Mice (6 page)

So not only was there to be no criminal prosecution, but they weren’t even going to be expelled for what they’d done to me – they weren’t going to be disciplined in any way at all!

There are people who would have roared up to the school and torn that letter to pieces in the head’s face; there are people who would have got on the phone to the national press and denounced the school and its lilylivered head in banner headlines; there are people who would have got the local TV station down to their house to film the scars on their face and neck. There are people who would have done anything to ensure that those girls were punished for what they’d done and that their viciousness was publicized the length and breadth of the country . . .

But we weren’t that sort of people. We were mice. Meekly, we thanked the police inspector for his time and accepted that there could be no prosecution. Meekly, we accepted the head’s decision not to discipline the three girls. Meekly, we accepted, we submitted, we said nothing, we did nothing, because weak submission is all that mice know.

By the second week of November I was no longer in any pain or discomfort. There was really nothing to stop me from returning to school. Except that I knew Teresa, Emma and Jane were waiting for me. And when the three of them got me alone next time . . . what then?

While Mum was at work, I moped about the
matrimonial home
. I sat in front of my dressing-table mirror futilely trying to do something with my cropped hair. It didn’t suit me at all – it made my face look mannish, my head too big for my shoulders, and showed my ears, which I’d always hated. With squeamish disgust, I examined my forehead and neck, the burns stretching their cobwebby brown fingers over my pale skin like some foul alien membrane. (
Why weren’t they fading? He said that they’d fade!
)

And my thoughts began to return to the beam in the garage, the towelling belt of my dressing gown . . .

 

Then I received the best news imaginable. The head, mistaking our pathetic silence for defiance and terrified of bad publicity, wrote us another letter. This time it contained a proposal: if Mum would agree not to bring any court action against the school and not to discuss ‘the incident of the twenty-third’ with any ‘news media (including newspapers, television, radio and Internet)’, I wouldn’t have to return to school. Instead the school would arrange for the local authority to provide tutors to teach me at home right up to my exams in the summer – which I would also be allowed to sit at home. In addition, they’d strongly recommend to the exam board that the coursework I’d already submitted should receive a ten per cent ‘uplift’ in light of ‘the difficult circumstances under which it was prepared (but for which the school makes no admission of liability)
. . .
’

Mum signed the agreement there and then, while I whooped and danced for joy around her, and sent it back to the school by return post. I was delirious with happiness.
I didn’t have to go back to school! I didn’t have to face my tormentors!
With tutors coming to the house five hours a day five days a week, I was sure I’d do really well in my exams. I’d go back to school liberated from the girls concerned and begin studying for university. I’d make a whole new set of friends. My life would start all over again . . .

 

To celebrate, Mum made my favourite dinner that night: duck in orange sauce with roast potatoes, peas and broccoli, followed by apple pie and ice-cream. To my surprise, she placed a bottle of red wine on the kitchen table along with two large glasses.

‘You know you’re breaking the law, Mum?’ I teased as she poured the wine into my glass and it glugged and splashed deliciously. ‘I’m not legally allowed to drink for another two years.
And
you’re a lawyer!’

‘I think you deserve it.’ She smiled.

I noticed how tired she looked – the lines under her eyes etched a little deeper, more strands of grey in her dark frizzy hair – and I realized how hard all this had been for her, too.
That’s the curse of mothers
, I thought,
doomed to feel their children’s pain as sharply as if it were their own
.

‘You do too, Mum.’ I smiled, and we clinked glasses.

‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘you’re sixteen in – what is it – four months? If sixteen’s old enough to get married, it’s old enough to have a glass of wine.’

 

Halfway through the meal the phone on the breakfast bench rang, and Mum hurried to swallow the food in her mouth before answering. She made pained, comical faces as she stood chewing by the phone, moving her head from side to side, rolling her eyes, chewing and chewing and chewing but still unable to swallow. I giggled uncontrollably at her antics, no doubt helped by the wine, which had gone straight to my head. At last she was able to pick up the receiver. It was Henry Lovell, her lawyer. He told her that the couple who’d expressed an interest in buying the
matrimonial home
had now made a formal offer, which ‘the other side’ (meaning her husband, my dad) had accepted.

