Mice

26

It was pitch dark when Mum got back at seven-thirty. The black rain clouds had strangled every last patch of light from the sky, but the storm they threatened had held off. Instead, a petulant, noisy wind had got up outside, roaring melodramatically in the chimney breast and rattling the windows in their frames.

Mum’s first words as she came in through the front door were, ‘Is it still there?’

‘Yes.’ I nodded excitedly. ‘Yes it is!’

We sat at the kitchen table and hurriedly made our plans.

‘I’m still not convinced it’s the burglar’s car,’ she began, her chest visibly heaving beneath her suit jacket. I rolled my eyes and folded my arms in irritation, and seeing me, she went on quickly, ‘But if it is, I don’t think we should just leave it in another lane around here. I think we should get it as far away from here as we can — leave it somewhere in town.’

‘Where?’

She pursed her lips before answering. ‘I was thinking the Farmer’s Harvest. The car park’s enormous and with so many people coming and going all the time we can just leave it and walk away without being noticed.’

It was a clever idea. Hide the car in plain sight rather than in some back street, where a nosy neighbour might be watching through the net curtains.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Sounds good.’

Mum glanced at her watch and stood up. I did the same, and felt momentarily groggy, as if I were in a lift that had suddenly started to descend.

She began to walk away, then turned sharply back to me. ‘And we mustn’t forget to remove anything from the car that could lead the police back here — before we leave.’

I nodded emphatically.

‘Now go and get dressed in the darkest clothes you have. And put some gloves on. I’ll go and do the same.’

As I searched through my wardrobe for my black polo-neck jumper, my black cords and the old black coat I’d had since I was twelve, I found myself giggling with nervous anticipation — just as I used to do when we played hide-and-seek when I was a little girl and I could hear the seeker’s breathing just inches away from my hiding place. How many times had I given the game away with my excited giggles? It was hard to believe that I was really dressing in black like a cat burglar so that I’d be less visible in the darkness, that I was really putting on gloves so that the police wouldn’t be able to trace my fingerprints. It was all too much like something out of a movie to have anything to do with my reality.

When we stepped out of the kitchen into the back garden, the profundity of the darkness took us both by surprise. For a few seconds it was like being blindfolded, and we both hesitated, unsure of our bearings and frightened to take a step into the unknown. The moon was no more than a fingernail indentation, regularly blotted out by the scudding black clouds that the blustery wind drove across the sky like a fleet of phantom galleons. The night was so dark I couldn’t make out a single star.

I set off cautiously in the direction of the car but hadn’t gone very far before I heard Mum’s anxious voice.

‘Shelley! Shelley! I can’t see anything! Wait for me!’

I stopped and waited for Mum to grab on to me. I led the way, but I could hardly see anything myself and shuffled forward hesitantly. The blind leading the blind, I thought. Disorientated, I veered too close to the fruit trees and walked straight into a branch. It dug sharply into my temple, just missing my eye, and I jumped back with a yelp of pain, stepping heavily on Mum’s toe.

‘It’s no good! It’s too dangerous!’ she said, having to raise her voice to be heard over the gale. ‘Go back into the house and get the torch! It’s in the second drawer down under the sink!’

I was back in a few minutes. Mum hadn’t moved from the spot where I’d left her. She put up her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the torch.

‘Turn it off if you hear a car,’ she said. She held on to me and I took the lead again.

The torch was a good one, bought in case of power cuts, but it wasn’t very effective outside in the allpervading darkness. Its beam illuminated an area no bigger than a dinner plate and our progress was still very slow. The grass looked strange in the torchlight, not green but silvery, ghostly, and the fallen branches were like skeletal hands reaching up through the soil. I thought about the burglar lying buried under the oval rose bed behind us. And I found myself thinking: What if the dead don’t stay dead? What if the dead don’t really die?

I imagined him coming towards us through the murky darkness. I saw his dead face, the Neanderthal brow, the glassy eyes, the fractured jaw, the gaping wound in his neck. I expected his cadaverous hand to reach out and seize hold of me at any moment. I tried to walk faster, but it was impossible with Mum holding on to me so tightly. I tried to drive away my morbid thoughts, telling myself that there was no such thing as ghosts, that the burglar was Paul David Hannigan, a weedy twenty-four-year-old crook and he was dead, dead, dead! But his name wasn’t the talisman against fear that I’d hoped it would be.

