‘Perhaps you shall have death, little one, or perhaps the sleep of a hundred years, or even the light of morning that follows the long night. We shall have to see, tiny mother to millions, but be humble and impudent, and sprinkle the cosmos with your droppings! Love your mouselings, little one, and know that no future is certain.’
Then Mother Owl’s wings beat white and hard, and the grace of them was exchanged for a great rushing. Long fingers stretched from the tips, and the treacle-gold eyes stayed focussed on the patchwork mouse, even as the face changed. Then it seemed that Mother Owl had a mouthful of smiling teeth, and the grandmother opened the window from without, and reached inside to grasp the patchwork mouse’s paw.
She climbed in like an owl landing awkwardly and her silhouette juttered for a moment between shapes. Then the grandmother walked away and down the stairs, making a whistling with her lips like a gale through a forest.
56
Knife
THE KNIVES ARE pining. The forks and carving sets and the treacherous cake slicers are famished. The dining room is whining with it, and the molecules of atmosphere beyond the parlour wall are quite delicious. Although they might ruin themselves, blunt to suffocating on the bite of brick and plaster, some have begun to eat that wall, mean as weeds breaking tarmac in their greed for daylight.
57
Marie
THE COAL WAS dwindling; where once it had lain in the scullery corner like some huge and grimy treasure, there was now a hole, a patch of emptiness that was dirty with dust. The remaining stash was hardly enough to hold my fears away, and I began to nag myself with worry. In my mind that heap was vanishingly small, melting under the weight of my anxiety like fool’s wealth. It would surely be stones by morning.
It came that I would sneak to the coal in the night, tiptoe through the house to look at it, a paranoid miser counting out chunks. I would comfort myself, filthy my fingers until I felt better, but before I had walked the length of the hall it was creeping to nothing again, ready to give me nightmares. More than anything I feared the cold; as world without fire was a world at an end. Oh, but I was afraid.
When the electricity went off, I had an awful shock, and it seemed to me an inexplicable thing, as though the sun had refused to rise. It was the bills of course; those envelopes that came through the door, but back then such things were beyond me. How was I to know of quarterlies, of black and red printed letters? They were not mine anyhow, but addressed to my mother and marked PRIVATE.
When finally, blood-faced with shame, I picked one open and uncreased the paper inside, I tried to comprehend the writing, honestly I had, but really, what hope had I? And if I understood, how might I have known how to pay? So we had to manage without lights.
My grandmother brought us candles sometimes, but somehow the fear of running out began to interfere with the fear of darkness, and I started to store them unlit, cached against some uncertain future. In the meantime I wandered, stub toed about the house at night like a thing half-blind. In the meantime the mice got into the candle store and gnawed them all to sinews of wick.
But somehow we all went along; we ate from cans and walked from room to room as living things do. In time the mice seemed to regain some of their quickness, the jump-candle brilliance of lives burnt through very fast. They bred like echoes and soon we were a whole plague, the mice and I.
After a time I allowed poor Thomas back into our lives, as the mice were so many and so swift; it seemed that he should have as much right to the fire as the rest of us. So I opened the kitchen door, and together they made the merry play of life and dying, although for the mice it seemed a dance without music; joyless leaping. I do not think that Thomas killed many. After all, I fed him well on Spam and Ideal Milk.
There came a night when I sat out in the old red chair, with no thought in me but fire, the jumping and bright witchery of it, when I thought for a moment that I could hear something, as if the glasscutter crying of knives was closer by a mite. I held my head and listened as best I could, and perhaps there was a dryish sound, a scraping, but against the crackle of the grate I might easily have made the sound up.
As soon as I turned my mind away from flames, I came to myself a little; remembered my discomfort. For days I had been hurting inside my clothes. It seemed that I had grown a great deal lately, as though some anchor had come away from my insides. All of a trice I became a gawk-kneed adolescent, my wrists hanging beyond the cuffs of my dress, my cardigan armpits pinching.
