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How 'A Midsummer Mouse' Was Discovered and Published
By Christopher
Mouse
Listen; twilight is stalking through the gardens of
Stratford on velvet paws. The dust falls in shafts of golden light and you can
almost hear the shuffling of bat's feet as they wake, for the moon is
calling to them from the east. On the sunlit hills above, the sheep call to
each other across the darkling town. Beetles are whirring towards one another,
clumsy in their amorous navigations. For a long minute the town’s clocks
hesitate in their relentless beat, but then the bells of the Holy Trinity crash
through the silence shaking a rain of pollen from the lime trees.
In the chancel of the church, squeezed behind
Shakespeare’s monument sleeps a mouse, here where mice have hidden from the
clamorous daytime for generations. Snug in a nest of crumbled hassocks a
slender grey mouse dreams of forgotten toffees under the gruesome misericords
of the choir stalls, of white wax candles, of the heaven of harvest festival,
when a mouse might hop over a hymn book with barely a passing nibble.
Under the floorboards of Shakespeare’s Birthplace,
beneath an undiscovered sonnet scrawled by the young poet when the lime mortar
was still wet, lie a pile of small mice wrapped in a shredded manuscript of
Cardenio. They twitch their back legs and pull their tails close around their
long whiskered noses. In their dreams they run through the fragrant cheese
shops of the town pausing only to nimble a blue veined Stilton or burrow into
the soft folds of a Stinking Bishop.
Deep in a hole under the Town Hall, uncomfortable in
a nest of chewed up expense claims, an old mouse quivers. In his dream he
clings to the neck of a ginger tom at the head of a herd of cats who chase
among the chimney pots. In the twilight of his consciousness the cats balance
above sickening drops and leap into the void only to land sure-footed.
In a dressing room at the theatre hidden at the back
of a cupboard sleeps a fat brown mouse. He wakes with a start and grabs an
ass’s head, struggling with his trousers, one shoe and one bare foot, he runs
through the endless corridors of his nightmares. Then finding a door in front
of him he rushes through to be greeted by the horrified faces of row upon row
of humans. He crams the ass’s head over his own and turns to the actor next to
him who is dressed in black and has a skull in his hand. He cannot think of
anything appropriate to say. Then he wakes up, is that the distant echo of his
call, he grabs an ass’s head and heads for the door.
The sun dips below the horizon, the damp vapours of
night rise from the ground. The creatures of the darkness begin to stir. The
barn owl is already abroad, gliding between the cow parsley, ghostly in the
blur of twilight. Bats are skimming down until they meet their reflections in
the glass of a sullen, slow moving river. The mice stir in their burrows, they
stretch behind the skirting boards, they yawn in dusty attics, they rub cobwebs
from their whiskers.
In the slow falling darkness no one sees a tiny
silhouette perched high above the Bancroft Gardens. A mouse has climbed the
dangerously smooth summit of Shakespeare’s head. He peers through the gloom in
the direction of the road and of a sudden he whistles and beckons just as
several coaches begin to rumble over the Clopton Bridge towards the theatre.
Out of the barges moored in the canal basin hundreds of mice race along the
mooring ropes heading towards the coaches as they come to a halt. For every
evening as the theatre goers descend showers of cake and sandwich crumbs fall
from their clothes raining down on the waiting mice below.
Time passes; most mice are about their business,
they nose their way through hidden spaces, only stopping to gnaw at that which
seems to them, at least, gnaw-able. They raid the kitchens fleeing the brushes
edge and the stamping feet. They nibble their way into soap boxes and in the
shadow of bird tables they hold peanuts in their delicate paws. Slowly the
evening darkens into night and the crowded streets begin to thin. The quiet is
only broken by the shattering of bottles as the last waiters whistling throw
the empties away. Midnight approaches and we encounter the liminal; as two
streams of time seem to converge and faint voices from another era echo above
the volume of the swirling waters.
If you hire a boat and row below the balcony in the
lea of the theatre you may just see a hole in the riverbank. By midnight all is
cloaked in black. Down river mists rise from the graveyard, for this is a time
when the dead will walk fleeing their marble tombs until the cock crow chases
them back into the cold ground. Nearer still; the Guild chapel clock begins the
fearful chimes of midnight. If you had the vision of some creature of the night
you might still pick out the entrance of a mouse hole closely hidden amongst the
forget-me-nots.
Move close; the hole is unusual, a groove has been
gnawed top and bottom to allow the passage of a rectangular object too large to
slide into the burrow’s original aperture. Follow this groove along a level
passage and you will reach a large chamber carved out of the bank by
generations of mice. Two objects catch the eye; a polystyrene box which once
held a burger, the lid closed and more surprising still, a smart phone with a
length of string tied round its middle. The screen of the phone is covered in
the muddy footprints of a mouse. A small nightlight lends a dim glow to the
scene but most of the chamber is lit by moonlight from an aperture high up near
the roof.
