Gordon Reece - Mice

‘What are you talking about, Mum? You’re not going to go to prison. He broke into our house. He had a knife. We were defending ourselves, for God’s sake. He was strangling me — if you hadn’t come along when you did, he would have killed me!’

I thought she was being completely pathetic. I wanted help to come. I wanted to go to hospital and have the pain in my throat taken away. I wanted to have all the sticky sour blood washed off me and to be clean again, to smell of soap and talcum powder and to lie in a crisp cool hospital bed and be fussed over by nurses. Above all, I wanted to sleep, to sleep for hours and hours, and to forget the horror I’d just lived through. .

To my amazement, when I looked at Mum again she was laughing — not a happy laugh, but a morbid, bitter laugh.

‘If only it were that simple, Shelley. . but it isn’t.’ She patiently collected her thoughts before she spoke again. ‘He was leaving the house when you chased after him. He was unarmed—’

‘ Unarmed! ’ I exclaimed in disbelief. ‘He’s a man. I’m just a girl.’

‘It makes no difference! He was leaving the house. You had the knife and he didn’t.’

‘Mum, you’re being ridiculous. It was self-defence. He tied us up. He hit you in the face. I didn’t know whether he’d really gone, or if he was about to come back and kill us both. He’d already come back once — I couldn’t take any chances. The police would never take his side against us. .’

‘Shelley, I’m a lawyer. I know what I’m talking about. If we call the police, their forensic people will search every inch of this house. They’ll quickly work out that he was outside the house when you attacked him. We’ll have to admit that you had the knife then and he was unarmed. They’ll have no choice but to prosecute us—’

‘Prosecute us? Prosecute us for what?’

‘For murder.’

‘For murder ?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Surely she was in shock, surely she was just talking nonsense. .

‘There’ll be a trial. Three or four court appearances beforehand, perhaps as long as a year to wait before the trial itself. There’ll be publicity, lots of publicity, the press will have a field day — this is just the kind of thing they love. I’ll lose my job. Blakely won’t want the firm to be connected with anything as messy as this. If we’re lucky, we’ll have a sympathetic jury who’ll take our side — they’ll understand that we were in fear of our lives, that it’s impossible to think rationally when you’re so terrified.’

‘And what if we’re unlucky?’

‘If we’re unlucky and we get a bad jury or a particularly good prosecutor—’

‘Then what?’

‘We could be convicted of murder.’

‘But how? This is insane!’

‘The law says you can use force to defend yourself against an attacker but only reasonable force. The jury only has to decide that one of those wounds — just one — that you gave him with the knife wasn’t reasonable and if it was potentially fatal—’

‘What does that mean?’

‘If he’d have died from it later, whether I’d hit him or not. If that’s what the medical evidence concludes, you could be found guilty of murder.’

I sat in stunned silence. Put like that, everything suddenly seemed very different.

I had been defending myself. I had been defending Mum. I did think he might come back. . but it was also true that I hadn’t wanted him to escape, that I’d been pleased when he’d run back into the kitchen. I remembered how I’d taunted him and struck at him as we ran round and round the table, how I’d aimed the blow at his back where I thought his heart would be as he’d huddled in the corner by the bread bin, so that he’d stop moving for good . If I was really honest, hadn’t I meant to kill him? And if I’d meant to kill him, wasn’t that murder?

I shouldn’t have gone after him. It was a stupid, stupid mistake. And if I had to be punished for it, so be it, but I didn’t understand why Mum should suffer for what I’d done.

‘What about you though, Mum? You hit him when he was strangling me. You saved my life. How could that be murder?’

‘That’s true, Shelley, that’s true, he was strangling you. But I hit him twice . That second blow. . I knew you were out of danger. I knew he was no longer a threat. I could have called the police then and who knows, he might be in the hospital now, he might even have gone on to recover from his injuries. But I didn’t. I hit him again. Deliberately. I–I don’t know what came over me. But the truth is, I wanted to kill him . I know it was done in the heat of the moment, but if the jury decides that second blow wasn’t reasonable — then I’m guilty of murder.’

‘I don’t believe this,’ I whimpered. We’d beaten off the weasel-faced burglar’s murderous assault, but he still remained a threat to us. Even though we’d killed him, he could still destroy our lives. ‘What are we going to do, Mum?’

‘I don’t think I could survive it,’ she said. ‘The trial, the reporters, the publicity. And prison — prison would kill me.’

‘What are we going to do, Mum?’ I moaned. ‘What are we going to do? ’

The clock said 5:56 when Mum spoke again. A watery grey light was beginning to seep in through the kitchen window, the birds in the trees outside were chirruping joyously, welcoming in the morning as if this were a new day just like any other.

‘I think we should bury him in the garden,’ she said.

And that’s what we did. We buried him in the garden.

‘Surreal’ is the only word to describe the hour that followed. It was as though Mum and I had stepped into a bizarre hall-of-mirrors world where familiar reality was warped into absurd and grotesque shapes. I knew that it was all really happening, but at the same time I couldn’t believe that it was all really happening.

Mum and I pulling on our wellington boots so that we wouldn’t have to wade into that sticky pool in our bare feet when we seized the burglar’s legs and pulled him out from under the table.

The two of us debating whether to bury him in the vegetable patch or the oval rose bed as rationally, as calmly, as if we’d been discussing which wallpaper to pick for my bedroom (we finally chose the oval rose bed, as the veggie patch was too far to drag him and too close to the road).

The way the burglar’s body resisted our first tug, as though he’d become stuck in that congealing gravy.

Mum and I dragging a corpse ( a corpse! A dead human being! ) through the dew-wet grass while the birds twittered hysterically in the trees around us, and the day, a beautiful warm spring day, dawned.

The burglar’s head bumping down the concrete steps that led to the front garden and the oval rose bed (I winced at each bump and then told myself: he can’t feel anything — he’s dead — and I realized that death was still too enormous for me to grasp, that I still couldn’t rid myself of the idea that he must feel something).

Mum lurching backwards when his trainer came off in her hand and taking a pratfall straight out of a homevideo bloopers show.

The two of us, staggering around the garden, helpless with laughter, while the corpse lay face-down on the grass, its right arm outstretched before it like a resolute swimmer.

Mum and I walking to the shed to get the shovels — not to plant vegetables this time, but to plant a corpse, to plant a skinny, pallid twenty-year-old man in the chalky soil of our front garden.

Returning with our tools to find a large ginger cat we’d never seen before and have never seen since, licking the blood from the tips of the corpse’s fingers (it slunk away reluctantly at our approach and disappeared through an impossibly small hole in the hedge).