The light in the grate was quite beguiling, and away from it the house was unbearable. Still, the splitting tautness that against my body was more than I could stand. With a kind of ruthlessness I leapt to my feet and turned to the door. I needed a different frock before my ribs broke, and so I went out to the stairs.
It was dark. I closed my eyes and began to creep upwards, preferring the black behind my eyelids to that that was beyond them. The mice all scuffed before me though, and scrabbled at my feet, and I was fearful that I might break them underneath my socks. I stopped where I was, before the turn in the landing, and I opened my eyes against that blindness, breathing slow until the banisters shone bone-pale amid the drifting shades of grey.
Among the dark the eyes of mice shone like some opposite kind of light, beacon bright. When I could see, when I knew that I would not crush them, I inched through the shadows and turned the handle on my mother’s bedroom door.
The air was stale inside, stirring in chilly spirals; and goodness me it was like winter after the warmth and light of the parlour. I began to shake and could have died for shivering as I darted forwards to hunt for a new dress to wear.
The window was star-littered, with a witless, gibbous moon that made a splash against my mother’s bed, silver and delicate as a slug-trails. I could hardly believe my bravery to be in here at all, but yet a dress of hers must be a better prospect than nakedness, or growing inside my child’s clothing until I suffocated?
So shuddering with cold, I struggled free of my green dress, feeling the rip and give of the seams as I hauled it off my shoulders. Then I stood for a moment in that moon’s stupid light, white limbed and astonished at myself. I dressed more slowly, pulled my mother’s frock over this unfamiliar body, softened and round at breast and belly, but heretic-thin elsewhere.
When I was done I remembered her, my mother’s sweat and rosebud scent, that unplaceable note of her that smelled of crying, and I felt wild-headed and guilty standing there. The mice all whispered forward and I held my hands to them; they did not condemn me, only shivered their backs in sympathy. Now at least I could swing my arms, and so I stole back down the stairs, breaking into a canter at the door with the relief of regaining the parlour and its lovely fire.
Thomas sidled into the parlour soon after, smiling like a robber. The mice in the parlour all clambered high, up to the picture rail and the bookcase tops; the cat craned his neck to see them but did not fuss. There would be no killing with me in the room.
When he jumped onto my lap he gave a start, smelling my mother on me, but as I stroked his back he seemed to calm. I was not my mother. His pelt began to warm against the fire, and I ran my hands against it, mackerel streaked and lead-grey, and he purred from the core of him and eased my heart.
Thomas was not so agile now, and he walked with a strange gait, pulling slightly to one side. One eye seemed a little milky and he had a split in his eartip from some battle in the garden. He was heavy against my lap; a mouse whispered to another from the shadows and the grate glowed. In time, even the purring petered out as the cat fell asleep. The house muttered to itself like an old man shaking his head, so low that I could hear it with the marrow in my bones.
The fire burned down to a glowing, quiet so that I could make out my grandmother in her attic rooms, her thinking a turmoil of wings, beating and frantic.
Somehow the metal voices from the parlour became clear, like a fork ag
ainst glass. And as I sat like a point of silence, I perceived that scraping again, a scratching between the skirting and the floor; I bit my lip and listened. In time the scratch grew hideous, and my eyes opened wide as a hole appeared. I could not move.
My grandmother came then, suddenly, as though she had already been on her way. She nodded at the wall, where that point was twisting slowly, corkscrew-wise. It stopped for a moment, tasting at the air, with its tip right through the hole.
She had a bottle from the kitchen and was already unscrewing the top. ‘Always remember,’ said she, ‘that rust is the thing.’ And so saying, she strode up to the wall and poured that knife-snout with vinegar.
I was amazed, for it shrieked and pulled back into the dining room, quick as that. Poor Thomas woke at the sound and fled with a yowl, tail streaming behind and leaving claw digs in my thigh. The mice were perfectly quiet; perfectly still.
