Mice (15 page)

I became aware of Roger’s voice, far, far away, barely audible. He was saying something for the second or third time.

‘Sorry – did you say something?’ I asked.

‘You
are
out of it, aren’t you?’ He laughed. ‘I was saying you’ve run out of time. It’s over.’

It’s over.
Is that what the police would say if they came to the house today?
You’ve run out of time
. . . I finished the word I was writing and put my pen down. I’d only answered half the questions.

‘Before we go through this,’ Roger said, ‘don’t you think we should have a little tea break? We’ve normally had two or three cups by now . . .’

I hadn’t offered him any tea because he had a habit of following me into the kitchen and chatting while the kettle boiled, and I was mindful of Mum’s warning:
keep people out of the kitchen whatever you do
.

‘I suppose because it’s your birthday you want me to make it, is that right?’ Roger joked. ‘Well, as it’s your special day – just this once—’ And he started to get up.

‘
No!
’ I cried, jumping to my feet. ‘I’ll do it, Roger. I just forgot, that’s all. Like I said, I had way too much wine yesterday. I’m still asleep, really.’

Roger sat back down, but as I went to pass behind him on my way to the kitchen, he leaned back in his chair and blocked my way.

‘Is there any chance of a slice of your mum’s lemon cake while you’re out there, Shelley? I’m absolutely starving.’

‘Yes, of course.’ I smiled, and grinning cheekily, he let me pass. I felt sure he was going to follow me, and I desperately tried to think of some way to keep him in the dining room.

‘Do you want to start looking through my answers now?’ I said. ‘I didn’t get very far, I’m afraid.’

‘Sure,’ Roger said, reaching for my notebook. ‘Sure.’

The smile vanished from my face as soon as I was on my own in the kitchen. I had to hurry. I knew he’d follow me in if I wasn’t quick. I got the lemon cake out of the cake tin and dropped it on the table. I quickly filled the kettle, put two teabags in the pot, and snatched a plate from the cupboard. I took a fork from the cutlery drawer and then looked for a knife to cut the wretched lemon cake. I found the long sharp knife with the black plastic handle. As soon as I held it in my hand the flashbacks started again.
Thumping the knife into the gap between his shoulder blades. Slashing at him as he ran bent double towards the house. Nicking the side of his neck as I pursued him around the kitchen. ‘We’re playing musical chairs now! We’re playing musical chairs now!’

‘You’re finding it very difficult, aren’t you, Shelley?’ said a voice behind me.

I spun around, the knife in my hand.

Roger was in the kitchen, walking nonchalantly towards the back door.

What did he mean? What was I finding difficult? Did he mean pretending that nothing had happened in the house last night? Did he mean covering up the murder of the burglar?

‘It’s not easy,’ he said, ‘especially when there’s so much blood.’

I gripped the knife tightly in my hand, unsure what I should do next. Should I stab him? Was that what Mum would have wanted me to do?

‘It was a savage business, wasn’t it?’

‘What are you talking about?’ I croaked hoarsely, barely able to give the words enough weight to reach him.

Roger looked surprised. ‘The passage – the passage from
Moby Dick
. It’s not only difficult technically, but also emotionally. Whaling was a savage, bloody business in those days. I’m surprised they set it for the exam last year. It upset a lot of students, there were lots of complaints. Why, what did you think I meant?’

I took the cake out of its greaseproof paper and tried to cut it with a trembling hand. My nerves were raw and jangling. I had a strange feeling in my head: a whirling vertigo, a craziness, and the sickening sensation that I was no longer in control of my own actions. I quite simply didn’t know what I was going to do next, what I was capable of doing next.
I had to get him out of the kitchen!
This was the epicentre. This was where the killing had taken place. This was where all the blood had been. The knife wouldn’t stop shaking, and I had to use two hands to steady it.

‘It looks different in here,’ Roger said.

I pretended not to hear, but his words made my heart race even faster.

‘Where have the curtains gone?’

‘Um – Mum’s washing them,’ I said, trying to make my voice sound breezy and unconcerned.

‘And the doormat’s gone, too.’

