Animals. Keith Ridgway

sometimes a son, who I have also heard being called Eric, though he doesn’t seem to like it very much. They stock groceries and newspapers and sweets, and some general small-scale DIY stuff like nails and screws and hammers and other tools, and watering cans and ropes and drain unblockers and sink plungers and bulbs and batteries and smoke alarms and mouse traps. Eric’s is the first port of call for the entire neighbourhood when some small domestic crisis hits. It can be annoying sometimes when you go in just to get a newspaper or some milk and you have to wait while Eric whose name is not Eric rummages around for an ancient fuse for a customer whose dinner depends on it. When I went in this time, I thought I’d been unlucky. Eric whose name is not Eric was standing at the back of the shop with a large woman I didn’t recognise. They were looking at mousetraps – an old-fashioned one with a spring-loaded neck-breaking bar, and a more modern one, involving an adhesive-floored box.

      —They get stuck, you see, not-Eric was saying. Stuck there, they cannot move.

      —And it’s alive?

      —They’re trapped. They die of a heart attack or something. Who can know? They just die.

      —And how do you get it out?

      —You don’t get it out, you just throw the box away. No problem.

      —Oh, I don’t know. Seems a bit cruel, doesn’t it?

      She was laughing a little uneasily and looked at me. I smiled. Luckily, Mrs Eric who is not Mrs Eric appeared out of the back room and took for my newspaper and bottle of mineral water.

      —The other snaps their neck, it’s not cruel?

      —Well, it’s quick at least. Which one is cheaper?

      —The more cruel is the cheaper. It’s always the way.

      On the bus, I read, and drank my water and forgot entirely about mice and the vanishing boys. I read lazily, yawning, and glanced at the rooftops and the arches and at the signs that line the routes here, and at the teeth of scaffold and at the wires. It was all a blur. I made sense of nothing, but I was content I think. I have a smallish life. It doesn’t need much. There were seven different stories on the front page. Nothing specific seemed to be occurring anywhere.

      The bus went quickly and I got off in the centre, a couple of stops early, thinking that it was nice, I could walk, I could get some fresh air and look in the windows and think about things. I wanted to draw a quick sketch. I rummaged in my bag and found my sketchbook and my pen, and standing where I was, on some street somewhere near the centre, about ten minutes’ walk from where I was going, I drew a rough cartoon of a daffodil running through a field of children, knocking off their heads. I frowned at it for a moment, wondering if maybe it wasn’t an idea at all, but a memory of something I’d seen before. Oh well. One thing follows another. It was when I put away the sketchbook and the pen, and turned to cross the road, my head down watching my hands fiddle with the bag, that I saw it.

      I saw a dead mouse. Guttered, up dead against the kerb. A silky little thing, like a purse. Shut down, remarkably unruffled, thoroughly dead. There wasn’t even the slightest hesitation. I did not think, There is a mouse, oh, it’s dead. I thought, There is a dead mouse. He lay on his side, with his belly exposed towards me, and his limbs, with their little feet, stretched out from either end. He was a grey brown. With the underside lighter. You’d think, against the ground, the belly would be black with dirt. They are probably clean little things, in their world. Proud little cleansers. His eyes were closed. His mouth slightly open, with the smallest hint of a tooth. His claws at prayer, almost clasped together, above his head. The way he lay, I fancied he had fallen off the footpath. I could see no injury. I could see no blemish on his body at all. From what I know. I say he. I could see no genitalia. I was not aware of any genitalia in what I was seeing. But he was furry around the end regions. I found it hard to see, to tell. I peered at the thing. A stretched tiny creature, inexplicably ended, at the side of the road.

      I thought of course, though not with any great focus, of the woman in Eric’s looking for a mousetrap. It was a minor little coincidence. I noted it and paid it the deference I thought it was due (not very much) and put it out of my head.

