The Knife Drawer

by Padrika Tarrant

  But when I had it all positioned I grew afraid again, for there were slits in the ceiling just above, and it seemed fit to cave in at any second. In the end I resolved to sleep in the middle of the room, away from those uncertain cabbage roses and the spore infested patches of brown.

  But the house missed me, and when I crept to bed that night I felt it mourning like an unfed dog, shaking the air with huge great sobs. I suppose that was good. At least it showed that something recognised that I cared for it. I hurt myself getting the bed back where it had started, and then I sat with my back against it where it could feel me; I sat for a long time with my spine stretched and aching.

  After an hour, it seemed to notice that I was there, and the house ceased its lamenting. When I stood up I was stiff and slow of thought, and cold as a mildewed window frame.

  It was an effort to bend at knee and elbow as I winced down those night-time stairs, for now it one in the morning. By then I often left my room at night. Perhaps I had become accustomed to being afraid; still I would hold my breath and steal around the corners like my own shadow, like my own ghost.

  Looking back, I am never sure quite when my mother began her metamorphosis. Maybe it was that exact moment; between me shifting my bed and sleeping. I took a breath at the parlour door before I walked in. The light was on, just as I had left it; my mother was still perched upon her red chair, knitting amidst a drift of dishcloths with her eyes intent, concentrating on nothing at all. Her lips were moving faintly, rapidly, as if she were trotting out a memorised Bible page. I came up to her, very close, and I crouched before my mother and put a kiss against her cheek.

  She blinked at that like an astonished baby and turned her face towards me with her eyes huge and dark. I recall starting a little, watching her and trying to remember, holding her still with my hand against her jaw. My mother had used to have blue eyes, blue like mine. I think she did.

  I doubted myself, but then shook my head and decided that it did not matter, for surely it did not. It was no use puzzling, I thought, as there was no proof, no photographs to look at. That was how we lived; there were no means to measure our world against, nothing real to match it to. My mother’s eyes were the almost-black of a burnt stove, and quick and bright as perfect fear, and she gazed at me with a question that had no words, nor any answer. She looked into my eyes for longer than I could bear, and then her gaze dawdled back to her knitting. As secretly as I could, I stole a dishcloth from her hoard. I would take it to the kitchen and unravel it later, so as to make fresh string for her knitting.

  Our hours of sleep had soon grown muddled; so lonely was I that I would rather sit up with my empty mother than go about the house by daylight. She had, by degrees, become a nocturnal creature. I missed her. Whatever had happened, whatever the mice said, she was my mother.

  As she knitted I stroked her hair, which seemed to have grown finer these days, less prone to frizz. Perhaps it was that she no longer dyed it, or wrenched at it with a hairbrush; for whatever reason, it was softer now, almost silky, and I think that she liked for me to run my fingers against it.

  There was a new trembling to my mother, a jitter that seemed to emerge from her skeleton itself, the bone replaced by nerves and stalks of wire. I turned my fingers, laid the back of my hand against her forehead and then her arm. ‘Mother,’ said I, ‘Are you cold?’ The sound of talking against that silence shocked me.

  And it scared the mice; I heard the scrit of their feet, the scuttle of them against the shadows and corners. I turned my head, saw the light glancing off their spun-glass whiskers. The mice had grown strange to me; there was a fury in them now that made them brittle and mean, and they seemed to see straight through me. They would sit so long and glower at my mother, that they would surely have starved had I not brought them food. The mice would have stared at my mother until one or other of them perished from sadness or hunger. I knew what ailed them, even then. It was what we had found in the garden; what we had not found. It was the aloneness that walked forever at my side. It was what they had hoped to find, but lost. But I had nobody to speak this understanding to, and so it was neither here nor there. I was such a lonely child.

  Perhaps my mother shook from cold. I braved the hallway and kitchen lino and made my way to the back of the scullery where the coal was poured each month in a smoky avalanche, back in the days when someone knew how to order coal. It was so silent that I could not bear to puncture that spell with the grate and scrape of the coal shovel. Instead I took some lumps from the pile with my fingers and carried them back in the folded sling of my dress, along with newspaper and a bundle of spiteful kindling, all points and splinters.

  I was forbidden to light the fire, and even that night I was doubtful, flinching and unsure as I laid the things out on the hearthstone. I scanned my mother’s face, tried to gauge her mood, some reflex or gratitude or disapproval. There was no flicker, even after a long wait, so I began to untie the kindling-sticks, thinking of pick-up sticks, thinking of drawing in the kitchen grease beneath the table with a spent match, sitting under the larger universe of onion chopping. There had been another there.

  I made a tiny pyre in the grate, tried to make well up with flame. I had seen my mother do this a thousand times, but it was so frustrating that it made me weep. After a finicky half-hour I got it alive, and arranged with coal like the miniature gardens that I used to make. And then, in the small hours, I patted the wall with my hands to keep the house company until I fell asleep.

  I slept, and woke, and stroked my mother, whose eyes were a bright midnight, who looked at me without the least comprehension. And then I must have begun to sleep again, for suddenly there was a battering at the front door.

