The poor mother. She is clinging to her self; with the tips of her knitting needles she is clinging, but it is quite useless. Her nose is rather long already and her ears are rather round.
Now, Marie has come in and she is hacking her way into a can with a blunt tin opener, and the parlour is slicked with the luscious odour of peas. The mother sits up, haunches stiff. The white haired child gathers food into dishes and lays one carefully on the arm of the red chair. Another is tucked into the space behind the laundry basket, where the mice might thieve at it in privacy.
The mother twitches her muzzle, gawps at those green balls, eyes sidelong, wondering if she dares. Marie is crouching very still, lip between teeth, fingers curled, as the mother creeps forwards in the chair to take a pea. Marie gasps at the same time, and the mother is startled, dish upended, one pea between her two hands. It smells like an orchestral symphony as the mother holds that pea in all her fingers at once and nibbles it to nothing.
And, although her daughter coos and hoots and flaps her mouth, the mother can never be happy again, and huge human tears begin to roll from her eyes and soak into the mouse-bitten layers of dressing gown and cardigan. She gazes at Marie’s eyes and is confused, for this child is so huge and so strange. Who knows what a creature like that might think about.
And the parlour grows as massive as a country, tie-dyed with smells, with a moonless plaster sky, and no hope at all. Not even a little.
49
Child
THE GARDEN IS vivid with sunlight, with fragrance and moving sky. The robin and the starlings are huddled like refugees in the cherry tree, which is jewelled all over with sour bloody fruit. The robin is shaking his feathers and shivering, and the starlings are staring wanly at the mud. None will look at his fellows, for every one is dull with fear. Each bird condemns his fellows with his silence. Birds are not by nature brave, for one needs a soul as trembling as leaves are, if one is to fly. Birds are all made of anxiety and feathers, and little more besides.
For the pit in the vegetable patch is empty, empty as a broken egg and plain as a confession. The secret child has fledged from her dark and underground nest; the birds all held their tiny tongues and watched as she unfolded herself and stole away. And they kept their voices silent as she slunk into the space beyond, past the garden and their territories. The secret child went bravely there, to where those other birds will murder any fool who flutters in their patch.
But the secret child is not a bird, no matter how she fledged, and she hasn’t wings for fluttering anyhow. She will be fine. And who knows, perhaps the garden birds have seen her a time or two since, watched her foraging or sleeping under drifts of leaf and scrub. Perhaps they have not seen her at all, for they are not telling.
The grandmother, queen and tyrant of the garden, has demanded their knowledge, has demanded on pain of misery that they give up every thing they saw. She will kill them if she must, she will snatch up the very weather and shake it in their faces, for she does not know where the secret child is. For their part the songbirds have stood their ground for the very first time. They are half dead already, from dread and apprehension.
But here she comes now, striding in from nowhere like the cruel north wind. Her mouth is a crack between boulders and her arms are crossed over her chest. She plants herself in the middle of the lawn and then lifts a hand for all of them to see. Then she jabs her finger at the ground and speaks. ‘Here.’
Then come the songbirds, from every corner and hiding place with their eyes rolling and blinking, obedient like mechanical nightingales. In a trice there are dozens of them, flapping and hopping on the grass. The lawn is a cage.
There is the pied wagtail, still for once in his life, white and black and thin as a hamstring; there is a guilty magpie who thinks his very soul is visible. The arrogant wren is silenced now, and the guttersnipe starlings glitter with terror. And so the grandmother stands among them in her crocheted cape, her anger withering the grass around her feet. Still they will not look up at her, respect her with their gaze; she might strip out their throats but she will not force them to betrayal.
Now, history is made, for until today the birds might never have stood up to her in a hundred years. The grandmother could simply have snapped one out from among that stranded flock and read him; his mind and his uncertainty and his wishes, all in a moment. It seems that now things are different, for all that she has to use on them is force. So she drags on the universe like a cigarette, heaves together heaven and earth, so that she might cling to her shape a little longer.
