Mouse Head

You are standing at the edge of a cliff. He is just behind you, waiting to see if you will jump. He subscribes to the notion that, if you were to jump, he would encourage it; and if you were to be found clinging to the edge of the cliff by your fingertips, then he would be the first to stand on them.

He subscribes to that notion. Quite possibly he would go through with it as well.

You look behind you. He is standing with hands in pockets, smirking at you.

“You haven’t got the guts,” he says.

“There’s something very wrong with you, you know that don’t you?”

“Why do you have to talk so much? Why can’t you just get on with it?”

“You’re going to have to push me,” you say.

He doesn’t move. You knew that he wouldn’t. You predict that his reasoning will be that it has to be your choice. He won’t make that choice for you. All he is there to do is help you to reach a decision; gain some clearer understanding of your own mind and desire to live.

You turn away from him again, and look out at the horizon. You are standing far enough from the edge that you couldn’t stumble and fall; far enough away, also, to not see the sea beneath you, or feel its pull.

“I expect you think this is some sort of metaphor,” you say.

“Do I?”

“I expect so.”

“I’m glad I’ve got you to tell me what I think. I wouldn’t know my own mind otherwise.”

“You don’t know your own mind. You only know the opposite of whatever anyone else is thinking.”

“Again, thank you for your insight. Are you ready to jump yet?”

“Like I said, you’re going to have to push me.”

“I thought that was why we were here,” he replies. “I thought that was the point.”

You put your hand in your pocket and pull out the head of a dead mouse, wrapped in cellophane, its eye still shiny. You look at it.

“Mouse head,” you say. You glance over your shoulder, barely moving your head, but needing to see the shadow of his presence behind you still. He is silent. He doesn’t move.

You weigh the mouse head in your hand. You consider pulling back your arm and hurling the skull still wrapped in flesh and fur out in an arc across the sky, to fall and land at the bottom of the cliff. You weigh it in your hand, tossing it up and down in your palm. If you throw it, it will be gone, and you will never have another one like it. If you don’t throw it, you will have to return it to your pocket, where it will begin to rot and to stink. So you pull back your arm and you throw. The mouse head in its cellophane wrapper sails out across the sky and disappears from view.

“And what was that symbolic of?” he asks you.

“My secret hatred of Steinbeck,” you reply.

Steinbeck, Steinbeck, who sat in his attic room to write, neglecting his wife, cocooned in sanctuary from the world he was trying to describe. Steinbeck who wrote the stories you loved the most, until you found Faulkner, until you found Bukowski, until you fell in love with Vonnegut.

“Well that was gratifyingly pretentious. I’m glad I witnessed it,” he says.

“You ought to know about pretension.”

“Are you going to jump yet? I’m becoming bored with the floorshow.”

“You can always leave.”

Boredom sits at the heart of everything that binds the two of you together. The need for distraction, diversion. The need to be noticed and recognised. The need to pile misery on top of misery until neither of you can bear the weight and you have to break. For a day, an hour, a month, a year. As long as it takes, and always the return to picking at the scab.

You push your hands into the pockets of your coat and turn away from the cliff edge.

“You’re not going to jump, then?”

You walk past him.

“Oh perfect! You’re not even going to speak. After dragging me all the way out here with the promise of something good, all that I get is some teenage staring at the horizon and a lame attempt at symbolism.”

You keep walking, across the sedge to where your car is parked. Perhaps, if you had a shovel in the boot, you would take it and bash him over the head, then dig him a grave. In full view of anyone who chose to walk along this coastal path, to pull up for a cup of coffee, steaming from a thermos.

But nobody has chosen to walk this way or park round here, except for you and him.

He is still talking to himself, following you back to where his car sits next to yours. You have successfully learned to tune out his minor rants, to pay them no attention. They are too distracting if allowed to invade your conscious thoughts.

You unlock the door to your car and get into the driver’s seat. You belt up and turn the key in the ignition. He stands in front of you, still talking, still ranting, arms flung wide. You could take him out, here and now. You could floor the accelerator pedal and drive him out of your life. You imagine it; him sprawled across your bonnet, still ranting, and then the sudden brake just before the nose of the car pulls your front wheels over the cliff, and his body catapulting out over the void.

It makes you smile, and you put the car into reverse to turn and drive away.

He is still ranting in your rear-view mirror, and you begin to laugh.

Another day, you tell yourself, and you might have done it. But you know that you are just saying that. Just like he knows you will never jump and that he will never push you. There’s too much there that must be kept raw, prevented from healing. Like the dogs cut open and sent out to sea so that powder of sympathy applied to the knife that cut them and plunged into an open flame would make them wince at set times of the day. So that astrologers and astronomers and captains and governments would know where they stood on the planet and in time.

Twisting the knife to remind yourself that you still exist.

