Gordon Reece - Mice

Looking up from our digging to see a farmer, perched high atop a ludicrous Heath Robinson piece of farm machinery, come roaring down the narrow lane and right past the house not more than a hundred and fifty metres from where we stood; watching him glance quickly in our direction and salute us with a stiff straight arm which he kept aloft until he’d passed out of sight.

We waved dazedly back at him, two women in bloodstained nightclothes burying a body in our front garden at half-past six in the morning.

There was just enough room to fit the corpse in the rose bed without having to uproot any of the rose bushes. The top layer of soil was wet after the night’s rain and our sharp spades cut through it easily. It was sticky and clung to the blades and we had to use our boots time and again to scrape them clean. The deeper we dug, however, the more difficult it became. Two feet down, the soil seemed unaffected by the rain and as hard as rock.

I started to sweat profusely. I felt dizzy and lightheaded and had to take off my heavy dressing gown before I could carry on. We were both too weak, too exhausted from lack of sleep, to make much of an impression against this stubborn stratum, and as we hacked away fruitlessly at the soil, the day was growing lighter every second. I began to feel horribly exposed and visible, even though there was no one around to see us — the farmer had long gone, the lane was deserted, and the surrounding fields were as still and silent as a photograph. I found myself remembering one of my religious education teacher’s favourite sayings: The eye of God sees all.

At three feet deep, Mum stopped, red-faced and breathing heavily from the exertion.

‘It’s not deep enough, Mum,’ I said. ‘Animals might be able to dig him up.’

‘It’ll have to do, Shelley. We’ve just got to hide him. We’ve got the house to clean up yet.’

We dragged the body to the very lip of the narrow trench, and then pushed him in using our feet and our spades, not wanting to touch something so disgusting with our hands. To my horror, he came to rest on his back, and I found myself staring at that weaselly face yet again. The same face, yet different, subtly changed by death.

The eyes were half-open, but they were glassy, unfocused. His eyebrows, completely relaxed now, had dropped low on his forehead, forming a dark Neanderthal ridge. His jaw must have been dislocated by Mum’s blow, because the bottom half of his face was twisted sharply away from the rest. The fracture had forced his mouth open and his lower teeth now protruded slightly above his top lip, giving him a fierce, animal look like a boxer dog. His left arm lay straight by his side, the hand on his thigh as if strumming a guitar, while his right arm, stiffened into the position in which he’d died, was extended high above his head like a keen student who knows the answer to a difficult question.

And maybe he does know the answer to a difficult question , I thought, the most difficult question of all — what happens to us when we die?

The shallow pit we’d dug wasn’t long enough to fit the burglar’s straightened right arm. The forearm and hand remained protruding out of the mud, a grotesque new five-petalled flower in the garden. Rather than dig any more, Mum stepped gingerly down into the hole and seized the corpse’s arm and tried to bend it down towards the top of his head. Rigor mortis had already started to set in, and the arm kept slipping from her grip and straightening itself as though the burglar was deliberately resisting her — even in death.

Mum was horribly pale when she stepped up out of the hole.

We shovelled the soil back on top of him. I buried his feet (one foot in its trainer, the other in a ragged green sock), his legs, his left hand, his waist, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw any dirt over his head. When I saw Mum dump a shovelful of soil onto his face, I winced ( mud was going in his eyes — mud was going in his mouth! ) and then kicked myself for being such a baby.

He can’t feel anything — he’s dead!

When we’d finished, the youth had completely disappeared from the face of the earth. There was Honeysuckle Cottage, there was the neat front garden, there was the oval rose bed, there were the rose bushes already showing here and there a precocious pink bud. But the corpse had vanished without trace.

We leaned on our spades, drunk with fatigue, taking a moment before we started on the next horrendous task — cleaning up the blood in the kitchen.

It was then that I heard the noise. Soft, muffled, a series of musical notes like a bird or maybe even an insect. It stopped and then a few seconds later it started again, the same set of musical notes. Mum and I looked at each other, confused. The noise stopped. It started again. I looked around at the bushes and flowerbeds to see what it could be, and then it dawned on me. I knew that tune. I’d heard it many times before, in the street, in cafes, in restaurants, on trains. .

It was the ringing of a mobile phone. And it was coming from the oval rose bed.

The burglar’s mobile must have rung more than twenty times before it finally rang off. I realized I’d been clenching my fists and gritting my teeth the whole time, as though enduring an agonizing physical pain.

Mum rarely swore but she swore now. A staccato outburst of ugly expletives.

‘Oh my God!’ I whined. ‘ Omigod! ’

We both stared in horror at the rose bed as if we’d seen the soil form itself into a mouth and start to speak.

‘What are we going to do, Mum? What are we going to do ?’

Mum was silent for a long time before she answered. ‘We’ve got to dig him up. We’ve got to get that phone. We can’t risk it ringing again and someone hearing it. . and the police will be able to trace it, they’ll be able to pinpoint its exact location. We’ve got to get it out of there.’

She raked her hand through her hair, her brow knotted with anxiety. ‘ Dammit! I should have gone through his pockets! Whatever was I thinking?’

The thought of digging up the corpse and searching through its pockets was simply too much for me. I slumped down on the grass.

Mum glanced at me over her shoulder. I was struggling to bite back the tears. I felt unnaturally hot, feverish. I was short of breath, but even taking great lungfuls of air didn’t seem to help. I didn’t want to see that face again. I didn’t want to see that face with mud in its eyes and mud in its mouth. I didn’t think I could bear that. .

‘I’ll do it, Shelley,’ she said as if reading my mind. ‘But we haven’t got a lot of time. Go back inside, get the mop from the kitchen cupboard and start cleaning up the floor. Don’t walk anywhere else — stay in the kitchen — we mustn’t tread blood all over the house.’

‘OK, Mum,’ I said in little more than a whisper. But I didn’t move. I felt weighed down by the futility, the stupidity, the wrong-headedness of what we were doing.

‘Someone’s looking for him already, Mum. Someone’s already trying to find him. We’re never going to get away with this. We’re bound to get caught!’

She turned towards me a face made strange and sinister by the livid purple bruising.

‘It’s too late to worry about that now,’ she said, her voice oddly hollow, as if her mind was elsewhere, perhaps already steeling herself to the grisly task she was about to perform.

Just then the burglar’s phone rang again, and I jumped as if I’d had an electric shock. I got quickly to my feet and hurried across the lawn back to the house. I couldn’t bear that sound! I had to get away from that sound!

That cheery eight-note sequence repeating itself over and over again sounded to my ears like the burglar’s laughter — taunting us, mocking us from the darkness of his shallow grave.