‘Yes – uh, Mum hated it. She’s thrown it out.’

Roger was leaning against the back door with his arms folded. His enormous green eyes panned this way and that around the kitchen like security cameras.

‘There’s something else . . .’ he said, as though thinking aloud. ‘Something else that’s different . . .’

‘What is it?’ he pondered. ‘What
is
it?’

I’d somehow managed to cut his slice of cake and put it on a plate. I held it up and smiled brightly but Roger was still scrutinizing the kitchen, tugging at the ends of his blond moustache.

And that’s when I saw it. Mum had missed it. I’d missed it. Exactly level with the point of Roger’s right elbow. Just above the handle on the door’s sea-blue frame. A kidney shape with four vertical stripes hovering above it. Now more brown than red, but still unmistakable.

It was a handprint.

(
He tried to close the back door against me but I shoulder-barged my way inside.
)

It was a bloody handprint.

Roger only had to turn his head a fraction of an inch and he couldn’t help but see it.

I didn’t lose my nerve, much to my own amazement. I fixed Roger’s eyes with my own, held them so that those darting green fish were stilled, and began to talk non-stop, blurting out the first thing that came into my head.

‘I thought the passage was impossible – the hardest comprehension exercise I’ve ever done and I didn’t get number five at all, Roger, I didn’t get it at all – “What’s the literary role of Stubb’s pipe?” What does “literary role” mean, for God’s sake? I mean, it’s just a pipe, isn’t it? Maybe it’s his trademark, maybe it’s something that marks him out as a character, but I can’t see that it’s got any
literary role . . .
’

All the time I talked, I moved across the kitchen towards the dining room, holding the cake out in front of me. As Roger’s gaze followed me, so his head turned slowly, slowly away from the bloodstain on the back door...

‘No, that’s very true, Shelley – the question isn’t very well phrased at all, but I think what they’re driving at is that the pipe isn’t just a pipe, it’s a symbol—’

‘Come on,’ I interrupted him, standing at the door to the dining room, ‘let’s sit down in here and you can have your cake.’

Obediently, like a dog whose master has taken down his lead ready for a walk, Roger smiled, pushed himself off the door without unfolding his arms, and followed me out of the kitchen.

When Roger had finally gone, I fell back against the front door and slid slowly down until I was sitting on the carpet with my legs stretched out in front of me. Those three hours had completely drained me. I’d never felt so exhausted in all my life.

My eyes felt swollen in their sockets, my vision strangely unequal, as if I were seeing more out of my right eye than my left. The spaghetti bolognese had started to come back, and every time I got the taste of it in my mouth I felt nauseous. It was as if all the horrors of the previous night were distilled into that taste of minced meat and tomato sauce. My stomach churned and groaned alarmingly. My head spun. I sat there in the hallway for a long time, holding my head in my hands, staring at the hall carpet, hoping that if I kept very still the nausea might pass, that I might still manage not to be sick.

Then I remembered the bloodstain. I had to get rid of the bloodstain before Mrs Harris arrived.

I dragged myself up and staggered to the kitchen and rubbed at the handprint with some damp kitchen towel. It didn’t come off easily – it had embedded itself in the cracks in the paintwork and I had to scrub hard. I had no strength in my wrists and the vigorous exertion made me feel even more nauseous. I began to have cold sweats and my mouth filled with bitter saliva, which I knew full well was the final stage before the sickness came. When I looked at the smear of clotted blood on the kitchen towel, it was the final straw.

I made it to the bathroom just in time.

 

I lay on the sofa in the lounge, but was too feverish to fall into a deep sleep. I tossed and turned in a kind of delirium, my mind racing at a million miles an hour, a train of confused, paranoid, guilty thoughts that went round and round the same tiny track at dizzying speed.

We hadn’t buried the burglar properly; we’d left his right arm protruding stiffly out of the soil. Or if it wasn’t his arm, it was his foot, the foot without a shoe in its threadbare green sock. I had to go out and cover him properly, I had to go out and bury him properly, or Mrs Harris would see him when she drove up to the house . . . Or we hadn’t actually killed the burglar, somehow he’d regained consciousness and hauled himself out of the ooze of his temporary grave. Like a B-movie monster of mud and hacked flesh, he was calling me on his mobile phone as he limped towards the cottage, calling to torment me, to taunt me, to terrify me . . .

