Gordon Reece - Mice

I watched another delicate sunbeam become swallowed up in the swirling blackness. It looked as if the triumph of Evil would be absolute.

It was pitch dark when Mum got back at seven-thirty. The black rain clouds had strangled every last patch of light from the sky, but the storm they threatened had held off. Instead, a petulant, noisy wind had got up outside, roaring melodramatically in the chimney breast and rattling the windows in their frames.

Mum’s first words as she came in through the front door were, ‘Is it still there?’

‘Yes.’ I nodded excitedly. ‘Yes it is!’

We sat at the kitchen table and hurriedly made our plans.

‘I’m still not convinced it’s the burglar’s car,’ she began, her chest visibly heaving beneath her suit jacket. I rolled my eyes and folded my arms in irritation, and seeing me, she went on quickly, ‘But if it is , I don’t think we should just leave it in another lane around here. I think we should get it as far away from here as we can — leave it somewhere in town.’

‘Where?’

She pursed her lips before answering. ‘I was thinking the Farmer’s Harvest. The car park’s enormous and with so many people coming and going all the time we can just leave it and walk away without being noticed.’

It was a clever idea. Hide the car in plain sight rather than in some back street, where a nosy neighbour might be watching through the net curtains.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Sounds good.’

Mum glanced at her watch and stood up. I did the same, and felt momentarily groggy, as if I were in a lift that had suddenly started to descend.

She began to walk away, then turned sharply back to me. ‘And we mustn’t forget to remove anything from the car that could lead the police back here — before we leave.’

I nodded emphatically.

‘Now go and get dressed in the darkest clothes you have. And put some gloves on. I’ll go and do the same.’

As I searched through my wardrobe for my black polo-neck jumper, my black cords and the old black coat I’d had since I was twelve, I found myself giggling with nervous anticipation — just as I used to do when we played hide-and-seek when I was a little girl and I could hear the seeker’s breathing just inches away from my hiding place. How many times had I given the game away with my excited giggles? It was hard to believe that I was really dressing in black like a cat burglar so that I’d be less visible in the darkness, that I was really putting on gloves so that the police wouldn’t be able to trace my fingerprints. It was all too much like something out of a movie to have anything to do with my reality.

When we stepped out of the kitchen into the back garden, the profundity of the darkness took us both by surprise. For a few seconds it was like being blindfolded, and we both hesitated, unsure of our bearings and frightened to take a step into the unknown. The moon was no more than a fingernail indentation, regularly blotted out by the scudding black clouds that the blustery wind drove across the sky like a fleet of phantom galleons. The night was so dark I couldn’t make out a single star.

I set off cautiously in the direction of the car but hadn’t gone very far before I heard Mum’s anxious voice.

‘Shelley! Shelley! I can’t see anything! Wait for me!’

I stopped and waited for Mum to grab on to me. I led the way, but I could hardly see anything myself and shuffled forward hesitantly. The blind leading the blind, I thought. Disorientated, I veered too close to the fruit trees and walked straight into a branch. It dug sharply into my temple, just missing my eye, and I jumped back with a yelp of pain, stepping heavily on Mum’s toe.

‘It’s no good! It’s too dangerous!’ she said, having to raise her voice to be heard over the gale. ‘Go back into the house and get the torch! It’s in the second drawer down under the sink!’

I was back in a few minutes. Mum hadn’t moved from the spot where I’d left her. She put up her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the torch.

‘Turn it off if you hear a car,’ she said. She held on to me and I took the lead again.

The torch was a good one, bought in case of power cuts, but it wasn’t very effective outside in the allpervading darkness. Its beam illuminated an area no bigger than a dinner plate and our progress was still very slow. The grass looked strange in the torchlight, not green but silvery, ghostly, and the fallen branches were like skeletal hands reaching up through the soil. I thought about the burglar lying buried under the oval rose bed behind us. And I found myself thinking: What if the dead don’t stay dead? What if the dead don’t really die?

I imagined him coming towards us through the murky darkness. I saw his dead face, the Neanderthal brow, the glassy eyes, the fractured jaw, the gaping wound in his neck. I expected his cadaverous hand to reach out and seize hold of me at any moment. I tried to walk faster, but it was impossible with Mum holding on to me so tightly. I tried to drive away my morbid thoughts, telling myself that there was no such thing as ghosts, that the burglar was Paul David Hannigan, a weedy twenty-four-year-old crook and he was dead, dead, dead! But his name wasn’t the talisman against fear that I’d hoped it would be.

At last we reached the hedge and I peered over it. The lane seemed to be completely deserted, but I could make out a strange sound when the gusts died down, an intermittent clacking and hissing coming from somewhere nearby and I held back. It took me a while to figure out what it was: a water sprinkler in the field across the road. There’d be little need for that when this storm broke, I thought.

I squeezed through the hedge and out onto the grassy bank, and Mum followed me. She went around to the driver’s side of the car and tried the key. I heard it slide home and unlock the door first time. I felt the childish urge to say something — I told you so! I told you so! — but managed to gag the impulse. When Mum yanked the door open, the interior light came on, taking us both by surprise. We scrambled into the car as if we’d been caught in the beam of a powerful searchlight, and quickly slammed the doors shut.

We sat for a moment in the dark car without speaking. I listened to Mum struggling to control her rapid breathing, and wrinkled my nose at the overpowering stench of stale tobacco.

‘OK,’ she whispered, ‘let’s see what’s in here.’ She began groping desperately around for the interior light switch. ‘Where’s that bloody—!’

‘It’s all right, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’ve still got the torch. We can use that.’

I flicked the torch on and we hurriedly began to search the inside of the car. In my feverish paranoia I expected another car to turn into the lane at any moment. I took a secretary’s notepad, full of what looked like calculations, from the glove box, but I left the sweet wrappers, cigarettes, parking tickets and the cellophane bag of what I took to be cannabis — a tobacco-coloured half-brick with a pungent aroma. Mum found a road atlas in the driver’s door and took that, just in case there was something incriminating scribbled inside. There was a big khaki trench coat on the back seat, and I rolled it into a bundle and brought it into the front with me. I shone the torch around the floors, but there was nothing apart from chocolate bar wrappers and an empty vodka bottle.

‘Shall I take all this back into the house?’

‘No,’ Mum said, her anxious face stained an ugly yellow in the torchlight and criss-crossed with deep black shadows. ‘It’ll take too long. Just put them in the garden behind the hedge. We’ll take them into the house when we get back.’