Gordon Reece - Mice

It was nearly eleven but I was too frightened to go upstairs to bed. I kidded myself that I’d decided to wait up for Mum, and put the television on to drown out the unsettling noises. With a sensation like cold fingers on the back of my neck, I realized that this was the first time I’d been alone in the house late at night since we’d killed Paul Hannigan. It was no wonder that I felt more afraid than usual. Why had Mum left me behind?

I curled up on the sofa and sipped my wine, struggling to shut out the thoughts that tried to terrify me ( he could be outside the house now — risen from his shallow grave, about to beat at the front door with his maggoty fists. . or, worse, he could be inside the house already. . )

I flicked up and down the TV channels, but there was nothing that interested me — celebrities on a desert island, a competition to find the world’s strongest man, a sitcom set in a hospital where every remark, every expression or gesture of the actors released helpless peals of canned laughter.

There was a programme about a tribe in Africa (or the Amazon, I wasn’t sure which) that I half-watched for want of anything better. Their village was on the banks of a river, slimy with yellow-ochre mud, which the children dived into and swam about in as happily as if it had been the chlorinated water of an English swimming pool. The documentary showed the men hunting wild pigs with home-made bows and arrows and decorating their bodies with a tool that seemed to slice into their skin and fill the groove with pigment at the same time. I would normally have changed the channel when they prepared to sacrifice one of their goats as a religious offering because I hated seeing cruelty to animals (as a little girl if I ever saw a bullfight or a fox hunt on TV it would send me into hysterics), but that night it didn’t seem to bother me as much as usual.

It’s just an animal, after all , I found myself thinking, as a tribesman knelt on the goat’s chest and nonchalantly cut its throat. It’s just a stupid goat. Its intelligence was so low it had no awareness of what was happening to it, no understanding of cruelty, no understanding of death — no understanding of life, for that matter. Only if there was intelligence, real intelligence, could there be any sympathy for the victim. .

I dropped off to sleep for a few minutes and when I opened my eyes again one of the elders was talking about the tribe’s religious beliefs. His words came up in subtitles that were white against a pale background and hard to read. He was saying that the tribe lived closely with the animals of the forest and knew their different characters well.

They respected certain animals for their good qualities; they reviled others for their bad. One of their fundamental religious beliefs, he said, was that a man took on the qualities of any animal he killed. So a hunter who killed lots of monkeys would become an ingenious and clever man who’d always be making people laugh with his clownish antics. A man who killed lots of wild pigs would become an exemplary family man, a devoted father who’d fight to the death to protect his loved ones. He mentioned an animal I’d never heard of and said they didn’t kill this particular animal because it was thought to be untrustworthy and cowardly, and they were afraid of contracting these bad qualities. They believed that in the spirit world the spirits of animals and men intermingled and sometimes even fused together. In fact, many of the gods they worshipped were spirit-world fusions of humans and animals, such as the monkey-man and the inexhaustibly fertile chicken-woman.

I finished my wine and stretched out full-length on the sofa. I’d heard about this sort of idea before, probably at school — tribesmen who thought that killing a lion would make them as brave as a lion. Something about the idea intrigued me. I wondered if there’d ever been a time thousands of years ago (before police and prisons and documentary crews), when the tribe had believed that they took on the qualities, not just of the animals they killed, but of the men they killed too. Were the forests filled with ancient graves of people murdered for their good looks, their intelligence or their witty sense of humour? And what if it was true, I wondered drowsily, what if you really did take on the qualities of the person you’d killed? Would Mum and I then become like Paul Hannigan? Would we contract his savage thuggery like some horrible disfiguring disease?

I must have drifted off to sleep again because the next thing I remember was being woken up by the sound of Mum’s car rolling heavily over the gravel outside. The channel’s programming had finished for the night and the screen showed a wallpaper of white clouds in a blue sky and played banal muzak. The clock on the DVD player said 1:53.

I was standing in the kitchen in the middle of an enormous yawn when Mum put her key in the door.

‘What are you doing up?’ she said in a whisper, as if it was too late at night to speak any louder.

‘I fell asleep watching TV,’ I said, rubbing a watery eye with the knuckle of my index finger. ‘Did you find it OK?’

Mum looked wide awake. Her cheeks were rosy from being out in the fresh air. Her eyes shone.

‘Yes, I did. But it was a hell of a job in the dark, I can tell you. I thought the car was going to give up the ghost struggling up those forestry tracks. It’s absolutely covered in mud — I’ll have to take it to the carwash first thing tomorrow. Thank God for the radio mast up there — it’s lit up at night. It really helped me get my bearings.’

Her nose had started to run now she was back in the warm house, and she loudly sniffed back a droplet and frisked her pockets for a hanky.

‘I had some luck too,’ she went on between soft blows into the tissue she’d found. ‘Part of the fence near the shaft has been broken down, and I was able to drive the car almost up to the pithead.’

Fighting back the tears, I threw my arms around her and hugged her as hard as I could.

‘I’m so glad you’re OK! I was so worried!’

She held me tightly and I smelled the outdoors in the folds of her coat. ‘It’s all gone, Shelley,’ she whispered, her lips almost touching my ear, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. ‘It’s all gone! Gone forever. They’ll never find it!’

She cupped my face in her hands and contemplated me intently. I could hardly keep my eyes open and broke into another enormous yawn.

‘You go on up to bed now, sleepy-head.’ She smiled. ‘I need to eat something and unwind a bit before I come up.’

I kissed her goodnight and trudged sleepily up the stairs. I heard her take a bottle of wine from the fridge, and the glugging sound it made as she generously filled her glass. As I passed the spare room I was shocked by how empty it looked without the bin bags.

I lay in bed waiting for sleep, knowing it wouldn’t be long in coming and hoping that I might be spared the now-familiar nightmare. It was a great relief to have that mountain of evidence gone from under our roof at last. The police could come tomorrow and they’d find nothing incriminating in the house. Everything that connected Paul Hannigan to us was sunk one thousand feet underground in a labyrinth of dark chambers.

Or rather, almost everything.

I’d kept Paul Hannigan’s driver’s licence. It was hidden in my secrets box in the bottom drawer of my dressing table, along with some photos of my dad that Mum didn’t know I’d kept, my hospital ID bracelet and my drawing of the mouse with the noose around its neck.

I’m not exactly sure why I was so determined to keep the licence in spite of the risk, in spite of how crazy Mum would go if she knew what I’d done. All I knew was that I wanted something to show that what had happened that night had really happened. I wanted proof . Proof that a man really had broken into our house on my sixteenth birthday and that Mum and I really had killed him.