I sat up screaming when the phone rang. I stared at it in horror and let it ring, too scared to pick it up. But as my head cleared and the ridiculous thought that it was the burglar was slowly dispelled, my next thought was that it was the police. God knows how many times I let it ring before I finally snatched up the receiver.

It was Mum.

She was very guarded. She was working on the assumption that someone, somewhere, might be listening to our call, and so I did the same.

‘Are you having a lovely birthday?’ she asked cheerily.

‘Yes, wonderful, Mum,’ I replied without the slightest trace of irony in my voice. ‘Roger bought me a beautiful edition of
Rebecca
.’

‘Wonderful! How did your class go?’

‘Fine, thanks – we did the origins of the First World War. It’s Roger’s special subject – you should hear him, there’s nothing he doesn’t know. He really should write a book.’

We talked without really saying anything for five minutes or so, but by the end of the conversation Mum had reassured herself that I was OK and that the police hadn’t come to the cottage . . . yet.

She said she’d try to get home early.

I was sick again a little later, but there was hardly anything left in my stomach to bring up. I went upstairs and washed my face in cold water and brushed my teeth and gargled with some mouthwash to get rid of the acidic aftertaste. As I stood at the basin, the desire to sleep was overwhelming; sleep called to me like a siren, like the pipes of the Pied Piper, and I would have gone to bed (damning all the consequences to hell) if I hadn’t heard Mrs Harris’s car pull into the drive at just that moment.

 

Mrs Harris was far easier to cope with than Roger. She had no interest whatsoever in the fact that it was my birthday, and when she saw Roger’s card and present she merely commented coldly that if she bought a present for every one of her pupils on their birthdays she’d be bankrupt by now. Unlike Roger, Mrs Harris had little curiosity in what was around her, and probably wouldn’t have noticed if the entire sideboard had been removed from the dining room. Nor did she ever want a cup of tea, preferring to drink cups of black coffee from the small Thermos flask she always brought with her.

The dull flat surface of that lesson was only disturbed once, briefly, but with a violence that shocked us both.

Mrs Harris had poured herself a cup of coffee and was carefully unwrapping the cling film from her digestive biscuits.

‘I’ve just taken on a new pupil who lives very close to here,’ she remarked, ‘a girl about your age. Her father’s a farmer – his fields must come up to the rear of your property. Jade’s her name.
Jade
, if you can believe it!’

I said nothing, merely glanced at my watch to see how much longer was left of the lesson.

‘She’s yet another so-called victim of bullying,’ Mrs Harris went on, dusting the biscuit crumbs from the tips of her fingers. ‘In other words, she prefers to stay at home rather than be inconvenienced by the tiresome business of going to school.’

I’d let remarks like this pass several times before; I knew Mrs Harris’s views on mice all too well. But this time, before I even realized what I was doing, I was speaking out.

‘
How dare you?
’ I hissed at her, unconsciously screwing up the piece of paper I’d been writing on.

Mrs Harris stared at me, completely stunned, as if her docile lapdog had suddenly bitten her finger right to the bone. I could feel my face twitching and contorting with uncontrollable anger.

‘How dare you?’ I shouted it right into her face. ‘I suffered eight months of hell at the hands of bullies! I was attacked day in and day out. I was set on fire! I could have been killed! What do you mean, another so-called victim?’

My anger was so great that my words couldn’t keep pace with it. I had so much pent-up rage to vent that now the floodgates were open it was impossible to know how to shape it all into words. My outburst fizzled out in tongue-tied incoherence.

Mrs Harris’s reaction took me completely by surprise. I expected her to bridle with haughty indignation, to unleash a venomous, withering rebuke that would reduce me to tears in a matter of seconds. But instead of flaring up in self-righteous fury, she put her fingers to her lips as if she couldn’t believe what had just escaped them.