Padrika Tarrant

Biographical note:  Padrika Tarrant was born in 1974. Emerging blinking from an honours degree in sculpture, she found herself unhealthily fixated with scissors and the animator Jan Svankmajer. She won an Arts Council Escalator award in 2005 and has been working more seriously since then. The Knife Drawer is her second full length book; Broken Things, a collection of shorts, was published by Salt (2007). Padrika quite likes sushi, although she tends to pick the fish out. She hates the smell of money.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717255
ISBN:  9781844717255
Author:  Padrika Tarrant
Title:  The Knife Drawer
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FA
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  20-Jun-11
Extent:  368pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  26 mm
Weight:  552 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 11.99
Price:  USD 18.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  In the house where Marie lives, the cutlery is running wild … Madness and fairy-story creep hand in hand in this darkly comic tale, where the mice learn the art of voodoo; where murdered bodies miraculously vanish; where the grandmother is sometimes an owl and where steak-knives grow so hungry that they scream.

Main description:  SHORTLISTED FOR THE AUTHORS’ CLUB BEST FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2012

In the house where Marie lives, the cutlery is running wild …

Madness and fairy story creep hand in hand in this darkly comic tale. At the top of a narrow driveway there is a shambling Victorian house full of dust and stairs. The walls inside are ancient emulsion, sloughing off the distemper walls in gorgeous ribbons.

The mice that infest the dining room chimney-breast are living out their own dreams and nightmares, learning voodoo and the meaning of love and forgiveness. In The Knife Drawer, dead bodies miraculously vanish as if scraped to nothing by pudding spoons.

Marie’s mother has rather lost her wits since she did away with her husband. She could swear they’re out to get her; even the house gets messy on purpose, all by itself. Marie’s twin is living in a hole in the back-garden, small and round as a cherry pip, waiting to be discovered.

In The Knife Drawer the steak knives grow so hungry that they scream. When the children murder the rent man, things get a little out of hand …

Table of contents:
Prologue: Titty Mouse and Tatty Mouse
PART ONE
Knife
The Mother
Mice
House
The Mother
Mice
The Mother
The Mother
Mice
House
PART TWO
Marie
The Mother
Mice
Marie
The Mother
Mice
Child
Marie
Mice
Child
Mice
Marie
Mice
Marie
The Mother
Mice
Marie
Knife
The Mother
Mice
Marie
Child
Rent Man
Marie
The Mother
Mice
Marie
The Mother
Knives
Mice
Child
Mice
Mice
Marie
Knife
The Mother
Marie
The Mother
Child
Marie
Mice
Marie
Knife
PART THREE
Marie
Mice
Knife
Marie
Mice
Marie
Knife
Marie
Mice
Marie
Knife
Marie
Mice
Rent Man
Marie
Mice
House
Marie
Mice
Marie
Mice
Acknowledgements

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Excerpt from book:  

48
The Mother

This is how it feels to become another kind of beast. This is how it feels to have one’s soul shaken to liquid and poured into a new mould. This is how it feels to become a mouse. The mother is discovering a different kind of time in which the thread of life slips through the noose of an eternal now, in which every beat of the pulse is just a drumming to ward off death.

The mother is discovering the sort of fear that gives life and ending to the very smallest things. A creature is limited in time by fear, is made and unmade by it, and the mother is oh-so frightened. Her life is evolving like fermenting dough, is becoming terribly quick, fast as the passing of clouds next to the slow footsteps of people.

The mother can hear her own heart, and it sounds like an hourglass, pattering for a little time before it spills out silence. The mother is discovering how it is to live one’s life as flames do.

The mother is speechless. She is afraid, and now her fear will not conform to words. She is afraid instead with her ears and eyes, with the deafening odours that are blinding her poor nose. The mother has discovered that speaking is meaningless, that all the mouth might achieve are hollow claps and whoops, noise that rings with all the sense of a slamming door.

This afternoon, Marie came to the mother and put her face very close. She smelled of powdered toothpaste and the air from the back bedroom. She had knelt for a long time with the mother’s paw clasped between her own, and had spoken and spoken, fallen silent and then spoken again, as if the mother had been supposed to respond, as if she should have moved her mouth and groaned in reply.

It has been such a time, this oozing between universes. The minds of women and mice are fashioned on such differing scales. The shift between the two is dizzying, where pattern and texture mean so much more than explanations, than justifications.

The mother is growing the morals of a mouse, and excuses are useless. She sees it now, plain as death. She is an evil thing. She is a laughing hurt-maker, a genocide of mice. She has scraped up all the truth of mousehood, all the love and beauty of it, and has offered it in sausage-fingers to owls.

Yes. She has killed a man, and thousands others at the thud of her slippers, but what is more she has doomed the household to perish. At the thought the mother’s hands flitter in front of her, close upon her knitting. But even knitting is of no avail, for her nest is never finished; the pile of dishcloths is never larger. Perhaps Marie is stealing them. Even so, the mother knits as if knitting might save her, as her heart and mind grow small and truly formed, and she tastes what she has done.

The mother sees her nasty child now as they do, as the childling, beloved one of mice. She finds that the smell of her and the lick of her skin is written in her new brain. She discovers the purity, the massive weakness of the childling and she cannot bear it. She knows how it has been to be lost from that childling, source of hope, for such a forever, and she comprehends the agony that bit them when they knew her to be truly gone.