      I wanted to prod it with my umbrella. An instinct in my arm, a twitch, so that I actually looked down at my side, as if for an umbrella, as if there was a chance that one of them, either K’s or mine, might have come with me, might have attached itself somehow, out of wisdom and the never-ending question. I had no umbrella. I had not brought one. I stood and stared down. I crouched a little. The thing was crying out to be prodded.

      I rummaged in my bag for something to touch it with. This small thing. Small dead creature. Just a touch. A little poke. Just to see. Just to feel. But in my bag there was nothing of any use. A novel, an address book, a half-empty bottle of water, half an apple in a tissue, a hat against cold, a glasses case, with sunglasses inside, my telephone, my camera, my sketchbook, my pen. I could see immediately of course how I might proceed: the pen. But I had only the one pen with me – and using a pen is what I do, it’s my role, I’m an illustrator and cartoonist, it’s what I do for a living, and I like to be able to sketch at any time and in any place – and I wasn’t that keen on using my pen on the mouse. Not really. So. I sought other options. I could take out the sunglasses, extend an arm, touch it like that. But I was afraid, frankly. Afraid of spillage. Of guts and ooze. I was afraid of what the touch would leave me with. And even if there was no obvious detritus left clinging to my glasses, I was not sure that I would want to wrap that arm around my ear, once I knew that it had prodded a dead mouse. The water bottle then. I could throw it away. But it was one of those wide-mouthed things, built to latch on to our own mouths, and it was too wide and bulky and awkward. I was sure it wouldn’t communicate to me anything of what I was after. What I was after was the body sense, the heft of it. The weight and the resistance. Things, I think, like that. So I would use the pen. I mean, I could buy another, if I really, suddenly, desperately needed to sketch something. Take the pen and poke the mouse and throw the pen away. Simply leave it there on the ground – a bewilderment for whoever came after. It would look, what, like the mouse had been hit from above by a falling pen. Maybe. Or that it had carried its pen as far it could before its miniature heart gave out. That the writing had killed it in the end. Some such thoughts might go through some kind of mind when I was gone. That’s what I thought.

      I could touch the mouse with the pen and then leave the pen by the mouse’s side. I put the pen in my hand. It was a nice pen, new or newish. It would be a shame. But I needed to know. I needed to touch the corpse. I needed to know the level of quiver and give, the degree of rigidity; the liquidity, possibly, of the innards. I took the pen in my hand. Which end? It was a rollerblade. No, excuse me, a rollerball. With a decent rubberised grip mid-shaft which would plainly be useless. I would be on one end of this pen, and the mouse on the distant other. One poke. One prod. That’s all. I decided on the butt end. I would hold to the rear. Clutch the base of it, the arse of it. Cap on or cap off? There was a danger I thought that if I used, as it were, the sharp end – the nib, or the ball in this case – that I would puncture something. That I would puncture the mouse. That there would be a barely discernible hiss of gaseous escape; an emission of mousey … life, followed in all likelihood by ooze – watery pink animal blood from grey string veins. About a mouthful in all, of bile and suppurations. I didn’t want that. And there was the remoter danger too (I looked around, the street was fairly quiet) of an explosion. Of a simple hideous pop. It didn’t look swollen, but how many dead mice have I seen? I would leave the cap on.

      I gripped the pen with my thumb and first two fingers. Right hand. Was there enough sensation there? Should I use the left for the sake of novelty? For the superior sensation from the lesser used limb? No. There was risk that the inexperienced left hand would over-poke or over-prod, and a resultant increased possibility of puncture or pop. Oh, I was just being stupid now. I thought of calling K. I put it off.

      I crouched, my coat skirting the ground, tenting my legs. My ribs rested on my thighs. My left hand held my bag beyond harm. My right hand went out. I was closer to it now, of course. Its claws were stretched up above its head. Yawning. Its forearms. Forelimbs. Why are we so unclear on the body parts of other creatures? Of how to name them. As if we’re a little embarrassed to let them