I went to stand before my grandmother; she took a moment to pinch my mother’s frock in her fingers with a Hm. Then she took me with her and showed me how to soak a rag with vinegar and patch up the hole.
58
Mice
THE CREATURES OF the earth are tramping into the Ark by sevens and by twos, even though the sun is slapped overhead like a spoonful of margarine; even though it does not looks like rain. Here they are, every one; the zebra goes nodding and shying up the gangplank, shaking his great striped head. His mate is on board already, stamping her hooves against the coffin walls of her cell.
Although the Ark is surely much too small, the tortured queue of beasts stretches a mile into the distance; elephant and okapi; hummingbird and untouchable pig. There are no mice. Perhaps the Lord need not have herded mice for the Ark; perhaps they infested it already.
The angel of the Lord is standing astride the sky as though it were some invisible horse. His hair is brilliant and his raiment Persil-white. He is holding a sword that is short and broad like a hanging metal tongue, and there are clouds in his eyes that belie his majestic wingspan. Perhaps there will be no room for the archangel in this boat. Perhaps this too is God’s perfect plan.
And so he plants his feet on clouds and keeps the order as the colour plate is devoured by mice, crossed and crossed by piddle and blunt claws. The page is glossy and difficult to shred, and it stinks of printer’s ink besides; still there is a kind of tang to the Young Christians’ Bible, a toxicity that seems a little holy.
The offspring of the patchwork mouse prefer their nests to taste a little deathish. They are Mouse; they are humble and low against the ground, and birth is such a littermate with death that their cradles seem like graves. So it is that the zebra and the mighty elk are bitten up for a nursery; and the white-yellow Bible soil is rendered soft at last. The stoneware blue sky turns into tissue, and the abandoned teacup at the back of a drift of clothes becomes a shelter for birthing in.
The mouse that builds this nursery is herself a piebald thing, a kind of patchwork mouse; the daughter or granddaughter of that other patchwork mouse, she who brought repentance to mousehood and revival of the old ways. This mouse is pendulous with her young; they clamour to be born at this very moment, and every swing of haunch is bone-hard labour. She tears and shreds, fusses at her picture snippings, for it must all be right before she pushes them into the air.
The child of the patchwork mouse pauses in her efforts, rests and polishes her face and right behind her ears. When she yawns, her teeth are yellow and bodkin-curved and terrible sharp. Her belly is pushing from the mice inside her, but she seems to be a thing made delicately, her heaviness balanced by the spike of teeth and the jewellery maker’s flick of her tail. The eyes of the patchwork mouse’s child are black, for they know love and death like the mice of old.
The rightful life for a mouse is equivocal, made from neither euphoria nor despair. A mouse is made, in essence, for doubting, for balancing along the washing line strung between birth-making and the leaping out for death. Now Mother Owl has made them know these things, and has made it known in a manner fit for mice, without flash of revelation or frenzied revolution.
The patchwork mouse simply told her children the things that she had learned; the mouse that had been witness to it told her children, and another had overheard it from a nearby running-place. Soon every nest was filled with the dark comfort of Mother Owl and her eyes of golden syrup amber.
Before a week had scampered past, every new pup in the colony knew well that he was Mouse and mouse alone, small and humble and low against the ground. And thus, with whisper and whisker-twitch, the evil cult of the fairy light god was crumbled away. There is no god that does not wish to kill them, of course there is not; for the gods of mice are gods of death. This is as it should be, for mice are fleeting only; flashing sparks against the grinning void of the night. They burn for a little time, and they make the darkness a place of beauty. They cling against their skins until their skins let them go.
And at Mother Owl’s behest, the cat has been permitted among the mice, to make them know their place, to drag his claws along their slightest trace of arrogance. They fear him, but they grudge him not his tithe of lives, although they do escape him if they can.
