The Knife Drawer Read online

  Mice live suspended lives, hanging in the spaces where water pipes run, where the wooden joists are dry as thighbones. They grate their teeth against the lead-work and worry in the darkness. They make their houses out of wire and mattress hair and knitted dishcloths, and the tin can roofs are sharp enough to cut a throat.

  Mice are mesmerised by death. Their skeletons are splintery and fragile. They run along the picture rails for a year, or perhaps two, and then they’re gone, just like that. They make their spindly houses and they buy and sell their scraps of leather and razorblades. They hope and hate,and gnaw their teeth short and nothing much after that. And, in a certain crevice, in a high-rise wedged inside a chimney breast, a mouse is eking out her life, as mice will. Outside her front door, the thoroughfares seethe with mice and filth and the busy sounds of every night.

  The fireplace in the dining room is never used and the chimney breast is full and full of mice. They live in cardboard bits and lollipop sticks, in ramshackle, towering slums. Their stink is bright and sharp; the reek of afraidness and urine.

  The grey mouse, seventh in a litter of ten, is polishing her face and waiting to push her children into the world. Female mice are always pregnant. This is what mice are for; they hold eternity at bay with procreation and sacrifice. That is the oldest religion.

  Until tonight, this mouse has made forty-nine mouse children to shore against nothingness, and she has clung to her skin for twelve trembling months. Even so, although she is leaking drops like Nestlé’s milk, she has no young to feed. Yesterday there were ten of them, weaned and furred, ready to scamper off towards the corners of the kitchen and cling to their own skins. Yesterday, in the sleepy, witchy hours of the afternoon, she licked and comforted her children as she watched them die, one by one. They died of nothing at all, as if all the fear of their lives leapt out on them at once; they grew rigid and shook and then turned floppy, with blood on their muzzles. No amount of nudging or pleading could make them lift their heads. These things frighten mice.

  The grey mouse scrubs at her face again, snuffles spit in her paws and grooms her little seashell ears, then sniffs at her own back end. Her nest is made in a stolen Bible: a Gideon’s New Testament and Psalms, tooth-ripped and hollow, with a gold-embossed front door. And then, with a squeak of effort, the grey mouse begins to give birth. The first is bright as a skinned prawn. It is born dead.

  What evils foretell the birth of a monster? And what strange events might presage it? The night before, the fridge was left open in the vast kitchen. The mice dragged massive, raw rashers of Danish bacon underneath the dining room door, leaving greasy scent trails that will last for months.

  The night before, it hailed so hard the roof might as well have been pelted by marbles. The night before, a stoat sat up in the garden, with its pale belly smeared in rabbit-gore. They saw it gazing through the window, a long-backed nightmare on the concrete patio, and they all stood still until it ran off, laughing.

  The night before, the corpse of a man fell onto the dining room floor and grew cold and hard. The night before, they heard the queerest thing, a thin keening from the steak knife in his chest. As they hid beneath the table, it was answered by small metal scrapings from the sideboard, from the knife drawer.

  The second and third mouslings, pink as plastic as they come loose from their mother, are born dead. The mother carries on heaving. Deep inside her, the prophet is waiting his turn. In front of him and to the side, his sisters are lined up like sweeties. They are all dead.

  A female mouse pup is like a Russian doll, filled with children and grandchildren, every one a tiny million, a Hamlyn plague. A dead female mouse pup is the end of potential, a story untold.

  A male mouse pup is something different; wilful, not productive. A male mouse pup tells his own story. Inside his foetal sac, the universe is wet and safe and filled with the liquid murmurings of pulse and blood. He bunches up his limbs, hunkers his body, curious for the outside world and waiting for that final shove.

  The seventh pup does not know he is a monster, as he’s squeezed into the dingy warmth of the nest, the only flailing, crawling one amongst his six dead sisters. He finds their bodies underneath his paws and doesn’t comprehend their soft resistance. He cannot see, but the light that beats against his tight eyelids is alien and cruel. The seventh pup, the prophet, is albino and his eyes, when they open, will be raw-pink.

