Mice Read online

  His eyes closed and a vague smile passed over his face as if he were enjoying a private joke. They opened again but only just, struggling to push up lids that had become unbearably heavy. He looked around him as though trying to remember where he was, what he’d been saying. ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ he drawled, ‘I’ll come back and do you. Understand?’

  ‘Yes, we understand,’ Mum said. ‘We won’t call the police. We promise.’

  He stood rooted to the spot for a long time, lost in the convoluted labyrinths of his trip. He mumbled something and tried to belch but nothing came up. His eyes closed and I’d just decided that he’d slipped into another one of his strange trances when they suddenly flicked open again like a doll’s. He stared fixedly at me with such cold, piercing, homicidal intensity that I had to look away. The bloodletting’s going to start now, the bloodletting’s going to start right now, just when we thought he’d gone away and left us in peace! The frenzy’s going to start now . . .

  He teetered forward and the pink envelope slipped off the laptop and clacked onto the floor. At this sound he drew himself up straight again, smacked his chops loudly and licked his lips.

  ‘I’ll come back and do you,’ he said again, so quietly it was almost inaudible.

  He fumblingly reorganized the laptop, turning it onto its side and gripping it under his left arm. As he did so, the beautiful red bow fell off and spiralled to the floor like an autumn leaf. Then he tacked his way slowly back to the dining room. He paused at the table and I was sure he was going to pick up the knife this time. But he just seemed to look right through it, as if it were invisible or some hallucinatory dagger of the mind, before he reeled into the kitchen and disappeared from sight.

  I listened to him in the kitchen struggling to let himself out with my computer under one arm and the red sports bag in the other, too far gone to put one down and open the back door with a free hand.

  ‘It’s over,’ Mum said. ‘He’s really going now. I told you he wouldn’t hurt us.’

  Yes, it was true this time. He really was going, taking away with him my sixteenth birthday present clasped tightly against his stinking jacket. The gift Mum had carefully wrapped up and decorated with a pretty red bow and put out on the kitchen table last thing before she went up to bed so that it would be there for me when I came down to breakfast in the morning, a wonderful birthday surprise. The laptop that with her mother’s intuition she’d known I wanted, that she couldn’t afford but that she’d been determined I should have, no matter what she had to go without herself.

  He was going – leaving behind him a jagged gouge on Mum’s cheek from his bulky signet ring and a storm-coloured bruise engulfing her right eye. He was going – leaving behind him two defenceless women he’d systematically humiliated, tormented and abused as if it were the natural order of things, as if it was his right.

  To this day I still don’t know exactly what made me do what I did next. Perhaps it was seeing that pallid, vicious thug carrying away my birthday present, the symbol of all my future ambitions; perhaps it was outrage at what he’d done to Mum; perhaps it was because he’d called me ugly; perhaps the truth is that we all have a limit to what we can endure – even mice – and that when that limit’s passed something just snaps. Perhaps it was merely the way Mum’s beautiful red bow had floated so slowly, so pathetically to the ground . . .

  I tore away the few remaining strands of rope that tied my legs, grabbed the knife from the dining-room table, and ran out into the garden after him.

  15

  He’d only gone a short distance to where the patio met the grass of the lawn, still within the yellow patch of light the kitchen threw out into the darkness. He heard me coming, and glanced back over his shoulder before continuing unconcernedly on his way, as if he’d seen no more than a cat going about its catty business – not a screaming girl running at him with a knife.

  I thumped the knife into the gap between his shoulder blades with all my might.

  I couldn’t believe how hard his back was, like stabbing the trunk of a tree – the blade stopped two inches short of the hilt and it took a huge effort to pull it out again. At the blow, he let out a long sigh and dropped the laptop and the red bag. He leaned forward as though he’d been punched in the stomach, and half-turning, glared up at me with a look of outraged innocence on his face.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ he moaned, as if I’d played some tasteless practical joke on him.