‘So . . . how’s the house-hunting going?’ he asked.

‘It’s not,’ Mum said. ‘We’ve not even started!’

‘Well, you’d better get your skates on,’ he warned her. ‘I understand these people are desperate to move in as soon as possible.’

We drank the whole bottle of red wine as befitted a double celebration, and the next morning I woke up with my very first hangover. But even the gimlet pain in my temples couldn’t dampen my spirits. No more school. No more Teresa, Emma and Jane. No more humiliation. No more suffering in silence. No more pain. And, to top it all, the
matrimonial home
had been sold. We were getting out of that house of horrors, that museum dedicated to a failed marriage, at last!

Six weeks later I was standing in the front garden of Honeysuckle Cottage contemplating the funereal mound of the oval rose bed.

Our life in Honeysuckle Cottage quickly settled down into a pleasant routine.

We had breakfast together every morning at the pine table in the kitchen. I’d prepare everything (taking no little pride in getting it all
just so
) while Mum flew around in her usual morning panic, speed-ironing a clean blouse, sending last-minute emails or searching high and low for something she’d lost. We had a rota – toast one morning, cereal the next – which we kept to religiously even at weekends.

Mum would leave at around a quarter past eight, as she had a much longer commute to work now. We’d say goodbye exactly the same way every day like an old married couple – I’d give her two glancing kisses in the hallway, remind her to drive carefully, and then stand at the door to wave her goodbye as the ancient Ford Escort crunched its way slowly down the gravel drive. She’d always glance back and give me a final little wave, her fingers pressed together like a glove puppet taking a bow. When she’d gone, I’d do the washing-up from breakfast and the night before, listening to the news on the radio, and then I’d go up to my room and get dressed.

At ten o’clock on the dot, my main tutor, Roger Clarke, would arrive. Roger taught me English language and literature, history, French and geography, the five subjects I was most confident of getting A grades in. Roger and I would work at the large table in the dining room, sustained by endless cups of tea, which Roger said I made so strong ‘you could stand the spoon up in it’.

Mum hadn’t been keen at first on the idea of a man coming to the house to teach me, but after she was assured he’d been thoroughly vetted, and after meeting him for herself, she relented. She must have seen that Roger didn’t pose any threat to me because Roger was a mouse too. He wore the badge of the mouse fellowship on his chest just like I did, just like Mum did, and I instantly felt a kinship with him.

He was only twenty-seven, but he’d already lost most of his hair due to a condition brought on by stress. All that remained were two hardy patches just above his ears. Perhaps to compensate, he’d grown a thick blond moustache. He was anorexically thin and wore round tortoiseshell glasses that hugely magnified his green eyes. When he spoke, his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his throat like a hardboiled egg. In spite of his slightly odd appearance, I felt comfortable with Roger right away, and quickly realized what a gifted teacher he was; with his softly spoken explanations, things I’d found difficult to follow at school suddenly seemed quite straightforward.

Roger and I got on really well. He was much more like a friend than a teacher. During our regular ‘concentration breaks’, he gradually told me more and more about himself. He’d got a first-class degree at university in history and then trained to become a classroom teacher. It had always been his ambition to teach – both his parents had been teachers, and he’d seen how much satisfaction and pleasure their work had given them.

For Roger, however, the reality had been very different to the fantasy. He’d found himself in a school where few of the children had any interest in learning. Because of the way he looked he was detested by the pupils, who nicknamed him the foetus. He’d had terrible discipline problems with his classes. In the five years he’d stuck it out, he’d been assaulted by pupils
eleven times
. His car had been keyed and the tyres punctured so often that he’d eventually sold it and walked to and from school instead – a round distance of more than four miles. He couldn’t take the bus because he was too frightened that pupils from his school might get on.

