Mice Read online

  I looked up from Mum’s shoulder to see him walking towards us, dragging two dining-room chairs with him. He put them back to back and told us to sit down.

  ‘We’re gonna play musical chairs,’ he said, and burst out laughing as if he’d just made the funniest joke.

  ‘Yeah – that’s right,’ he said, ‘we’re gonna play musical chairs. Like in school with the teacher. Laa dee laa dee laa dee laa. Stop! Who’s got the chair? I’ve got the chair! Who’s got the chair? I’ve got the chair! Laa dee laa dee laa dee laa!’

  With another wild jag of the knife, he gestured for us to sit down. We reluctantly let go of each other and did what he wanted. I instantly regretted it because now I couldn’t see Mum at all – only the fireplace and the piano – and I felt my fear intensify and panic rise in my breast. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths, trying to drive the hysteria back down.

  The youth stood just a few feet away to my left, silent, like an actor who’s unexpectedly forgotten his lines. His eyelids began to flicker wildly again and his eyes slid upwards until all I could see were the discoloured whites. His head slumped forward. It was almost as though he’d fallen asleep standing up. The knife hung limply in his hand just held by the tips of his fingers.

  I stared at him, expecting him to suddenly snap out of it, but he didn’t. He stayed immobile, like a clockwork toy that has run itself down. If I throw myself at him now, I thought, right now, the knife will drop harmlessly to the floor and Mum will pick it up. Without the knife he wasn’t a cat in the mouse hole at all – he was only a kitten, and a sick, disorientated kitten at that. If I rushed at him now, when he was off in one of his trances, I could knock the knife from his hand. I could do it. I should do it. I had to do it . . .

  But slowly his eyelids unglued themselves, his grey irises with their pencil-point pupils dropped back into place, and he stared directly at me. He smiled vacantly and smacked his chops like someone waking from a deep sleep with a foul taste in their mouth. His grip tightened on the knife. He brought it up to his face and used the back of his hand to wipe away some bubbly dribble that was running down his chin.

  I was too late. I was too late again.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said slowly, beginning to remember where he was. ‘Yeah – we’re gonna play musical chairs.’

  He groped around in his pocket and pulled out a ragged jumble of rope.

  13

  ‘You don’t have to tie us up,’ Mum said, trying to sound as calm and reasonable as she could. But I could hear the fear in her voice. If he tied us up, we’d be completely at his mercy; we couldn’t even run away if he started to use his knife. We’d be as helpless as the turkeys I’d seen in the market at Christmas, trussed up in a squalid corner, pathetically awaiting the butcher’s hatchet.

  ‘It’s really not necessary,’ Mum went on. ‘We’re not going to do anything. Take whatever you want – there’s jewellery in the red box in my bedroom, and there’s cash under my mattress – take it. We won’t call the police. I promise.’

  The youth stood stock still, his face strangely distracted. Perhaps he was considering what she’d said; perhaps his trip was taking him through a particularly scary loop the loop at nauseating speed.

  Then he laughed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand again and began to tie Mum’s wrists together. ‘I gotta tie you up,’ he said. ‘That’s why I brought the rope.’

  He knelt on the floor and tied her legs together, and then crawled over on his hands and knees to me. He tied my legs over and over again, lost in the action of taking the rope round and round my ankles. I watched his greasy head bobbing around me and tried not to breathe in his fetid stink. When he finished my legs he found he’d used up nearly all the rope. He grabbed my wrists and pulled them roughly towards him and bound them tightly in the raggedy end that was all he had left. There was just enough to tie a tiny knot.

  ‘There,’ he said, ‘that’ll stop you going anywhere!’

  He got up slowly from his knees, breathing heavily. He held his stomach and grimaced as if he were about to be sick. He cracked a loud sour belch.

  ‘Sorry, ladies,’ he said. ‘Sorry, madam. Sorry, madame. I shouldn’t have had them eggs. Them eggs was off.’

