The mother was as happy as a flower herself, and she sang as her knees became stiff and the house glowered around her, morose and empty-brained. There was a whole garden’s worth of flowers on the low table: there were sword lilies, and pink things that seemed to be dog roses. The mother paused, frowning at her crop. There were dandelions and daisies and these things here, which were ox-eye. Or ox-tongue. Or ox-bow. And these, these in her hand were yellow, and they smelled of sunshine.
The mother had been forced to widen the top of her vase, for Domestos bottles have stupidly narrow throats. But it was coming up a treat and the table was littering with severings and stumps of flower, and round, spilt jewels of tap water. The mother laid down her hedge clippers, flinching at the noise of metal against the wood.
She kept a surreptitious eye on them, but these were from the scullery, dull idiot things that did not seem to know anything about blood; about eating. She regarded them narrowly for a minute and then remembered that she had been singing. Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.
There were mice behind her, staring into her back like lemon juice in a cut. The bloody mice. She had all but forgotten them, scarred the dining room out of her head. For a couple of blissful years she had amnesia, had sailed between the parlour and the dining room with barely a twist of her nerves. But now they plagued her like flies, fast and impossible to swat. It was clear that she would never trick them into the dining room again. It was a scream. It was a nightmare. After that first awful night, when she feared that she would be raked to death by rodent teeth; after then they were everywhere, accusing, fixing her with their vicious, berry-black eyes.
The mother snatched up a flower and broke its back ramming it into the bottle. Then she half-turned, feinting as if to rush at the mice. The prickling stopped against her back as the mice scattered.
The first weeks had been horrible; she felt like a splitting sausage, gasping and grasping at her belly to keep her insides in, to contain the foul blackness in her that slipped like creosote, tried to ooze through the holes. Some death-like instinct in her wanted her to blurt her whole self, guts and secrets and lymphatic fluids, blurt it all upon the floor and contain herself no longer.
She had not dared speak with Marie for a long time, just in case; she held her daughter in place in her mind, as one might do with a bookmark, so that she should be able to attend to her later. She was a good mother; a protective mother.
The mother knew all this as she glowered from behind her knitting, or when she boxed her daughter in with cornflake packets at the dinner table. It was an act of love, born out of a selfless, motherly devotion. There had been a near miss, a near collision early on, when the mother had spent a bone-scratched day injuring Marie with her eyes, and playing Grandmother’s Footsteps with the wretched mice.
She sat on the loo upstairs, worrying at her nails until they bled, and for a time it seemed as if the world was all how it used to be. In that slice of time, the man who had married her might as well have still been outside the door, prodding at things, digging at her pain like a dentist, making every thing that she did into a wrong thing. She was hot-faced and guilty, waiting to be shown up, and then her innards sank at the thought: he was not even the accuser any more, but the sin, the colossal, colossal wound on her conscience. If he made her a failure in his life, he condemned her by his death. The mother sat on the toilet, and she rocked and sobbed. The mice knew it all, and they made it real. It was real; it was real; oh god it was all real.
When she had pulled herself together that night, and crept streak-faced down the stairs, the mother had made tea. She sat at the table and jotted a note to the milkman, saying two pints gold-top please, and a bottle of Unigate orange juice, and that she was a filthy liar and a rubbish mother and a murderess and persecutor of mice and small things; that she knew the judder that a knife makes when it spits right through a man and catches on the backbone. And that the noise he made was just like a sink full of water, draining with a slice of onion stuck in the plug hole, a comical, gurgling suck. And that she had laughed (imagine that!); laughed and wiped her nose against her flannelette sleeve. And that she was sorry, but there was only one empty left out because the other one had been accidently broken. It had not been until four o’clock in the morning that she understood what she had done; at the mosquito wail of the milk float, she had scalded out of bed and snatched in the letter before the milkman picked it up.
