Mice

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.