  The sun was halfway up the sky when I opened the door to the rent man. I had not one word to say out loud. He did not seem interested, just beamed at me with a faceful of teeth, and he snatched my hand to kiss it. I ran away.

  I fled before the rent man in a spinning panic, with no thought but being wherever he was not, but then it dawned on me that he had turned left, had gone into the parlour. I stopped dead, mouth hanging, but then there was a strange noise from upstairs, as though the window had been opened from without, as if such a thing were possible.

  And I suppose it must have been possible, for my grandmother then strode round the turn in the corridor, pulling her overcoat around her nicely, as though she had just climbed in through.

  I was so relieved to see her. If I had been a different child, had we all been different people, I might have buried myself in her arms. I might have even cried a little, as children will, and my grandmother might have held me close. She might have told me that it would all be alright. She might have said, ‘Marie, be brave!’ We were not this sort of people.

  But she rescued us all the same. My grandmother strode down the stairs, towards the voice of the rent man who was talking to my mother like an orator practising a speech before a mirror. The rent man’s voice was resonant, fruity as a spoonful of marmalade. I counted a slow ten before I went in to join her, and another ten besides because I was a coward.

  Before I could control my quailing heart, the rent man was back in the hallway, perfectly charming and utterly furious, with an envelope hanging from his fingers and the other hand digging his pocket for his car keys. He informed my grandmother that he was delighted to see her looking so very well; my grandmother informed the rent man that he was too, too kind and that he really must make time for a chat one of these days.

  And with that, he was gone, just as emphatically as if he had been picked up by the scruff and britches and thrown. Then my grandmother nodded to me and marched off to her attic kingdom with her joints cracking like greenwood on a fire. The door thumped shut upstairs, and I tiptoed forwards to close the front door.

  Then I returned to my mother and fussed about, pulling a cardigan around her shoulders as if it were a cloak of invisibility. She looked r
ight into my face and held up a dishcloth. My mother was as soft and loose as a kid glove, but inside she was an empty canister, or else a sardine can with no key. ‘Mother,’ said I, ‘are you hungry?’ And so saying, I went to find us all food.

  I hated the pantry. That metal cemetery was a dismal sight. It was stacked with rows and rows of tin cans, six or seven high, until the shelves themselves had bowed beneath their weight. At the very back, oval slabs of jellied ham gathered rust with cling peaches in Prince’s tins, and they could probably have only been fetched down with the use of a ladder. Nearest the walls, most of the labels had bleached right out, or else gone so musty and soft that their contents were a deep mystery.

  One huge tin had waited in the pantry for as long as I could remember; it was a monster that must have held half a gallon, with one side bashed in and no label at all. I stood on tiptoe; the embossing at the top seemed to read a word, but it was a foreign word, and meant nothing at all to me.

  Over years, the crimping at the edge had decayed, and today I saw that a thick black liquid, like molasses or some dreadful syrup, had begun to creep from it and right down the wall like a nasty secret. It oozed like the hour hand on a clock, slow and revolting and quite unstoppable. I hadn’t the stomach to wipe it up, to smear it against the shelf and paintwork, so I let it alone. I took a tin of potatoes in brine, and I came away.

  I came back through the hall with saucers for my mother, for the mice and for me. I had found that if I laid out a meal, only just out of reach, then my mother would sniff and nibble through a little food. And so would the mice; hateful and hard as they were, they still needed to eat.

  But at the door I dropped it all in horror. The mice, in my absence, had crawled right up to my mother, crawled right over her shoulders and head and the top of her glasses, and they were gnawing off her hair, gathering it in their paws like some vile harvest. I went a little wild.

  Leave her alone!’ I shouted, and I swept my mother free of them with my hands. The mice all escaped me, but only so far away as they knew I could not reach. There they sat with hair in their paws, clever like crows; like needles; like throwing-darts.

  48

  The Mother

  THIS IS HOW it feels to become another kind of beast. This is how it feels to have one’s soul shaken to liquid and poured into a new mould. This is how it feels to become a mouse. The mother is discovering a different kind of time in which the thread of life slips through the noose of an eternal now, in which every beat of the pulse is just a drumming to ward off death.

  The mother is discovering the sort of fear that gives life and ending to the very smallest things. A creature is limited in time by fear, is made and unmade by it, and the mother is oh-so frightened. Her life is evolving like fermenting dough, is becoming terribly quick, fast as the passing of clouds next to the slow footsteps of people.

  The mother can hear her own heart, and it sounds like an hourglass, pattering for a little time before it spills out silence. The mother is discovering how it is to live one’s life as flames do.

  The mother is speechless. She is afraid, and now her fear will not conform to words. She is afraid instead with her ears and eyes, with the deafening odours that are blinding her poor nose. The mother has discovered that speaking is meaningless, that all the mouth might achieve are hollow claps and whoops, noise that rings with all the sense of a slamming door.

  This afternoon, Marie came to the mother and put her face very close. She smelled of powdered toothpaste and the air from the back bedroom. She had knelt for a long time with the mother’s paw clasped between her own, and had spoken and spoken, fallen silent and then spoken again, as if the mother had been supposed to respond, as if she should have moved her mouth and groaned in reply.