Eventually, after a pupil had headbutted him in the mouth and knocked out one of his front teeth, Roger had a nervous breakdown and was forced to resign on health grounds. When he was better he’d returned to university to write a research paper on the origins of the First World War (
one of the greatest mice massacres in history
). He’d been struggling financially, as his grant was very small, and a friend had suggested he put himself forward to the local authority as a personal tutor for those children too sick or too terrified to attend school. I was only his second pupil.

With Roger, my former reticence disappeared and I readily told him my own story: about my dad, whose sex life was more important to him than his own daughter; about the JETS and how they’d knocked me almost unconscious and then set my hair on fire.

‘It’s amazing,’ I said to him one day, ‘that I was a pupil and you were a teacher and we were both victims of school bullies.’

His brow furrowed as if he wanted to draw some distinction because of our ages, but then he smiled as if to say:
What’s the use denying it when it’s true?

‘We’ve got a lot in common,’ I said.

His distorted green eyes lingered on my face. ‘Yes, Shelley, we’ve got a lot in common.’

At one o’clock we’d stop work and Roger would leave to drive back to his flat in town, never tiring of his parting quip – ‘Glad I brought a ball of wool with me or I’d never find my way back to civilization again!’

I’d prepare myself something light for lunch – a salad, usually – and sit and watch the news on TV. Mum’s caseload was so heavy that she had to work through her lunchtimes, making do with a hurriedly nibbled sandwich at her desk. While Blakely, Davis and the other partners gorged themselves at the local bistro, bragging and bellowing like the fat cats they liked to think they were, Mum sat in the empty office quietly and efficiently correcting their mistakes.

After lunch I’d burrow into whatever novel I was reading at the time, sitting upstairs on the window seat in my bedroom in that glorious lucent light. If it was warm – and there were some beautiful days that February – I’d sit outside and read, always careful to keep the scars on my forehead and neck well covered from the sun.

At two-thirty Mrs Harris, a short combative woman in her fifties with dyed orange hair, would arrive. I didn’t get on with her anywhere near as well as I got on with Roger, and this wasn’t only because she taught me maths and science, my least favourite subjects.

Mrs Harris had been teaching mice like me for years and over that time her sympathy had been completely eroded away. She’d come to the conclusion that we were nothing more than shirkers – spoilt and over-indulged children who couldn’t face up to the realities of life. I once made a remark about my scars to her, and she turned on me with derision.

‘Scars? Scars? You call those
scars
? You should go down to the hospital and see what
real
burns look like. A bit of make-up and no one would notice your scars. That’s the problem with young people today – too vain, only think about themselves.’

I bitterly resented her attitude, but was too weak to speak up in my own defence. I felt I’d seen plenty of life’s realities –
too many
, in fact. I doubted Mrs Harris had, or she’d have been more understanding.

Mrs Harris would leave at four-thirty and I’d work on whatever homework I had until Mum got back at around six-thirty. If I’d finished my homework I’d practise my flute, my music stand set up beside the piano so I had a view out onto the front garden while the light lasted. If I didn’t feel like playing my flute, I’d read more, or get out my watercolours and paint. As I wasn’t very good at just making pictures up, I’d get one of the big art books down from the lounge bookshelves and copy a particularly beautiful horse or an interesting landscape. Sometimes I’d have a go at painting one of the objects on the sideboard in the dining room – the wooden bowl of potpourri, or the vase of dried flowers, or one of the many china and glass knick-knacks Mum had collected over the years. Most of these ornaments were presents to Mum from her mum (Mum had never had the heart to tell her they weren’t really her thing). They were hideously kitsch – a Beatrix Potter hedgehog, a Victorian flower girl with rosy red cheeks, a little boy fishing with a string tied to his big toe, a glass dolphin breaking the water, a miniature thatched cottage – yet, strangely, the more kitsch they looked, the more they amused us and the more attached to them we became.