Presently the drumming starts. The grey-black mouse is the first moved to mourning, and so he begins to thrum his hind feet against the tomato can. At the sound, the others hang their heads and go tend to the dead. One by one, each corpse goes gently to his resting place.
They pack their dead in twists of kitchen roll and Bacofoil, and they stand very solemnly and polish their faces. The mice wonder at this new fortune, try to discover its form. The future is a licked-at battery. The patchwork mouse can taste it, and so can her mouse-children, for it leaches into their milk.
Then the mice turn their backs and they bring the fourth body, the fifth and sixth, and they make their funerals there. Then they go to look at Marie.
They scale the stairs like mountaineers and swarm beneath the door. The house is very quiet now, without the clatters and shouts of the mother, her sobbings and laughter and the talking that the humans used to make. Now there is hardly any talking in the house, for Marie is alone in the world and it is useless to talk alone. Now she steals around like a cat; she jumps at the sound of her own feet. The mice are sorry; they are terribly sorry, for this has been harsh for her.
When they crowd around her bed, she is buried in a chrysalis of blanket and they have no wish to wake her. Instead they let her lie and struggle in her dreams. They are not angry with her any more. She did not mean to fail them. She is a poor thing.
They watch her for a time, helpless because they know her heart is wounded too, and moreover that that hurt was inflicted by mice. It had seemed a right course of action; they had thought themselves justified, but now they know that their ruthless hope was futile.
But mice, after all, are not gods. They do not make their fate, only follow it. They had been foolish to think it might be otherwise. They sweep their eyes and whiskers over the carpet, rich with socks and biscuit fragments, and treacherous too, with tacks and sharp objects. At last they tiptoe away and leave her be, as she lies against her side and wanders amongst the pictures from the Young Christians’ Bible.
The mice take a long time to come downstairs; they plod like lame things and jump down the stairs by twos and ones, a flood in slow motion. And then finally, reluctantly, they make their way towards the kitchen again, towards the mouse that was the frizz-haired mother.
She is hidden in a cage of cardboard; in a strange little house inside a cage of cardboard. The mice draw near to the table, shin up the legs, ready to face her, the destroyer of hope, the hater of mice.
But the magic of the transformation has been such a tax upon them that they are calm now, quiet with exhaustion. It seems that their fury and vengeance was all used up in it. The mice despised her and filled her to the top of her head with their own terror and misery, with all the agony they had, and now it is gone. Only the horror of a whole nation might transmute one creature into another, for it is no easy thing to achieve.
Nothing is all right now. Nothing shall ever be well again. And here is the punishment for the frizz-haired mother. They have made her to be a small thing, a creature with no power of her own, condemned to following behind her fate.
She must trail now in the wake of what she has done; for a whole enormous lifespan, the mother must comprehend despair, and the coming destruction of the colony. She must make mouse-children every twenty-one days, and she must send them into the world knowing they are damned. She must tell her pups the lore of death, and confess to every single one of them that hope is at an end.
She will tell her little ones of the dining room and the knives, and she will confess the awful things that she did to mousehood. She will tell them of Thomas and the mousetraps; she will confess that she had been in league with owls and evil gods. She will tell and tell and tell, and on the twenty-second day she will give birth again. And finally, either she or her pups, or her children’s pups, will see that judgment come to pass.
But now that the punishment is written there is nothing to the mice but sorrow. The mother-mouse is the same as them; they will go to her and comfort her, for she is only a mouse and their fate is hard. They will teach her how to be a mouse, to polish her face and balance with her tail. So it is that they begin to set her free, to tear at the cardboard.
That is easily done, for the stockade is made of Sugar Puff boxes and soon the mice have a space that they can pull wide open; they expose the dolls’ house like the nut inside a shell.
The mice stop then, and listen; they tut and squeak at the painted front door, but it is not real. They call to the mother but get only hush in reply. So they turn to one another, and they try to go through it, but it is just a picture and the gap beneath it is a stripe of black. They do not understand the hinge that opens the house right out, and so the mice busy their teeth against the cardboard brickwork until there is an exit for the mother, so she can come and find her hopeless life.
But she does not come out, not even after the mice have waited politely for several minutes, and so eventually, the grey-black mouse pushes his nose inside and follows it with his shoulders. The grey-black mouse scuttles up the staircase and then he pushes in the little doors one by one.
But the mother is not in either oblong bedroom, not in the bath with its blue-painted water. By the time he is coming down again, another mouse has found her, and the tiny parlour grows crowded with silent mice, every one aghast.
A twist of dishcloth string, thick as rope, is knotted around the handle and then slung over the top of the door. And on the other side, the mother-mouse of hair-dye brown is hanging, cold and perfectly stiff. Her paws are greyed, and they curve together like the paws of sleeping mice. Her tail is as useless as a pipe cleaner.
The mother’s eyes are closed, and her face quite serene; perhaps she died without a fight, or perhaps she was so tired by her dying that death gave her a rest. Her belly is velvet brushed the wrong way, and her ears are crumpled like poppy petals. A tiny wooden armchair lies on its side, close by. It is red.