As the cold bell strikes midnight the candle flame
burns blue, gutters and dies. An instant drop of temperature fogs a glass with
frost. Then a single walnut rolls along a shelf and drops onto the lid of the
burger box with a thud. Up flips the lid to reveal a mouse, still curled as if
asleep but now two bright eyes shine in the gloom. A shaft of moonlight
illuminates a swirl of dust motes thrown into the air by a sudden cold breeze.
Christopher who keeps odd hours for a mouse had spent the evening on twitter.
After discovering the phone lost in the long grass he dragged it home finding he
could type with reasonable success by jumping from key to key. He already had a
number of followers who seemed keen to improve his spelling.
‘Who’s
there?’ he asked, he could hear the quiver in his voice. Silence, then in the
distance music and singing from a restaurant boat making its way down river.
Still silence, Chris suddenly remembers to breathe swallowing icy air. He
stares at the ceiling unwilling to move his gaze, eyes popping, whiskers
twitching, the short hairs on his neck began to rise unbidden and clouds of
breath appear in the sudden cold.
Blazing white light, Chris shoots vertically upwards
crashing against the lid of the box, the screen of the smart phone had suddenly
lit up. White noise crackles for a second then:
‘Follow’,
faint but undeniable.
Chris attempts to look for the source of this
injunction though being able to move would have made this easier. From the
corner of his eye he could see the shadow of a figure cast onto the wall and
managing to shift a fraction he could see the spectral form of a mouse
delineated by a thousand points of sparkling dust shimmering in the moonshine.
‘Follow!’
He is compelled to move. The shadowy figure glides
towards the wall and without pause or hesitation it passes straight through.
Christopher rises slowly to his feet and follows entranced. On reaching the
apparently solid wall he carefully removes a postcard of David Tennant in
Richard II from its hanging and taps the wall behind.
‘Follow!’
echoing in a space behind the present wall, Chris begins to scratch away the
plaster with strong paws. Soon a large portion of the wall falls outwards and
with an audible sigh stale air rushes out. He makes short work of enlarging the
hole and steps into a room he has never seen before. His ancestors have lived
in this part of the riverbank for years and this is obviously a long-forgotten
house of some size. The room in which he stands is large with book shelves
climbing high up the walls, large beams support the roof and a bay window
provides some light, though it is partially obscured by snaking tendrils of ivy
which have forced their way through many of the panes.
A heavy table stands by the doorway through which he
had broken and at its centre is a silver thimble, black with age, in which stands
a bouquet of speedwell flowers. He reaches out but the swirl of air created by
the gesture is too much; the flowers fall in a cloud of blue powder. This is a
kingdom of dust where its noiseless accumulation marks the passage of time.
In the centre of the room water has crept in from
the ground above and many centuries of patient drips have solidified into a
glistering stalactite reaching down towards the floor far below. Although dimly
illuminated the gold lettering of the book titles could be clearly seen; The
Cheese Taster, Robin’s Nine Day Wonder, Mouse Tails from Shakespeare, books on
alchemy and colour, a mouse atlas, plays and scripts on rolls of parchment and
several broadsheets detailing the iniquities of cats.
A sigh of cold air stirs his whiskers and turning
back from the bookcase his gaze returns to the room. The wooden floor is
covered in undulating dunes of dust and as he looks on paw prints begin to
cross the room from where he stands. They stop in front of a desk which fills
most of the bay window. Chris follows the footfalls to the desk which is
shrouded in ivy. In its centre is an exquisite book bound in dragonfly wings
and studded with tiny jewels. Beyond this book is a pile of several others but
their titles are obscured by thick layers of dust. As he looks on the book falls
open at the title page; ‘A Midsummer Mouse, the memoir of Stratford’s
theatrical mouse, or what you will’. He felt a cold paw on his arm and close to
his ear a whisper.
‘Remember
me!’
Dear reader I was that startled mouse, my ancestor
Kit had guided me through the long-neglected shelves of his study. There I
discovered his memoir; a thrilling tale of love in adversity, of adventure and
piracy and of course the role my fore-father played in bringing theatre to
Stratford-upon-Avon and his part in the Company of William Shakespeare in those
years when his history is obscured by time. Prompted by his instruction to
‘remember me’ I decided to publish this volume, so his name would live again.
The book is illustrated with watercolour so fine that many refuse to credit
that they could be the work of a mouse but mutter darkly about the supernatural
and the dark work of faery folk. Now you can read the history of Kit the mouse
published after many hours of furious dancing up and down a smart phone and
many emails to Flaydemouse printers of Yeovil.
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