As to the future, why that is equivocal too, for every mouse deserves a crumb of hope. Perhaps they will all burn alive; perhaps they will not. In humility dwells the essence of Mouse, in quiet hope and the gathering of fluff. My, these are humble times; for a whole forever, Mother Owl has trodden these carpets; now her footsteps are as silent-winged as the air around her is loud.
Mother owl. May they be forgiven, the mice have lived these centuries with Mother Owl herself, and even so they have given themselves to idolatry, to the making of new and false religions. They have bled out whole life spans, entire generations, on the making of hatreds, the hoarding of guilt like bitter nuts. It is not right for Mouse to have the sort of voice that other creatures hear.
Mother Owl has been a patient teacher, and slow to chide. Mother Owl is as kind as a trap that cuts deep and sudden and hard; she makes no bones about despair or worthiness. She showed herself to them suddenly, turned her eyes from blue to amber and unmasked the scent of sky from her flesh.
Now her time is come; now they see the god in her, the wind and storm and tumult in her, for they are ready to understand. With every moment they see more of her, the more and more raw her power, high as a month old dustbin and as strong as a million slamming doors. Mother Owl is outgrowing her body; she is calling all the power in the universe towards herself, towards her mirror-grey hair and her eyes. She is too strong for flesh; she will scatter, surely. It has been a month of flapping curtains and of whistling in the ears.
And the child of the patchwork mouse is turning these things over in her mind. Her nest is flashed all over with colour; the tawny brown of lion skin and the secretive leopard’s spots. At last the Ark is reduced to bedding, with a mouse curled up in its centre like an ancient secret, a rebus from the time before there were words. The corner that she has chosen is skeined and strung with cobwebs, and every hard straight line is soft, and dust-filthy. The child of the patchwork mouse breathes against the musty air and begins to give birth.
The forks and knives and spoons are whining again, singing like saws do, from their prison in the dining room. It is a tiny sound, almost as quiet as thinking. There is no blocking it out; it is a crying so shrill that it is the first thing that the mouselings ever hear. The child of the patchwork mouse licks her children clean, bites away umbilicus and afterbirth, one for every pup like the twin of each, the headless fleshy anchor that roots every life to its mother’s.
Suddenly Mother Owl is there, and the bedroom door is smacked out wide, without her even touching it. The mice all cower back against shadow and stain, overawed and in the most frightful danger. Mother Owl might tear the roof off with a careless laugh. She strides inside and stands in the centre of the room, in the eye of herself as the univer
se turns.
The mice all stare, perfectly transfixed at the sight of Mother Owl, at the weather in her face, the fear of tiny birds, at the sounds of river and thunder and falling trees. Mother Owl stares back through each tiny soul, and suddenly her power is at its zenith. Every poor little whisker trembles like palsy; every heart patters a music of terror.
The child of the patchwork mouse crouches, frozen in her nest, and Mother Owl gazes through obstacles and dirty clothing, and she sees her there, her anxiety and humility and her squirming mouselings, and she nods as if satisfied. Then she is gone, fluttering small objects and paper fragments behind her like the ice-trail of a comet. And in her writhing wake, the mice follow nose to tail, dancing and prancing against their will, cascading the staircase and the gaps between banisters, where the morning is small and hard and not yet ripe, whilst Mother Owl goes to wake Marie.
Very soon after, she leaves the house with Marie at her heels, but when it seems that they are all to be stripped from their home, she glances backwards to the mice, breaks the tendons that had dragged them so, and the mice all scatter backwards.
The house is staring, disbelieving, at this woman who might drag the stars into new orbit, and then the god breaks into parts, returns her fragments to the places from which they were poached. The mice stare from the open door, and they see it happen, feel the moment when the garden sucks her in, when the light between her atoms grows dazzling.
Then the earth has her back, absorbs the realness and power of the grandmother; Mother Owl is the last part of her to break away, and she looks back one last time with her treacle-gold eyes; she closes one lid and opens it again, as if this is some gesture for humans, with meaning of its own.
The Knife Drawer Page 23