  There was a long silence. An unbearably long silence. I couldn’t see him, but I sensed he was standing in front of Mum. I tried to look over my shoulder, but he was in the blind spot directly behind me and I couldn’t catch even a glimpse of him. He’s going to stab her, I thought. The killing’s going to start right now. He’s going to kill her and then he’s going to kill me. He’s not interested in stealing anything. He’s come here to kill us. He’s going to slit our throats in our own lounge. This disgusting pig is going to slit our throats.

  I tugged at the rope tying my hands but it was tied too tightly and wouldn’t give. There was nothing I could do. I slumped back in my chair and waited for it to begin.

  ‘I need a bag,’ he said. ‘I didn’t bring a bag.’

  ‘There are – there are some bags under the stairs,’ Mum suggested tentatively. I was relieved to hear her voice again.

  ‘I brought the rope, but I forgot a bag,’ he said, like a little boy apologizing to the teacher for not coming to school properly prepared.

  ‘Under the stairs,’ Mum repeated gently. ‘There’s a sports bag there. You can have the sports bag.’

  ‘I’m going upstairs now. I’m getting the money and all them jewels. And if you try anything while I’m gone, I’m gonna kill you. I’m gonna kill both of you. You understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mum said.

  ‘You understand?’ he brayed.

  ‘Yes, we understand completely,’ Mum repeated in a voice that was as compliant as she could possibly make it.

  There was another long, uneasy silence.

  ‘You want the sports bag under the stairs,’ Mum prompted. ‘It’s red.’

  ‘I know what I want, lady! I know what I want!’ he shouted petulantly. ‘Don’t you tell me what I want! Don’t you tell me what I want!’

  For a moment he seemed to hesitate, as though he was tempted to work this spark of anger up into a real blaze, but when he spoke again his voice was more subdued than angry. ‘I know what I want, lady. I know what I’m doing. Don’t you worry about that . . .’

  Then he was gone. I heard him rummaging under the stairs and dragging out the sports bag, then his heavy sleepwalker’s footsteps clomping up the stairs.

  ‘Mum?’ I whispered. ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Just keep calm, Shelley. If we panic, then he’ll panic as well. We have to stay calm.’

  ‘But he’s going to kill us!’

  ‘No, he’s not. He just wants money. When he thinks he’s got all there is, he’ll go – that’s all he’s interested in.’

  She was wrong. I was sure she was wrong, but there was no point in arguing. We were both tied up. There was nothing we could do now but wait. Something heavy thumped to the floor in the room above us. A little later we heard him flush the toilet in the bathroom.

  I stared at the piano, its lid still open, Russian Folk Songs still turned to ‘The Gypsy Wedding’ from the night before. There was my flute, still balanced on the velvet seat of the piano stool where I’d left it. It was impossible to believe that just a few hours earlier Mum and I had been playing a duet in that very room, that we’d been laughing and giggling as I struggled to keep up with the frenetic pace of the music. Now we sat trussed up and terrified, waiting to see if a drug-addled burglar was going to kill us or let us live.

  With a sick smile, I remembered that it was officially my birthday. Happy birthday to me! How many people, I wondered, had died on their birthday? Now there was irony for you. I was going to say something to Mum, but thought better of it. My morbid observations weren’t going to help the situation.

  I surveyed the bookshelves on either side of the craggy vertebral column of the chimney breast. There they all were – The Complete Works of Shakespeare, War and Peace
, Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment, Pride and Prejudice, Don Quixote, Oliver Twist, Les Miserables – a worthy selection of the classics of Western literature packed tightly onto those walnut shelves. Above them were our books on art and artists – enormous illustrated volumes on the Renaissance, the Impressionists, Modernism, Degas and Vermeer, Michelangelo, Turner and Botticelli. Just below these in our ‘music section’ was the thirty-volume Lives of the Great Composers that we’d ordered from the Music Lover’s Book Club, neatly arranged in alphabetical order from Bach to Wagner.

  Yes, there they all were, all the gods and goddesses of art, literature and music. All the deities of middle-class culture. But for the first time in my life as I looked up and down their ranks, instead of feeling awe and admiration for them, I only felt loathing. More than loathing, in fact – disgust. They made me want to be sick.

