the sound of tapping, stopping well short of the piano. After that, the water-grey mouse carries on alone, yanking the body by herself until the both of them are six inches from the cutlery’s domain. She stands there a second, shaking violently, terrified, and when the metal slithers begin she flees for her life.
The mice all fling into the Christmas tree and they cannot turn away, nor even blink as the body jumps as if thrown by a cat. They stare emptily at the seething metal as he is reduced to wet and guts, and rags and tatters of fur, and then finally nothing. This is how it must be in this world, for were they not to offer the dead, the cutlery would take the living. The knocking ceases; the mouse who had been drumming his foot on a meat can, stops. The mouse that is grey like dishwater hates herself. And then, because they cannot bear to go back to their lives, the mice all start to pray, to the fairy lights and to the childling, with their flanks hot almost to singeing where they’re pressed against the bulbs. They pray; they beg and beg for pity.
There are footsteps beyond the door; Marie is passing, and she pauses for a moment and listens. The mice all shudder to resting, exhausted and miserable.
20
Child
A YEAR LATER and November is crumpling up the garden like screwed paper. The house is sitting on its old flat feet, hunkered in an awkward square. It is holding its breath and concentrating very hard, for the grandmother is in the garden, pottering amongst the microscopic lights of stars and the iridescent feathers of garden birds, fluttering in the cherry tree like leaves. There is enough light to see by, if you have eyes like an owl’s.
The grandmother has eyes like an owl’s. The house is staring, entranced, for although she moves much too quickly, as bloodish creatures do, even though she bleeds and hurts, she is much more stone than blood. The house can watch her moving, even when she is only being kind, because her lines and edges are chisel-hard; like a broken cliff-face.
The grandmother is small, but she stamps as solidly as a church. She slows the world around herself; to the house it is as if she were spectacles, a lens that lets it focus on the garden for a while, even if doing so makes its insulation ache afterwards for weeks. It is like sticking one’s head into a pond to see the fishes eye to eye. It is fascinating.
The grandmother snaps the ice-shrivelled grass as she crosses the lawn with a stepladder in one hand, carelessly, as though she were only holding a lolly stick. The house furrows its roof. In the other, she has a large black sack, swinging it lightly, though it’s surely heavy. She turns suddenly, catches it staring. The grandmother inclines her head, bowing slightly, rudely polite. ‘And good evening to you too,’ says she. The house looks away, but only until she does. After that it gawps again.
Life underground is strange. It is sunless, damp and oh-so dark, but it is not cruel. Underground is where the small things dwell, where everywhere there is the secret rustle of germination and decay. Life underground is a thing to which one must become accustomed. For a time, the wrong child was full of frets and fear, but it was not long until she understood the way of this life. It is a rich life; the soil is luscious and generous and treacle-black, and the creatures speak to one another as they never might in air. In the darkness, one’s eyes are blind; in being blind they see other things. Every mole is a soothsayer, witness to lives and silences, and the alien sun that bleaches the universe white. These things, for the creatures beneath the soil, are visions and nightmares, incomprehensible; full of guessed-at meaning.
It is winter, and the child, wrong child, childling of mice, is wrapped about her self like a nut, small and rounded and perfectly safe. As she sleeps, she looks a little as mice do, whilst they imagine away the weeks before they are born; before they know if they are to become mice, or flowers, or horses or tall human princes. The edges of mouse embryos are smooth and undecided, and shining as though varnished. Beneath her lashes, her eyes slide over the pictures that she is thinking of. The wrong child’s hair is luscious-thick, and it swathes her back to keep her warm. It curls like ferns and brushes over her toes and tender places. She sighs a little, and hugs at her knees; perhaps she smiles. And carefully, because the smallest things know best how to be safe, she stays the shape that she is; the length and breadth and width that fits this hole. All is well; she is well, because the cherry tree has taught her how to be a seed, a hard, smooth cherry pip, and how it is that one waits to grow. The only key is patience; that is all.
And above the roots and the buried child, the grandmother is listening, and squinting up at the sky, as one looks into space whilst digging in a bag for a thing one cannot see. Or, thinks the house, perhaps she might be listening with her feet. It strains, trying to hear it too, listening for chiming nightingales or the voices of bats. But mortar ears are slow, and half-deaf anyway; perhaps the grandmother is only teasing after all, catching the poor old house out in its eavesdropping. At this idea, it groans to itself and settles down for sleeping.
The polythene walls of the child’s house are scrunched down now, not needed to keep the garden at bay. She lives in a softer house these days, a nest of roots, a white cocoon with rounded edges, touched all over with their tips. The way in which the cherry tree might grip a stone, hold it absentmindedly among its roots; that same way it grips the wrong child and her little orb of air. It holds the soil back for her, holds the roof up for her, where the tube-end of the funnel pokes down, grey like the white of an eye. The tree holds her in its many-fingered hands; it rocks her and tells her stories, tales of trees from before there were animals, or birds, or houses. It sings to her too; the music of trees is supple and sappish and calm. It throbs with the sadness of the autumn and the passion of springtime. And it’s a low singing; only things beneath the ground can hear it, for the music is made by the twisting of their roots. It is a secret. It is a perfect thing.
