Gordon Reece - Mice

My knees buckled, and with all the burglar’s weight on top of me, I fell heavily backwards onto the floor. I landed on something sharp and hard that ground against my coccyx, and I screamed out in blinding pain. I knew at once what it was. I was lying on the knife!

He writhed on my chest, dragging himself up my body, trying to push back my chin with his forearm to expose my throat. Blood streamed from his neck wound like wine from an upturned bottle. It poured into my face, a never-ending river, flowing over me, filling my mouth so I had to spit and gasp for air as if I were drowning, stinging my eyes like soap, blinding me completely.

His face was pressed up against mine now, our lips almost touching in a hideous parody of a lovers’ kiss. He was trying to get his hands around my neck, but I frenziedly beat them away and clawed wildly at his face. Every time he tried to pin my hands to the floor I twisted out of his grip and dug my nails back into his eyes. I was flailing and screaming, desperately trying to push his suffocating weight off me so that I could get my hand to the knife trapped against the small of my back. If I could just roll him off me for one second and reach the knife then I’d have the advantage again. If I could just get my hand to the knife. .

But he was too strong. In spite of the wounds he’d suffered, in spite of the blood he was haemorrhaging from his neck, he was still too strong for me, and he finally managed to get both his hands around my throat. I felt a sudden vice-like pressure cut off my air supply. Pinpricks of white light exploded in the darkness behind my eyelids, and I knew with absolute certainty that I was about to die if I didn’t breathe in the next few seconds. I managed to squint my burning eyes open and saw his contorted face in repulsive close-up. His pupils were hugely dilated with adrenalized frenzy, his yellow teeth gritted with effort as he choked the life out of me; a thin thread of pink spittle dangled from his lower lip. And I thought, This is the last thing I’ll ever see .

Something started to give in the middle of my neck; something was on the point of snapping. I’d managed to get my fingertips to the knife, but now all the strength was draining from me. My arms flopped uselessly by my sides. I hadn’t drawn a breath for a very long time. The pinpricks of white light became bigger and bigger until there was only white light. So this is what dying is like , I thought, this is dying — this is the white light they talk about — and I stopped fighting him, even in my mind, and closed my eyes and gave up and waited for death to come, the actual moment of death to come, and then there was an enormous crack and as if by magic all his weight was gone and the terrible pressure on my throat was suddenly taken away.

When I opened my eyes again I saw Mum holding the chopping board in both hands, its white marble surface spattered with dark blood. She’d struck him with such force that he’d been lifted right off me and pivoted sideways so that only his legs still touched me, lying across mine at an oblique angle.

Amazingly, he was still conscious, his two eyes staring wildly out of a mask of bright crimson blood. He was up on his forearms, trying to drag himself under the kitchen table before another blow could fall. But Mum wasn’t going to be denied. I watched her lining up the blow, picking her spot carefully, tightening her grip on the board’s short handle so there would be no slipping, no mistake. Then she raised it high above her head.

I closed my eyes as it started to descend. I dreaded seeing the obscenity it would make when it struck. But I heard the sickening mushy noise and felt a hard fragment of the burglar’s skull ricochet off my cheek.

The clock on the kitchen cooker said 4:57.

I sat propped against the washing machine, hungrily sucking air into my burning throat. Mum sat at the table, her head in her hands, sobbing quietly.

The burglar was dead. There was no doubt about that. His body was sprawled on the floor, his head and torso under the kitchen table. His jacket was bunched up around his ears, his right arm stretched out in front of him as if he’d been reaching for something when he died.

I couldn’t see his face from where I was sitting — thank God — just the back of his head, grotesquely misshapen after Mum’s killing blow. A lake of blood was spreading out around him, a veritable sea of blood, glistening in the bright electric light. It crept slowly over the tiles in thick oily tongues, and lapped against the bottoms of the cupboards, the cooker, the prickly coir fibre doormat by the back door, the dusty heating pipes beneath the breakfast bench. I thought of that line in Macbeth that I’d found so odd, when Lady Macbeth, remembering Duncan’s murder, says: ‘Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’ I understood it completely now. I wondered idly if Shakespeare had ever killed anyone — how else could he have known so exactly what the aftermath was like? Who would have thought the skinny burglar to have had so much blood in him?

The red tide threatened my feet, stretched out in front of me, and I pulled them back a few inches to avoid contact with the syrupy pool. But I didn’t move — I was simply too exhausted. Besides, I was already covered in his blood. My hands were slippery with it, my hair matted, my nightdress spattered and stained, my towelling dressing gown that had soaked it up like a sponge was heavy with it, my mouth was full of its sharp metallic taste.

The next time I looked at the clock it was 5:13.

I tried to speak, but my throat burned and only a hoarse croak emerged. After a while I tried again, and this time it was a little easier.

‘Mum?’

She sat at the table, lost in thought, her head still propped up by the columns of her forearms as though it was unspeakably heavy. She looked up when I spoke, but it took a moment for her eyes to return to the present.

‘Mum, shouldn’t you call the police?’

She smiled sadly and shook her head. ‘That’s what I’ve been sitting here trying to work out, darling.’

I didn’t understand what she meant and thought she was in some kind of shock. ‘We have to call the police, Mum,’ I said gently. ‘We’ve got to tell them what’s happened. They’ll call an ambulance. I need to go to hospital — my neck — it’s killing me.’

But she didn’t go to the phone. She remained seated at the kitchen table, her bare feet perched on the struts of the chair to keep them out of the pool of congealing blood. With the right side of her face swollen, her eye puffy and half-closed and ringed by black and purple bruising, she didn’t look like herself any more — it was almost like looking at a completely different person.

‘Mum?’ I prompted her again. ‘The police? I need to go to hospital.’

But still she didn’t move towards the phone.

‘Shelley. .’

‘Hm?’

‘What happened when you ran into the garden? I couldn’t see — I was still struggling to untie my legs. I saw you take the knife. What happened then?’

‘I stabbed him,’ I replied.

‘Where?’

‘In his back.’

‘Did he have a weapon?’

‘No.’

‘How many times did you stab him before I found you in the kitchen?’

‘I don’t know. . lots. . lots. Mum,’ I groaned, ‘when are you going to call the police?’

Her reply took me completely by surprise.

‘I don’t want to go to prison, Shelley.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I croaked. ‘What do you mean, prison ?’

‘I don’t want to go to prison,’ she repeated coldly, flatly. ‘And I don’t want you to go to prison either.’