The Knife Drawer

by Padrika Tarrant

  In those earliest months it was surely the mice that kept me going; their leaping children and their downcast humility. I wondered at first if the mice might ever recover, for I was certain that they found themselves to blame for all that had happened. Truly, I did not accuse the mice as they did, for all our lives were so much bigger than we poor things were, and so confusing that a single cause might hardly be ascribed to anything. But I could never ease their aching consciences, for how could one convey such a sense with gesture and mute expression?

  My world became quite wordless, devoid of human speech, and although I was never alone from mice, I felt like the only child alive. My thinking grew dumb, such that when my grandmother did deign to find me or speak she seemed quite alarming, and I would have to work my wits hard to follow the meaning of the things she said.

  Our world was hushed as treading paws and as sad as it was serene. The mice fed me sometimes from the rubbish, bless their hearts, and for my part I would guard them from Thomas. Poor Thomas; I made him live in the kitchen by himself where he could do us no harm, and he cried at the door every day.

  I would sit in my mother’s red chair, amongst the flicker and cuss of the fire, and find myself unwinding the silences by layers. My own life was loud and clumsy; I could divide that off easily enough, like the long-string spine from a canned sardine. To my own ears I sounded like a creature remaining absolutely still, a hind in a thicket, huge eyed in the shade, betrayed by nothing more than its own throbbing heart.

  And the mice, the mice were at once a great impressionistic threnody and a hundred thousand tiny pointillist notes. When I learned how to be truly quiet I discovered the needlepoint language of them, the high bright fall and rise of it. But I was no mouse, and I comprehended not a word. Each voice, each staggering pulse, was unique, balanced between despair and love; too much of each to bear. I could hear the plaints of the newly-born and the weary sighs of ten-month ancients. I wonder just how I sounded to them.

  I discovered that I could hear my grandmother whenever she was near, even if she were shut away in her rooms. My grandmother sounded like wings, but there was no voice to her, no inner monologue to eavesdrop on, just the rush of beating wings. She made the noise of a kind of power, a huge and circling energy that clad itself in itself like a tornado.

  My grandmother trod the staircase with such a concentration that it made the wallpaper peel, as though every breath and movement was a colossal gathering of will. Sometimes I would look into my grandmother’s face and not see eyes there, just the puddle-sheen of feathers. She was collapsing, even as her power seemed to expand; I heard it, but could not discern what this might mean.

  The mind of the house was slow and unhappy and stupid, and I grew fond of it, heartbroken for its pain and its muddleheaded rafters. That house was miserable as a mountain, and I kept the fire going day and night because it was afraid of being cold; and, I suppose, because I was afraid as well. And, also because of my own fear, I began to use my room less and less; I left my toys to moulder in their heaps and camped in the parlour with the mice and a musty-damp eiderdown.

  There were other voices too; other silences that one might separate out like fish bones on a plate. There were voices like the chittering of cockroaches, tinny and metally and nasty. Sometimes when I heard the cutlery talking, the mice would all look to me and fix their eyes with mine, jumping for horror, seeing what I would do. I would always look back, shake my head. I was not my mother. I knew all about her mousetraps (how could I not have), but I was not her and I would not stoop to murder.

  And for all I knew, a knife might be like a scorpion, a thing that feeds once in a hundred years. That was what I told myself at first; that the monsters were only very few, and hardly at all hungry. Besides, I had no flesh to throw in, so what might I have done? As time went on, my excuses evolved. How could I ever open that door, dare to kick away the barricade that blocked the gap beneath? Lord knows what might jump out, scythe at the throat? And food stocks were low enough as it was. We might ourselves starve, before one considered feeding nightmares.

  In the end though, it was naked fear that paralysed me; fear of apathy and action both. They nicked against my sleep and waking, and whenever I stabbed open a can with the jab-ended opener, I could hear them listening, quiet and wary as scissors.

  So, this was how we went, eking out the cans, eking out the coal. The larder grew thinner, until I found myself prising open unlabelled things that tasted of metal and mandarin juice. It did not once occur to me to go out, find a shop. We were not this kind of people. Besides, I had no money of my own, and did not know the way.