  I struck at him again and again, half-closing my eyes, not wanting to see the wounds the knife was making, not wanting to see the blood.

  Still bent double like a soldier under sniper fire, he headed back towards the kitchen, his left arm raised to try to ward off the worst of my blows. I thought, Good! I want you back inside the house! I don’t want you to get away from me!

  He got into the kitchen and tried to close the back door against me, but he wasn’t fast enough and I shoulder-barged my way inside. He staggered towards the pantry, trying to put the pine table between us, but again he was too slow. I ran alongside him, stabbing him at will, taunting him like a picador taunts the bull as he jabs his spear into the animal’s streaming flanks. He went round and round the table and I followed him, stabbing, stabbing, stabbing.

  ‘We’re playing musical chairs now!’ I screamed at him. ‘We’re playing musical chairs now!’

  I’d struck him so many times by then I’d lost count. He seemed to be growing weaker, and he collapsed against the sink, upsetting the plastic drainer full of plates and dishes from the previous night and sending them crashing to the floor. As he tried to recover his balance, one of my blows nicked the side of his neck and blood suddenly jetted out like water from a burst pipe. He clapped his hand to the wound and hunched in the corner by the bread bin, his back turned to me.

  I just wanted him to lie down, to stop moving, to stop being any sort of threat to us. I contemplated the back of his ripped and bloody jacket, trying to judge where his heart would be, and struck as hard as I could. Just at that instant, he twisted away. The knife met the thick bone plate of his shoulder blade with such force that it was jarred out of my hand and went skidding away across the floor.

  I saw the expression on his face change from cowering submission to a mocking, murderous triumph as he realized the tables had turned in his favour, and before I could even look round to see where the knife was, he launched himself at me.

  My knees buckled, and with all the burglar’s weight on top of me, I fell heavily backwards onto the floor. I landed on something sharp and hard that ground against my coccyx, and I screamed out in blinding pain. I knew at once what it was. I was lying on the knife!

  He writhed on my chest, dragging himself up my body, trying to push back my chin with his forearm to expose my throat. Blood streamed from his neck wound like wine from an upturned bottle. It poured into my face, a never-ending river, flowing over me, filling my mouth so I had to spit and gasp for air as if I were drowning, stinging my eyes like soap, blinding me completely.

  His face was pressed up against mine now, our lips almost touching in a hideous parody of a lovers’ kiss. He was trying to get his hands around my neck, but I frenziedly beat them away and clawed wildly at his face. Every time he tried to pin my hands to the floor I twisted out of his grip and dug my nails back into his eyes. I was flailing and screaming, desperately trying to push his suffocating weight off me so that I could get my hand to the knife trapped against the small of my back. If I could just roll him off me for one second and reach the knife then I’d have the advantage again. If I could just get my hand to the knife . . .

  But he was too strong. In spite of the wounds he’d suffered, in spite of the blood he was haemorrhaging from his neck, he was still too strong for me, and he finally managed to get both his hands around my throat. I felt a sudden vice-like pressure cut off my air supply. Pinpricks of white light exploded in the darkness behind my eyelids, and I knew with absolute certainty that I was about to die if I didn
’t breathe in the next few seconds. I managed to squint my burning eyes open and saw his contorted face in repulsive close-up. His pupils were hugely dilated with adrenalized frenzy, his yellow teeth gritted with effort as he choked the life out of me; a thin thread of pink spittle dangled from his lower lip. And I thought, This is the last thing I’ll ever see.

  Something started to give in the middle of my neck; something was on the point of snapping. I’d managed to get my fingertips to the knife, but now all the strength was draining from me. My arms flopped uselessly by my sides. I hadn’t drawn a breath for a very long time. The pinpricks of white light became bigger and bigger until there was only white light. So this is what dying is like, I thought, this is dying – this is the white light they talk about – and I stopped fighting him, even in my mind, and closed my eyes and gave up and waited for death to come, the actual moment of death to come, and then there was an enormous crack and as if by magic all his weight was gone and the terrible pressure on my throat was suddenly taken away.