You park in the street outside your house. You remember to lock the doors, remove all valuables that were on view. You run up the short flight of steps that lift you up from path to front doorstep. You don’t know why, but as you slip the key into the lock, you look over your shoulder. The street is empty. No pedestrians, no drivers, nobody to witness your return. Unless neighbours with nothing to do are watching you through their net curtains.

The shiny blue-painted door opens onto your cream-painted hallway. You close it behind you and lean against it. Sun shining through the half-light above the door casts multicoloured patterns on the hardwood floor. They shiver slightly, because of the effect of the heat from the radiators on the air.

You remove your coat, glad of the warmth of the house after the coldness of outside. You take off your scarf and gloves as well. You kick off your boots and walk in stockinged feet through the house.

There is no sound of a car pulling up outside. No door slam. No knock on the door or ring of the bell.

There is not even a phone call.

Your head is hurting from the cold, so you take two paracetamol. Cold juice from the fridge sends pain along your nose and into your forehead and the frown lines between your eyebrows reappear.

Your telephone rings, but it is not him. You answer it and hear the voice of the other. He talks and knows you are distracted but doesn’t comment. He just talks, glad of the conduit for his voice to be heard, glad of your ears being there to receive the self-centred nothingness he speaks. The trick is to murmur the right things at the right times. You stand at the window, behind your own net curtains, and watch the nothingness that happens every day on your street.

He stops speaking, and for some reason you say the first thing that comes into your head.

“People on this street could be killing each other, and we would never know it.”

He is silent on his end of the phone. You non-sequitur doesn’t fit into the story he was telling you. He doesn’t know how to respond; how to bring it back to him.

“Grady,” you say, “I have to go. I need to turn all the lights on in the house.”

When you have hung up, you do just that. You go from room to room for no reason and turn on all the lights. You leave them blazing. You don’t close any of the curtains. You want your house to be a beacon against the gathering gloom of the winter afternoon.

You leave the house and drive to his. No thought has gone into this next move. You’ve picked certain things up and put them into your coat pockets as you left the house, but you have no idea what they are or why you have them. They feel comfortingly heavy in your pockets.

You ring the doorbell and she answers.

“Hi,” you say. “I’m Jenna.”

“Hello,” she says, trying to place you.

“Is Michael in?”

“Yes,” she says, her face showing relief that she hasn’t forgotten a face; that this visitor is for her husband. “Michael,” she calls over her shoulder. “Won’t you come in?” she says to you, and opens the door a little wider.

“What is it?” you hear him say from somewhere in the back of the house.

“A visitor for you. Jenna.”

There’s a silence, and you imagine him trying to work out how he’s going to get out of this one. Then there’s the scrape of a chair’s legs against a tiled floor, and you guess that he’s in the kitchen.

“You weren’t eating, were you?” you say, covering your face with faux concern.

“Oh, no! He works in the kitchen. It drives me mad, his stuff all over the place when I’m trying to prepare dinner!” She laughs, and you manage to smile in return.

He appears at last in the hallway behind his wife.

“Jenna,” he says. “Is anything wrong?”

“I forgot to bring this with me earlier; I thought you might need it.”

You take his phone from your pocket; the one that fell out of his coat pocket in your car weeks ago. You hold it out to him.

“Oh, thanks! I wondered what had happened to that.”

He looks at you, trying to work out what you are here for. You look back at him and smile. ‘Boredom,’ is what your look tells him.

“I think it must have fallen from your coat pocket the other week, when I gave you a lift.”

“Right. Thanks.”

“Grady’s away, and I’ve been busy, otherwise I would have brought it back before. And like I say, I clean forgot to bring it with me earlier today.”

“No problem. How is Grady?”

His silent wife has been listening to your exchange stiffly. The mention of Grady relaxes her. A colleague of sorts, that’s how she’s placing you now. A colleague, rather than a direct threat.

“Oh, Grady’s Grady,” you say. You are still holding the phone; still holding it out to him. He hasn’t moved from where he came to a standstill in the hallway behind his wife.

You take a step forward and bring him within your reach. You lift one hand from his side with tenderness and place the phone into it.

“Have a good evening,” you say to his wife as you open the door and leave the house.

He gives you enough time to return home to your beacon of light blazing in the middle of your street. You’re surprised at how much of the interior can be seen through the net curtains when all the lights are on. Your phone rings before you have even had chance to leave the car.

“What was all that about?”

“I wanted to return your phone.”

“You could have done it somewhere else. Some other time, even. You didn’t have to come here while she was here.”

“I was bored. Besides, you should see what I had in my other pocket.”

He hangs up.

You go back inside your own house. After you have hung your coat up in the hallway, you take the gun from your other pocket and weigh it in your hand. Heavier than the mouse head. Heavier than his phone. It smells of metal and it makes you smile. You return it to the drawer in the telephone table.

The gun will do another time.

© J R Hargreaves December 2006