  One morning, when the winter and summer had gone again, I sat in the parlour, still as a colour plate whilst the mice nibbled my hair for me. They cut it short and thick, for I had grown accustomed to having it cropped, and I could not stand to feel hair lying against my skin.

  Before they were done, there was the sound of an engine, a low-bellied grumble that was not the rent man’s car. It was surely not rent day, for if it had been my grandmother would have given me an envelope. I had one every time, regular as breathing, laid against the hearthstone for when I woke up. And, yes, he had come yesterday with his wrinkled shirt and his hands upon his belt, and so it could not possibly be him.

  Before I could bring myself to move, there was a great square noise, as of a heavy box dropped upon the step. The mice and I crouched, petrified, for then we heard whistling, and then a curse as a milk bottle was sent rolling down the path. Feet died away and then returned with another thump, a third, fifth, eighth box piled up against the door. I was entirely frozen.

  Then there was a cough and I had thought my life would end as the letterbox rattled long and hard. I cowered to my feet and crept down the hall; I stopped at the sight of eyes at the letterbox, at the reek of rolling tobacco. I opened the door as if to a tiger.

  A man stood before me, squinting through his smoke at my face, then down to my ankles and back up. ‘Delivery,’ he said simply. ‘For Askin. You Miss Ashkin? Yeah? Sign here love. Ta.’ And he was off down the path as though it were the most normal thing in the world. I looked down at the boxes; there were tins and tins, food for an army, food for a decade. And, not knowing quite else I should do, I began to lug them all inside, heave them to the kitchen, pile stuff on the table top. There were lychees in heavy syrup. There was pink pork roll with egg in the centre. There was condensed milk.

  I heard wings on the stairs, and my grandmother came. She stood and glared until I came to stand before her, and then she laid a hand on either of my shoulders. I was surprised to find myself taller than I realised, almost at her eye level. She tipped her head and looked down her nose at me, inspecting; appraising. I stared back, a little defiantly. Then her eyes lit upon the table and the mountains of food, and she smiled with her teeth, uncharacteristically excited.

  ‘Marie,’ said she, ‘Marie, happy birthday!’ And she laughed and clapped my shoulders. She nodded at the boxes and said that whilst it would not last forever, it would do for a time at least. Then she sighed like a fluttering bird and seemed to speak, but if those were words then I did not understand them. My grandmother pulled herself together and I felt the heaving of it, the vacuum against my lungs.

  She spoke again. ‘Happy birthday,’ she said, this time gently, and reached into her pocket. ‘See what I have made you,’ she whispered and I flinched, but this time it was different. My grandmother gave me a pretty little bottle, like a vial for perfume, which was bound up in a rare and complicated filigree, twists and curls and plaited plaits. I took it from her fingers, dumbfounded, staring. It was exquisite.

  ‘Always remember,’ said my grandmother, ‘that the opposite of metal is rust.’ And so saying, she went out of the back door.

  I sat down among the boxes and examined it. The bottle was mounted on a chain, as though I was meant to wear it around my neck, and the latticework, which
I had supposed to be silver wire, was in fact made from hair, lacquered and tied and varnished perfectly stiff. That hair was pale, so blond as to be all but white. It was my own.

  When I unscrewed the top I discovered it to be full of vinegar, sherry coloured with a bite instead of an odour. A gift must never be refused, and so I looped it round my neck and let it warm against the hollow of my throat, until I forgot that it was even there.

  55

  Mice

  IN THE VERY old times, when mousehood was a wretched thing, and filled with misery as a female is with young, the world was a place of great beauty; rich as lemon curd with crumbs and shadows. The ceilings were as high as clouds, and brilliant with stars; the night never fell at all, and nor did the dustbin ever empty of food. Those were days of no rain, when the water issued forth, it is said, from the great shiny taps in the basin. Huge flowers grew in posies in the wallpaper, flat and mysterious like living pictures.