When a creature is twisted out of earthly matter, made not born, such things are spells of a sort, living and walking spells. Spells exist only in the mind of the one that wished them up; when that mind itself is unwritten, the incantation is slowly lost, though it takes some little time to burn away. This heals the world and helps maintain the balance of things; for if all the growingness of nature became knotted up in immortals then there might never be a springtime again. The songbirds keep their faces towards the ground as the daylight seeps away and they feel this change, this subtle unmagic.
The grandmother feels it too and her core is cold and furious. She makes a fist and the magpie falls dead, but her strength is no use now, for she might only slaughter them. She might strike each down, one by frightened one, and only achieve a heap of cooling carcasses. So they stand, peasants and ruler, for hours as the clouds whip overhead and the leaves on the cherry tree writhe in the wind.
This is how the house sees them, each pinned in its place, and although the house cannot comprehend what it sees, it observes the lines of fault and mortar in her. Her edges are coming loose and there is daylight in between. Even so, she is powerful, stronger and stronger as her form grows indistinct. She might become the very sky; she will be God before she dies. Still, when she wheels round to scowl at the house, it does not drop its windowed stare.
The grandmother’s smile is like a gale and she lifts her fist to smite, to bring it falling down; it looks simply back at her, wondering how it would be to die. Somehow the grandmother seems to change her mind a little; she has seen her granddaughter come to the kitchen. And with her little face low and tears against her cheek, Marie potters past the window to the sink. The grandmother sees her there, and something in the old witch softens.
So the grandmother flats her fist instead, and with a silent laugh she stirs her open palm against the sky. The house knits its roof and the birds all stand miserable as the air begins to chime with snow. Summer bleeds away by moments until the garden is naked with cold, and frostbite brittles the flowers.
The garden crystallises around the cherry tree as the songbirds struggle to free themselves, to escape, to beat away into the whitening air. And with a bow, and after spreading out her arms to them all like some wicked saint, she leaves them to their secret and the ice. She makes hardly a footprint at all as she marches to the back door, to present the snowing to Marie like some curious gift.
50
Marie
SO WE SLEPT; we woke; we slept again, and our various hours were infested, I suppose, by each of our own kind of suffering. I closed the curtains in the parlour and left the bulbs lit so as not to be tormented by the daylight and the nights. For what use is either with no routine to pin against them, with no mother to order you to bed, nor to wish you good morning? Without a parent, none of this means a thing, and meal times never happened any more, and the fire was my only comfort outwith when the dark stole in.
So I slept when I was tired, and when I was awake I watched my mother and the mice, anxiously watched over them and tried to spot their needs, tell from them the symptoms of cold and hunger. In my way I tried to keep our little household afloat. The next time that the rent was due, my grandmother had come to me in the morning and shoved an envelope into my pocket without a single word. With it I had managed to fend off the rent man and his glistening face, and I had b
een relieved.
The parlour gathered shadows and cobwebs by the day, it seemed, and the carpet beneath the window-bay grew damp and nasty. The paint picked away at the sash joints, and the house took to humming to itself from time to time, as though its great dumb mind was beginning to unhinge.
My mother knitted and sighed, and she looked at me sometimes with her huge black eyes. Over time, so gradually that it took me days to realise it, her breathing grew more rapid, and finally when I pressed my wrist against her chest, I could feel her heart racing.
I thought that perhaps my mother might have a fever, and so I emptied the first aid cupboard; there wasn’t a cure for what ailed my mother, but I did find a bottle of Veno’s at the back, the syrup turned thick and bitty.
My mother hadn’t a cough, of course, but even so I thought there would be no harm in giving her a dose. At least she might see that I was trying to help her. All my mother would do for me was turn her face to mine and look, as stupid as a china Pierrot.
