Mice

28

Every day, my first thought on waking up was the same: Today’s the day the police will come.

I could see it all so clearly: the forensic experts in their white overalls swarming over the kitchen and the patio; the police cadets working their way meticulously across the garden on their hands and knees; the tent they’d erect over the oval rose bed when they found the body; Mum and me pushing our way through the scrum of journalists gathered on the gravel drive; entering the doubtful sanctuary of the waiting police car. .

In those days I endowed the police with almost supernatural powers. I didn’t stop to analyse the situation, to see what pieces of the jigsaw they actually had in their hands (a missing man, an abandoned car), I simply felt that they knew what we’d done, that, like the all-seeing eye of God whose penetrating vision no walls could obstruct, they’d seen everything that had gone on inside Honeysuckle Cottage that night.

Yet, to my continuing surprise, nothing happened. The flashing blue lights, the sickening knock at the front door, still didn’t come. The next few days passed — ostensibly at least — just as they had before. Roger came to teach me in the mornings, Mrs Harris came in the afternoons, I worked on my homework at the dining-room table till Mum came home, practised my flute, prepared dinner with Mum, read my novels and listened to Puccini; Mum went to work and tended each of her cases ‘little and often’ like a careful gardener, and did her best to avoid Blakely’s wandering hands and ugly temper.

A new week began. . and still nothing happened.

The struggle in the kitchen with Paul Hannigan left me feeling physically exhausted for days. At first I slept at any and every opportunity, like a cat — deep, deep sleeps from which I’d wake with a dry mouth and gummy eyes. But once I’d slept the exhaustion off, I started to have serious problems sleeping. I’d had insomnia before, especially when the bullying was at its worst, but those intermittent episodes were nothing compared to the bleak white nights I suffered now.

When I went up to bed and closed my eyes, I would see Paul Hannigan’s face with astonishing clarity, as if he were standing right in front of me again. The chalky pallor of his skin, the lank, greasy, black hair leaking like oil over his ears and shoulders, the barely visible fuzz of immature beard around his mouth, the way his eyelids flickered wildly as they struggled to stay open, and his eyes rolled back into his head like a medium who’s just made contact with the spirit world. I would hear his voice, the twisted vowels of his ugly accent, his slurred arrogant cocksureness (I know what I want, lady! I know what I want!). Sometimes his voice sounded so real in my head that I became convinced he was actually in the bedroom with me — I even thought I could smell him there, that fetid mixture of alcohol, cigarettes and sweat that enveloped him like a mist. I’d sit up in bed and peer terrified into the darkest corners of my bedroom, expecting to see his silhouette detach itself from the surrounding shadows and walk towards me.

I tossed and turned, but that malicious weasel face wouldn’t let me sleep. After three nights of this I told Mum, and asked if I could sleep with her until it passed. She readily agreed, giving me one of those reassuring everything will be all right smiles. Enfolded in Mum’s arms that night, snug in her warmth, the shadow of the burglar’s face vanished completely from my mind as if within that magic maternal circle nothing whatsoever could hurt me.

But what Mum hadn’t told me was that she was suffering from insomnia as well, and although I could fall asleep in her bed easily enough, her own agonized efforts to get to sleep would soon wake me up. After a few nights I went back to my own bed, hoping I might have broken the cycle, but found insomnia still waiting for me there. I was back to square one.

Reluctantly, we decided to try sleeping pills. Mum had always been strongly against them in the past, fearing they could be addictive. But the little mauve pills she got from Dr Lyle worked wonderfully for me. I took one, half an hour before going to bed and fell into a deep dreamless sleep almost straight away. I cut it down to half a pill, and then to a quarter, and in a week or so I was able to fall asleep within ten minutes of my head hitting the pillow without taking any medication at all.

That was when the nightmares started.

The first nightmares were confused, fragmentary affairs. They jumped rapidly from one chamber of horrors to another, like restless flies, unable to settle anywhere for very long. When I woke up I could remember little about them, just the general impression of being pursued the whole night long by some unseen horror (I didn’t have to see it, I knew what — or rather who — it was).