  The holy childling was gone and vanished; she who had needed and saved them all was dead and joy was done with. Those cursed souls that trod the carpet ached and filled the endless hallway with their yearnings.

  These were the days that the mice have named the Echoing, for they were filled to their muzzles with their tragedy, ringing like metal cans with the despair and guilt of their lives. In the days of Echoing, a mouse could live a dozen years; so full were they of sadness that their very lives were made to be slow. In the Echoing their hearts were written like newsprint with their crimes.

  The mouse-mother, here and now in this nest, is a coil around her children; she pauses, takes a few moments with nuzzling. The tale is hard to tell, and so she grooms them instead; cleans every blind eyed face, every blunt-tipped nose. The little ones protest; each digs his toes among his siblings, questing through the dawning of his days for a suck of milk. The mother snuffs at them, the warm rank perfume of mouse.

  At the end of the Echoing, the mice had thought their misery must have been quite made; perfect for its pain and utterness. Mousehood lost its way so badly at the time of Echoing; for a second time it had found within its nerves the strength to murder. Mousehood knew at last the colour of its own wicked core, had discovered the twenty-first claw in every one of them. The last claw in a mouse is not attached to foot or toe, but jabbing from his soul, ready to tear a creature’s skin off. The mice before the echoes denied this thing, despised this thing within them.

  Yet in their haste to hide their cruelty, they proved themselves dreadfully cruel; for those mice of the ancient days were doers of evil. Their sin was pride. They were prophet-killers, these mice; they had known their punishment since the era before time, but in their arrogance they had denied it, choked it back like bitten glue. The gods had sent them the childling to teach them a lesson of kindness; they had sent to them the frizz-haired mother also, to show the mice that they must accept the might of larger beasts.

  Instead they sought to change their doom, to wrench the world around them, to try and cheat their fate. In their ignorance and pride, the mice sought godness itself, as though they might invent a god to suit their own desire.

  And in the days of the Echoing they had all lived together, mice and frizz-mother and sacred childling, and others besides, of whom other tales are told. As the childling was lightness, so the frizz-mother was dark; when the gods saw fit to hide the childling from their sight, the mice should have remembered the small things that mice are.

  At this the female halts once more for a rest, takes in the tang of air beyond the nest. It is very cold outside, but here the rags are cosy. She dips her face to her mouselings.

  Mousehood found its way into spite, fixed the claw in its heart into the frizz-mother’s flesh, even though in her person she held the sacred childling, even though each was, in a sense, an aspect of the other. The mice in the time of Echoing forgot the lessons of the white mouse, forgot the penalty of hate. And with every hook that they possessed, they dragged the frizz-mother from her own mind, forced her to share their misery. In this way they killed her, and this is why the old days were a time of echoes. The air, the banisters rang hollow with ghosts and guilts and memories.

  Oh, those ancient times of woe! To have lived in such evil, to have filled the air with such long and chiming sorrow! Now they had not understood it then, but there had already been a sign to mousehood, a message from the true gods, not some wistful invention but the truth. For, one magic night, death called a mouse to come to her in the garden; she had borne down on him with her whispered wings and shown him the height beyond ceilings and the crawling lives of mice.

  Mother Owl came to guide them back to the ways of death, and kindly. The proper gods for mice are those of death; their greatest mercy and power is in the breaking of a backbone.

  Now there is no greater love on earth than a dam for her mouselings, and there came a day when a piebald mouse found a germ of a prophet in herself and had a premonition of fire. But she recalled the propriety of mice, their smallness and the powerlessness of old.

  And although her litter was yet unweaned, that patchwork mouse climbed up the staircase, which was in those days like a great and mighty hillside. In secret, and in a humility befitting to a mouse, she made her way through the old frizzmother’s dwelling quarters, past her great flat nest of blankets, to speak with the owl god.

  While yet her new brood was forming in her uterus, that patchwork mouse crept to the window, where the moon was like a light bulb sliced in half. Another mouse, who was chosen by the gods to bear witness, looked down from the bookcase and saw it all.

