Mice Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,

  Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632,

  New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © Gordon Reece, 2010

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in Australia by Allen & Unwin

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Reece, Gordon.

  Mice : a novel / Gordon Reece.

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-51771-0

  [1. Assertiveness (Psychology)—Fiction. 2. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 3. Conduct of life—Fiction. 4. Bul-

  lying—Fiction. 5. Crime—Fiction. 6. England—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.R24583Mi 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010043580

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Joanna

  1

  My mum and I lived in a cottage about half an hour outside town.

  It hadn’t been easy finding a home that met all our requirements: in the country, no neighbours, three bedrooms, front and back gardens; a property that was old (it had to have character) but at the same time had all the mod cons – a modern central heating system was essential, as we both hated to be cold. It had to be quiet. It had to be private. We were mice, after all. We weren’t looking for a home. We were looking for a place to hide.

  We viewed scores of properties with the agent, but if we could make out a neighbour’s roof through the trees or hear the drone of traffic in the distance, we’d exchange a subtle glance that struck it off our list. We’d still go through with the visit, of course, patiently listening as the obvious was explained: This is the main bedroom – this is another bedroom – this is the bathroom. We would have felt it was somehow rude not to after the agent had driven us so far out into the country, and Mum could as soon have asserted herself over the cocky young man with his gelled hair and constantly trilling mobile phone (We’ve seen enough, thank you, Darren, we’re not interested), as fly to the moon. Mice are never rude. Mice are never assertive. And so we spent many Saturdays being shown around properties in which we had no interest whatsoever.

  Eventually, however, we’d been taken to see Honeysuckle Cottage.

  It wasn’t the prettiest cottage we’d viewed – with its brown brick facade, small windows, grey slate roof and smoke-stained chimneys, it looked more town than country. But it was wonderfully remote. Surrounded on all sides by acres of farmland, the nearest neighbour was more than half a mile away. The cottage could only be reached by following a tortuous single-track road that meandered its way around the large garden in a wide, serpentine loop. With tight hairpin bends, and hedgetopped banks obscuring the view, it felt more like a maze than a public road. For once we had little trouble believing Darren when he told us that few cars ever ventured down that way, wary of being caught behind slow-moving farm machinery. The long tree-lined driveway we had to negotiate up to the house, with its potholes and sharp dog-leg to the left, only added to the impression that Honeysuckle Cottage was too far off the beaten track for the harsh realities of the world ever to find us there.

  It was blissfully quiet, too. When we climbed out of Darren’s four-wheel drive on a gusty day in early January, the silence was the first thing I noticed. It was there when the birds in the trees high above us stopped chirruping and Darren paused momentarily in his relentless sales pitch (I love this house – and I’m not just saying that – I’d live here tomorrow if I could); it was there, the most wonderful sound in the world – the complete absence of sound.

  The owners, Mr and Mrs Jenkins, were an elderly couple. They met us at the door, all stringy grey hair and ruddy cheeks, nursing mugs of tea against their chunky cardigans, bursting into hearty laughter when no one had said anything particularly funny. Mr Jenkins explained that they were having to move back into town because of Mrs Jenkins’s health – a ‘dicky ticker’ as he put it – and they didn’t want to be out here ‘in the sticks’ if anything went wrong. They were heartbroken to be leaving, he said, and assured us that they’d had thirty-five wonderful years in the cottage. Yes, thirty-five wonderful years, Mrs Jenkins repeated after him, like a woman used to being little more than her husband’s obedient echo.

  They took us on the usual awkward tour of the house: too many people trying to squeeze into the narrow hall and landing, the bumbling confusion (After you – no, after you) at every doorway. As we went from room to room, I could feel Mr Jenkins’s stare return to me again and aga
in, trying to work out how a shy, middle-class girl had come to get those nasty scars on her face. I was relieved when they took us out through the kitchen and into the back garden so that I could drop back and avoid his prying blue eyes.

  Mr Jenkins was an expert gardener and he was determined we should know it. We trudged behind him around the back garden while he showed off his fruit trees, his vegetable patch, and his two sheds. They were the cleanest, most organized sheds I’d ever seen: every tool hung from its own hook; even their gardening gloves had their own pegs, labelled Jerry and Sue. He showed us his fetid compost heap, exclaiming proudly, ‘Here she is – my pride and joy!’, and took us down to the row of cypresses he’d planted when they first moved there. The trees now towered more than ten metres high, and as he expounded on the health of their bark, I peered cautiously through the thick foliage. Beyond them was nothing but the dun-coloured furrows of the farmers’ fields, stretching away into the distance.

  Mr Jenkins was especially proud of his front garden. The wide lawn, shaved as close as a bowling green, was bordered by innumerable plants and shrubs, which still showed patches of bright colour here and there in spite of it being the dead of winter. ‘It’s important to have some winter bloomers,’ he told Mum, ‘and plenty of perennials, or else you lose all your colour during winter.’ Mum, trying to change the subject, said she didn’t know very much about gardening, but Mr Jenkins took this as an invitation to repair the gap in her education there and then. He began a long lecture on the different types of soil. ‘Now this soil,’ he said, ‘is a chalky soil. It’s a little dry, a little hungry. It needs a lot of farmyard manure, garden compost, turf...’ I wandered away, unable to listen to him as he churned on and on – ‘leaf mould . . . artificial fertilizer . . . limestone strata . . .’ I thought I heard him say ‘dried blood’ at one point, but decided I must have misheard.

