Mouse
Mouse
The winter he found the mouse, Carl changed from an unhappy boy into a miserable one. He’d discovered the corpse when reaching into the caddy for a biscuit. Instead of a crumble cream, he’d pulled out a dead rodent. The tail had dangled from his fingers like string. He hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry.
Now Carl listens to his favourite Puccini opera with Goro the cat on his knee. Goro hasn’t caught a mouse in years. Carl remembers how his fear gave way to sadness after he found the mouse. He reads the libretto notes on the sleeve, and thinks sorrow seldom transitions to joy. He visualises the animal’s mummified body, and he’s back in the house where he lived as a six-years-old child.
Carl had stepped out of the pantry and shown the creature to his mother. He thought she’d know what to do. Mother saw the mouse, filled her red hands with bunches of white cotton from her apron and screamed.
What is that, you disgusting boy?
Carl had dropped the mouse’s body, fled from the kitchen and run upstairs. He’d locked himself in the bathroom and washed his hands twice, his breath patterning the chill air. A silken butterfly had flitted onto the windowsill outside, something unexpected for that time of year.
Carl shoos the cat away, lifts the L.P., examines it for dust and turns it over. He sucks on his asthma inhaler. There’s a pain inside him like the scratch of a pin on stone. It radiates across his back and shapes itself into a weighty canopy.
Did he stay in the bathroom for an hour? A whole winter’s afternoon, or was it only fifteen minutes? Time passes unsteadily for frightened six-year-old boys. Carl had crumpled a sheet of toilet paper, watched the green triangle logo disappear, gagged on its medicinal scent.
His mother’s fox fur stole, the one with scary glass eyes, hung on a peg inside the toilet door. He wished he hadn’t shown her the mouse and wondered what the stole was doing there. The fox fur was soft and supple, whereas the mouse had been matted and ugly. Carl’s mother’s screams echoed in his head, drowning his internal whimpers.
What is that, you disgusting boy?
A shrill soprano cuts the air. Carl’s wife wore her fake fur stole when they visited the opera. They would travel to distant cities to attend their favourite Puccini. The final act always reminded him of lost childhoods.
Carl had wanted to die that winter. He’d thought of running away. He imagined rushing to the ocean behind his cousin’s house and throwing himself into the waves like an offering. His father only left because Carl disobeyed him. Wasn’t that what Mother had said?
Life was difficult afterwards, but it would become worse still when winter melted into spring.
Carl's cell phone glints like a piece of charred wood on the table. He can’t remember why he didn’t run into the ocean that winter. He picks the scars on his wrists. He could have ended everything before this. Before puberty. Before adolescence. Before jobs. Before marriage.
His mother hadn’t known what to do. She’d made Carl feel small and tight.
What is that, you disgusting boy?
Carl looks at the phone and wonders whether his wife will ring. Is it right to leave when a marriage stagnates? What is a person to say when they don’t know how to feel?
Carl waited in the bathroom that winter’s day. He didn’t know what to think, his tummy had felt as if it was floating, trying to escape his body. He’d scanned the floor for mice. There weren’t any.
It seemed he’d waited forever. In reality, his mother likely climbed the stairs soon after he did. She had a bad heart. It would have been hard for her to pull the weight of her body up, each step a victory, grasping the banisters, gasping for breath, clasping onto things mothers do in such situations.
Carl was crying when Mother shook the door.
Let me in.
Her voice was flat and level. He’d hesitated before unfastening the bolt, not knowing what to expect. He’d swallowed his nervousness and eked the door open a crack. His mother had pushed through and laughed at him. It wasn’t a friendly laugh. It wasn’t kind. It wasn’t a laugh for sharing.
The laugh fixed the notion Carl had done something stupid.
Something wrong. Idiotic.
Carl’s wife is with another man. She won’t ring tonight. He takes the album from the record player, places it in its sleeve and searches the pantry for a ginger nut.
That winter, the mice proliferated. They ran across Carl’s bed. They nested in Mother’s knitting. They turned summersaults in the dustbin.
See how they run.
His mother summoned a man in blue overalls. The man placed bait stations under the sink, in the pantry, over the joists that ran above the parlour and in the garden shed.
The bait didn’t stop the mice.
Carl and his mother moved to a smaller house before the vermin were eradicated. Would his father have come with them if Carl had been good?
Carl shudders when he remembers the desiccated mouse. Years ago, before his wife left, Goro used to present them with prey. Birds. Worms. Mice. It was Carl’s responsibility to dispose of them. He never knew whether to laugh or cry when he swept the broken bodies into a dustpan. The adult in him knows not to touch dead things.
The bait didn’t stop the mice. Nothing stopped the mice.
Carl hears a shuffling under the floorboards. The six-year-old child inside him shudders. He puts the cat out for the night, imagines something running through hidden passageways in the house and is frightened. He visualises tiny feet, scaly tails and glassy eyes.
He bites his biscuit and wishes his teeth didn’t hurt.
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