Gordon Reece - Mice

Real life was the complete opposite of order and beauty; it was chaos and suffering, cruelty and horror. It was having your hair set on fire when you’d done no harm to anyone; it was being blown up by a terrorist bomb as you walked your children to school or sat down in your favourite restaurant; it was being kicked to death in a back street for the meagre pension you’d just collected; it was being raped by a gang of drunken strangers; it was having your throat cut by a drug addict who’d broken into your house looking for money. Real life was a massacre of the innocents every day . It was an abattoir, a butcher’s shop, draped with the bodies of countless mice victims. .

And all this culture, all this art, was simply a trick. It allowed us to pretend that human beings were noble, intelligent creatures who’d left their animal past behind them long ago and had evolved into something finer, something purer; that because they could paint and write like angels they were angels. But this art was just a screen that hid the ugly truth — that we hadn’t changed at all, that we were still the same creatures who had cut into the warm bellies of the animals we’d killed with sharpened stones and vented our anger on the weak with frenzied blows of a blunt club. Pretty paintings and clever poems didn’t alter our real nature one bit.

No — art, music and poetry didn’t reflect real life at all. It was just a refuge for cowards, a delusion for those too weak to face the truth. By trying to absorb this culture, all I’d done was make myself weak, weak and helpless, unable to defend myself against the human beasts that inhabited this twenty-first-century jungle.

‘He’s going to kill us, Mum. I know it for sure.’

‘Shelley, you’ve got to stay calm. Just do what he says.’

‘You don’t understand the danger we’re in! He’s high on drugs! He’s going to kill us! ’

What kind of justice was this? What kind of God would let this happen? Hadn’t Mum and I suffered enough? Dad had walked out on us and left us to struggle on by ourselves while he luxuriated in the Spanish sun with his twenty-four-year-old slut. I’d been so badly bullied that I’d had to leave school and be taught at home. My face had been left scarred with the marks of others’ spite. And now out of all the houses that this walking time bomb could have broken into, he’d broken into ours, just as we were starting to build a new life together, just as things were beginning to get better again.

What more did we have to suffer now? Rape? Torture? What crime had we ever committed apart from the crime of being weak, the crime of being mice? What harm had we ever done to deserve such relentless punishment? Why wasn’t this happening to Teresa Watson and Emma Townley? Why wasn’t this happening to the girls who’d bullied me so badly that I’d wanted to take my own life? Why wasn’t this happening to my dad and Zoe? Why was this happening to us? Again? Hadn’t we suffered enough?

‘Mum?’

‘Yes, darling?’

‘Mum, this rope’s beginning to give. I think I can get my hands free.’

And then I smelled the chemical tang of alcohol and knew that he was back in the room.

He walked past us, carrying the red sports bag, its sides straining to contain all the objects he’d stuffed inside. It seemed he’d grabbed anything that had come to hand — I could even see the family-sized bottle of shampoo from the bathroom protruding from one of the zippered side pockets.

He went into the dining room and began sweeping the knick-knacks from the top of the sideboard into what little space was left in the bag. All the while he stared glassily at the wall in front of him like a blind man, almost oblivious to what he was doing. He didn’t seem to notice when any of the miniature glass animals or china figurines missed the bag and fell to the floor, but just carried on sweeping, sweeping, like a robot.

But what I couldn’t take my eyes off, what I stared at in disbelief, was the knife. He’d left the fanged hunting knife on the dining-room table. He was unarmed .

My hands were free now. I left them lying loosely in my lap, the rope still ineffectively coiled around them, and began to work on my legs. The rope must have been years old, and as I forced my ankles apart I could feel the dry prickly strands snapping one by one.

‘Mum!’ I hissed, turning right around in my chair to bring my lips close to her cheek. ‘This rope’s so old that—’

‘Hey!’

I jumped as if a firecracker had gone off under my chair. He was staring straight at me, an ugly dog snarl curling around his lips and nose.

‘No talking!’ he screamed, the veins standing out in his forehead and a shower of spittle spraying from his mouth. It was so loud that I still felt the words echoing round and round the room long after he’d said them.

When he couldn’t fit anything more into the bag, he walked towards us, the knife still lying forgotten on the table behind him. He stood in front of us, rocking queasily backwards and forwards. Under the bright ceiling light, his skin was greasy with sweat and deathly pale; he wore a pained expression like a child who’d eaten too much at a party and now had raking stomach ache and knew he was going to be sick. I could see the hairs on his top lip and chin — not a man’s bristles, but the ugly, sparse whiskers of an adolescent.

‘I’m goin’ now,’ he said.

But he didn’t move. He stayed swaying unsteadily in front of us while his eyelids began their now-familiar flickering and his eyes rolled up like those of an epileptic about to fall into a seizure. His head lolled onto his chest and slowly, slowly he began to topple forwards. The sound of the bag thudding to the floor brought him around too late to stop his forward momentum. He fell heavily against me. His greasy face rubbed against mine and I inhaled the nauseating stench of his foul breath. He kept his face close to mine, laughing quietly to himself, enjoying the fear and disgust he aroused in me. I kept my hands tight together, praying he wouldn’t see that I’d managed to untie them.

‘Fancy a snog?’ he said.

I closed my eyes tightly and clenched my teeth, ready for his disgusting assault. But it didn’t come. He pushed himself upright.

‘I don’t want to snog you,’ he said. ‘You’re an ugly, stuck-up bitch.’

I opened my eyes a fraction and saw his olive-green shape hovering at my side.

‘What’s all that — ’ he grimaced — ‘what’s all that crap all over your face?’

I couldn’t speak. I’d been so frightened for so long now I felt I couldn’t take much more. I felt as though my pounding heart was going to give out at any second and I was going to die of fright, like I’d heard hunted animals did even before the hunters’ dogs seized them in their jaws.

‘What is it, eh?’

Silence. A long uncomfortable silence.

‘What is it?’

‘She was in an accident at school,’ Mum answered hurriedly.

With a speed I wouldn’t have thought him capable of, he wheeled around and punched her hard in the face. I felt her whole body rock violently sideways in the chair behind me.

‘I didn’t ask you !’ he shouted.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mum said, still thinking clearly even in the full shock of the blow, trying to placate him, trying to stop him from losing his temper and spiralling out of control.

‘I had an accident at school!’ I cried, trying to get his attention back to me and away from Mum as his arm drew back, readying to strike her again. ‘I got burned in a fire! They’re scars! I’m scarred now!’

He unclenched his fist, and his arm dropped back down to his side.