  The patchwork mouse crept to the sill and jumped up on it, and she lifted her paws high and placed them against that unthawing glass. It is said that in the time of Echoing, the summers were as bitter as winters, and that the country beyond was brilliant with snow and flowers, like a parable of love and agony.

  As she stood with her haunches stretched and her paws upraised, she looked exactly as mice do when the owl comes to bless them with dying, and show them the hugeness of sky. ‘Mother Owl,’ cried the patchwork mouse, ‘Mother Owl?’

  And it is said that a light was spat from the moon, from the broken teacup brightness of it. That splinter seemed to grow into wings, each as a bath towel thrown in air. In time those wings grew closer, and gathered to themselves two eyes, two eyes of treacle gold.

  As the patchwork mouse called aloud to Mother Owl, she came, with cats’ claw talons and a blink like the eclipse of a world. Mother Owl’s face was as old as a house is old; old as a stone is old; older than any thing known. Mother Owl spoke like teeth against a slate.

  ‘I am she.’

  In their nest, the mouselings are not feeding and their dam hardly dare go on with this tale. The lie against each other’s flanks, every mouth clamped against a teat, quivering.

  ‘And who,’ demanded Mother Owl, ‘who, who wakes me from my cloud and sky by wailing so?’

  That patchwork mouse had no pretension to push at Mother Owl, and so she simply spoke thus: ‘Mother Owl, I do. I have nothing to offer but meekness. I am humble. I am small, and close to the ground. I beg only for an audience, that I may repent our pride, Mother Owl. I am mouse and mouse only. That is my confession. Strike me if you will, Mother Owl, but what of my mouselings?’

  At that, Mother Owl was affronted and seemed about to reply, but the patchwork mouse’s eyes were downcast and so she did not see. ‘Mother Owl, you are the bringer of death and the unmaker of universes. Yet you are a mother, are you not, a mother as I am? And do you not feel, Mother Owl, that if you could not spare your owl-pups harm, that you would sooner not have created them at all?

  ‘Do the pups of nightmares push and nose at your teats in the darkness? Do you feed them from your blood and your milk, Mother Owl, as I do? Do they cry for you when you are gone? Spare my mouselings, Mother Owl, or else spare me the torn love of pup-making and let me bear no more.’


  And as the patchwork mouse spoke, her soul was naked and trembling, as fragile and humble as a mouse is born to be.

  Mother Owl flapped in the sky beyond the windowpane, at once so close that she might have plucked a whisker from the patchwork mouse, and a million trillion inches away too. Mother Owl dodged and flurried like falling snow, at once herself and a death for every tiny living thing in the whole wide world. She flickered, a great pale terror in that coal black night, and her wings made not the slightest sound. ‘Hush little mouse,’ said Mother Owl, ‘lest you should find that you have said too much.’

  And then the patchwork mouse lifted up her little head, brave and quivering and scared to death. Her face, it is said, was transfigured with mouseish fear; generations of blasphemy burned away as the patchwork mouse gazed into the face of the god of death.

  ‘If I do say too much, Mother Owl,’ said the mouse quickly, thinking that she should be snapped at any moment, ‘then punish me. For our lives are gone and hope is over, and I fear that I shall never see my nest again. But, Mother Owl, please bite us now, that we night die before the end of the world.’

  ‘Mother Owl, the house shall fill with knives, and fire shall climb from the grate, and shred up whole rooms with which to line his nest. The fire shall eat us, Mother Owl, devour us, every one, and the colony shall perish in flames. But you, Mother Owl, you are a mother as I am; pity my grief and make me die this night!’

  But Mother Owl, she laughed, and her laughing clattered the air like breaking. Mother Owl fractured the atmosphere with it, until she made a windstorm rattle the pane. And the patchwork mouse just wrung her paws and twirled her tail, as she stared into the face of death.

  These are the words that the owl god said. ‘Such things you shall see, little one. And who would be left to soothe the world with love if every mouse should die? Yes, for your rudeness I shall give to you a doubt, a little grey doubt in disaster. For even a mouse deserves a crumb of hope for his supper.’