Every mole is a soothsayer; the wrong child drifts sometimes, among strange pictures of other lives. She has felt the misery of the mice. And in her embryonic state, she has seen them, fairy lights and all; she has dreamed the mice and felt their love. Sometimes, when they pray, a tear will squeeze itself between her tight-fused eyelids, and the cherry tree wonders. No, life beneath the ground is not cruel.
And now the wrong child’s eyes flicker elsewhere, dreaming of a child like herself and a mother with her head in her fingers; grasping her scalp as though she feared it might just slough off.
The grandmother nods to herself and stops her listening. She stumps through the frost with her ladder and then she shakes it open with her arm and plants it up against the cherry tree’s offended trunk. For an hour or two, the grandmother replaces her fly papers, furling new ones from the winter twigs ends, gathering up last month’s laden flaps. Each
one is like some rare collage, all stuck up with the songbirds’ tithe. She stands there against the night, the ladder sinking into the mud, and strips the feathers off one by one. There are hundreds, every one a resentful gift, plucked from wing or breast and left for the grandmother to stuff into her sack. It is nearly dawn before she is finished.
21
Mice
NOW IT HAS come to this: the mice must eat their own dead; swallow their meat with guilt and the drippings of rainwater that trickle down the chimney. They must cut up their own poor kin, divide them into dinners for the cutlery and themselves. Their coats are scurfy and ridden with fleas. They have no scrap left of pride, and only a little love to keep them warm, burnt down very low.
Sometimes there are mice that make the journey to the piano before they are dead. When the others are holed-up and trembling in the chimneybreast, they creep out. They go by themselves, or even in pairs, and they only have to stand for a moment at the gap, before they are scissored to tatters.
So it is that there is enough to eat, for the cutlery is fed in part by the living, the knives can spare them a little flesh. None acknowledges this; every one thinks that the others might not have noticed, and so he holds his tongue and carries the secret. For after all, mice may not kill, even if it is an act of loving. The death of a mouse is the end of potential, a story untold. And the fairy lights are watching. They fear in their hearts that they shall never be worthy of the childling, of redemption.
After every funeral, the tapping and the procession, the mice always go to the tree and pray. They pray like things demented, torn and ripping between despair and hope. For the sadness of mice has become a throb in the air, and some of them stare into the fairy lights until they turn blind. It hurts. The bulbs grow brighter somehow, more hot as they suffer, and sometimes in the pain there might be found a crackle of inspiration, some other consciousness that echoes in their heads for a moment. But it never comes to anything. They try and try to save each other if not themselves, if not their own eyes. But what is there to do anymore, than to indulge in a little fancy? They are becoming rather mad. They sometimes rock from side to side, or seem to believe that invisible mice are speaking to them from under the piano.
Instinctively, the mice are fishing for minds, though they do not know they are. They are flailing out beyond the dining room, grasping at anything at all. There is a darkness about this voodoo that frightens them. A shrine of sorts is developing upon the drop-leafed table, all made in splintered ribs and broken Christmas baubles. It is three-dimensional, tied and twisted through with the sinews that come out of the feet of mice. It is ever so pretty. They fuss at it for hours on end, simply for something to do with their time, and now it resembles a complicated wedding cake, all royal-iced, or else a kind of psychotic architecture; a church of bone. It is delicate as jewellery, this shrine, decorated with toe bones and picked-up teeth. The part that might get mistaken for a roof is made in dozens of plunging arches, zigzags turned sideways, cruel at the apex and curving low to French polish. Mice cannot read for toffee, but if one were to look at it a certain way, then perhaps the design might be based upon the letter M, repeated and repeated.
The mouse that is grey like dishwater is hunched at the top of the empty bookcase. She is tired to the death as she shrugs her fur and grooms her little saucer ears. She scrubs at her muzzle and closes her eyes and she wishes that she was not here. From up in the shelving she can see the whole universe, this filthy oblong full of mice and Christmas trimmings, with a stripe against the piano where the mice do not dare go until they come to die. The water-grey mouse has come to that spot many times, and she has seen the forks and spoons in a way that no other has. She has seen the eyeless hunger of them, the relentlessness. They are alien; in another life, a weasel would have seemed less evil. She has seen their jaws snip shut, the gluts and blood in scissor hinges.