The mother arranged flowers like a savage, drowning the earlier blooms as she shoved new ones on top, crushing them in hard. But yes, as she looked she remembered; they were surely coming on a treat, all pretty and fresh as a garden; why, she might yet stave off the darkness with singing and flowers, and dozens and dozens of mousetraps. After all, she actually spoke to Marie today, with a smile, and eye contact and everything. And Marie had looked back at her and smiled too. Yes, certainly things would be alright. The mother pressed a picking of Love-in-a-Mist against her cheek and beamed for perfect joy.
And when the grandmother came in, she hardly even broke the spell when she demanded that she feed the thing in the garden. For now they had the job off pat; it was barely a chore at all, since the mother had hit upon the notion of funnels.
It had been the work of a minute to widen one of the breathing holes a little, so as to accommodate the thin tube-end. The mother’s heart was hardly leaden at all as she strode out to the back door. The nasty child only ever ate things with a diameter of less than one-and-a-quarter inches; the mother gave her flower trimmings and a packet of Midget Gems, which she dropped down into the hole one by one. There was no particular movement beneath her feet, just a half-hearted scuffling that proved that the thing must still be alive. The mother stood up, wiped her hands on the hips of her dress and smiled. Then she tripped back indoors like a bridesmaid.
The grandmother was in the hallway making distractions, demonstrating to a rabbit-eyed Marie that the beaks of finches are as strong as pliers. Her little girl’s eyes were shining, brimming even; she had a demeanour, the mother thought, of rapture, of a child moved by the ecstasy of learning. She was shaking, even; quite violently shaking at the perfect symmetry of nature. The mother smiled again, fondly and draped her arms around her daughter’s neck and watched a while. So it was true; the beaks of finches really are as strong as pliers. Well, well.
Marie had tottered away by the time the mother returned to her flowers. They lay there for her, patiently wilting, waiting for the transfiguration of a loving hand. The mother considered herself to be rather like the Interflora nymph thing as she settled herself among the leaves and snippings, and began to arrange them. Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.
She spent a happy half hour with her flowers; taking them out, putting them in again, scattering petals like ripped-off butterfly wings. The mice slipped in behind her. Gradually, insidious as fear, the stinging began on her neck, her shoulders, the slings of flesh underneath her arms. Their eyes always got to the bare skin first. Then she felt the staring pincer through her summer dress, the frizz of her hair, small and endless like midge bites. In time, if they all focused at once, the mice could stare right through a winter coat, even through the glass of her spectacles to pin-dig and pain the whites of her eyes.
The mother persevered as best she could, persisted with her flowers and her song, but in time all there was in her brain was the discord of the mice. Her temper snapped, suddenly, ruptured like a tendon; the mother leapt up at them, upsetting the water jug, roaring at them as they scattered. There was only one thing to be done: to go and find the cat.
Thomas might loathe her, but at least he was only one creature. He could never hate her hundreds of times at once, in minutely different ways. And Thomas was the antidote to mice; wherever he was, the mice were not.
The mother stormed about the place, opening doors, looking in cupboards, seeking out her defender. He was in none of the places that she looked. As she opened the front
door, her scalp was crawling with sweat and itches, and her dress was gluing against the hollow of her back. She wrenched the handle sideways, pulled herself outside and smacked the rent man in the chest with her forehead.
There was a moment of confusion as the two of them divided from each other and brushed themselves as though dusted accidentally with flour. The rent man was charming, instantly forgiving, chuckling a little at the slight mishap. He bade the mother a courteous ‘Hello’, face glistening. His eyes were blue; a very pale shade as though they had been boiled. Before he had quite completed his sentence, she had turned and escaped, leaving him on the step, beaming into thin air. Half a minute later, and she reappeared, aiming a newly-lip-sticked grin at the middle of his forehead. She held an envelope between her two hands, pendulous with coins inside, and she proffered it at the rent man with ineffectual jabs until he took it from her.