I only remember two from that time with any clarity. In one, I was in the lounge practising my flute when I looked up to see Paul Hannigan staring at me through the window, his horribly dislocated lower jaw hanging open like a ghost-train ghoul. In the other, Mum and I pulled the body of the burglar out by his feet from under the kitchen table, only to find that it wasn’t Paul Hannigan we’d killed after all, but my dad.

This nightmare tortured me for days, and not only because the image of Dad face-down in all that blood was so graphic. It was more than that. It gnawed at me like an accusation. Was that what the killing of Paul Hannigan had really been about? I refused to believe it — I couldn’t even kill my feelings for my dad, so how could I possibly want to kill him?

Gradually, instead of countless confused and disjointed nightmares, I started to have the same one night after night, as if my brain had finally distilled all the horrors I’d lived through into a perfect script that wasn’t to be altered in even the tiniest detail.

It always began with Mum and me playing croquet in the front garden on an idyllic summer’s day. I was about eight years old, wearing the blue-and-white striped dress that had been my favourite when I was a little girl (there was a period, Mum told me, when I wouldn’t wear anything else). Mum was different too. She looked as if she’d just stepped out of the framed wedding photograph that used to stand on the mantelpiece in the matrimonial home; she wore a flowing white wedding dress and was still young and fresh-faced — the streaks of grey in her hair and the crow’s feet around her eyes were yet to arrive.

Mum croqueted me and sent my ball racing away across the short grass. I went running after it, calling over my shoulder that she was playing really well — better than I’d ever seen her play before. The croquet ball raced on and on and came to rest in the oval rose bed. I stopped running. I stopped smiling. I didn’t want to go any closer. I knew that the burglar’s body was buried there. I looked round for Mum, hoping she’d say that I could leave it where it was, but she was suddenly an immense distance away, at the far end of a garden that was now enormous. I called out to her, but I knew she wouldn’t be able to hear me. I made up my mind to make a quick grab for the ball, then turn on my heels and run as fast as I could back to her. But when I looked back at the oval rose bed, I saw that right next to the croquet ball, actually touching it, the burglar’s green decomposing hand protruded through the soil.

I knew I had to cover the hand up or someone would see it and call the police and all would be lost. I was now my real age and wearing my dressing gown and nightie. I took off my dressing gown and threw it over the hand. I realized it was only a temporary solution, but it would do until I could tell Mum. I knelt down in the grass and reached for the croquet ball, but the instant I touched it, my wrist was seized by the burglar’s other hand, which suddenly came snaking up out of the shallow grave.

This hand was immensely strong. It dragged me down into the thick mud until my face was pressed right up against Paul Hannigan’s and I could smell his nauseating corpse breath.

‘I’ve been trying to ring you,’ he said, ‘but you won’t answer the phone.’ A sudden jump-cut transported us to the bottom of a real grave. Paul Hannigan was on top of me, with both his hands clamped around my throat — hands that sometimes changed into snakes or the roots of trees, but with the weird logic of dreams somehow always remained hands as well. Above me, the sky was just as it had been on the night we’d moved the car: the clouds’ dirty thumbprints grubbily obscuring the stars, the moon a thin silver scimitar in the blackness. I struggled ferociously, but he pinned me down with ease.

‘I’m gonna do it right this time,’ he leered, and tightened his grip around my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I started to lose consciousness. I made one final maniacal effort to free myself but it was useless. The grotesque Halloween-mask face above me was grinning triumphantly. And then I saw Mum loom over his left shoulder, holding the chopping board in her hands. She wasn’t her young self any more; her face was now exaggeratedly haggard and drawn and the white wedding dress had been replaced by her blood-soaked dressing gown. I knew what she was going to do. I was willing her to do it: Hit him! Hit him! But instead of raising the chopping board high above her head as I expected, she drew away, saying, I don’t want to go to prison, over and over again, until I couldn’t see her any more. .

I’d wake up soaked in sweat, my heart thumping so violently in my chest that I could scarcely draw breath, the quilt kicked into a lump at the bottom of the bed, its empty cover twisted in knots around my body.