Today she lost half her tail; when she escaped she had been too slow. She felt the bite, and when she turned to stare, she saw it snapped in bits by a steak knife. The water-grey mouse clambered a trail of blood all the way from floor to wall to the shelves. Now the bone is white against the raw end, showing through like the letters in a stick of seaside rock. She cannot bring herself to lick it, for it tastes like food. When she opens her eyes again the world is still there. Suddenly, the water-grey mouse discovers that she cannot bear it and she gathers up all the love that she has left and squeezes it into a ball between her paws. She points her face down, towards the piano and its gap, and wonders if she dares creep out and give her body to the cutlery. She lifts her neck and studies the trimmings that hang from the ceiling; garlands cut in one piece from shiny plastic and dragged into fragile, wavering ropes. They could not help her if they wanted to. She scrubs her face again, starts to prepare herself. There are no mice about.
Then the tapping begins. Another mouse is dead. The mice pour from the chimneybreast and gaze up at the water-grey mouse, expectant. The water-grey undertaker looks down at them and is filled with fury at their passive, waiting faces. She drops to the floor, surrounded by silent watching. She grits her jaws into the corpse’s fur and feeds the cutlery again.
She will not drag another to the metal things. May the fairy-lights forgive her, she will pray once more and die. Her eyes are wild now, prophetic; the other mice can see it, and are uneasy.
The body is still among the knives as the dishwater mouse hurls herself into the Christmas tree. The others follow her, half reluctantly, because she has the face of one about to blind herself. Before they can bring themselves to pray, she is ahead of them, and she fixes her mouth against the hurting-hot glass, and she bites. The mice all lean forward; they flinch and then hold steady as the burn sweeps across them like washing soda in the eyes. Her tongue will never work again; the pain turns her pelt outside-in, she is a living streak of electricity, but it hardly matters when one is about to die.
Then is a flash of that other mind; no, more than a flash, the strongest yet, and they cling to it with the teeth of their imaginations. Please.
It works.
There is a shoving at the dining room door, and then a kicking, a battering, and the most enormous creature shoulders in the door; it swings on its hinges with a scrape. The water-grey mouse drops away from the wire, somehow not dead. The fairy lights, with one bulb bitten right off, somehow carry on shining. There is silence. The mice are transfixed, hysterical. Then they run.
They run; they run; they run. They seethe between her feet and over them; they scatter to the hallway, into corners and empty shoes and the pockets of the coats on the coat rack. They squeeze into crevices of every kind, every mouse alone, a narrow string of nerves and joy and panic.
The water grey mouse remains for a little time; she flings herself from the branches of the tree and lands right on this human being’s collarbone. She gazes up at her, wild and balancing with her bleeding tail; there are so many questions and nowhere at all to start. Anyhow, her mouth is just one huge pain now and a squeak is beyond her, so she just stares at her bewildered saviour, and then leaps clear.
Under the piano, the cutlery observes all that has just happened with perfect detachment.
22
Marie
I DON’T KNOW why I kept dreaming of cutlery; at least I didn’t know back then. But sometimes the dreams were strong enough to hurt my teeth, like the grind of a bitten spoon.
In my bed I saw them all, I think, even the posh silver for christenings. There were elegant fish knives worn thin with engraving, ‘EPNS’ stamped behind the cutting edge, and a lithe, pretty pickle fork with an ivory handle. It was slim and pale, and it could jab like an insult, right to the bottom of a heavy glass jar. Sometimes I dreamed of pudding spoons with scoops like scallop shells, which fitted the mouth awkwardly and sometimes cut your lip.
And I began to develop awful headaches, which would come on quick as storms, where it seemed as if my
ear was pierced right through with a kind of grasshopper chirping, like hundreds of tiny voices.
And yet, I was young then, and kind; I was the sort of child who sought out the beauty in small things. I spent a whole hour once with my cheek against the landscape of moss outside the back door, stroking it ever so gently with the round pad of my finger. It was soft as a cheek; every little plant was a fragile tree, green as last winter’s velvet dress. If I could only be a little gentler, a little less frightening, then perhaps I might coax out the creatures that lived among that silky forest. There might be deer, or birds, bright as the thickness of a snapped needle. I was never quite gentle enough; I was very lonely. I tried though, until the air turned mauve and my mother called me in for supper.
I straightened my back then, and braced myself against the outside windowsill. Standing always made me dizzy; perhaps I had vertigo inside me, the chasm between being both so very large and small. For a moment, I stood, giddy, and leaned my head against the pink window; the window that my mother swore was not there. And she swore it, on the few times that I dared to ask, with such a brilliant smile that I concluded that she must be right. Nobody could smile like that unless they were telling the gospel truth.
Pink glass, pink frames, pink in streaks down the stone sill and the limestone skin of our house. The pink window always made my head pound. When the sparkles in my eyes faded I went indoors, heavy as a pocketful of stones.
At the dinner table I was as sad as could be. My mother was in a hostess mood; she chattered like a parrot about string and knitting needles, whilst my grandmother nodded wisely, as if in agreement. What she actually agreed with was not a thing I could guess.
The Knife Drawer Page 8
