19. The Mouse, Part I

When the rules change

Jun 03, 2024

In this edition: I’m back with some heavy stuff. Grief, animal suffering, death, references to police violence and childhood trauma – basically at any time I’m excavating what’s available inside my own brain, and that’s where I’m at. If you’re not in a place to read that at the moment, that’s okay – skip this one, or file it away for another time. This will be part one of a three-part series, which I started writing from the midst of unfolding events, so references to time are a bit wonky.

The mouse doesn’t make it out of this story alive, and I want to tell you that up front. There’s a version of this story that goes along the same path of obliviousness and hope and uncertainty and shock that we had while living it, and that wasn’t fun – although narratively, it’s got a lot going for it. I’m sure it would land with impact and maybe even some meaning and tenderness, but it matters to me whether I cause you pain in the telling of things. We shall have to settle for dramatic irony instead. You’ll get to carry the knowledge of the punchline with you all the way through.

Here is the punchline (punch as in to the gut; line as in finality, as in “crossing the”) -

I killed the mouse, because I could.

“I keep thinking I should know how to like, do grief by now,” I tell John, stumbling out of his apartment building into the beautiful spring evening. “But I think I am somehow better at the sudden kind. I don’t know how to do this drawn-out thing.”

“What does that mean?”

“Like if something happens suddenly, you just have to come to terms with the fact that things end in the state they’re in. That’s just… it. But if it’s drawn out, there’s so many opportunities to wonder if you should be doing something other than what you’re doing.”

It’s Saturday. I have received an email I have been dreading. I have sent a dreadfully inadequate voice message, less than two minutes long. I have texted everyone it made sense to text. Now there is just… existing, from one minute to the next. I had tasks, I was mid-task, then there were no tasks, just existing. Now there are new tasks: go outside.

Peter is alive as we head into the gardens down the road. Peter is alive as I type this now, in late April, at least as far as I know.

There are at least twelve types of birds, which we dutifully record – woodpecker, goshawk, the elusive goldfinch – and perhaps more that we can hear but can’t see. A task: listen, consider, record. There are several hives of bees. “Stand here,” says John, amidst the stream of bees coming in and out of the entrance to the hive several metres away. “It’s the middle of the highway.” It sounds like one too. I think about telling the bees about Peter. I’m not there yet.

There will be a second email, at some point.

I think of Peter outside his and Rachel’s house on the hills near Volterra, pointing into the trees along the driveway. “Listen, there’s the wols,” he says, a deliberate mispronunciation. “Civette.” The first time I came to Tuscany, in August 2011, they took me to Siena and I bought a little patch with the emblem of the Civetta contrada on it, a little owl on red and black. I spent half the week in a hammock on the terrace, reading and gazing out over the gentle slopes and drinking gin and tonics in the evening as we discussed various members of our family that Peter insisted I must know, despite the fact that I simply didn’t.

“So when are you coming back to visit?” he asked, at the end of the stay, and then every single time we talked for the next thirteen years.

“How many robins did we see? I’ll put two,” says John. He’s filling out a proper report, each bird and how many, rather than the incidental sightings I’ve been noting down. “For these ones you have to put every bird you see over a period of time, so they can use it as data.”

It’s only been two years, but the experience we’ve gathered has taught us that laying out the rules in more detail in the Spiel at the start of every Unicorn Open Mic evening yields better results. I have – finally – written up a whole handbook, but I try and remember everything by heart. The Spiel is about a page and a half long.

“We are NOT here for any misogynysexismhomophobiatransphobiaracismantisemitismislamophobia or shittiness of ANY kind,” that part is easy, that rolls off my tongue by now, “take your edgy takes elsewhere, the devil has enough advocates!”

There are many reasons we spend so long doing the hard work of defining and then laying out the rules, twice a night. For starters, it means that every person, whether they’ve been a hundred times or six times or never before, knows what’s expected of them in this space, and what they can expect from the team and from each other. It also means that when something goes wrong, we all more or less know how to deal with it together – organisers, performers, and audience alike. We try and get everyone on the same page, in a very obvious way. The longer you take to be clear about these things, the quicker you can create something that brings a kind of relief people sometimes didn’t even know they were looking for.

“And we love content warnings! Use them! I promise you, letting people know what they’re in for ahead of time will make it better for you, and better for them – everyone can decide what they’re up for this evening.”