I bore the bottle back downstairs and washed a dirty spoon from the sink, but then I stopped, chewing at my lip. What if I was to overdose her? Who was to say what manner of spoon it should be? The egg spoon in my hand was minute and exquisite, with a complicated pattern engraved upon the handle. But that was surely much too small. I pushed up my sleeve and rummaged among the mouldy plates again.
A minute later I had acquired a teaspoon, a jam spoon, a great metal serving thing and a plastic one for weaning babies. I hung back, wondering which I should choose. Eventually I settled for the jam spoon with its flat shovel end and took it off to the parlour, feeling dishwater grease on my fingers.
I had to drive the mice from my mother again, for they were advancing on her like children playing Mister Wolf. I shooed them in a dull sort of way, because they did not respect me and did not care if I waved my hands. The mice would always come back.
And so it was that I tried to give my mother medicine. I oozed it from the bottle like oil; it took an age and my hands were none too steady any more. When the spoon was spilling-full, I lifted it to her face.
She blinked, but did nothing to accept the spoon. I pushed it at her but she did not open her mouth, and suddenly I was frustrated beyond endurance, and I could have screamed out loud as I forced it to her lips.
But the curious thing was that her face was harder to place than it should have been, and somehow I missed altogether. I misjudged and spilt it in my mother’s lap without even touching her teeth. Veno’s drooled over her wrist, or that is to say it should have done; instead that sticky layer dithered at the surface like ink on soap scum. I left the spoon on the carpet, stuck among the hairs and mouse fur.
I stared at my mother, at the vacuum of her eyes, stared so hard that it made my head hurt, for suddenly she seemed equivocal, blurred as though she sat behind a smeared sheet of plastic. And when I reached out my hand for her, she flinched and I felt my fingers slide through the muscle of her cheek and out the other side. The sensation was vile.
And the mice had crept right up to her again, intent as assassins, so insidious that they were nearly on her lap when I noticed. Or at least, where her lap seemed to be, where her dressing gown folded limply over nothing much. ‘Oh mother,’ said I, and she turned again, looked right at me.
And because there was nothing to say, I went to the fire and stoked it, but it only turned to white ash and dull red like something dying. And I straightened, unstuck the spoon from the floor and tramped out to the scullery for coal. And as I faced the coal heap, huge and heavy and black, I wondered how long it might last. I also wondered just what I might do when it was gone. I chose five precious pieces and stood, trying to be courageous. Then the back door opened in the kitchen and my grandmother came in, stamping her boots and chuckling to herself.
I went to greet her. She had crow feathers in her hair, stuck through a lead-coloured knot at the nape of her neck. ‘Marie,’ said my grandmother, ‘see, it is snowing for you!’ And she moved aside for me to look.
It was. Great goose-feather flakes were spiralling in the air, collecting on the patio and the bramble leaves, in the tender folds of rose petals. The garden was full of birds, fluffed into balls inside their plumage, faces downcast, none of them singing. I half turned, perplexed. ‘But Grandmother,’ I said, ‘it is June.’
But she had vanished, gone whistling up the stairs. The garden was beautiful, bluing with the coming nightfall, dizzy with the falling snow, and utterly alien. I stood until I hurt with the cold and then I remembered my mother and fled to the parlour.
The mice all started, guilty as I came through the door, but resolute also, as if they had completed some hateful task that they would never apologise for. They settled once more out of my reach.
My mother was gone, melted to nothing but her clothing and her soiled slippers; her glasses lay abandoned in the chair, not even folded. I let my hands drop, felt the weight of coal in my pockets. And then I perceived a little mouse half-hidden amongst knitting, cowering in the yarn’s grey shade, shivering hard. She did not run for a corner but perched very still, gazing into my face, shedding gigantic tears.
I let my breath out very slowly and sat on the floor, cough mixture underneath my palm, and I looked back at this mouse, tried to convince myself that this was not my mother. Of course it was.
