Mice

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?’

‘That’s true, Shelley, that’s true, he was strangling you. But I hit him twice. That second blow. . I knew you were out of danger. I knew he was no longer a threat. I could have called the police then and who knows, he might be in the hospital now, he might even have gone on to recover from his injuries. But I didn’t. I hit him again. Deliberately. I–I don’t know what came over me. But the truth is, I wanted to kill him. I know it was done in the heat of the moment, but if the jury decides that second blow wasn’t reasonable — then I’m guilty of murder.’

‘I don’t believe this,’ I whimpered. We’d beaten off the weasel-faced burglar’s murderous assault, but he still remained a threat to us. Even though we’d killed him, he could still destroy our lives. ‘What are we going to do, Mum?’

‘I don’t think I could survive it,’ she said. ‘The trial, the reporters, the publicity. And prison — prison would kill me.’

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

The clock said 5:56 when Mum spoke again. A watery grey light was beginning to seep in through the kitchen window, the birds in the trees outside were chirruping joyously, welcoming in the morning as if this were a new day just like any other.

‘I think we should bury him in the garden,’ she said.