At last we reached the hedge and I peered over it. The lane seemed to be completely deserted, but I could make out a strange sound when the gusts died down, an intermittent clacking and hissing coming from somewhere nearby and I held back. It took me a while to figure out what it was: a water sprinkler in the field across the road. There’d be little need for that when this storm broke, I thought.

I squeezed through the hedge and out onto the grassy bank, and Mum followed me. She went around to the driver’s side of the car and tried the key. I heard it slide home and unlock the door first time. I felt the childish urge to say something — I told you so! I told you so! — but managed to gag the impulse. When Mum yanked the door open, the interior light came on, taking us both by surprise. We scrambled into the car as if we’d been caught in the beam of a powerful searchlight, and quickly slammed the doors shut.

We sat for a moment in the dark car without speaking. I listened to Mum struggling to control her rapid breathing, and wrinkled my nose at the overpowering stench of stale tobacco.

‘OK,’ she whispered, ‘let’s see what’s in here.’ She began groping desperately around for the interior light switch. ‘Where’s that bloody—!’

‘It’s all right, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’ve still got the torch. We can use that.’

I flicked the torch on and we hurriedly began to search the inside of the car. In my feverish paranoia I expected another car to turn into the lane at any moment. I took a secretary’s notepad, full of what looked like calculations, from the glove box, but I left the sweet wrappers, cigarettes, parking tickets and the cellophane bag of what I took to be cannabis — a tobacco-coloured half-brick with a pungent aroma. Mum found a road atlas in the driver’s door and took that, just in case there was something incriminating scribbled inside. There was a big khaki trench coat on the back seat, and I rolled it into a bundle and brought it into the front with me. I shone the torch around the floors, but there was nothing apart from chocolate bar wrappers and an empty vodka bottle.

‘Shall I take all this back into the house?’

‘No,’ Mum said, her anxious face stained an ugly yellow in the torchlight and criss-crossed with deep black shadows. ‘It’ll take too long. Just put them in the garden behind the hedge. We’ll take them into the house when we get back.’

I let myself out and wriggled back through the hedge, dropping the notepad and atlas on the grass and putting the heavy trench coat on top to weigh them down. I didn’t want to risk anything blowing away in the wind.

As soon as I was back inside the car Mum tried to start the engine, but her hands were shaking so much she couldn’t get the key in the ignition. The other keys in the bunch jangled together noisily as she struggled to wriggle the key home. Then I remembered something and gently touched her shoulder. She jumped and glared at me.

‘Mum — Mum, wait. We haven’t looked in the boot!’

She didn’t say anything. She got out of the car and went round to the back. After another age of fumbling with the keys, I heard the boot spring open and a moment later slam shut again. I tried to look for her in the rear-view mirror but I couldn’t see her. It was as if she’d just disappeared, swallowed up by the night. Where is she? I wondered with growing anxiety. Where’s she gone? I heard something heavy crashing through the bushes on the other side of the hedge, in our back garden, and glanced around nervously, feeling my eyes grow enormous with fear. What the hell was that?

Mum’s door was suddenly wrenched open and she slipped back into the driver’s seat.

‘What was that noise?’ I gasped.

‘That was the bag of tools,’ she said, a little out of breath.

‘Tools?’

‘There was a bag of tools in the boot. I threw them over the hedge into our garden. If we have them, then they can’t be of any help to the police. Why take chances?’

‘It sounded like someone—’ but my voice was drowned out by the engine exploding into life. We lurched into motion and bumped off the grassy bank. The gears whined and groaned as Mum struggled to find second, and the engine over-revved deafeningly.

‘Change gear, Mum! Change gear, for Christ’s sake!’

‘I’m trying, Shelley!’

‘Your lights! You haven’t got your lights on!’

We were driving into a darkness as unrelieved as deep space; it was impossible to see where we were going. Mum slapped at the dashboard, searching for the lights, but instead the windscreen wipers began scraping frenetically back and forth across the glass. Mum killed them with a curse and tried again. Now the left indicator came on, flashing impatiently on the dashboard like a nervous tic. I was praying: Please don’t let another car come now, please don’t let another car come now. They’ll plough straight into us!