You know the feeling though, right? The one where you walk into a room and you’re sort of excited to be there, but mostly wondering where you should sit, who might be looking at you, what they’ll want from you. You try and identify who in the room will be the authority on whether you’ve done the right thing, whether you’re existing here correctly, whose opinion will matter to you, whose opinion will matter to other people, which of those people will matter to you, how quickly a consensus might be reached on whether you’re doing well at Being Here. You hesitate before addressing anyone who looks too busy, trying to do the detective work on your own before asking some dumb question.

Right? You’re familiar with that feeling? Do you only get it in new places? Do you get it like, once a year maybe? Do you get it like, once a week? A day?

When was the first time you felt it?

It is March 2024, and I am standing in the upstairs hallway of a house I lived in when I was very small.

The floorboards creak under my weight, and I freeze, waiting. The house says to me, danger, no danger, danger, no danger. I am five, I am thirty-four, I love this house and the people in it, but I can’t figure out what they think of me. My name is etched on the kitchen doorway at different heights, 1996, 2008, there is a photo pinned to the wall of me wearing a green and yellow tutu, and when I suggested to Stani that we come and stay here while we are in Sydney I don’t think I expected that it would involve a full re-immersion in the waters of my formative years.

“You know, you’ve told me all these stories about what your childhood was like, and somehow it’s actually more intense than what you described?”

We think we understand our own stories, more or less. We think we know what they mean. We think we have a sense of ourselves and the events of our lives. This part of the story was not the climax, it was a dream sequence, it was a narrative red herring. My birth mother died and then we went to live in a big house with Val1 and lots of kids and then it didn’t work out and we went home again. But everyone stayed friends.

Val looks at me and says, “Well your dad’s a screamer, he yelled a lot, you know what it’s like, it’s normal, some people are just like that,” and I think no it’s not, not it’s not, no it’s not but I can’t interrupt Val to say so because when she talks she is a river after heavy rain. My Mum, the still-alive one, calls Val a force of nature and I think about how once the riptide has its hold on you, there’s no point swimming against it, you’ll just get tired. You have to swim out sideways, or let it take you where it’s going until it runs out of pull, and who knows where you end up.

As an adult, I learn context, and it makes less sense. As an adult, I am returned to the strangeness of childhood that the fairytale washed away through repetition. As an adult, I can see my kid self in that hallway learning that when one circumstance changes, one of the tectonic plates underneath you shifts, everything else is shifting with it. Your mother dies, you’re not the oldest kid anymore, there is a big house with new rules and everyone eats Weetbix with sugar and a bit of boiling water and is fearless and loud and says grace before dinner and you’re in the riptide and now you’re afraid of the creaking floorboards because you just want to be silent and invisible for one moment, to move without scrutiny long enough to be able to figure out how to be here correctly, because nobody actually set out the new rules, and you’d only just learned the old ones. And even when you go back, you’re not going back. You can’t really go back.

It is Sunday, one day after I got Rachel’s email about Peter. I’m back at John’s and we’re playing a board game to keep ourselves occupied, because I’ve been talking about grief for more than an hour now over breakfast. Max goes to get something from the kitchen.

“Does anyone have a box or something?” he calls softly from the hall. “There’s a mouse here and I think we can catch it. It looks pretty chill.”

They’ve had humane traps set up for a few weeks now, but the mice are smarter. John springs to his feet and runs out to look. I don’t want to look at the mouse, I don’t want to creep up slowly so as not to scare it, to figure out how to capture it and not let it run back to whichever pocket dimension it’s been hiding in, making noises, invisible. They catch it under a bowl.

“Where should we take it?” asks Max. “How far away does it need to be?”

“At least two miles.” John pulls out a cardboard shoebox and punches rapid holes in the top of it with a screwdriver. He looks up, apologetic. “Loud. Sorry. I think Hasenheide should be far enough.” He uses duct tape to stop the box collapsing in on itself, carefully securing the tabs.

I don’t see the mouse as it’s transferred from bowl to box. “There’s something wrong with it, I think. It’s too chill,” says Max. “Hasenheide is how far?”

“Listen,” I say, “if you take it out into the middle of the Feld, it’s either going to find a great new home before it can get back here, or, you know. The birds.” There are plenty of birds of prey on Tempelhofer Feld. “It’s not coming back here alive.”

“You hear that?” John tells the box. “You remember what she said about you.”

We’d have to cross the Feld to get to Hasenheide anyway, and we decide to head to the top of the lookout hill.