  The grey mouse, his mother, is nosing among the newborn, testing them, one by one, understanding that each is dead. Then she comes to the seventh and chews his birth cord through, feeling a new kind of fear through the claws on her toes. After a pause, she lets him suckle.

  4

  House

  THE LIVES OF houses are ruinously long next to the lives of people. Although the hearts of houses are strong, they are terribly slow. The heart of a house beats only four times a year and every pulse takes a whole weekend. The infrasonic din of it is loud enough to frighten dogs, audible only in migraines. A creature is pinned in time by sadness and houses are the tiredest, oldest, saddest things there are. This makes their lives very long. Nothing is sadder than a very old house, staring backwards through history at the kilns and quarries of its making.

  Houses do not understand the future because they are stupid and their brains are made of Artex and lath. Houses only see things as they happen, and then afterwards they gape and furrow their roofs and try to make sense of what they saw. Houses are packhorse-dumb and patient and exhausted. Houses are afraid that they will live forever.

  The house was watching August unravel in sticky heat and overgrowth. Hours flickered by as it saw dandelions writhe on the lawn, exploding suddenly into seeds and fluff. The sun was soothing on its rough old hide, sore for a century with chisel wounds. Limestone is eaten a little every time it rains, but the summer seals its skin for as long as it lasts.

  The cherry tree was thickening at its middle, sucking up the rot of mud, drying out and dying at its centre as the sap grew outwards and up. The ivy on the building’s face was bristling in the mortar cracks, clinging like lice, itching and picking holes.

  This house was already elderly; it was made from old things, defeated before the foundations were gouged in. Bricks are young, and curiosity keeps them going for the first hundred years, at least. Stones, on the other hand, bear the baffled memories of mountains and a world before men and raised voices and slammed doors.

  Houses like each other, they keep each other going when they’re planted in terraces; they lean together like pissed old navvies, and hold one another up against the sky. This house though, was alone, dug in the side of a steep track that a car could barely pass. The house didn’t have a number for its front door because there were no other houses to confuse it with. It used to have a name, but nobody could remember it after all these years.

  When the house had known its name, it was a grand house, with a maid-of-all-work and a housekeeper, who lived in the attic and lit their evenings with candle ends. It had protected its inhabitants from the cold, the spiders and people and mice, and it was stiff and dignified like a duke whose mind is on the wane. Over the years, its aches have multiplied, and its lumpy insides are driven with carpet nails, and choked with Polyfilla, and screwed right through with rawl plugs and picture hooks. When they put the electrics in, they smashed the plaster and hid the welts with pink rough-coat. When the parlour door swelled and sank, they tore it off and put another one there instead. When they slapped gloss on the mantle piece, it filled up every pore. When they took out the scullery window, they broke the glass and put in a new one that ached like a crack in a tooth. Now it hunches on the hillside, dark-faced and glowering, and very, very sad. As it sits, the night unfurls and a hand punches a face inside its hollow belly, and the house is sick at the feel of it.

  The life of a house is measured out in cruelty and weather. The only things that register on its bricky nerves are the massiveness of
sky and the mean, sharp actions of the things that infest it. It struggles to keep up with blooded creatures with their squishy, boned bodies. They streak along like chattering drips of colour, but before it can ever focus on one, it has moved. Gentleness, soft words and long, slow touches are just too weak to fire its nervous system, so it seems to the house that blooded life is all violence and kicked woodwork. Even laughter is hard and brittle like broken saucers. The house tries to love the vulnerable things that live inside it, but all they repay it with are scuffed skirting boards and the awful slap of swatted flies.

  September had begun when the house blinked. A woman in the top bedroom gave birth, but the house didn’t understand; it sat in the garden like a terrified child, rocking and subsiding on its foundations as she screamed and screamed all night.

  Then, all there was for months was a different type of crying, as though the children of people were born despairing, as houses are. This made it sadder than ever. And, being just a poor stupid house, it didn’t notice when the cries diminished into contented sleep.

