Mice

19

For the second time in my life I looked at my reflection and was unable to recognize myself. The face of a savage stared out at me from the bathroom mirror — not a sixteen-year-old middle-class English girl, but a primitive savage with a face daubed in the blood of the kill, eyes wide with the excitement of battle, hair stiff with dried blood and sticking up in jagged stipples. It was a shocking sight and it took several seconds before I could accept that the savage in the mirror was me.

I rubbed my cheek with my index finger and the dried blood flaked off like rust, leaving a trail of russet powder on the white ceramic of the sink. I examined the grey smudges on my throat, two dark half-moons on either side of my windpipe, where the burglar had tried to strangle me. My throat still stung and I could feel something odd, something lumpy, every time I swallowed. My eyes were completely bloodshot save for a few microscopic blobs of white floating here and there. I remembered reading that the police could tell if a person had been strangled by the burst blood vessels in their eyes. Something to do with lack of oxygen in the blood. How close had I come to death? My head throbbed, and I felt so tired I could have curled up on the bathroom floor and gone to sleep right then and there.

A huge wave of depression crashed over me and swept me away. What a mess! What a disaster! And it was all my fault. I’d turned an unpleasant but commonplace domestic burglary into a disaster of monumental proportions, a calamity so shocking, so sensational it would be blazoned across the front pages in banner headlines.

In all likelihood I’d ruined my life and Mum’s life for good. We were never going to get away with what we’d done. No one gets away with murder, there’s always some clue, some loose end that they miss. The police always catch them sooner or later. We’d end up in prison, we’d both end up in prison. And all because I’d lost control. All because I’d refused to listen to Mum. She’d told me to stay calm, she’d told me not to panic. She’d told me that he wasn’t going to hurt us. What had come over me? Why hadn’t I listened? I’d ruined everything. I wanted to disappear, I wanted the ground to swallow me up.

Yet beneath all the guilt and self-recrimination there was something else, another emotion, stubborn and rebellious, refusing to bend to the dominant mood. It was as if in a piece of classical music, beneath the slow, sad weeping of violins and cellos, a tinny trumpet could just be made out, playing a different tune altogether — something defiant and brash, like a military march. What was it? What was this emotion — unfamiliar, rude, independent, causing trouble like a drunk at a wedding?

I looked at my bloodshot eyes, the bruises on my neck. He’d really tried to kill me — he’d really tried to choke the life out of me while I’d lain helpless on the kitchen floor. I remembered the determination and hatred on his face, how my air supply had ceased suddenly, absolutely, as if a valve had been shut off. And he would have done it, he would have wrung the life out of me and then gone into the lounge and done the same to Mum. . but we’d turned the tables on him. The cat had got into the mouse hole, but this time the mice had killed the cat.

When I looked at myself in the mirror again, I was surprised to see my white teeth flashing. I was smiling broadly. And then I knew what that discordant emotion was: it was exhilaration.

My nightie was stuck to me where the blood had dried and I had to peel it off like a plaster. It felt so good to stand under the hot rain of the shower and let the hard drops hammer soothingly on my scalp. I watched the blood disappearing down the plughole in a slurping pink whirlpool with an odd satisfaction.

Was there some mysterious connection, I wondered, between women and blood? Hadn’t I been washing away blood since the age of twelve, washing it off my hands, washing it out of my clothes? That was something boys knew nothing about. Was blood somehow the special domain of women? Was this why so many women became nurses? I remembered the nurses at the hospital: those women who never fainted at the sight of blood, who never looked away, never winced, because blood held no fears for them, blood was an old friend.

I worked the soap up into a thick lather and plastered myself with it, enjoying the noisy smacking and squelching. I wanted to scrub every inch of my body clean, to make it immaculate, to step from the shower with a completely new skin. As I rinsed off the soap, I glimpsed in the mirror behind me the nasty welt where I’d fallen on the knife. Just above my buttocks, a raised black lump the size of a fist surrounded by an angry red inflammation.

I reached for the shampoo to wash my hair, but it wasn’t in its usual place and I remembered with a shudder that the burglar had taken it. I washed my hair with soap instead, softening it with some conditioner from a little green bottle that had stood on the bathroom shelf for so long its lid was covered in dust. When I’d rinsed out all the suds, I set about washing it all over again.

I dried myself thoroughly and put the towel in the bin bag where I’d already put my nightie, then wrapped myself in another towel and secured it under my arm. I put my favourite moisturizer on my face, working in the cold milk with circular movements of my fingertips, and I anointed my hands in Mum’s hand cream with the strong vanilla scent. I cleaned my teeth to get rid of the disgusting taste of blood that still lingered in my mouth, brushing and brushing until the minty toothpaste was burning so much I couldn’t keep it in my mouth a second longer.

When I’d finished, I rubbed away the steam and looked in the bathroom mirror again. The savage had disappeared, washed away in a torrent of cleansing hot water, and I was myself once more, my hair soft and limp, my face scrubbed so vigorously my cheeks glowed. Lady Macbeth’s words after Duncan’s murder drifted into my mind.

A little water clears us of this deed.

But she’d been proved hopelessly wrong; water had cleaned away the blood from her body, but it couldn’t remove the memory of what she’d done from her mind. Guilt over Duncan’s murder had eventually driven her insane. .

What would it be like for Mum and me? Would we be able to wash away what we’d done with a little water? Or would our minds be affected too? Would we be able to return to a normal life with the burglar rotting away under a mere three feet of soil in our front garden? Would we be able to lie to the police when they came knocking at our front door? Can mice lie like that? Can mice gag their consciences and sleep peacefully when they’re surrounded by so many dark secrets?

And then a thought occurred to me. After what we’d done — killing the burglar, burying his body in the garden — maybe we weren’t mice any more.

But in that case — what were we?