mouse

“You want to sleep there? But why?”

“Mom.”

“Why can’t you sleep here?”

“We do our homework together,” Con repeated dully. “We’ve got a project. We’ll finish late. It’s easier for me to sleep there.”

She observed him over the scarred table. He ran his fingers along the familiar knife tracks, pressing his fingertips into the grooves.

“Well, why doesn’t he come here sometimes?” she grumbled, and he knew he’d won. “Too fancy for us, your friends.”

Where would we put them? he wanted to ask her. Every bed is taken in this house, every corner crammed. Having seen Mark’s home, he was struck by the claustrophobia of his own, its meanness. For the first time he understood that Lorraine’s wealth of things wasn’t wealth at all. The empty acreage of the Carolissen property showed him what money could truly buy.

Mark was the only child he knew who lived in his own entire building, a kind of separate cabin. His family lived on the other side of the large garden; you could barely see their house through the trees. In fact, the first few times Con went around there, it seemed Mark had no parents at all. There was a mother and father of course, a sister too; but they were hard to imagine. Mark appeared to have raised himself, directing his own development, just like he tailored his own school uniform.

Mark’s room was almost empty. There was a mattress, a wardrobe, some posters, a stereo. One side was entirely taken up by a sliding patio door, covered by a thin white curtain that let in the light from a streetlamp on the other side of the wall. Even Mark’s technique for entering the property was excitingly rudimentary: toe in the gap in the brick wall, grab a branch, launch yourself over into the leaves, fall out of them on the other side … Con never thought to enter by the front door.

The first night he stayed over there, Con was pulling his balled-up school trousers out of his rucksack when the wooden lion fell to the ground with a clatter. Mark caught it and spun it on his fingertips. “What is it? What’s that in its mouth?”

“It’s nothing. Just something my dad made. Some dumb toy or something.” Con’s cheeks were flaming.

“It’s cool. It’s artistic. He’s artistic, your dad?”

“I suppose.”

But Mark was nodding as if at some significant confirmation. “I must do some sculpture. Woodcarving, ja.”

Mark had already told Con his plans: to go to London after school, to be an artist. It was completely plausible. Mark was already an artist in everything he did. The way he tucked the hair behind his ear, the loops of his signature, the curve of his mouth, the angle of his lush eyebrows. All strokes in a harmonious calligraphy.

“Let’s put him here,” said Mark, reaching up to hook the lion by his tail to the edge of the lampshade. “That looks kiff.”

Con was flushed with pleasure. Lying on his back, staring up at the swinging animal, he watched its magnified shadows dance around the room. The shapes were playful: the lion forming, dissolving, reforming in distorted silhouette, pouncing and rushing and pulling back across the ceiling. He didn’t say, You can have it if you like it; there was no need.

“You’re so lucky,” Mark murmured later, after they’d switched off the light and lay waiting for sleep. “You’re so lucky to have a dad who can do this kind of shit. Does he teach you?”

“Well, actually. He’s not … he’s dead.”

“Oh, oh man. Serious? Sorry!”

“It’s okay, it was a while ago.”

“So how …?”

Con was a little drunk with confiding. “It was the animals,” he said, and laughed.

He could feel Mark’s interest immediately beside him, electric. “Animals? Jees! Like wild animals?”

Another pause. Con could taste the dark. When the lights were off, words were less your own; nobody could see your mouth make them. Con couldn’t say whose words these were, scrolling above the bed, black ink on black fabric. “Sure,” he said. “It was a hunting accident. In the Arctic. The wolves came for him.”

“Fuuuck!” Mark thrashed the duvet excitedly off the bed.

Con retrieved the bedclothes. “He had six bullets. But there were eleven wolves,” he continued. “They couldn’t reach his body until the summer thaw.”

“Hectic.”

 

The next morning, Con woke from a dream of his mother, or perhaps Mark’s mother, wrapping something slippery around his body, his face, his groin. Long wet leaves. It was early.

Mark had pulled the covers completely over his head, leaving his long toes poking out at the bottom of the duvet. Even Mark’s toenails were shapely, long ovals without ridges. They gleamed in the blue early-morning light, as if polished. Con put his face close to his friend’s feet, then drew back, embarrassed.

The garden tapped its leaves against the glass. In his tracksuit pants, Con quietly slid open and closed the glass doors. His skin prickled in the cool, but he didn’t want to cover himself; the cold was sharp, freeing him from the constriction of the dream.

It was like stepping into another dream altogether. The strangeness of walking through an unfamiliar garden, almost naked. The volume of the birdsong was startling. Here was a path. The moss was chill and moist on his soles.

And here was a body curled up in the grass. A peaceful sight: a child of about six or seven, so snugly nested in the grass that it didn’t even strike him as strange. After a moment, when she didn’t move, he saw that she was sleeping, her breath even and regular. She was dressed in fuzzy lime pyjamas. Black hair straggled over her cheek, mouth open. Curled up like a mouse.