  When the fruit on the brambles had gone, the cherry tree began to drop its leaves in the cold. The house was sympathetic in its way, when it wasn’t paralysed by baby noises, or the bawling to-and-fros from the man and the woman who carried the babies from room to room, or the vicious teeth of mice on its joists. The house regarded the cherry tree and wondered what it thought about. Then the shouting people climbed on chairs and jabbed it all over with little pins and Christmas trimmings that tickled like string down a throat. They shouted at each other and at the babies. The babies cried and its life was more confusing than ever, until one astonishing night the shouting reached a peak and was answered by a silence that was worse than shouting.

  That night, the house felt itself drench with blood as its feet grew wet from a haemorrhage in the water pipes underground, and the woodworm sang like midges. After that, the house grew resentful and guilty and full of fear, like a dog awaiting a kick.

  5

  The Mother

  THE ROOM WAS dim as the mother drifted out of sleep. For twenty minutes she rose and sank between smokish layers of dreams and waking, dreaming of a magpie that pecked at the kitchen window to be let in, and of the fading paper chains on the piano. Then she dreamed of eyes, and for a second she saw her husband’s, wide and blind and collapsing into his face. Suddenly, she was awake and felt as if she had never slept. She lay on her back and turned her face sideways, cheek against the cold side of the pillow. In the dark, on the other side of the wall, the baby with black hair was staring at her again; she could feel the jab of her stare. The sky was wheezing in the chimney and a woodpigeon on the roof set up its pretend-cuckoo chanting.

  The mother lay a while, crucified by the corners of the bed, gazing at the shadow-patched wall, watched by a child she couldn’t see. With an effort, she rolled upright and gulped at the water in the bottom of a glass on the cabinet. It was old and had turned nasty and it filled her like a stagnant pond. She coughed, hard, and then she dragged her fingers through her hair.

  The mother’s hair wanted to be curly, but it wasn’t washed often enough, and the dye and relentless brushing made it stand against her scalp like sheep’s wool. She picked up her glasses from the cabinet top and smeared a fingerprint off one lens with the cuff of her nightie. Her glasses were harder to see through these days, and all the while she could never think properly with that awful child staring at her with something like disgust. The mother groaned softly and stood to get her dressing gown. The stains never did come out, not quite.

  When she opened the curtains it was getting light and the sky was white. The mother rubbed at the corners of her eyes and opened the window, feeling the damp give of the rotten frames under her thumb.

  Suddenly the mother saw that she was alone in this great mouldering house, alone with these two unknowable babies. She found herself wishing like a child on a star. She wished against the wet morning and the sodden hedgerow and the woodpigeon. She closed her eyes and wished that her mother was there. Or a godmother. Someone to help her breathe all this air. Her eyes spilt over and it seemed for a moment that the atmosphere was chiming with birdsong. Afterwards all she could hear was the coo-coo of the pigeon. When she walked to the twins, her slippers made the floor creak.

  The blond child was curled on her tummy, bottom in the air, breathing soft. The curtains were not quite shut, and the light escaping though the gap made the room warm and dark, dark pink. For a moment, the mother found herself in love; she reached into the cot and stroked the down on the baby’s face with the knuckle of her finger. ‘Marie,’ she said, her voice low. ‘Marie.’ The other baby was awake, of course, and watching; the mother felt a slap of guilt at the sight of her. She sighed and shook her head and then she gathered a baby onto either hip and struggled down the top landing.

  Downstairs, the house was gloomy and uncertain. The mother deposited her children into bouncing-chairs on the kitchen table, and began to squish up Farley’s rusks with milk. But somehow these days her attention seemed a difficult thing to muster, as though it leached out of her lungs with each exhaled breath. There was a constant thickness in her mouth; her hands felt as though she was wearing gloves. And there was a persistent stink around the place that she had just noticed. She drifted out towards the back door, spoon in hand, staring blankly through the scullery window, trying to think. The cherry tree stood on the muddy lawn like a tragedy; testimony to nothing at all. The scullery reeked.