The grey-black mouse will not look up as he shoulders his way out of the cardboard house. As he regains the kitchen and its playing-field table, he discovers a crowd, slow and patient, each waiting her turn to squeeze inside. Every one must edge through that little parlour door and come face to face with the mother, hanging like a decoration from a Christmas tree.
It takes hours for every one of them to have a look, until the sun rises on the garden with its shroud of summer snow.
52
Marie
THE NIGHT THAT it snowed, I saw myself clad in strange clothes; a coarse Hessian dress and sandals, with a scarf over my hair, which was long and black and thick. My hands were thin and brown, but bitten and broken at the nails. There were splinters in my fingers from the broom’s rough handle, but still I was sweeping, searching, brushing a paisley carpet; searching and sweeping. My broom was falling to pieces, and all I seemed to do was brush that Bible dust from side to side.
There was a coin; I remember thinking that, returning to that thought again and again, but I could not find it, not by sweeping out corners. In my dream I was growing afraid, fretting about my coin, where it had been lost, whether it had even been lost at all.
I bent over like an old lady, hunting the shadows behind a bookcase, behind an armchair, and all the while I was wondering if I had ever had a coin at all. Perhaps it could not be found because it was only an imaginary coin. As I tried to conjure my coin in my mind, it seemed to grow smaller, from a fifty pence to a two pence, smaller than a half-penny and smaller still, smaller than the head of a pin.
My dress was like bandages, looping and fraying loose; I kept pushing up my sleeves, trying to get my hands free of the cuffs. However I tried they only fell right back again; and the broom was broken; and I could not find my coin, not even by the light of an oil lamp.
Instead I kept turning up other things, the perfect little bones of mice; skulls like the work of a clock-maker with microscopic lacing where the p
lates of face and head fuse. I could not pick them up, for I was looking for my coin.
When I woke, I knew that I might never find it, not even if I had slept for a hundred years. When I woke, my room was riddled with the cold and my breath clouded my face. When I woke, I knew that my mother was dead, for there was peace in the house.
I lay in my bed for as long as I could, breathing the stillness, dreading the emptiness that lay before me, and the freezing space beyond my bedspread. I listened, dragged the air in the hope of a sound, some footfall or sigh or scrape of kettle and teapot. There were no such noises, and it was because my mother was dead.
In time my ears grew gentler, more sensitive, and I could pick out the whispering of mice, the dry slither of metal from the dining room. When one is truly quiet, then any old sorrow can clang in one’s ears. I listened until my thirst forced me up, and then I made my way into that reluctant day.
Before I left my room I went to stand at the window, and looked into a garden that was amnesiac with snow. The flowers were half buried; tiny coloured flashes and petal edges were all that one could see of marigold and rose. The cherry tree held its pose like a stoic cart-horse, every dark fruit frozen to its stone. Even the great hole in the soil was healed over in the snow, smoothed and soothed with white. The birds still waited on the lawn, just as they had yesterday, perished with the cold.
The window-glass was feathered with frost. I put my palm against it to see if my warmth might melt the ice outside. It did not, even though it made my hand feel killed. When I took it away again there was a little print, an outline of condensation, nothing more.
Then I spotted brindle among the snow, and I saw that Thomas was in the garden. I was overjoyed; he had vanished so thoroughly that I had thought him gone forever. Perhaps he knew that my mother was dead. Cats have a sense for these things. He did not look to the window; Thomas had stolen right up to the tableau of birds.
They all stared at him, panic in their faces, and they raised their wings and clapped them as if they were staked to the grass, as though they could not fly. He slowed, sank his body into a stalking crouch, bunched up his haunches. I turned away before he sprang, with my lip caught in my teeth, and I trod through the morning to the stairs.
There were mice at the foot of it, anxious, peeping up as I descended. They were utterly taut. They need not have worried so. I knew that my mother was dead. The air did not ring with her any more; it did not jangle with her nerves, but a new kind of sadness, vivid-bright and mouseish.
At the last step they gathered round me and shepherded my feet, tugged on the hem of my nightdress. I let them bear me through the hall as if the strength of mice alone might move me forward. At the kitchen they fanned out, gazed up at my face as though they might at any moment address me in words. When they were sure that I was watching, they flicked themselves up the table legs, and the mice stood around the dolls’ house with its ruined defence of cardboard.
One mouse, a little thing of pencil-lead black tiptoed right up and brushed his face with his paws before he pulled at my sleeve. I opened up the dolls’ house, more to comfort the mice than for myself, for I knew already that my mother was dead.
When I pulled the house in two, I disturbed another mouse, a sort of patchwork one, who had been watching at the small parlour door. But of course, the door was neither here nor there with one whole wall folded out, and that was how I found my mother.
It took a moment only to untwist the string from the door, and then I curled my mother and the thread together in the palm of my hand. She was so very small, and as beautiful as a broken clockwork toy; then I looked back to the mice. There were hundreds of them in the kitchen, even the pinkish piglet mice with their eyes gummed shut. The whole colony stood before me and made their mute confession. I nodded, for there seemed nothing to say.