  When I opened my eyes again I saw Mum holding the chopping board in both hands, its white marble surface spattered with dark blood. She’d struck him with such force that he’d been lifted right off me and pivoted sideways so that only his legs still touched me, lying across mine at an oblique angle.

  Amazingly, he was still conscious, his two eyes staring wildly out of a mask of bright crimson blood. He was up on his forearms, trying to drag himself under the kitchen table before another blow could fall. But Mum wasn’t going to be denied. I watched her lining up the blow, picking her spot carefully, tightening her grip on the board’s short handle so there would be no slipping, no mistake. Then she raised it high above her head.

  I closed my eyes as it started to descend. I dreaded seeing the obscenity it would make when it struck. But I heard the sickening mushy noise and felt a hard fragment of the burglar’s skull ricochet off my cheek.

  16

  The clock on the kitchen cooker said 4:57.

  I sat propped against the washing machine, hungrily sucking air into my burning throat. Mum sat at the table, her head in her hands, sobbing quietly.

  The burglar was dead. There was no doubt about that. His body was sprawled on the floor, his head and torso under the kitchen table. His jacket was bunched up around his ears, his right arm stretched out in front of him as if he’d been reaching for something when he died.

  I couldn’t see his face from where I was sitting – thank God – just the back of his head, grotesquely misshapen after Mum’s killing blow. A lake of blood was spreading out around him, a veritable sea of blood, glistening in the bright electric light. It crept slowly over the tiles in thick oily tongues, and lapped against the bottoms of the cupboards, the cooker, the prickly coir fibre doormat by the back door, the dusty heating pipes beneath the breakfast bench. I thought of that line in Macbeth that I’d found so odd, when Lady Macbeth, remembering Duncan’s murder, says: ‘Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’ I understood it completely now. I wondered idly if Shakespeare had ever killed anyone – how else could he have known so exactly what the aftermath was like? Who would have thought the skinny burglar to have had so much blood in him?

  The red tide threatened my feet, stretched out in front of me, and I pulled them back a few inches to avoid contact with the syrupy pool. But I didn’t move – I was simply too exhausted. Besides, I was already covered in his blood. My hands were slippery with it, my hair matted, my nightdress spattered and stained, my towelling dressing gown that had soaked it up like a sponge was heavy with it, my mouth was full of its sharp metallic taste.

  The next time I looked at the clock it was 5:13.

  I tried to speak, but my throat burned and only a hoarse croak emerged. After a while I tried again, and this time it was a little easier.

  ‘Mum?’

  She sat at the table, lost in thought, her head still propped up by the columns of her forearms as though it was unspeakably heavy. She looked up when I spoke, but it took a moment for her eyes to return to the present.

  ‘Mum, shouldn’t you call the police?’

  She smiled sadly and shook her head. ‘That’s what I’ve been sitting here trying to work out, darling.’

  I didn’t understand what she meant and thought she was in some kind of shock. ‘We have to call the police, Mum,’ I said gently. ‘We’ve got to tell them what’s happened. They’ll call an ambulance. I need to go to hospital – my neck – it’s killing me.’

  But she didn’t go to the phone. She remained seated at the kitchen table, her bare feet perched on the struts of the chair to keep them out of the pool of congealing blood. With the right side of her face swollen, her eye puffy and half-closed and ringed by black and purple bruising, she didn’t look like herself any more – it was almost like looking at a completely different person.

  ‘Mum?’ I prompted her again. ‘The police? I need to go to hospital.’

  But still she didn’t move towards the phone.

  ‘Shelley . . .’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘What happened when you ran into the garden? I couldn’t see – I was still struggling to untie my legs. I saw you take the knife. What happened then?’

  ‘I stabbed him,’ I replied.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In his back.’