  It was all lies. It was all one gigantic fraud. They pretended to be about life – real life – but they weren’t connected with real life at all. Real life had nothing to do with novels or poems, it had nothing to do with landscapes in oils or abstract paintings of red and yellow squares, it had nothing to do with the organization of sounds into the formal harmony of music.

  Real life was the complete opposite of order and beauty; it was chaos and suffering, cruelty and horror. It was having your hair set on fire when you’d done no harm to anyone; it was being blown up by a terrorist bomb as you walked your children to school or sat down in your favourite restaurant; it was being kicked to death in a back street for the meagre pension you’d just collected; it was being raped by a gang of drunken strangers; it was having your throat cut by a drug addict who’d broken into your house looking for money. Real life was a massacre of the innocents every day. It was an abattoir, a butcher’s shop, draped with the bodies of countless mice victims . . .

  And all this culture, all this art, was simply a trick. It allowed us to pretend that human beings were noble, intelligent creatures who’d left their animal past behind them long ago and had evolved into something finer, something purer; that because they could paint and write like angels they were angels. But this art was just a screen that hid the ugly truth – that we hadn’t changed at all, that we were still the same creatures who had cut into the warm bellies of the animals we’d killed with sharpened stones and vented our anger on the weak with frenzied blows of a blunt club. Pretty paintings and clever poems didn’t alter our real nature one bit.

  No – art, music and poetry didn’t reflect real life at all. It was just a refuge for cowards, a delusion for those too weak to face the truth. By trying to absorb this culture, all I’d done was make myself weak, weak and helpless, unable to defend myself against the human beasts that inhabited this twenty-first-century jungle.

  ‘He’s going to kill us, Mum. I know it for sure.’

  ‘Shelley, you’ve got to stay calm. Just do what he says.’

  ‘You don’t understand the danger we’re in! He’s high on drugs! He’s going to kill us!’

  What kind of justice was this? What kind of God would let this happen? Hadn’t Mum and I suffered enough? Dad had walked out on us and left us to struggle on by ourselves while he luxuriated in the Spanish sun with his twenty-four-year-old slut. I’d been so badly bullied that I’d had to leave school and be taught at home. My face had been left scarred with the marks of others’ spite. And now out of all the houses that this walking time bomb could have broken into, he’d broken into ours, just as we were starting to build a new life together, just as things were beginning to get better again.

  What more did we have to suffer now? Rape? Torture? What crime had we ever committed apart from the crime of being weak, the crime of being mice? What harm had we ever done to deserve such relentless punishment? Why wasn’t this happening to Teresa Watson and Emma Townley? Why wasn’t this happening to the girls who’d bullied me so badly that I’d wanted to take my own life? Why wasn’t this happening to my dad and Zoe? Why was this happening to us? Again? Hadn’t we suffered enough?

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yes, darling?’

  ‘Mum, this rope’s beginning to give. I think I can get my hands free.’

  And then I smelled the chemical tang of alcohol and knew that he was back in the room.

  14

  He walked past us, carrying the red sports bag, its sides straining to contain all the objects he’d stuffed inside. It seemed he’d grabbed anything that had come to hand – I could even see the family-sized bottle of shampoo from the bathroom protruding from one of the zippered side pockets.

  He went into the dining room and began sweeping the knick-knacks from the top of the sideboard into what little space was left in the bag. All the while he stared glassily at the wall in front of him like a blind man, almost oblivious to what he was doing. He didn’t seem to notice when any of the miniature glass animals or china figurines missed the bag and fell to the floor, but just carried on sweeping, sweeping, like a robot.

  But what I couldn’t take my eyes off, what I stared at in disbelief, was the knife. He’d left the fanged hunting knife on the dining-room table. He was unarmed.

  My hands were free now. I left them lying loosely in my lap, the rope still ineffectively coiled around them, and began to work on my legs. The rope must have been years old, and as I forced my ankles apart I could feel the dry prickly strands snapping one by one.