A wave of small talk blew against her face like cigarette smoke, and then the rent man was gone, hitching up the waistband of his trousers and rolling off towards his car. The cat was on the garden wall, absorbing sun with his tail curled up along his side. He stood up, stretched his back, and slouched out of reach as the mother came up to grab him.
Irritable, stamping her slippers as she went, the mother returned indoors, to where her bouquet lay sidelong on the carpet. The mice were busy as only mice can be, rearranging the stems, forming flowers into a large and fragrant arrow, which pointed exactly at the mother, where she stood with her jaw hanging. Marie was open mouthed as well, and standing in the parlour; she looked down at the arrow, then behind her at the fleeing mice, and then finally up at her mother.
‘Mind your own business,’ said she, and then she stalked away.
26
Mice
AS THEY RECALL their fundamental nature, the mice are finding things that they seem to know. They quickly discovered that they had told each other fibs, for the frizz-haired mother did not stream flames from her fingertips like a petrol lighter at all. Death did not issue, unbidden from her lips, only the hollow clapping, the whoops and cusses that human beings use in the place of squeaking.
She smelled like an animalish thing, a thing made of flesh only. She was neither ethereal nor eternal. She was no hellish ghost, not like the albino prophet of centuries ago. She smelled of cooking fat and strong tea. She smelled afraid; she smelled very afraid. She flapped her hands, she rolled her eyes and squawked at them. The first new litter of that fresh age slipped into being in the sweaty cup of a slipper, emerald green and stolen. The first new mouse-mother found that her offspring were clamouring to be born as she danced on the not-a-mother-god’s flat mountain of a bed. She was part of that strange moment, savage and peaceful; she was part of that overthrowing, until her belly tightened and she began to push.
Now, mice are private creatures and they give birth in squalid nurseries, out of the reach of prying muzzles. A female in pup is even a little aggressive, greedy for the moment of life-giving, selfish with her love. She shuns the others; the others shun her, until the young creep out of their nest to scuttle along their own life-spans. Not that night; there was a moment of rareness, for these are children that would belong to all of them.
The mice jumped down like weightless things, landing on the mat that the not-god mother sinks her feet against every morning, when she sighs and forces herself from her bed. The female mouse, shuddering already with the pain and giving of labour, was pulled in the slipper like a May Queen on a flower cart, making children even as her nest was dragged into the gap below the wardrobe.
The mice left her to her labouring, then, underneath the oblong protection of the closet, with its walnut veneer and bulbous Victorian feet. She curled her children around the knot of her tail, a Holy Family amongst the swathes of dust-fleece and a lost baby’s bootee from years ago. Her exhausted joy, her welling love and the pups’ first whimpers were things done in secret, drowned out by the snoring of the frizz-haired mother. And, even though the mouse-mother tried, she could not hear the metal slide of the cutlery from the dining room. That was the start of the new times.
As with all kinds of creature, it has been the youngest who have adjusted the most rapidly. For the children, the culture shock has been only a tremor, a tremble on their constantly trembling lives. For the mouselings, the universe merely unfolded like a miracle, from the misery of the dining room and mother’s milk that reeked of cannibal meat, to this heaven. It is a beautiful thing, but only as astounding as living a life without eyes until reaching the fourteenth day and discovering how to open them, suddenly not-blind. It is only as amazing as being born at all, plucked from among the atoms of nothing that swirl between the dust motes, and wrapped in flesh and mewling skin and pushed into thin air.
The young mice bite into every soft place like sparks; they possess every little space exactly, with perfect confidence, for their inheritance, always due, has come. They are only home; the universe is theirs as it always should have been: from cellar to rafters and east to west. And it is the young pups too who have recently been born with memories that are not theirs. It is as if the house, with its huge carpeted geography, has been absorbed by them, by their foetal whiskers. When the mice first stumble to their paws, static-sparked with fear and questions, they already know where to run and what to be afraid of.