He crouched down next to the little girl. Her eyelashes were fine strokes of ink. Hands wrapped together near her mouth. Con had never paid much attention to the fact that Mark had a sister – but here she was, up close, alive; a miniature, more delicate version of Mark himself.

He sat and watched the child, feeling the damp come up through the seat of his pants. She stirred and rolled, her hand coming down warm and limp on his knee and her face nuzzling his leg.

He stiffened, a small jolt of imprecise panic coursing through him at this sleepy trust. I could be anyone, he thought.

As if lifting a porcelain bowl, he took her head in his hands – the ticking pulse, the delicate bone! – shifted his leg and laid her head carefully down on her own folded hands. She looked wrong, though, skew, as if he’d broken something. He stood up, the cold seeping through to his buttocks and the places where her warm head and hand had lain.

Paleness through the branches solidified into the body of a house, lemon-coloured, its windows glowing a deeper yolky yellow. It was as if it had been invisible before, a house in a fairytale that springs into existence at the seeker’s approach.

He stepped over the dewed grass and peered in through a window. Inside, two figures moved as clearly as on a television screen. A man was reading a newspaper at a kitchen table; behind him, a tall woman swayed at a counter, as if to music. Mark’s parents, must be. Except they seemed old, much older than Con’s own mother. A certain gravity in their movements. The next things he noticed were the animal heads looming down on them from above, as if nibbling at their greying crowns. A zebra, some great heavy-headed antelope that Con couldn’t name. At first the couple seemed fragile and bowed beneath the weight of the mounted animals. But then the woman glanced up and pinned him with a stare. She traversed the kitchen in seconds, mouth pursed in alarm. To his right, Con heard a door thrust open, saw a wedge of light cast onto the grass. His heart jolted like a thief ’s.

“Poor child!” said the woman, swooping down on him. “Come inside! Has Mark not offered you breakfast? It’s freezing out here! Are you hungry? You must be starving.”

“Good lord!” cried the man, in a richly thespian tone. “An intruder! He looks like he needs some feeding up, don’t you think, Margaret? Come in!”

“Well now,” said the woman. “Sit down, sit down! I’m Margaret and this is Gerard. And you must be Con.”

He smiled, surprised that Mark had mentioned him at all.

The breakfast they gave him in the warm kitchen was enormous: two slippery eggs and a pile of bacon and three slices of toast. The older pair didn’t touch the food themselves; they sat at the table and watched benevolently as he ate. Con perched on the edge of his seat, in alert discomfort. It was difficult to finish the big plate of food. Afterwards, he thanked them and stood up to take the plate to the kitchen, but Margaret stopped him: “Lettie will do that,” she said. They seemed to want to talk to him. He fiddled with a teaspoon and returned their gaze.

For the first time in his life he was thinking of people over twenty-five: they are beautiful. Margaret had a long-limbed grace and fine features. Her colouring – pale eyes, faded hair – seemed a sign of a wise and tasteful restraint. Her hair was taken up in a bun, a style that belonged to someone older still. She must have been in her late forties, Gerard ten years older. He had a broad, owlish face set with emphatic features, his hair still mostly black, his profile only slightly blunted by time.

Their age was glamorous to Con. Margaret had authority over his own mother, easily fifteen years younger. Lorraine – short and plump, with her oily skin, her full breasts beneath thin t-shirts, the sweaty ringlets at the back of her neck, the tumble of brown hair – seemed in comparison unformed, unrefined. Her lack of years was a kind of poverty, like their small home, their meagre meals, their spare conversation.

“Quiet little chap, isn’t he?” said Gerard.

The “little” shrank him, deflated his belly around the mass of bacon and eggs.

“You haven’t spoken at all,” observed Margaret. “Tell us about yourself, Con.”

He flushed, throat closing.

“For example, tell us about your name.” She had a warmly commanding way of speaking. “Is it Conrad? Connor?”

He whispered his name.

“What?”

“Constantine,” he said too loudly. Nobody at school knew his full name.

“Constantine! Well, how grand!”

He blushed, but she seemed genuinely pleased. Gerard said “Hah!” in a tone of happy surprise. “Emperor Constantine. Now there’s a name. Much more imaginative than our lot.”

The kitchen door swung open and Mark backed in, dressed, hair slicked back and damp from a shower, carrying the little girl across his chest.

“Oh, Elizabeth, not again!” said Margaret.

“She does it all the time. She’s such a pain.”

“Oh, come now, Mark. Be kind. She just wants to be near you.”

“I know! She comes and hangs around me, she’s waiting for me when I get up! It’s impossible.”

“It’s just because your sister loves you,” Margaret smiled, taking the sleepily bundled child onto her knee. The little girl’s half-open eyes passed over Con without recognition. “This is our laatlammetjie, Constantine. Our late lamb, Lizzy.”