  ‘Did he have a weapon?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How many times did you stab him before I found you in the kitchen?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . lots . . . lots. Mum,’ I groaned, ‘when are you going to call the police?’

  Her reply took me completely by surprise.

  ‘I don’t want to go to prison, Shelley.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I croaked. ‘What do you mean, prison?’

  ‘I don’t want to go to prison,’ she repeated coldly, flatly. ‘And I don’t want you to go to prison either.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Mum? You’re not going to go to prison. He broke into our house. He had a knife. We were defending ourselves, for God’s sake. He was strangling me – if you hadn’t come along when you did, he would have killed me!’

  I thought she was being completely pathetic. I wanted help to come. I wanted to go to hospital and have the pain in my throat taken away. I wanted to have all the sticky sour blood washed off me and to be clean again, to smell of soap and talcum powder and to lie in a crisp cool hospital bed and be fussed over by nurses. Above all, I wanted to sleep, to sleep for hours and hours, and to forget the horror I’d just lived through . . .

  To my amazement, when I looked at Mum again she was laughing – not a happy laugh, but a morbid, bitter laugh.

  ‘If only it were that simple, Shelley . . . but it isn’t.’ She patiently collected her thoughts before she spoke again. ‘He was leaving the house when you chased after him. He was unarmed—’

  ‘Unarmed!’ I exclaimed in disbelief. ‘He’s a man. I’m just a girl.’

  ‘It makes no difference! He was leaving the house. You had the knife and he didn’t.’

  ‘Mum, you’re being ridiculous. It was self-defence. He tied us up. He hit you in the face. I didn’t know whether he’d really gone, or if he was about to come back and kill us both. He’d already come back once – I couldn’t take any chances. The police would never take his side against us . . .’

  ‘Shelley, I’m a lawyer. I know what I’m talking about. If we call the police, their forensic people will search every inch of this house. They’ll quickly work out that he was outside the house when you attacked him. We’ll have to admit that you had the knife then and he was unarmed. They’ll have no choice but to prosecute us—’

  ‘Prosecute us? Prosecute us for what?’

  ‘For murder.’

  ‘For murder?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Surely she was in shock, surely she was just talking nonsense . . .

  ‘There’ll be a trial. Three or four court appearances beforehand, perhaps as long
as a year to wait before the trial itself. There’ll be publicity, lots of publicity, the press will have a field day – this is just the kind of thing they love. I’ll lose my job. Blakely won’t want the firm to be connected with anything as messy as this. If we’re lucky, we’ll have a sympathetic jury who’ll take our side – they’ll understand that we were in fear of our lives, that it’s impossible to think rationally when you’re so terrified.’

  ‘And what if we’re unlucky?’

  ‘If we’re unlucky and we get a bad jury or a particularly good prosecutor—’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘We could be convicted of murder.’

  ‘But how? This is insane!’

  ‘The law says you can use force to defend yourself against an attacker but only reasonable force. The jury only has to decide that one of those wounds – just one – that you gave him with the knife wasn’t reasonable and if it was potentially fatal—’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘If he’d have died from it later, whether I’d hit him or not. If that’s what the medical evidence concludes, you could be found guilty of murder.’

  I sat in stunned silence. Put like that, everything suddenly seemed very different.

  I had been defending myself. I had been defending Mum. I did think he might come back . . . but it was also true that I hadn’t wanted him to escape, that I’d been pleased when he’d run back into the kitchen. I remembered how I’d taunted him and struck at him as we ran round and round the table, how I’d aimed the blow at his back where I thought his heart would be as he’d huddled in the corner by the bread bin, so that he’d stop moving for good. If I was really honest, hadn’t I meant to kill him? And if I’d meant to kill him, wasn’t that murder?

  I shouldn’t have gone after him. It was a stupid, stupid mistake. And if I had to be punished for it, so be it, but I didn’t understand why Mum should suffer for what I’d done.

  ‘What about you though, Mum? You hit him when he was strangling me. You saved my life. How could that be murder?’