  It has been such a time, this oozing between universes. The minds of women and mice are fashioned on such differing scales. The shift between the two is dizzying, where pattern and texture mean so much more than explanations, than justifications.

  The mother is growing the morals of a mouse, and excuses are useless. She sees it now, plain as death. She is an evil thing. She is a laughing hurt-maker, a genocide of mice. She has scraped up all the truth of mousehood, all the love and beauty of it, and has offered it in sausage-fingers to owls.

  Yes. She has killed a man, and thousands others at the thud of her slippers, but what is more she has doomed the household to perish. At the thought the mother’s hands flitter in front of her, close upon her knitting. But even knitting is of no avail, for her nest is never finished; the pile of dishcloths is never larger. Perhaps Marie is stealing them. Even so, the mother knits as if knitting might save her, as her heart and mind grow small and truly formed, and she tastes what she has done.

  The mother sees her nasty child now as they do, as the childling, beloved one of mice. She finds that the smell of her and the lick of her skin is written in her new brain. She discovers the purity, the massive weakness of the childling and she cannot bear it. She knows how it has been to be lost from that childling, source of hope, for such a forever, and she comprehends the agony that bit them when they knew her to be truly gone.

  The mother shuts her eyes and is astounded at the suffering of mice, the slightness of their lives and their very great tragedy. Now she knows that she must have given the childling to owls, for she feels the ache of Judas across her neck, even if she cannot quite recall the details. The mother has learnt to know herself as the mice know her. She knows the mice too, as they do not wish to be known, and the albino sings in her ears as much as in theirs.

  The mother sees that redemption is lost, and if she could then she would claw back through history to save that child, or claw through her own breast to uncover the secret of where she put the body. And in this new sort of now that does not quite have a future or past, the corpse of a husband and child might easily become each other, or else exchange themselves for the trillion ruined mice from traps, every one thrown in sacrifice to metal things.

  Now the mother knows the feel of a life carved up by kitchen scissors and roasting forks, and she knows the sound her own body would make if it were split to soup by knives. The mother’s jaw hangs slack, for she is Satan.

  The Crying Boy has slipped between the cushion and the arm of the chair, and all that can be seen of him is his gilt-brushed frame. It hardly matters, for now the Crying Boy would mean nothing to her, not against the cryings of an entire civilisation. If only she had known, the mother would have been different. If she had known, perhaps she would have made an effort not to be born. Perhaps she might have grasped her way up from flesh and into air, to have only been a sigh on the wind.

  And while the mother’s body is yet that of a woman, with great arms and legs like timbers, her mind has made its metamorphosis complete. And, now the mice have more magic to work upon her, a revenge more perfect and precise, and so the final change is coming. For it seems her eyes are growing black, with neither white nor iris. Now her ears are unfurling and acute, hurtingly sensitive like the ears of newborn mice.

  And perhaps her shape hovers more uncertainly around her skin. To look at her, one might think the mother very much smaller. She seems to harbour another self within her, a little trembling terrified self that it absorbing all the realness that she used to embody. She is becoming a tiny thing, made of lead and misery.

  Marie is not here; perhaps she is shivering in her bed, trying to sleep. Perhaps it is four in the morning; all there is to know is that the garden is dark at the window and the bulbs are burning in the parlour. The mother lifts her snout to that blue-black nothing-place and she cannot believe that she condemned her own childling there. Her own pup.

  The mother regards those starred skies and knows for sure that she must have been in league with owls, with death herself, with the forces against the god that does not wish to kill mice. But now it seems that this god is gone, or else he has forsaken them all. They were
not worthy after all; now they will suffer the fate that the albino mouse sang from the grate. The mother dips her face again, shakes her silky head. Her cardigan is growing loose around her.

  The mice have been very busy with the mother, perfecting their spell. The job is arduous, and not without cost; some mice have even dropped in the middle of their magicking. When all of a mouse’s fear is spent, then he is no longer a mouse but a furry husk, and so he dies. The mice are giving themselves, projecting terror at the mother, channelled and pure and terrible, and this is how they make her a mouse. The dead lie where they fall, for the dining room door is fast shut.

  By now they have gathered all of her that they need: the mice have gnawed the mother’s hair from her head in clumps, and have bitten her fingernails to round stumps. They even tried to get a tooth loose, but the mother had squealed at that and Marie came running. It doesn’t really matter; they have samples of slipper and cardigan. They have stolen away her wedding ring and several eyelashes, and the effigy that they are making is a curious thing.

  It is small and mean and hidden in the empty guts of the red armchair. It is not quite a mother, and not quite a mouse, but an animal in flux, pulled to stretching between one and the other.

  She can feel that effigy beneath her backside, beneath the flat cushion that is stained with disappointment and tea. It is sucking her down into itself, forming her skin over its voodoo bones. She can feel the pang of those Polo-round eyes, the tiny dressing gown that forms a kind of pelt. The cord from it has grown nerves and strings within its length; it is finding a life of its own, a twist and flex and flick of its own. And the claws are toenails and the limbs are plaited hair, and it feels as evil a creature as might find it in its heart to murder a childling, or a host of harmless mice.