Animals. Keith Ridgway

of him as a him, I still do. I could see nothing to confirm it, even this close, but I thought of him as him. I don’t know why. His arms stretched up over his head. His hands close to clasping. He looked like he’d surrendered, or been swimming. Perhaps he had been caught in a flood in the gutter. A sudden deluge, taking him and bringing him here, as helpless as a paper boat, choked in his little lungs and unable to hold. Or perhaps he had simply surrendered. Given up. Abandoned the fight. His belly was pathetic. It was open to anything. He lay there like a puppy waiting to be tickled, or a lamb waiting to be slaughtered, and either way he didn’t know and he didn’t care and he was better off in not knowing and not caring and in generally not being. Something stilled around me. I don’t know what I mean. I think I mean the city came to a halt. Which it didn’t. But I lost it for a moment. Lost the city and the city’s noise, and the world, and the world’s sorry items. Something got in the way. Just for a second. Something got in the way of my curiosity for details, facts, experiences. Something minutely sad. Something small and terribly strange. That pause in living. Sadness, I think it is. Sadness. All right.

      I thought of calling K. I put it off.

      I extended my pen. I sent it on its way, across that patch of air, that polluted patch. And all my sudden sadness went with it, expanded with it, pushed out from me like sound, and I wondered if I could carry on.

      It did quiver to the touch. And seemed to shrink. Its small extended limbs seemed to come in, to try to close, to try to cover its vulnerable front. It was as if a shadow briefly crossed its dream. Its uncontaminated dream. A slight disturbance in its sleep. A breeze rippled something that was closed, and lifted, for a second, an opening of sorts. A memory of something. A dim recall in the dirty street. It was nothing, was it? I prodded a dead mouse with my pen. There in the street. I crouched and touched its corpse. I felt a small resistance. Give and no give and give – a weak bundle of death on the end of my pen. I could have flicked it in the air with barely an effort. It was nothing. Nothing. It should have been nothing. It should have been utterly nothing.

      But since that, all of this.

      I tried once more. What was I trying for? I poked it again. Perhaps a little harder. Or perhaps a little softer, overcompensating against the risks run by attempting to go a little harder. There was the same small contraction, protective-looking, awful really, and the return then, the relax, like a last breath breathed again. It looked like it had looked when I’d found it. Let it be. Leave it in peace. I imagined I saw a tiny indentation left in its belly by the tip of my capped pen. I paused again. The world paused again. I felt something shift inside me, a worrisome realignment.

      I thought of calling K. I put it off.

      There was certainly an indentation. There certainly was. A pockmark in the shape of a pen cap. It seemed to shimmer like a morning puddle on the pale flesh. It was a sort of greyish shadow. I looked at the pen, and saw, much to my weird guilt, that there had indeed been some kind of small secretion. A minutely cluttered sheen of moisture clung to the smoothness of the plastic like a grimy sweat. It caught the light, and I could even see a tiny bead of it roll around the shaft, in and out of the almost microscopic debris of what must have been the first symptoms of rot. And I thought I could detect a mild smell to go with it. A sort of warm sweet sickness, very light, but present, like a childish bad breath. I remembered measles and chicken-pox. My mouth dried.

      I laid the pen on the ground.

      There must have been more than that. That’s what I think now. I think that I don’t have enough detail, and the detail I have is the wrong kind of detail – that it misses the point. Because although there was seepage and although there was a smell, these things did not, at the time, get in the way of the feeling I had that this was a very interesting and, in some obscure way, meaningful encounter. So the corpse was a bit yucky. So what? It was a corpse after all. It was not nearly so repugnant as it was striking. But it’s difficult now, if I’m honest, to say whether I genuinely thought that it was striking, or whether I just wanted it to be striking. Perhaps the significance comes later. Perhaps it wasn’t there then. But I think it was. I really do think it was.

      So I think about the face. The face of the mouse. Its eyes and nostril nose and its mouth and its teeth and its whiskers. What were all of them doing while I prodded its belly? I don’t know. I can’t remember. Did I even look? I mean, I only poked him twice, and my eyes have only so many things they can look at. But you’d imagine, would you not, that the face would be the obvious thing to monitor? We have that instinct. We look at faces. Do mice have faces? Something about that word ‘mice’ worries me. It is unlike what it describes. It has been corrupted and diminished by cartoons, and by its pronunciation as ‘meece’ in some of those cartoons. And the idea of mice faces, as well, is ruined somewhat by cartoons. Even now, trying to remember the face, I am interfered with by features entirely unmouselike but forever associated with mice because of the consistent use to which mice have been put in the last one hundred or so years. Mouse as Everyman. Cute resourceful little fellow with a twitchy whiskered nose and a spunky sense of humour. Why? I have never drawn mice. Never. They’re a devalued currency really, in terms of illustration. I draw all sorts of other creatures, but not mice. I’ve never liked them anyway. Crouching in the street poking this dead one was the closest I have ever willingly been to a mouse. That I know of. Something about their speed, their size, their ability to infiltrate, their capacity for turning up anywhere, at any time, has always half terrified me. I do mean half terrified. Because I feel the start of full terror but close it off quickly, with the thought that it’s only a mouse, it’s only a little mouse, mice are harmless, they’re not like rats. If rats did not exist would we feel the same about mice? I don’t think so. They are blurred things. Uneasy little shapes that flash by, on our periphery, on the sidelines, like a scratch on the surface of the eye, like fat black clouds across the grey sky. They cling to skirting boards and kerbs and edges. They come looking for the food we drop without noticing – the crumbs that fall from us daily, the rain of our chewing and our fumbling and our bad-mannered lives. They know something about us that we don’t fully comprehend. Mice is the wrong word for them.

      When I try to remember his face now I get a composite of memory and Disney and fear, and the backwards assignation of things that hadn’t happened yet. There’s a childish scrunch to it, a sort of eek-a-mouse fright. I see the mouth, and a glint of inner whites and pinks, God, and the nose, which is really no more than two wet nostril holes in the grey fur, at the point of the whiskered snout. The eyes must have been closed. Either that or I have blanked them out. Either that or something else. It all goes forward, leans out, presses out ahead of the body. They are pointed little creatures – missiles, arrowheads. No wonder they move at such speed. He looked like a child that had bitten something bitter. Something horrid and yuck. Perhaps he was poisoned? Perhaps they lay some toxin down here on the streets. Or perhaps just one of our idle by-products did for it. Some accidental spillage or fume.

      —It’s me.

      —Yes.

      —I saw a dead mouse.

      —Did you eat the apple?

      —I ate half of it.

      —All right. That’s a start. I suppose.

      —I saw, I see, I’m looking at a dead mouse.

      —Oh shit.

      —No, no, I’m not at home. I’m out on the street. In town I mean.

      —Oh, OK.

      —It’s just lying here, in the gutter.

      —Right. Are you sure it’s dead?

      —Yes.

      —You don’t want to attempt some CPR? Call an ambulance?

      —I can’t figure out how it died.

      —Old age maybe.

      —Do mice die of old age?

      —I’m sure some of them must do.

      —On the street?

      —What, you think they should have a sacred place where they go to die?

      —I