And then she found them, and a swathe of yellow light illuminated the terrible danger we were in. We’d left the lane altogether and were on the point of going into the ditch that ran along the side of the road. I screamed out, and she jerked the steering wheel round hard. I waited for the front of the car to drop into empty space, but somehow all four wheels stayed on the road. We clipped the opposite bank as Mum counteracted the sharp turn she’d made, and then we were back on the tarmac. She found second gear at last and the anxious moaning of the engine abated, like a starving animal finally thrown some food.

We negotiated the twisting lanes at a crawl, Mum still battling with the unfamiliar gears. Fifteen minutes or so later we emerged onto the B road that eventually joined up with the main road into town. I felt exposed and vulnerable as we left the darkness of the lanes behind us and joined the stream of traffic under the bright glare of the street lights. I sank down in my seat and put a hand up to cover my face. What if a friend of Paul Hannigan’s was in one of the cars behind us and recognized the car? What would he do if he saw two strangers driving his friend’s car? I tried not to think about it. .

‘Can’t you go any faster, Mum?’ I groaned.

‘It’s thirty here, Shelley. The last thing we want is to get pulled over by the police.’

I hunkered lower.

After fifteen agonizing minutes, the garish lights of the Farmer’s Harvest loomed up ahead on our left.

The Farmer’s Harvest was a chain of restaurants with an olde-worlde theme, where the waitresses dressed like characters from a Thomas Hardy novel; the walls were decorated with horse brasses and antique farm implements and the ‘chicken’ came in perfect rectangles, the tomato sauce in little sachets that you had to pay extra for. Yet in spite of its hideousness, the Farmer’s Harvest was always packed. When we passed it Mum often used to say it was ‘the living proof’ of a remark some wit had once made. The public taste? The public taste is awful!

Mum slowed down, indicated left and turned into the Farmer’s Harvest’s car park with all the prissy precision of a learner driver on their test, anxious not to do anything that might attract attention to us. She drove through the rows of parked cars towards the rear where there were bushes and trees and it was less well lit. We went to the very end, but there were no free spaces.

‘Don’t tell me,’ Mum said under her breath. ‘Don’t tell me!’

We did an entire circuit of the car park, but there was nothing. Soon we were in front of the brightly lit restaurant again.

‘Go round again, Mum, go round again! Maybe we missed one!’

We had to wait while a large group of diners crossed in front of us. They looked like wedding guests — the women in tight fishtail dresses and high heels, the men in suits, some with carnations in their lapels. In spite of all their finery, there was something rough, something threatening, about them. I noticed the men’s tattooed knuckles, the ponytails, the obligatory earrings. They seemed drunk already, grinning inanely into the car at us.

I thought they were just the sort of people that Paul Hannigan would have known. His greasy long hair and weasel face would have fitted in perfectly among them. I covered my eyes with my hand and prayed that none of them would recognize the car. A youth with a shaven head and jug ears, a fag see-sawing between his lips, hit the bonnet of the car hard with his fist and shouted something at us that I couldn’t make out. I squirmed in my seat and wished I was anywhere, anywhere, but where I was. At last I felt the car rolling slowly forward again, and when I looked up the wedding guests were in a scrum around the restaurant door, shouting and gesticulating, the jug-eared youth’s head thrown back in raucous laughter — a laughter full of brutal malice and devoid of human warmth.

We headed to the back of the car park again, passing other cars also circling, looking for spaces. Then I saw one — in the middle of the second to last row — and cried out to Mum to back up.

‘I don’t know, Shelley,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I’ll fit.’

Mum was a terrible parker and never reversed into a parking spot if she could avoid it.

‘It doesn’t have to be perfect, Mum. Just put it in there and let’s get out of here!’

Mum ground the gear stick into reverse and edged her way slowly back into the space. She hadn’t steered enough, however, and had to come forward for another attempt. There was a car on either side of the space, the one on my side a very new-looking four-wheel drive. Mum got it wrong again and had to move forward for the second time. Her face was contorted with concentration, her jaw tightly clenched. Another car appeared now, wanting to get past, their way blocked by our manoeuvre. Mum crunched the gears and tried once more. This time the angles worked and we could at least move far enough into the gap to let the other car pass. She drove forward one more time and then we were able to ease slowly into the space.

She turned off the engine and let out a huge sigh of relief.

‘Well done, Mum,’ I said, and she looked at me and shook her head as if to say: What a nightmare!

