Gordon Reece - Mice

‘It looks different in here,’ Roger said.

I pretended not to hear, but his words made my heart race even faster.

‘Where have the curtains gone?’

‘Um — Mum’s washing them,’ I said, trying to make my voice sound breezy and unconcerned.

‘And the doormat’s gone, too.’

‘Yes — uh, Mum hated it. She’s thrown it out.’

Roger was leaning against the back door with his arms folded. His enormous green eyes panned this way and that around the kitchen like security cameras.

‘There’s something else. .’ he said, as though thinking aloud. ‘Something else that’s different. .’

I could have told him: the heavy Italian marble chopping board that hung by the cooker was missing from its hook. It was upstairs in one of the bin bags, sticky with the burglar’s blood and brain matter.

‘What is it?’ he pondered. ‘What is it?’

I’d somehow managed to cut his slice of cake and put it on a plate. I held it up and smiled brightly but Roger was still scrutinizing the kitchen, tugging at the ends of his blond moustache.

And that’s when I saw it. Mum had missed it. I’d missed it. Exactly level with the point of Roger’s right elbow. Just above the handle on the door’s sea-blue frame. A kidney shape with four vertical stripes hovering above it. Now more brown than red, but still unmistakable.

It was a handprint.

( He tried to close the back door against me but I shoulder-barged my way inside. )

It was a bloody handprint.

Roger only had to turn his head a fraction of an inch and he couldn’t help but see it.

I didn’t lose my nerve, much to my own amazement. I fixed Roger’s eyes with my own, held them so that those darting green fish were stilled, and began to talk non-stop, blurting out the first thing that came into my head.

‘I thought the passage was impossible — the hardest comprehension exercise I’ve ever done and I didn’t get number five at all, Roger, I didn’t get it at all — “What’s the literary role of Stubb’s pipe?” What does “literary role” mean, for God’s sake? I mean, it’s just a pipe, isn’t it? Maybe it’s his trademark, maybe it’s something that marks him out as a character, but I can’t see that it’s got any literary role. . ’

All the time I talked, I moved across the kitchen towards the dining room, holding the cake out in front of me. As Roger’s gaze followed me, so his head turned slowly, slowly away from the bloodstain on the back door…

‘No, that’s very true, Shelley — the question isn’t very well phrased at all, but I think what they’re driving at is that the pipe isn’t just a pipe, it’s a symbol—’

‘Come on,’ I interrupted him, standing at the door to the dining room, ‘let’s sit down in here and you can have your cake.’

Obediently, like a dog whose master has taken down his lead ready for a walk, Roger smiled, pushed himself off the door without unfolding his arms, and followed me out of the kitchen.

When Roger had finally gone, I fell back against the front door and slid slowly down until I was sitting on the carpet with my legs stretched out in front of me. Those three hours had completely drained me. I’d never felt so exhausted in all my life.

My eyes felt swollen in their sockets, my vision strangely unequal, as if I were seeing more out of my right eye than my left. The spaghetti bolognese had started to come back, and every time I got the taste of it in my mouth I felt nauseous. It was as if all the horrors of the previous night were distilled into that taste of minced meat and tomato sauce. My stomach churned and groaned alarmingly. My head spun. I sat there in the hallway for a long time, holding my head in my hands, staring at the hall carpet, hoping that if I kept very still the nausea might pass, that I might still manage not to be sick.

Then I remembered the bloodstain. I had to get rid of the bloodstain before Mrs Harris arrived.

I dragged myself up and staggered to the kitchen and rubbed at the handprint with some damp kitchen towel. It didn’t come off easily — it had embedded itself in the cracks in the paintwork and I had to scrub hard. I had no strength in my wrists and the vigorous exertion made me feel even more nauseous. I began to have cold sweats and my mouth filled with bitter saliva, which I knew full well was the final stage before the sickness came. When I looked at the smear of clotted blood on the kitchen towel, it was the final straw.

I made it to the bathroom just in time.

I lay on the sofa in the lounge, but was too feverish to fall into a deep sleep. I tossed and turned in a kind of delirium, my mind racing at a million miles an hour, a train of confused, paranoid, guilty thoughts that went round and round the same tiny track at dizzying speed.

We hadn’t buried the burglar properly; we’d left his right arm protruding stiffly out of the soil. Or if it wasn’t his arm, it was his foot, the foot without a shoe in its threadbare green sock. I had to go out and cover him properly, I had to go out and bury him properly, or Mrs Harris would see him when she drove up to the house. . Or we hadn’t actually killed the burglar, somehow he’d regained consciousness and hauled himself out of the ooze of his temporary grave. Like a B-movie monster of mud and hacked flesh, he was calling me on his mobile phone as he limped towards the cottage, calling to torment me, to taunt me, to terrify me. .

I sat up screaming when the phone rang. I stared at it in horror and let it ring, too scared to pick it up. But as my head cleared and the ridiculous thought that it was the burglar was slowly dispelled, my next thought was that it was the police. God knows how many times I let it ring before I finally snatched up the receiver.

It was Mum.

She was very guarded. She was working on the assumption that someone, somewhere, might be listening to our call, and so I did the same.

‘Are you having a lovely birthday?’ she asked cheerily.

‘Yes, wonderful, Mum,’ I replied without the slightest trace of irony in my voice. ‘Roger bought me a beautiful edition of Rebecca .’

‘Wonderful! How did your class go?’

‘Fine, thanks — we did the origins of the First World War. It’s Roger’s special subject — you should hear him, there’s nothing he doesn’t know. He really should write a book.’

We talked without really saying anything for five minutes or so, but by the end of the conversation Mum had reassured herself that I was OK and that the police hadn’t come to the cottage. . yet.

She said she’d try to get home early.

I was sick again a little later, but there was hardly anything left in my stomach to bring up. I went upstairs and washed my face in cold water and brushed my teeth and gargled with some mouthwash to get rid of the acidic aftertaste. As I stood at the basin, the desire to sleep was overwhelming; sleep called to me like a siren, like the pipes of the Pied Piper, and I would have gone to bed (damning all the consequences to hell) if I hadn’t heard Mrs Harris’s car pull into the drive at just that moment.

Mrs Harris was far easier to cope with than Roger. She had no interest whatsoever in the fact that it was my birthday, and when she saw Roger’s card and present she merely commented coldly that if she bought a present for every one of her pupils on their birthdays she’d be bankrupt by now. Unlike Roger, Mrs Harris had little curiosity in what was around her, and probably wouldn’t have noticed if the entire sideboard had been removed from the dining room. Nor did she ever want a cup of tea, preferring to drink cups of black coffee from the small Thermos flask she always brought with her.