He tried to avoid Mark’s eyes, which no doubt would be full of evil delight at the sound of Con’s silly full name. But when he looked up, he was surprised to find Mark appraising him quite seriously. Con tried a small smile, but it wasn’t returned. There was a sulky, restive spirit in his friend this morning.

Now that the child was there, Con was struck by the wholeness of the family: mother, father, brother, sister. Full set, matching. They all shared pieces of each other: turn of the wrist, flare of the lips. One of those families where it’s fun to play the heredity game, noting how the smile of the mother has recombined with the nose of the father, or vice versa, to create new and equally pleasing variations in the children. You could see Gerard in Mark’s strong eyebrows, but the distance in the boy’s eyes was from Margaret. Something tore a little inside Con to see it so clearly.

“And what do your parents do?” Gerard continued.

“His dad’s a big-game hunter,” said Mark, with a challenge in his voice. “He’s not shocked by all your corpses.”

“Mark refers to our historic family trophies,” said Gerard dryly. “You’ve noticed them, I take it?”

Mark talked over him. “Come on, I’ll show you.” He gripped Con’s shoulder and Con rose from the chair as if Mark’s hand contained magnets. The skin on his chest goosebumped, and all at once he was embarrassed by its bareness.

“I just want to put on—”

“Okay, but I need to show you first.”

Mark was irresistible. Con followed him out of the kitchen and along a corridor, under the watchful eyes of antelopes, eagles and foxes, down into a dim basement room. Inside, there was only one display case, a tall old-fashioned cabinet in dark wood with thin panes of antique glass, lightly bubbled. Mark closed the door of the room and then it was just the three of them: the two boys, and the lion staring directly at them through the glass.

“This is the oldest one we’ve got,” said Mark. “My great-great-granddad killed it.”

Con had never been so close to a wild animal before, and the proximity was enough to send the faintest instinctive jolt of fright down his spine. But this one wasn’t very fierce. Although its pelt was patched in places – perhaps to conceal bullet holes – the lion was long beyond violence. His face was threadbare, his brown glass eyes like a lapdog’s. A sparse mane. He was not much larger than a Labrador, and slender. “It’s not as big as I thought,” he said.

“It’s a young one. One day I’m going to get an adult, a big male.” Mark’s voice was unusually avid. He was rustling in a drawer of a desk to one side, and came up with a tiny metal key. “Come on,” he said, unlocking the cabinet and swinging back its tall door. When he stepped up, the sheets of glass shivered in their frames. Mark slung a leg over the lion’s back and sat astride, grinning and flexing his bare toes, clicking his tongue. The lion continued to stare straight ahead.

“Come on,” Mark said again. “It’s fun.”

Con hesitated, smiling uncertainly. He was embarrassed by the indignity: long-legged Mark straddling the animal like a little boy on a rocking horse. But he was about to join him when Gerard lurched into the room.

“Mark!” he barked. “Don’t be bloody stupid! That thing is more than a hundred years old!”

Mark lost his grin. Con, head down, saw his friend’s toes stiffen. Gerard strode across the room, reaching up to take his son by the front of the t-shirt. But he was moving quite slowly, controlled, the force concentrated in his grip as he pulled Mark off the lion. Mark seemed to cooperate in this. Con realised that they were both restraining themselves because of the peril of their situation: two people cautiously wrestling in a glass box, the tall panes rattling with every move.

As soon as they were out, Mark commenced struggling, and Gerard, still holding him by the scruff with one hand, brought the other hand up and gave his son a slap on the cheek. It couldn’t have hurt much – Mark was wriggling, Gerard’s arm cramped, the action clearly unpractised – but Mark flinched and Gerard dropped him in what seemed to be equal shock. Mark shoved his way out of the room, a red patch showing through the tan of his cheek.

After a moment’s silence, Gerard turned back to the case and eased the tall door closed. Without looking at Con, he pulled the cuff of his cardigan over his knuckles and buffed Mark’s fingerprints off the glass.

*

Con found him in the garden.

“Chatting with the old man, were you?” Mark asked coldly.

“Not really.”

“Old fucker.” His cheeks were still red in spots and his mouth looked bony and stretched, like the mouth of a fish. “What did he say to you?”

“Nothing. I came looking for you.”

Mark laughed and flung a fist towards Con’s chest. Con flinched away. “Constantine,” he teased. “Don’t be such a pussy.” His eyes were very clear.

Mark jiggled his fist, then flipped his hand open like a conjurer. An amber marble was caught in the crease of his palm. Not a marble; it was flat on one side and had a dark spot in the middle. Mark smacked his hand to his own head, and the lion’s glass eye stayed there, stuck to his brow. It glowed against his skin, gold-rimmed, dark in the centre.