“I’ll take the box,” I say. “I need something to do with my hands.” I can feel a scratching at the corner, a small body in movement.

It’s beautiful outside again, today.

It is August 2023, it is after midnight, and the Feld gates closed hours ago.

Rhys, Theodore, Marina and I are sitting on the bollards at the side of the runway, watching the Perseid meteor shower. Technically everyone’s meant to be on the other side of the Feld, near the old airport buildings, but the park rangers are doing the absolute bare minimum effort version of patrolling. We’ve been helping people scale the locked gates.

I am lying flat on the tarmac when I hear voices float out of the darkness. Rishi’s arrived, and brought John with them. Not long after they arrive, the patrol car comes round again.

“Here they come!”

Those of us who’ve been here a while grab our things and hurl ourselves behind the bollards, trying to keep our silhouettes out of view. It’s become a glorified game of hide and seek at this point – the headlights approach, everyone scatters, giggling and whispering, and then as the lights swing away heads pop up again and we all resume our stargazing. We’ve been enjoying the game, the absolute lowest stakes renegade behaviour – those who get caught merely get asked to leave the park or move to the other side of it (the Feld is huge – the opposite gates are some two or three kilometres away), but the rangers don’t even stick around long enough to see that they walk towards the exit.

But Rishi and John haven’t seen a round of this game play out yet. As we all dive for cover, grinning and shushing, I catch the look on Rishi’s face.

“They’re not cops,” I say, “it’s fine,” but I’m missing the point. John looks worried, but Rishi looks frightened. Rolling out the likely future interactions between us and the source of those headlights looks and feels so different for each of us. It’s not that I know better; it’s that under these circumstances I’m cushioned by whiteness, by living here, by having lived in countries where police murder comparatively few people in scenarios like this. I don’t feel the spectre of violence in this moment. I’m not used to being the one who isn’t afraid of consequences.

Wasn’t expecting that part to trigger what it did, Rishi texts me, two hours later. They’d left not long after they arrived. Everyone else had stayed, taking our subterfuge to the gardens to hide among the plants as the rangers got out of their car and walked among the paths with flashlights, passing by not more than a metre away from us. My heart had thudded in my chest, but not with its usual panic. This felt like a controlled thrill, escalated silliness. I want to feel like that more. What might it cost, though?

We’re crossing that same bit of tarmac now, in the daylight. John laid out our walking route options – long, but pretty, or short and meh. We choose the long route. We’ve been laughing and enjoying the sun, imagining the mouse’s life back out in the wild. The mouse has been scrabbling at the bottom of the box quite consistently the whole time I’ve held it. I try so hard to hold it level, steady, smooth, to glide rather than walk.

“Actually I think we won’t want to let this mouse go, at the end,” says Max. “We’ve been through so much together, we’ve walked all this way.”

“Yeah actually it’s not the mouse we’ll be releasing at the hill,” I tell him. “We’re setting you free to live in the park, and the mouse is taking your room in the apartment. It was all the mouse’s idea.”

Occasionally I talk to it, softly. “Nearly there, nearly there.” Scratch, scratch. I can feel its small weight in the corner. “I think it’s trying to dig through the box?”

“It would take it a long time to make a hole large enough to get out,” says John, but that’s not what I meant. “Do you want me to take it?”

“No, I’ve got it.” I’m still so focused on trying to keep the journey level and smooth inside that dark, speckled space. “You know, I think there’s something about carrying a mouse in a box that transcends age. Like I’d be holding it just like this,” reverent, elbows pinned in, hands splayed, “if I were five, or twelve, or indeed thirty-four.” I can be any age right now, I can think mouse and I can think hospital bed in Tuscany and I can think nearly there.

We cross Columbiadamm, head into the trees of Hasenheide. The path up to the hill curves and switches back on itself, and at the top there is a circular clearing, bordered by crumbling concrete plinths that used to be the bases of benches. Four crows watch us approach.

“Ominous,” I say.

We move to the opposite edge of the circle, near some bushes. Together we place the box gently on the ground. Scratch, scratch. Someone opens the lid. “Time to go!”

And then daylight hits the inside of the box, and we finally see what’s happened.

Hello. If this is the first time you’re getting Figs in your inbox, welcome! Seems like a recommendation from The Whippet has a long yield, it’s been a year and I keep getting a couple of notifications every month or so that new people have signed up. I’m honoured to have you here, please say hi, I’d love to know who I’m writing to!

Figs for Breakfast

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