She was tiny, frail as rotted cotton, and a perfect hair-dye brown. She tilted her little face to me, squinting as though she could not quite focus. Then she scurried over to her glasses and put her face against a windowpane of lens, and I crouched very low so that we could study one another. ‘Mother,’ said I, ‘are you a mouse?’
She seemed to nod, although perhaps I imagined it. I put my hand out to my mother, very gently, very carefully, and she let me pick her up, shaking all the while. I raised my mother to my face and she brushed my cheek with her whiskers. I was so grateful.
And then I turned to all the mice, at their needlepoint eyes, the black light of them, and I would have liked to say something, some challenge or reproach; but really there was nothing to be said. They had done this thing, but perhaps I could not blame them.
I cupped my mother against my chest and went into the dustbin in the kitchen for a box to put her in. When she was safe inside an empty packet of tea I stood and thought, then had an inspiration and rushed up the stairs. In my bedroom, I heaved apart the piles of toys until I uncovered my old dolls’ house.
It was a large thing, made in thick board and hinged in the middle. The roof was tiled in tile-print Fablon and the carpets were stuck-on felt, and down the joint at the centre there ran a staircase with a row of banisters, matchstick-thin. A postage-stamp picture was glued to the wall, and a piece of tinfoil was the bathroom mirror.
I carried it down to the kitchen, feeling its cheap walls bow beneath my hands, and I put it on the table amongst the spilled sugar and crumbs. I was nervous as I opened my mother’s box, but she did not seem offended as I dropped her into her new house.
As my mother explored, I made her a matchbox bed with Andrex blankets. I gave her some string, just in case she wanted to make a nest with it, and I put a tiny thimble-dish of cracker bits on her kitchen table. Last of all I made her a stockade fence in cardboard and Sellotape, so that the mice might not torment her further.
Before I stuck on the roof, I lifted my little mother and dried her tears with the edge of a handkerchief large enough to be her shroud. Then I kissed my mother’s delicate back and shut her up inside.
After that I went to my bed and slept for hours and hours and hours.
51
Mice
THE JOB WAS hard for the mice, and costly too, for thirteen little lives were all spent out with that dark voodoo. Now it is done and they must each shake themselves and polish their whiskers like creatures emerging from a trance. Their hate had been a septic thing; now it is lanced and poured away in a nasty trickle. M
ice are hardly made for hating, although despair suits them well enough.
All that they have now is despair, for the prophet spoke the truth and all hope is at an end. But in the meantime, what is there to do but live? The only thing that they might keep is a little love, and a flame of that might at least keep them warm until damnation makes warmth into blaze and kills them all.
And so the mice turn to each other now and embrace their sisters and mothers as mice will, with nuzzles and light touches of whisker and paw. A piebald, patchwork mouse goes wearily back to her nest and holds her mouselings close; she feeds and soothes them as best she can.
Every night for the days of their childhood, the mother will brood over them and whisper the lore of mousehood, of deaths that mice will suffer, of the fates and tragedies of small things. This is the way of mice; this has been the tradition since men made fire and built walls around themselves, since mice have stowed away in corners. Tonight the doctrine will be different. Tonight the piebald mouse shall tell her infants that they are cursed.
So it is that the piebald mouse nurses her mouse-children and then takes a huge breath. Then she tells them how much she loves them as she starts to break their hearts.
The other mice, among them one that is the grey-black of pencil-lead, stand together and gaze around the parlour at all of nature’s bounty. There are curtains and skirtings, and great plains of carpet; there are corners and underneaths enough to comfort the soul. There is a dish of canned tomatoes behind the washing basket and enough electric flex to wear the teeth short for a thousand years.
Thomas fled the house after his incarceration in the bathroom, taking one last mouse with him, and he has not been seen since. The mice are well fed and many, for the traps now lie unset, for nobody has cause or means to snip off their lives. It does not look like the dawning of a great despair. And yet it is.
The Knife Drawer Page 20