The mother shuts her eyes and is astounded at the suffering of mice, the slightness of their lives and their very great tragedy. Now she knows that she must have given the childling to owls, for she feels the ache of Judas across her neck, even if she cannot quite recall the details. The mother has learnt to know herself as the mice know her. She knows the mice too, as they do not wish to be known, and the albino sings in her ears as much as in theirs.

The mother sees that redemption is lost, and if she could then she would claw back through history to save that child, or claw through her own breast to uncover the secret of where she put the body. And in this new sort of now that does not quite have a future or past, the corpse of a husband and child might easily become each other, or else exchange themselves for the trillion ruined mice from traps, every one thrown in sacrifice to metal things.

Now the mother knows the feel of a life carved up by kitchen scissors and roasting forks, and she knows the sound her own body would make if it were split to soup by knives. The mother’s jaw hangs slack, for she is Satan.

The Crying Boy has slipped between the cushion and the arm of the chair, and all that can be seen of him is his gilt-brushed frame. It hardly matters, for now the Crying Boy would mean nothing to her, not against the cryings of an entire civilisation. If only she had known, the mother would have been different. If she had known, perhaps she would have made an effort not to be born. Perhaps she might have grasped her way up from flesh and into air, to have only been a sigh on the wind.

And while the mother’s body is yet that of a woman, with great arms and legs like timbers, her mind has made its metamorphosis complete. And, now the mice have more magic to work upon her, a revenge more perfect and precise, and so the final change is coming. For it seems her eyes are growing black, with neither white nor iris. Now her ears are unfurling and acute, hurtingly sensitive like the ears of newborn mice.

And perhaps her shape hovers more uncertainly around her skin. To look at her, one might think the mother very much smaller. She seems to harbour another self within her, a little trembling terrified self that it absorbing all the realness that she used to embody. She is becoming a tiny thing, made of lead and misery.

Marie is not here; perhaps she is shivering in her bed, trying to sleep. Perhaps it is four in the morning; all there is to know is that the garden is dark at the window and the bulbs are burning in the parlour. The mother lifts her snout to that blue-black nothing-place and she cannot believe that she condemned her own childling there. Her own pup.

The mother regards those starred skies and knows for sure that she must have been in league with owls, with death herself, with the forces against the god that does not wish to kill mice. But now it seems that this god is gone, or else he has forsaken them all. They were not worthy after all; now they will suffer the fate that the albino mouse sang from the grate. The mother dips her face again, shakes her silky head. Her cardigan is growing loose around her.

The mice have been very busy with the mother, perfecting their spell. The job is arduous, and not without cost; some mice have even dropped in the middle of their magicking. When all of a mouse’s fear is spent, then he is no longer a mouse but a furry husk, and so he dies. The mice are giving themselves, projecting terror at the mother, channelled and pure and terrible, and this is how they make her a mouse. The dead lie where they fall, for the dining room door is fast shut.

By now they have gathered all of her that they need: the mice have gnawed the mother’s hair from her head in clumps, and have bitten her fingernails to round stumps. They even tried to get a tooth loose, but the mother had squealed at that and Marie came running. It doesn’t really matter; they have samples of slipper and cardigan. They have stolen away her wedding ring and several eyelashes, and the effigy that they are making is a curious thing.

It is small and mean and hidden in the empty guts of the red armchair. It is not quite a mother, and not quite a mouse, but an animal in flux, pulled to stretching between one and the other.

She can feel that effigy beneath her backside, beneath the flat cushion that is stained with disappointment and tea. It is sucking her down into itself, forming her skin over its voodoo bones. She can feel the pang of those Polo-round eyes, the tiny dressing gown that forms a kind of pelt. The cord from it has grown nerves and strings within its length; it is finding a life of its own, a twist and flex and flick of its own. And the claws are toenails and the limbs are plaited hair, and it feels as evil a creature as might find it in its heart to murder a childling, or a host of harmless mice.

The poor mother. She is clinging to her self; with the tips of her knitting needles she is clinging, but it is quite useless. Her nose is rather long already and her ears are rather round.

Now, Marie has come in and she is hacking her way into a can with a blunt tin opener, and the parlour is slicked with the luscious odour of peas. The mother sits up, haunches stiff. The white haired child gathers food into dishes and lays one carefully on the arm of the red chair. Another is tucked into the space behind the laundry basket, where the mice might thieve at it in privacy.

The mother twitches her muzzle, gawps at those green balls, eyes sidelong, wondering if she dares. Marie is crouching very still, lip between teeth, fingers curled, as the mother creeps forwards in the chair to take a pea. Marie gasps at the same time, and the mother is startled, dish upended, one pea between her two hands. It smells like an orchestral symphony as the mother holds that pea in all her fingers at once and nibbles it to nothing.

And, although her daughter coos and hoots and flaps her mouth, the mother can never be happy again, and huge human tears begin to roll from her eyes and soak into the mouse-bitten layers of dressing gown and cardigan. She gazes at Marie’s eyes and is confused, for this child is so huge and so strange. Who knows what a creature like that might think about.

And the parlour grows as massive as a country, tie-dyed with smells, with a moonless plaster sky, and no hope at all. Not even a little.

Unpublished endorsement:  Padrika Tarrant’s imagination is not a comfortable place to be, but it is darkly addictive.

Sarah Bower
Ink Sweat and Tears blog

Unpublished endorsement:  Her language is both precise and arrestingly strange.

Nicholas Clee
The Guardian

Unpublished endorsement:  Tarrant’s stories are images trapped and corralled, temporarily, and put on brief display before they slip off of the page and back into the wilds from which they came.

Laura Benedict
Notes from the Handbasket blog