Mice by Gordon Reece Page A

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    Something started to give in the middle of my neck; something was on the point of snapping. I’d managed to get my fingertips to the knife, but now all the strength was draining from me. My arms flopped uselessly by my sides. I hadn’t drawn a breath for a very long time. The pinpricks of white light became bigger and bigger until there was only white light. So this is what dying is like , I thought, this is dying – this is the white light they talk about – and I stopped fighting him, even in my mind, and closed my eyes and gave up and waited for death to come, the actual moment of death to come, and then there was an enormous crack and as if by magic all his weight was gone and the terrible pressure on my throat was suddenly taken away.
    When I opened my eyes again I saw Mum holding the chopping board in both hands, its white marble surface spattered with dark blood. She’d struck him with such force that he’d been lifted right off me and pivoted sideways so that only his legs still touched me, lying across mine at an oblique angle.
    Amazingly, he was still conscious, his two eyes staring wildly out of a mask of bright crimson blood. He was up on his forearms, trying to drag himself under the kitchen table before another blow could fall. But Mum wasn’t going to be denied. I watched her lining up the blow, picking her spot carefully, tightening her grip on the board’s short handle so there would be no slipping, no mistake. Then she raised it high above her head.
    I closed my eyes as it started to descend. I dreaded seeing the obscenity it would make when it struck. But I heard the sickening mushy noise and felt a hard fragment of the burglar’s skull ricochet off my cheek.

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