  She looked down at her hand, holding a spoon over the ancient sink, and she realised with horror that she had missed Christmas, for here was the turkey, defrosted weeks ago, lying there and turning the horrible colours of a corpse.

  The mother thought then of her husband, face up in the dining room, and the guilt rose in her like sickness. Frantically, she grabbed at piles of old newspaper from the floor and dirty washing waiting for the machine, and unrolled black bin bags and covered the wretched body so she would not have to see it any more. She could not disguise the smell, though. And, when she was done, and her heart had slowed, the mother looked around her at the chaos of paint cans and heavy oily tools and unwashed bedding, and found she was confused to be there, standing by herself in all this mess, as though she were hunting for something.

  She held herself around the rusk spoon and concentrated very hard and then remembered that it should have been Christmas and that she had children, and that she had forgotten them again. And finally, she realised with a guilty burn that she could hear them crying. She was a mother again then, and so, sulkily, like a twelve-year-old put upon by the grown ups, she returned to them, changed their nappies and gave them breakfast.

  Two were just too much to keep track of. And the black-haired one, the one that did not look like her, was not pretty and did not coo or kick her legs. The black-haired twin barely even fed or cried; she simply stared at her mother like a prosecuting witness. The mother regarded her for a long minute, fuddled and moving her lips. She tried to recall what her husband had named this one, until she was distracted and went to run the bowl under the tap, without quite washing it properly. Then she picked them up, chairs and all, and struggled into the parlour to light the fire, even though the house was already warm. Afterwards, she rubbed her fingers against her dressing gown, leaving sooty marks, and she told her children that it was Christmas Day.

  The mother yanked a silvery garland from the wall, as if to prove the point, and gave an end to the nice child. Marie opened her mouth like an O and whooped in delight. Clapping her hands, the mother jumped to her feet, making the black-haired baby start, and she began to sing: ‘Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way . . .’ She trailed off, wondering where she had mislaid the Christmas tree.

  In the hallway, she dwindled to a halt and put her fingers in her mouth, staring at the invisible trail along the carpet. Finally, reckless and sick-kneed, she eased open the dining room door, braced f
or a greenish cadaver like a turkey. There was nothing to see when she bobbed her head inside, so the mother scuttled in like a little crab until she was turning in circles where her husband had lain. There was no body there; there was nothing at all. She dropped down and brushed her fingers at the floor; there was a thin black layer, like spilled paint. It described the perfect shape of a man, and the carpet was worn right through as if it had been scraged at for decades with knives and forks and spoons. The mother began an anxious, sobbing sort of giggle, and she heaved up an armful of Christmas presents from the stack beneath the tree. Little eyes watched her go.

  And so, all that day it was Christmas in the parlour, whilst the trimmings on the ceiling gathered dust and the poor bewildered house tried to understand. The mother wrenched crackers and filled the babies’ resisting hands with cuddly toys. For lunch she let them suck on chocolate, and in the afternoon she hollered out every carol that she knew.

  The mother was a mother, as hard as she possibly could be, and when it was time to put the children to bed, she took the pretty one first, with her bundle of lovely new things. Somehow she forgot to return for the other baby. Somehow it barely mattered. Marie was sleeping by the time the mother came back downstairs, exhausted. She slept like an angel, like the child of an angel; the mother had stood over her, watching, until her legs ached with standing. She went to the kitchen and ate a bowl of cornflakes at the table, and when she was bored of cornflakes, she went to bed. She slept well for the first time in ages, without the pointed staring of the black-haired child digging through the wall at her.

  In the parlour, at four in the morning, the fire had burnt down very low and the draught from the hallway was tearing the warmth away in strips. The child that was not Marie was jerking with shivers amongst the wrapping paper. A coffee-brown mouse who had come in looking for matches, saw her and fled. After a few minutes, when it was clear that she was not going to give chase, he came back, to brush her with his whiskers and sniff. The baby unrolled her hands and raised her arms as if the tiny creature might be able to pick her up. His nose ruddled-up in sorrow and he skittered off to fetch another mouse. Then the two examined the sad little thing, and she gazed at them with her great black eyes and risked a smile.