  ‘Mum!’ I hissed, turning right around in my chair to bring my lips close to her cheek. ‘This rope’s so old that—’

  ‘Hey!’

  I jumped as if a firecracker had gone off under my chair. He was staring straight at me, an ugly dog snarl curling around his lips and nose.

  ‘No talking!’ he screamed, the veins standing out in his forehead and a shower of spittle spraying from his mouth. It was so loud that I still felt the words echoing round and round the room long after he’d said them.

  When he couldn’t fit anything more into the bag, he walked towards us, the knife still lying forgotten on the table behind him. He stood in front of us, rocking queasily backwards and forwards. Under the bright ceiling light, his skin was greasy with sweat and deathly pale; he wore a pained expression like a child who’d eaten too much at a party and now had raking stomach ache and knew he was going to be sick. I could see the hairs on his top lip and chin – not a man’s bristles, but the ugly, sparse whiskers of an adolescent.

  ‘I’m goin’ now,’ he said.

  But he didn’t move. He stayed swaying unsteadily in front of us while his eyelids began their now-familiar flickering and his eyes rolled up like those of an epileptic about to fall into a seizure. His head lolled onto his chest and slowly, slowly he began to topple forwards. The sound of the bag thudding to the floor brought him around too late to stop his forward momentum. He fell heavily against me. His greasy face rubbed against mine and I inhaled the nauseating stench of his foul breath. He kept his face close to mine, laughing quietly to himself, enjoying the fear and disgust he aroused in me. I kept my hands tight together, praying he wouldn’t see that I’d managed to untie them.

  ‘Fancy a snog?’ he said.

  I closed my eyes tightly and clenched my teeth, ready for his disgusting assault. But it didn’t come. He pushed himself upright.

  ‘I don’t want to snog you,’ he said. ‘You’re an ugly, stuck-up bitch.’

  I opened my eyes a fraction and saw his olive-green shape hovering at my side.

  ‘What’s all that – ’ he grimaced – ‘what’s all that crap all over your face?’

  I couldn’t speak. I’d been so frightened for so long now I felt I couldn’t take much more. I felt as though my pounding heart was going to give out at any second and I was going to die of fright, like I’d heard hunted animals did even before the hunters’ dogs seized them in their jaws.

  ‘What is it, eh?’

  Silence. A long uncomfortable silence.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘She was in an accident at school,’ Mum answered h
urriedly.

  With a speed I wouldn’t have thought him capable of, he wheeled around and punched her hard in the face. I felt her whole body rock violently sideways in the chair behind me.

  ‘I didn’t ask you!’ he shouted.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mum said, still thinking clearly even in the full shock of the blow, trying to placate him, trying to stop him from losing his temper and spiralling out of control.

  ‘I had an accident at school!’ I cried, trying to get his attention back to me and away from Mum as his arm drew back, readying to strike her again. ‘I got burned in a fire! They’re scars! I’m scarred now!’

  He unclenched his fist, and his arm dropped back down to his side.

  ‘Yeah – well, you’re a mess.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said, trying to keep him talking, trying to keep his attention on me.

  ‘Your old mum’s prettier than you are.’ He hiccuped, triggering another sour belch.

  He picked up the red bag and tottered drunkenly away. He walked right past the hunting knife without so much as a glance in its direction, and disappeared into the kitchen.

  We heard nothing for a long time.

  ‘I think he’s gone,’ Mum whispered.

  As if that were his cue, he walked back into the lounge carrying a large gift-wrapped box in his arms. It was decorated with a bright red bow, and balanced on top of it was a pink envelope with my name written on it in Mum’s neatest calligraphy.

  ‘What’s this?’ he demanded.

  ‘It’s my daughter’s birthday present,’ Mum answered coldly.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a computer, a portable computer.’

  ‘Nice one!’ he exclaimed delightedly, as though the gift had been bought especially for him. ‘I’m goin’ now. You’d better not call the police or I’ll come back.’