The maps of the very oldest took some little time to unfurl; for a few days they tagged along behind the very youngest, those most arrogant and wise. And they gave thanks to the fairy lights and the childling. But now, after a week, a month, the pups have begun to turn to their elders with demands: ‘Where,’ they ask, ‘Where is the childling?’ Is she not their rescuer, the huge thing once saved by the love of mice? Yes, perhaps she is watching; yes, she will surely rise up soon, but where is she?
And this nags at the mice, unnerves them, for it was their love that gave them deliverance from all their suffering. Their hope was in the god that does not wish to kill them, that the childling should come from the fairy lights somehow, to shove in the door; yet it was not the childling who rescued them.
The memories of mice, the little minds of a whole race, have shaped a picture of their childling. She is gigantic and small, somehow; her hair is like coal dust. Her body is white, unfurred, without tail. To care for a childling, one must wrap her in cloths, as though she carries a nest about her shoulders. The childling smells like a laundry basket.
‘But Mama, where is my childling?’ Gradually the euphoria of freedom and space and far too much to eat, wears away and they wonder. ‘Where is the childling? Where is she?’ And the very wisest ask this: what if the exodus itself was only a further test? Why, if they were to sit back upon their haunches and rest, might their ease actually undo the work of their loving? Faith is all very well, but mice need to love, to have a thing to love.
Loving is the reason for mice. It is only love that might save them, redeem them from their ancient murder and the albino’s prophecy (curse his name and the womb that he crawled from). Only love might be enough to save them from eternal knives and the sort of fire that has a whole house to live in; the sort of death that might destroy every mouse alive, all in one moment.
‘But Mama, where is my childling?’ And in time, the mice begin to search. Quickly, they uncover the playroom that their ancestors made for her, and they snuff in the sweetness and decay like a rare and scared incense. But their childling is not there, and somehow they can get no further. It is a puzzle.
Mice are tiny creatures, and they live out tiny lives. A mouse will rarely set his claws fifty feet from the hovel he was weaned in. All the mice truly comprehend is their house; the garden is an ocean, wide and treacherous, infested with half-mythical demons, with owls and stoats and thousand-year-old terrors. They remember that the childling is beneath; the mouselings tell them this much, but beneath what? What does beneath mean? Where is the childling?
The mice want to ask the frizz
-haired mother. They follow her, they plague her, they ask and ask and ask her where their own one is, what she did with her? They ask her other things too: why does she hate them so; why she injures little things; why she infected the house with the spirit of murder. They barely remember the human corpse any longer; that has slipped away, eclipsed by the smaller tragedies of mice. But why must she trap them, kill them, fling their corpses into the dining room, as if that place had not tortured them enough. Why has she made a cat come to their house, to break their necks though they have done no harm to anyone? And the mice want to know: where, where is the childling? They only want her to explain, perhaps to apologise; they do not repay hate with its like, whatever the mother might think.
The mice know well the horror of a moment’s lost control, which an age of regret may not erase. Coiled inside every mouse, along with their maps and garbled folklore, is a nugget of guilt about the albino’s burning. They know it as well as the face of their dear childling, and understand it just as badly. They ask the mother their questions, but all she does is stamp her feet at them. Eventually, at a loss, they resolve to ask Marie.
27
Marie
THE DAY THE winter took hold, I knelt at my mother’s feet whilst she pulled a comb through my hair. I could hear the minute sound of strands stretching, or pulling loose from my head, snarling up amongst the red plastic teeth. Presently she left off combing and began to part my hair in two with the comb’s thin corner, pressing so carefully hard that I feared she might actually slice my scalp.
From here on the floor, I could see under the table, and the small space beneath the stove, where a mousetrap had been wedged. As often as I could, I would lie on my side with my eye to the gap, and I would push the point of a pencil into the mechanism, shuddering at the snap. Always, I would imagine how a little body would break under that metal crack. My mother never found out that I used to save the mice. It would have made her cross. The linoleum floor was cold against my folded legs, and slightly greasy.
The Knife Drawer Page 10
