Gordon Reece - Mice

But the snapping and crackling of gravel, the squealing of unhealthy brakes, the spitting and panting of exhausted metal wasn’t in my imagination — a car was coming up the drive towards the house.

Mum heard it too and her eyes widened with fear, the unhealthy yellow sclera disfigured by a red graffiti of broken veins.

‘It’s him!’ she whispered, and her whisper was as loud as a scream. ‘He’s here already!’

‘What are we going to do , Mum?’ I cried, but she was already on her feet, snatching up the gun and hurriedly secreting it in the fleece’s front pouch.

She turned on me fiercely, bringing her face close to mine and clutched my wrist hard in her right hand. ‘Leave everything to me, Shelley! Don’t do anything, don’t say anything! Let me do all the talking!’

The arrival of the blackmailer had transformed her. She was suddenly wired, suffused with a hard, determined energy. Every vestige of her jaded torpor was thrown off in an instant. She swept her hair impatiently out of her eyes and strode into the lounge. Slavishly I staggered to my feet and followed her.

The dining room and lounge were much darker than the kitchen, deprived as they were of sun until the afternoon. The fireplace, the piano, the armchairs and sofa, appeared dark, solid, funereal, and it took a few moments for my eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom. Mum, who was standing directly in front of the window, was just a silhouette. I felt the sudden need to be physically close to her as this unknown danger neared the house, and I walked towards her on legs as faltering and uncertain as a toddler’s.

The crunching of gravel, the dry whining of the brakes grew louder and louder until a car suddenly lunged into sight across the lounge window.

I stopped dead in my tracks, unable at first to comprehend what I was seeing, unable to believe the evidence of my own eyes — almost, almost convinced by the physical impossibility of this apparition that I wasn’t really awake at all, but wrestling in the coils of another monstrous nightmare.

The battered turquoise car, the car we’d got rid of weeks before in the car park of the Farmer’s Harvest — Paul Hannigan’s car — was coming slowly to a halt behind our Ford Escort.

The floor seemed to tilt suddenly beneath my feet and I had to put out a foot so as not to fall, like a gymnast who’s mistimed her landing. It didn’t make any sense! It wasn’t possible! We’d got rid of the car! Paul Hannigan was dead ! How on earth had the car found its way back here to Honeysuckle Cottage? How on earth had it found its way back to us ?

So it was true, after all. The dead don’t stay dead. Paul Hannigan had come back to take revenge on us for what we did to him.

Mum turned away from the window, her face grim, terrible, as white as bone. She started towards the front door, but I blocked her way and seized her hands.

‘What is it, Mum? What’s going on?’

She didn’t answer me. A car door clunked shut outside.

‘I don’t understand,’ I moaned. ‘We got rid of his car! We got rid of his car! What’s it doing back here?’

I could hear heavy footsteps making their way slowly across the gravel, coming closer to the front door.

‘Leave everything to me, Shelley.’

She freed herself from my grip and tried to go into the hall, but I held on to her, seizing hold of her fleece, gripping the belt of her jeans.

‘Don’t open the door, Mum!’ I pleaded. ‘Don’t let him in here!’

Mum pulled my hands roughly off her. ‘Don’t be stupid , Shelley!’ she shouted. ‘Don’t get hysterical! We have to let him in! This has to be brought to an end one way or another!’

There was a resounding thump at the front door that shook the entire frame and set the chains rattling.

I followed Mum down the hall and leaned against the balustrade for support. I watched her undo each of the locks and chains and slip the bolts — one at the bottom, one at the top — and as she yanked the front door open, I fully expected to be confronted by the vengeful, bloody ghost of Paul Hannigan.

But it was no ghost.

A small, comical-looking man of about fifty, with an enormously distended pot belly, stood on the doorstep. He’d tried to cover his baldness by combing the long strands of hair that grew above his right ear over the top of his crown and flattening them into place with some kind of grease. The podgy swag of his double chin hung down almost as far as his sternum. A pair of large-framed plastic glasses perched on a small snub nose, a roll-up fag dangled from a flabby bottom lip. He wore a grease-spotted yellow T-shirt stretched almost to breaking point, baggy grey tracksuit bottoms and a pair of decrepit trainers.

But what caught my attention even more than his huge stomach was the man’s arms. They were short, truncated, almost like a dwarf’s, yet powerfully muscled, the bloated, marble-veined biceps covered in the faded hieroglyphs of ancient tattoos. On one hairy wrist there was a chunky identity bracelet and one of those copper bands that are supposed to cure arthritis. On the other, a gold Rolex flashed in curious contrast to his otherwise shabby appearance.

He stood there jangling his car keys and the loose change in his pocket, waiting to be invited in. I don’t know who Mum had been expecting, but she seemed as taken aback as I was. We both stood gawping at the fat man, speechless.

He peeled the saliva-sodden cigarette from his bottom lip and flicked it away across the gravel.

‘I think you know what I’m here for,’ he said, with a belligerent thrust of his lower jaw.

But I didn’t. It was only slowly that my brain connected this caricature to the battered turquoise car, only slowly that I came to the only conclusion possible: that, in spite of all my hysterical expectations, this was the blackmailer.

‘You’d better come in,’ Mum said and opened the door wider for him to enter.

The fat man stepped into the hallway and for a moment all three of us stood there squashed close together, awkward and embarrassed, like strangers in a lift. The only sound was the fat man’s strained breathing, the only movement the rise and fall of his enormous yellow gut.

Mum hesitated, seemingly unsure what to do next. Her hand hovered at the mouth of the fleece pocket. Was she going to shoot him right then and there in the hallway? Was she going to press the gun against that swollen belly and pull the trigger before he could take another step into the house? But her hand dropped back to her side and she turned and walked slowly down the hallway and into the kitchen.

The fat man followed her and, reluctantly, I followed him. Although I lagged several paces behind, I couldn’t help noticing that he limped, his body keeling sideways every time he shifted his weight onto his left foot. One of his trainers made a squelchy fart sound at every step, like the comic honk of a clown’s car.

When we were all in the kitchen, Mum turned to face the blackmailer.

‘So I suppose you’re responsible for this ?’ she said, holding up the note like a schoolmistress reproving a delinquent pupil.

‘I am indeed!’ he said jovially. Moving towards the chair Mum had just been sitting in, he asked, ‘Do you mind?’

‘Yes, I bloody well do mind!’ she snapped fiercely, but he ignored her and eased himself into the chair.

When he was settled, he looked around with a selfsatisfied smile, pushing his glasses back up his nose with an obscene jab of his pink index finger.

He had the perennially youthful face of many obese people, as if those full cheeks and dimpled chins are immune to the usual ravages of time. Sitting there at the kitchen table in a chair that his great bulk reduced to kindergarten proportions, he resembled a monstrously overgrown schoolboy, a bald, criminal Billy Bunter, who could no longer fit comfortably behind his desk. His face, with its pouty feminine lips and turned-up nose, could almost have been the face of a victim, of a mouse, if those soft features hadn’t been contradicted by the short tattooed arms. They told a different story, of hours spent bench-pressing in the gym to turn them into lethal weapons, brutal pistons that broke jaws and snapped noses. He folded them now across the yellow egg of his paunch and calmly looked Mum up and down.