There was hardly any room to get out of the door on my side; Mum had even less on hers, and I could see the door cutting into her waist as she squeezed herself out. I’d managed to ease myself halfway out and was just swivelling round to free my right leg when the world around me suddenly exploded.

There was an ear-splitting noise and a flashing of orange lights. I looked around, expecting to see police cars closing in on all sides, but there was nothing. I stood in a daze, dumbfounded by the noise, blinking stupidly. Only slowly did it dawn on me that the four-wheel drive’s alarm had gone off.

Mum was suddenly beside me, leading me away by the arm. I could just hear what she was saying under the deafening wail of the alarm.

‘Don’t panic, Shelley. Just keep walking.’

I did as I was told, convinced that the alarm was going to bring all the diners out of the restaurant to see what was going on. Then suddenly it stopped.

We feigned indifference and kept walking quickly away. And then a man’s voice behind us called out.

‘Oi! Where d’you think you’re going?’

We stopped and looked around.

The owner of the four-wheel drive was standing there, his car key in his hand after deactivating the alarm. He was heavily built with a shaved head and dark goatee.

‘You don’t just walk off when you’ve damaged someone’s car,’ he snarled.

I tensed myself to run. We were meant to leave the car without being noticed, without attracting attention to ourselves. If we stopped now, this man would be able to describe us to the police. But Mum, who still held me firmly by the arm, didn’t move.

‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘We haven’t damaged your car.’

‘Yes, you did,’ he grunted. ‘I was watching you. She hit it with her door.’ He indicated me with a brutal butt of his bony head and bent to examine his car, running his hands over it like a vet stroking the flanks of an injured thoroughbred horse.

‘No, I didn’t,’ I said. ‘The door never touched your car. I must have bumped it with my backside.’

‘I can’t see any damage,’ he said, almost with disappointment, ‘but then there’s not much light here. Let me take your details.’

We couldn’t let this happen. This was insane. We had to leave the car without being noticed. I suddenly remembered the torch in my pocket.

‘Use this,’ I said. ‘I didn’t touch your door.’

As he took the torch from me, he stared hard at my face and I saw a wrinkle of disgust pass across his features. My first thought was that he’d noticed my scars, so I was confused when he pointed to my left eye and said, ‘You’re bleeding.’

I put my hand up to my temple and sure enough, there was a small dark stain on the woollen tip of my glove. The branch! The branch I’d walked into when I was crossing the back garden in the dark!

He went back to his car and began running the beam over the driver’s door, meticulously examining the paintwork. He made no effort to hurry himself while Mum and I stood in the car park, battered by the capricious gusts of wind, completely at a loss what to do next.

Without looking up from the door, he said, ‘D’you always carry a torch around with you?’

My face burned as the magnitude of my mistake dawned on me. I’d given him the torch without thinking! What girl carries a torch like that around with her in her pocket? And when she’s meant to be going out to dinner! I looked at Mum in horror, but she just pressed my arm firmly as if to say, it’s OK, Shelley, it’s OK.

When he started moving towards the back of his car, Mum — to my astonishment — suddenly broke away from me and strode boldly towards him.

‘This is ridiculous!’ she exclaimed. ‘The car door’s up here, not down there! Give me the torch! We haven’t got time for this nonsense!’

He gave her back the torch, eyeing her contemptuously, an arrogant half-smile on his lips.

‘There’s no damage to your precious car! Maybe your alarm shouldn’t be so sensitive.’ She took my arm again and we started off towards the restaurant.

‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Where are you going? I still want to exchange details!’

Mum spun on her heel. ‘We haven’t damaged your stupid car! And that’s an end to it!’

We strode on purposefully until we were almost at the door to the restaurant. I could see the queue of people inside waiting to be seated, a girl who I thought I recognized from school offering a basket of bread to a group of Japanese businessmen wearing paper hats. We didn’t want to go inside the restaurant — that would only increase our chances of being noticed and remembered. I glanced back. The man had his back to us and seemed to be examining his car door again, his hands bunched on his hips.

‘Is he watching us?’ Mum asked.

‘No, he’s not.’

Mum looked to make sure for herself and then tugged me into the dark alley beside the restaurant. We only had to follow this alley to the end, and it would bring us out onto another main road. About half a mile along was the train station, where we’d be able to catch a taxi home.