Gordon Reece - Mice

Mum shrugged her shoulders helplessly. ‘We can pay the twenty thousand pounds,’ she said, but in a way that made it sound more like a question than a statement.

‘But we don’t have twenty thousand pounds,’ I groaned. ‘That’s more than your salary for a whole year. It would take forever to find that amount of money.’

‘I could get it, Shelley,’ she said quietly.

‘How?’

‘I could borrow against the value of the house. I could take out a mortgage.’

The thought of Mum paying all that money to the blackmailer made me feel physically sick. She worked hard enough and went without enough as it was. The thought of her carrying the extra burden of the blackmailer on her back was just too horrible to countenance. And it was naive to think this would be the blackmailer’s only demand for money. He’d keep coming back for more and more and more. We’d have to live the rest of our lives with this disgusting parasite feeding on us at will. It wouldn’t be any kind of life at all. It would be the most miserable servitude imaginable. There’d never be any closure to the traumatic events of April the eleventh. It was a wound the blackmailer would pick open again every time it began to heal.

‘It’ll never stop, Mum,’ I said. ‘Once we give him money he’ll just keep coming back for more.’

‘I know, Shelley, I know.’

A stupid thought came into my mind and I gave it voice without thinking. ‘What about Dad? Would Dad give us the money?’

Mum turned a face full of bitterness and hurt towards me.

‘ I’d never ask him! ’ she hissed. It was clear she would tolerate no further discussion.

I felt my skin prickle with anger. She was dismissing Dad with such cold finality that it was as if he were dead. But he wasn’t dead to me. I struggled to swallow the words I wanted to shout at her. It was the wrong time, the wrong place, to have this argument.

There was a long silence between us. Mum eyed the blackmailer’s note obsessively, as though still convinced the answer lay somewhere in those lines of biro block capitals.

‘So is that it?’ I said eventually, unable to believe that our road had run out so suddenly, so hopelessly.

Mum was silent. She chewed at her bottom lip and played with the note, folding it into a thin strip and snaking it between the fingers of her right hand. She studiously avoided my eyes.

I wanted to scream at her at the top of my voice. Is that it? Is that the best that your razor-sharp intellect can come up with? Is that the best that the super-brain, the woman-who-can-solve-any-problem can do?

I glared at her with contempt as she sagged listlessly at the kitchen table, hardly able to keep her eyes open because she’d barely slept, because she’d drunk too much wine again the night before. If she hadn’t been so weak, if she hadn’t started to fall apart after we’d killed Paul Hannigan, she wouldn’t have been such a wreck that morning, she’d have been able to think of a way out of the mess we were in! If she hadn’t been so weak, maybe Dad would still be here to protect us! If she hadn’t been so weak, maybe I wouldn’t have been such a mouse — maybe I would have been able to stand up to the girls concerned and we’d never have found ourselves in this situation!

The flood of anger I felt towards Mum also dragged with it the sour realization that in spite of my sixteen years, I still looked to her to act like a mother and keep me safe; I still looked to her to perform a maternal miracle that would dispel this danger, that would chase away the wolf circling our door. And I felt betrayed when I realized that there was going to be no maternal magic today, no miracle in the kitchen — just the too-bright sunlight and the silence, occasionally broken by a flurry of soft, feathered bodies in the eaves.

After a long, long time Mum spoke again. ‘There is another way, Shelley.’

‘What?’ I grunted sullenly, expecting no more than some pathetic straw to clutch at. ‘What, for God’s sake? What? ’

Mum let the blackmailer’s note drop from her fingers onto the table and looked deep into my eyes, her face as ghastly as an alabaster death mask.

‘We kill him, Shelley,’ she said in barely more than a whisper. ‘When he comes here today, we kill him.’

It’s strange looking back on it now, but Mum’s words didn’t shock me. I wasn’t appalled as I suppose I should have been. Just two months earlier, I would have been stuttering in disbelief — Are you insane? Are you out of your mind? — but now I simply considered the idea, coldly, dispassionately, on its merits . .

And the first objection that sprang into my mind wasn’t moral, it was practical. I remembered Four-wheel-drive Man, I remembered his heavy bulldog build, the shaven head, the dagger-shaped goatee, the mean, penetrating little eyes.

‘How, Mum? How are we going to kill him? Four-wheel-drive Man’s huge — he’s built like a wrestler. What are we going to do to a man like that? The burglar was drunk, he hardly knew what he was doing. Four-wheel-drive Man will be a different proposition altogether.’

‘We don’t know that it is Four-wheel-drive Man, Shelley. You’re jumping to conclusions again.’

‘But what if it is him?’ I persisted, refusing to be fobbed off. ‘What if it is him? One hard punch in the face from a man like that could kill you. You won’t be just covering the bruise with make-up and going off to work the next day, that’s for sure. How are we going to kill a man like that, for God’s sake?’

Mum said nothing. She just stared down at her large, awkward hands, which sat on the table like two sunbleached crabs washed up by the tide. She seemed to be weighing something up in her mind; weighing, balancing, slowly coming to a conclusion that she reached only with the greatest reluctance.

‘There is a way,’ she said finally, looking up at me with a strange expression on her face, perplexed, a little shamefaced. ‘I know how.’

‘ How? ’

‘Wait here.’

With a great effort she raised herself wearily from her chair and left the kitchen. I heard her boots clomping up the stairs, the groaning of the floorboards in her bedroom somewhere above my head, and then a prolonged silence.

Finding myself alone in the kitchen, I began to feel uncomfortably exposed and vulnerable. What if Four-wheel-drive Man came to the house now while I was downstairs all alone? What if his face suddenly appeared at the kitchen window? This last thought was so terrifying that I squeezed my eyes shut so that I couldn’t see the kitchen window any more. There was only one thought running through my head while I waited impatiently for Mum’s return: HurryupMum hurryupMum — hurryupMum!

The plaintive squeak of the fourth stair told me that she was on her way back down, and I opened my eyes.

I was surprised to see that she’d put her beige fleece on over her blouse, as it was clear it was going to be another scorching hot day. Both her hands were buried inside the large pouch-like pocket, which bulged strangely.

When Mum reached the table, she turned to face me and drew something slowly out of the fleece pocket. At that instant, a starburst of bright white sunlight flooded through the kitchen window behind her, momentarily blinding me, and it was only when I shifted position and put my hand up to shield my eyes that I saw what she was holding in her outstretched hand.

‘You didn’t get rid of the gun ?’ I gasped, astonished to see the loathsome object again. ‘You didn’t take it to the mine?’

Mum gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head.

‘Why not?’