Gordon Reece - Mice

‘Yeah — well, you’re a mess.’

‘Yes, I know,’ I said, trying to keep him talking, trying to keep his attention on me.

‘Your old mum’s prettier than you are.’ He hiccuped, triggering another sour belch.

He picked up the red bag and tottered drunkenly away. He walked right past the hunting knife without so much as a glance in its direction, and disappeared into the kitchen.

We heard nothing for a long time.

‘I think he’s gone,’ Mum whispered.

As if that were his cue, he walked back into the lounge carrying a large gift-wrapped box in his arms. It was decorated with a bright red bow, and balanced on top of it was a pink envelope with my name written on it in Mum’s neatest calligraphy.

‘What’s this ?’ he demanded.

‘It’s my daughter’s birthday present,’ Mum answered coldly.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a computer, a portable computer.’

‘Nice one!’ he exclaimed delightedly, as though the gift had been bought especially for him. ‘I’m goin’ now. You’d better not call the police or I’ll come back.’

His eyes closed and a vague smile passed over his face as if he were enjoying a private joke. They opened again but only just, struggling to push up lids that had become unbearably heavy. He looked around him as though trying to remember where he was, what he’d been saying. ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ he drawled, ‘I’ll come back and do you. Understand?’

‘Yes, we understand,’ Mum said. ‘We won’t call the police. We promise.’

He stood rooted to the spot for a long time, lost in the convoluted labyrinths of his trip. He mumbled something and tried to belch but nothing came up. His eyes closed and I’d just decided that he’d slipped into another one of his strange trances when they suddenly flicked open again like a doll’s. He stared fixedly at me with such cold, piercing, homicidal intensity that I had to look away. The bloodletting’s going to start now, the bloodletting’s going to start right now, just when we thought he’d gone away and left us in peace! The frenzy’s going to start now . .

He teetered forward and the pink envelope slipped off the laptop and clacked onto the floor. At this sound he drew himself up straight again, smacked his chops loudly and licked his lips.

‘I’ll come back and do you,’ he said again, so quietly it was almost inaudible.

He fumblingly reorganized the laptop, turning it onto its side and gripping it under his left arm. As he did so, the beautiful red bow fell off and spiralled to the floor like an autumn leaf. Then he tacked his way slowly back to the dining room. He paused at the table and I was sure he was going to pick up the knife this time. But he just seemed to look right through it, as if it were invisible or some hallucinatory dagger of the mind, before he reeled into the kitchen and disappeared from sight.

I listened to him in the kitchen struggling to let himself out with my computer under one arm and the red sports bag in the other, too far gone to put one down and open the back door with a free hand.

‘It’s over,’ Mum said. ‘He’s really going now. I told you he wouldn’t hurt us.’

Yes, it was true this time. He really was going, taking away with him my sixteenth birthday present clasped tightly against his stinking jacket. The gift Mum had carefully wrapped up and decorated with a pretty red bow and put out on the kitchen table last thing before she went up to bed so that it would be there for me when I came down to breakfast in the morning, a wonderful birthday surprise. The laptop that with her mother’s intuition she’d known I wanted, that she couldn’t afford but that she’d been determined I should have, no matter what she had to go without herself.

He was going — leaving behind him a jagged gouge on Mum’s cheek from his bulky signet ring and a storm-coloured bruise engulfing her right eye. He was going — leaving behind him two defenceless women he’d systematically humiliated, tormented and abused as if it were the natural order of things, as if it was his right .

To this day I still don’t know exactly what made me do what I did next. Perhaps it was seeing that pallid, vicious thug carrying away my birthday present, the symbol of all my future ambitions; perhaps it was outrage at what he’d done to Mum; perhaps it was because he’d called me ugly; perhaps the truth is that we all have a limit to what we can endure — even mice — and that when that limit’s passed something just snaps. Perhaps it was merely the way Mum’s beautiful red bow had floated so slowly, so pathetically to the ground. .

I tore away the few remaining strands of rope that tied my legs, grabbed the knife from the dining-room table, and ran out into the garden after him.

He’d only gone a short distance to where the patio met the grass of the lawn, still within the yellow patch of light the kitchen threw out into the darkness. He heard me coming, and glanced back over his shoulder before continuing unconcernedly on his way, as if he’d seen no more than a cat going about its catty business — not a screaming girl running at him with a knife.

I thumped the knife into the gap between his shoulder blades with all my might.

I couldn’t believe how hard his back was, like stabbing the trunk of a tree — the blade stopped two inches short of the hilt and it took a huge effort to pull it out again. At the blow, he let out a long sigh and dropped the laptop and the red bag. He leaned forward as though he’d been punched in the stomach, and half-turning, glared up at me with a look of outraged innocence on his face.

‘What did you do that for?’ he moaned, as if I’d played some tasteless practical joke on him.

I struck at him again and again, half-closing my eyes, not wanting to see the wounds the knife was making, not wanting to see the blood.

Still bent double like a soldier under sniper fire, he headed back towards the kitchen, his left arm raised to try to ward off the worst of my blows. I thought, Good! I want you back inside the house! I don’t want you to get away from me!

He got into the kitchen and tried to close the back door against me, but he wasn’t fast enough and I shoulder-barged my way inside. He staggered towards the pantry, trying to put the pine table between us, but again he was too slow. I ran alongside him, stabbing him at will, taunting him like a picador taunts the bull as he jabs his spear into the animal’s streaming flanks. He went round and round the table and I followed him, stabbing, stabbing, stabbing.

‘ We’re playing musical chairs now! ’ I screamed at him. ‘ We’re playing musical chairs now! ’

I’d struck him so many times by then I’d lost count. He seemed to be growing weaker, and he collapsed against the sink, upsetting the plastic drainer full of plates and dishes from the previous night and sending them crashing to the floor. As he tried to recover his balance, one of my blows nicked the side of his neck and blood suddenly jetted out like water from a burst pipe. He clapped his hand to the wound and hunched in the corner by the bread bin, his back turned to me.

I just wanted him to lie down, to stop moving, to stop being any sort of threat to us. I contemplated the back of his ripped and bloody jacket, trying to judge where his heart would be, and struck as hard as I could. Just at that instant, he twisted away. The knife met the thick bone plate of his shoulder blade with such force that it was jarred out of my hand and went skidding away across the floor.

I saw the expression on his face change from cowering submission to a mocking, murderous triumph as he realized the tables had turned in his favour, and before I could even look round to see where the knife was, he launched himself at me.