I cradled my little mother in the cup of my hand and stroked her mole-flock fur. She was a perfect thing, tenderly curved from string to tail tip, faultless in repose. She was without strife, and without rancour. Her whiskers tickled my lips as I gave my mother a last kiss and ran my fingertip across the fearless arc of her flank.
She was the most peaceful thing that I had ever seen before in all my life. My heart stuttered a little as I found an uncommon kind of joy start in it, and as my face spilt over with tears. I held my mother to the pad of my cheek and I cried for her, for myself and this massive houseful of suffering.
She did not resist; she neither flinched nor muttered, only lay there, soft as tissue as I caressed her. It was a beautiful thing – don’t you think that strange? – a beautiful moment. I held her, comforted her finally, after all these years, and my mother just lay still and comforted me too. The mice stood about with their heads bent low; the youngest ones cried and their mothers shushed them.
There was a long time when I could not see for tears, my eyes crying all by themselves as though they had waited for this forever, as if they would not be denied this grief. And yet, in my own way I was happy. My mother’s fur grew damp and I cried like a summer storm, without stopping, until my legs ached from standing. Slowly I became aware of a respectful pulling at my sleeve, and when I looked, blur-faced at the mice, they were hauling her glasses along the table towards me. I smiled at them and took them, and then I cried the more.
When I was done crying, I felt new-made; reborn. I laid my mother down and the mice gathered round to protect her as I went to the sink. I washed out a glass, and then drank water as if I had escaped a desert; I drank and drank, and then it seemed to me that I was clean.
As I turned back the mice were all staring, rigid at the window. Thomas was there, miaowing and patting his paws at the glass. I pulled the curtain across.
Somehow the day went past; the mice brought me a bread heel from the bin and I took a few bites out of nothing but politeness. When I discovered that I was shivering, I plodded upstairs and got dressed. And I spent hours just stroking my mother, admiring her delicate corpse, considering the beauty and tragedy of very little things.
I took the tiny noose away and smoothed the fur that it had compressed. I got a dish of soapy water and cleaned her feet and face; I made her whiskers sparkle like a dew soaked spider’s web, and then I slowly dried her with the breeze of my breath.
It was after seven when my grandmother came in with Thomas in her arms. I jumped up in a panic; my grandmother glanced at the table and understood immediately, as though all this were utterly mundane. Perhaps it was; I had no other childhood to compare my life against; at any rate she just said, ‘Oh, I see,’ and she turned to shut the cat outside again. Then she nodded at the mice with a ‘How do you do?’
I beckoned my grandmother close and showed her the body. She did not take it from me, but her face grew soft in a way that I rarely saw. She marched off upstairs and came back down with my mother’s old jewellery box. We emptied out the knotted silver chains, and laid her inside its red padding; I covered her all over with flakes of pot pourri as the mechanism played Fur Elise.
I fetched her knitting needles but they would not fit; my grandmother snapped each one as if it were a kindling-stick, and laid them in the coffin. We gave her a little skein of dishcloth string and closed the lid up tight. Then my grandmother picked it up; she gave me a spoon for digging, and put her dry white hand in mine. The mice all went to the scullery window to look as we went outside.
The song birds waited, miserable and motionless, until my grandmother clapped her hands at them and they all fell into the air. Then we processed towards the hole in the vegetable patch. My grandmother stopped there and looked at me as though I should bury her in that heartless pit, but I ignored her and kept walking, as far as the back fence with its clambering clematis and honeysuckle. My grandmother followed me. She smiled, actually kindly smiled; my grandmother said, ‘Good for you, Marie.’
The poor flowers were choked with snow, but their fragrance sang through
the whole evening, that summer evening when the sun did not go down until half-past nine. With my spoon I dug a tiny grave, and when my mother was buried I patted the raw earth over with snow and flowers, and it was beautiful. My grandmother did not assist me, only stood and watched, dry eyed, saying nothing. But she must have come away, for then she came towards me with my mother’s slippers, with her dressing gown and carrier bags. Silently we folded these and dropped them, one by one, into the deep pit, and when we were done we dragged that rotten door over it.
Then, all of a sudden, the birds began to sing, rivering music all over the garden like spilled mercury, and I found that I did not have a single tear more to shed.
53
Knife
THE CUTLERY IS bickering; a wicked little paring knife is trying its luck against the leggy tailor’s shears. The dining room rattles with the click and sneer of shiny points colliding. The others lie still beneath the sideboard, the bellyless piano and the drop-leaf table, observing the sport of it.
Neither has the upper claw, for the scissors are elderly, though strong as a headmaster, but the knife is small and deft and quick. The scything grates all night, falling silent at last before the dawn.
Once the meagre daylight peers through the window they are plain to see, the peeling blade wedged solid between the scissors’ halves, turning them quite useless, bending its own self to a hateful arc. Neither of these shall die of these twistings, for rust alone will murder a knife. They shall wait like this forever, screeching at each other’s narrow throats, married, like some new utensil.
PART THREE
54
Marie
OH, BUT WHAT might I tell you of the months that followed my mother’s death? There is little that holds in the memory, for the weeks were bleak and without form. I think that in my head I became a little crazed, for it seemed that sometimes a whole day might pass whilst I was thinking, whilst I tried to gather myself.
The Knife Drawer Page 21
