expectations. I dream the colour of my love for P.J., the
staggering orange of a rising sun. I won’t be able to tell her
that. This is completely fucked. I mean, when it comes to my
life touching hers I might as well be dead or a Chinaman from
Wuhan. Sometimes it feels like I’m going to cry, but that’s
nonsense, I’m going to turn to stone. Work on that. Never stop
practicing, Master Musashi says. Do not think P.J. thoughts.
That weakens. Practice practicing. Become stone. This is my
Strategy.
I closed myself up in the darkness of Mousetown in order to think diffuse thoughts, about how they transported an attraction like this from town to town, for example, or what you would have to do to keep the population from exploding. If the mice were allowed to reproduce at will, before you knew it the whole city would become a roiling blanket of soft little mousehides, they would form factions, the struggle for resources would begin, all against all and each one for himself, a bloodbath. .
Maybe the owner got rid of the nests with a spade or a Dust-buster. It was also possible that the baby mice were eaten by the adult animals, a phenomenon I had seen once with Dirk’s guinea pigs, who had exterminated their entire nest one night in an inexplicable fit of fury. We found the hairy babies the next morning: bitten in two. Those otherwise so daffy guinea pigs had in their hearts a horror you would never expect. Not long afterwards the adult animals met the same fate. The culprit was never brought to justice.
I sat in my cart in the dark by the back wall, because it amused me not only to look at the mice, but also at the people doing the same thing. They were so intent on the sparkling light source in the darkness that they usually didn’t see me. It was the vantage point I liked most: looking without being seen. Creeping into their minds and trying like hell to figure out what was going on in there.
From the sniggering you could tell that mice were doing it, otherwise it was mostly women complaining about ‘that smell, it’s like ammonia’, and children growing ecstatic at the pileup of hundreds of filthy animals.
The black curtain opened and some of the twilight leaked in, I saw the sheen of P.J.’s hair. Joe was behind her.
‘Oh, that smell!’ P.J. said.
The curtain fell heavily into place behind them, and P.J. approached Mousetown with the enthusiasm of a child.
‘Oh, look, what a darling! The one with that crippled leg.’
She stuck her arm over the moat and tried to pet some of the mice. Her finger scared the daylights out of dozens of little animals.
IT IS ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN
TO TOUCH MOUSETOWN!!!!!!!
was written on at least six pieces of cardboard.
‘Picolien Jane!’ Joe said in mock rebuke.
I breathed as quietly as I could, the longer they were in here the more painful it would be to have them spot me. My heart was pounding. People I knew seemed very strange whenever I eavesdropped on them. I drifted far away from them; paradoxically enough it wasn’t the intimacy but the alienation that grew.
P.J. wouldn’t stop teasing the mice. She leaned far over the moat and was busy trying to cut off one particular mouse from the rest. She succeeded in manoeuvring him toward the drawbridge, then blocked the road into town with her right hand, her fingers spread slightly like the pickets in a fence. All the animal could do was cross the bridge to the island in the moat.
‘Come on, Robinson, there you go.’
In a panic he ran across the bridge onto the island; P.J. raised the drawbridge and isolated him from the rest.
‘That’s kind of mean,’ Joe said.
‘Nooo, Robinson’s always been kind of a loner.’
Joe laughed a little reluctantly and followed her to the curtain at the other end of the room, where the EXIT sign spread its soft green glow.
‘Bye, Robinson,’ P.J. said. ‘Be a good boy now!’
They went out through the curtain, P.J. laughing at something Joe said, and I was alone again. I took a few deep breaths and looked at the castaway mouse, who was now on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He sniffed around at his new surroundings, and I noticed then that mice have lovely beady little eyes.
Although it was early spring and the heating season was almost over, I jacked up my daily production of briquettes. Working helped ward off bad thoughts. ‘You’d think they were eating those things for breakfast,’ Pa said each time he loaded a new batch onto the trailer.
We could be outside now without freezing to the ground or being washed away by rain; the greenery in its pots shot up high. Each day the rushes in the ditch grew a few centimetres as well. The silhouettes of trees, hard in winter, were coming into light-green bud and the chestnuts were full of pale candles. Sometimes a happy feeling started swirling around inside you that had nothing to do with good news or anything that had happened. ‘It’s in the air,’ that’s what they always said, and because I have no better explanation I’ll leave it at that.
I was in the garden, waiting for the newspapers to spin-dry.
It was eleven o’clock, Ma had already called out, ‘Coffee, Frankie?’, when Joe suddenly appeared at the bike gate.
‘Welcome,’ he said, ‘on this glorious Day of Labour.’
It was indeed 1 May, and Joe had a bee in his bonnet: I’d known him long enough to see that. Hands in his pockets, he took a look around the junk store that I had secretly started thinking of as Briquetterie F. Hermans & Son, the son being the result of a glorious union between a certain Ms Eilander and yours truly.
‘Yup, today’s a lucky day,’ Joe said.
He took the aluminium ladder from its hook at the back of the house and asked for a claw hammer. Then he began prying at the horseshoe above my door. Ma came to the kitchen window, waving and pointing to ask me what he was up to. I shrugged. The door opened.
‘Good morning, Joe! What are you doing?’
From his perch halfway up the ladder, he looked at her over his shoulder.
‘Mrs Hermans, good morning. I’m turning the horseshoe around. It brings bad luck if you hang it upside down. It’s sort of asking for trouble, if you know what I mean.’
With a couple of blows that made the windows rattle in their frames he hammered the horseshoe back in place, with the points up. Wednesday began cawing and jumping around in his cage. I’d been neglecting him for the last few months, and I promised myself to do something about that.
‘Are you serious?’ Ma yelled back. ‘Has that poor boy been living all these years. .?’
I hissed at her to make her shut up. She stood in the doorway wringing her hands, our Marie Hermans, laden with guilt and motherly love.
‘Don’t worry,’ Joe said as he hung the ladder back in place. ‘Today’s a lucky day anyway, Mrs Hermans.’
He pulled out a pack of Marlboros. Since he’d started at Bethlehem he smoked cigarettes from a pack; it was too much trouble to roll them while he was working.
‘Smoke?’
Oh yes, something was definitely up. He had that Half-a-league-half-a-league-half-a-league-onward look in his eye that held a promise, a Change of Gear.
I waited. For a while we sat across from each other like that in the crystal clarity of the first May morning, blowing clouds of smoke into air so fresh you felt like licking it up. The neighbours had the blankets hanging out the windows. Joe looked at the briquettes drying on their racks.
‘How many of these things have you made, anyway?’ he asked suddenly. ‘A thousand? Two thousand?’
I nodded. A thousand, two thousand, how should I know?
‘And how many are you planning to make?’ Joe asked. ‘Another thousand?’