Mice

41

Mum pulled sharply away from me and walked determinedly out of the house and across the drive towards the blackmailer, deftly switching her handbag from her right shoulder to her left as she went. When she was about two metres away from him she stopped and plunged her hand deep into her fleece pocket.

The fat man had started to move towards the front of the car on his way to the driver’s side, but he stopped when he saw Mum pointing the gun at his head, clutching it tightly in both hands, her left eye closed, taking careful aim.

His hands shot up in surrender and he pressed himself against the car’s front wing, arching his torso backwards over the bonnet, pathetically trying to increase the distance between his face and the gun as if those few extra inches could mitigate the bullet’s brutal impact. He cringed, unable even to look in the direction of the gun, squinting desperately away to his left and right as if convinced that the slightest eye contact with Mum would induce her to pull the trigger.

‘All right, luv,’ he said, over and over again, ‘all right, luv, everything’s all right now, luv, everything’s all right now, it’s all right, luv, it’s all right, everything’s all right.’

I hovered at the door, willing Mum to shoot. She shook her hair from her face and took a few shuffling steps closer.

The fat man tried to say something, but he could only talk in terrified tongues and his babbling sputtered out in confused silence. A dark stain spread over his crotch and down the thick trunk of his right thigh.

I held my breath, still waiting for the gunshot. It must come now, any second now, any second now! But Mum still didn’t pull the trigger. From where I was standing I could see the gun in her outstretched arms start to sway from side to side, a dead bough in the breeze, but I only realized what was happening when I saw the expression on the blackmailer’s face change. His eyes still darted anxiously all around him, but not because he couldn’t bear to look in the direction of the gun any more — he was getting ready to make a run for it.

That’s when I knew Mum had lost her nerve. She wasn’t able to pull the trigger.

I ran out into the drive screaming: ‘Do it, Mum! Do it! Do it now! Do it!’

I was right beside her, screaming into her face, my hand tugging at the back of her fleece. The sudden, deafening whipcrack of the gun made me scream and jump high in the air. The recoil drove Mum backwards three huge strides and spun her around almost one hundred and eighty degrees, so that she ended up pointing the gun at the lounge window.

I stared at the blackmailer, looking for the blob of strawberry jam in the middle of his forehead, the slow emptying of his eyes as his soul fled, waiting to see him crumple to the ground in a lifeless heap. To my amazement, he seemed entirely unchanged. He still stood by the car, arching backwards as far as he could across the bonnet, his arms still raised, the fat pink hands waggling at his shoulders like starfish.

He realized what had happened — that Mum had missed him — much faster than we did, and with astonishing speed for a man of his size he pushed himself off the car and sprinted down the drive.

Mum was still recovering from the vicious recoil, dazedly trying to steady the leaden weight of the gun and aim.

‘Shoot him, Mum! Shoot him! He’s getting away!’

I knew that if he got out of the drive and onto the public road, we wouldn’t be able to chase after him; the risk of being seen was just too great. If he made it to the road, if he escaped the tree-screened privacy of Honeysuckle Cottage, he’d be safe, and all we’d have to look forward to would be his terrible revenge, a revenge I was sure wouldn’t be long in coming.

Mum pointed the gun at his receding figure and there was another ear-splitting explosion. A white wound appeared high up in the trunk of one of the ash trees at the top of the drive, and I knew she’d missed again.

The blackmailer had disappeared from sight around the corner of the drive where it straightened leading down to the road. I could just see glimpses of his yellow T-shirt flashing through the foliage. Mum and I set off after him.

It was impossible to run in my slippers in the thick gravel and I had to kick them off as I went. The sharp little stones stabbed into the soles of my feet, but I swallowed the pain — we had to stop him getting to the road! Mum was lagging behind me, bent double with a stitch after just a few paces, holding her side, hardly looking where she was going. I screamed at her to hurry up, that he was going to get away, and wincing with pain she forced herself to run faster and managed to catch me up.

As we entered the straight leg of the drive, we saw that the fat man’s pace had slowed dramatically, his sprint declined to no more than a limping jog. And he was still twenty metres from the gate and the safety of the road.

Mum and I gained on him quickly. He looked back when he heard us coming up behind him, his face a shocking black-red like blood in a test tube. He tried to shout something at us, his lips curled up into a snarl, but he was so short of breath he couldn’t form the words and all I heard was something like ‘Ha! — Fa! — Pa!’ His face was drenched with sweat and he had to keep his finger pressed permanently to the bridge of his nose now or his glasses would have fallen off. He turned his attention back to the gate, the finishing line he was desperately trying to reach, but he was hardly moving forwards any more, he was virtually jogging on the spot, and I knew now that Mum and I would catch him before he could get to the road.

As we closed in on him, I became aware that I was giggling as I ran, giggling in excited anticipation of the moment when we’d overtake the fat man and Mum would shoot him. In those last few seconds before we caught up with him, running barefoot in the drive, my dressing gown flapping open around me, I felt something I’d never felt in my life before. It was a totally new emotion, a liberating, exulting sweetness that flooded through my veins like a drug. It was as if everything artificial in my life suddenly fell away and I was fleetingly in touch with a primitive truth, a reality older than life itself. And I felt like a giant, I felt like a god!

And then we were so close I could have reached out and grabbed hold of the fat man’s filthy T-shirt. Mum, still clutching at her side as she ran, held the gun out until it was just a few inches away from the folds of fat on the back of his neck and squeezed the trigger.

The gunshot was so loud that I felt it rather than heard it, a reverberating thunder deep in my chest, and the fat man crashed face-down into the gravel like a felled oak.