  I kept walking, the irritating voice fading to a dull murmur behind me, until I found my path blocked by a large oval rose bed cut in the centre of the lawn. The roses had been pruned back ruthlessly and seemed to raise their amputated stumps to heaven in protest. The whole bed had a forlorn look. With its great mound of turned-over soil, it reminded me of a freshly dug grave.

  Looking around at the other plants and shrubs in the garden, I realized I knew the names of hardly any of them. If I was going to be a writer, surely that was something I should put right. Writers always seemed to know the names of flowers and trees; it helped to make them sound more authoritative, more Godlike. I made up my mind that the first thing I’d do when we moved in (because I already knew from the dreamy look on Mum’s face that this was going to be our new home) would be to learn the names of every flower and tree in the garden – their common names and their Latin names.

  When I came back to Mum’s side, Mr Jenkins was unable to keep his curiosity at bay any longer.

  ‘And what happened to you, my dear?’ he asked, indicating with a vague wave of his hand that he was referring to my scarred face.

  Mum instinctively pulled me close to her and answered for me.

  ‘Shelley had an accident. An accident at school.’

  2

  Mum bought Honeysuckle Cottage with her share of the money from the divorce. Her mouse’s share. My dad – a family lawyer, believe it or not – had left us eighteen months earlier for his secretary, a girl an incredible thirty years younger than him, with a lewd baby-doll face and a cleavage always on display (she was only ten years older than me! And I was meant to see her as my new mother?). The financial and child-care aspects of the divorce had dragged on for the best part of a year. Dad fought my mum as if she’d been his bitterest enemy, rather than his wife of eighteen years, and he tried to take everything away from her – even me.

  Mum gave in on issue after issue – she gave up her right to a share of his pension, she gave up her right to alimony, she even gave back some of the gifts he’d bought her during the marriage, as he’d petulantly demanded – but she refused to give me up. The court took the view that being an exceptionally bright fourteen-year-old, I was able to make up my own mind about who I wanted to live with. Since I desperately wanted to stay with Mum, my dad’s custody application was eventually thrown out of court. When he realized that he couldn’t punish Mum for her years of devotion by taking me away from her, he promptly emigrated to Spain with Zoe. Having apparently loved me so much that he wanted me to live with him, he left without even saying goodbye and I hadn’t heard from him since.

  The conveyancing went through with unusual speed, and we moved into Honeysuckle Cottage at the end of that January. It was one of those psychotic winter days when the sky is full of louring black clouds one moment, and the next the sun is shining brightly as if spring has come early – only to be snuffed out once again by gruesome clouds bringing a bitter wind and spots of cold rain.

  The removal men, chewing gum and reeking of body odour, traipsed back and forth through the cottage in their muddy boots, dropping loud hints about how thirsty the work made them and how they could ‘kill for a cuppa’. Mum obediently brought them out mugs of milky tea on a tray and added three or four sugars as they directed, and they sat around on the gravel drive drinking and smoking, perched on the tea chests they should have been moving. One of them saw her looking at the nasty gouge they’d made in the side of her piano and called out blithely, ‘We didn’t do that, luv. It was already like that.’ She scurried back into the house (mice are terrified of confrontation) and they all had a good laugh.

  They bullied her into paying them in cash – including for the half hour they’d sat drinking her tea and imitating her ‘posh’ accent – and then finally drove away, leaving their discarded cigarette butts suspended in the axils of the flowers.

  I had no regrets about swapping the luxurious house in town, where I’d lived nearly all my life, for the modest comforts of Honeysuckle Cottage. The house had stopped being my home when the divorce proceedings began; after that it became the matrimonial home – a valuable piece that the lawyers on both sides manoeuvred to take, like two crafty chess players. A matrimonial home can never be a happy home.

  There were too many memories there for me – both good and bad. I wasn’t sure which were the more painful: my dad dressed up as Santa Claus when I was seven, passing me a little golden hamster that sat trembling in his gently cupped hands; my dad, dangerously drunk, literally kicking down the front door seven years later when it was his turn to have me for the weekend and I was refusing to go with him; my parents’ fifteenth wedding anniversary when they danced cheek to cheek in the lounge in front of all their friends to Eric Clapton’s ‘Wonderful Tonight’; three years later, my dad pushing Mum away from him with such venom that she’d fallen over backwards onto the floor and broken one of her fingers. In that very same lounge . . .

  There was another reason I was relieved to be leaving the matrimonial home, a reason I was loath to admit even to myself. It was the temptation to keep loving my dad. In spite of the disgusting way he’d treated Mum and me, in spite of my best efforts to paint him as blacker than black in my mind, the blood bond was still hard to break. Everywhere there were reminders of his other side, of how kind he could be and how much fun we used to have together. There was the tree house in the copper beech that he’d made for me when I was six or seven; the beautiful bookshelves he’d put up in my bedroom before I started secondary school, and the leather-bound collection of children’s classics he’d brought me back from London (it was Dad who’d encouraged me to be a writer, he’d planted that seed). In the garage, where he used to work out and which still smelled faintly of his sweat, there was the old dartboard on which we used to play hysterical games of Round the Clock.

  But perhaps the most poignant reminder of my dad came every time I looked in the mirror – and saw his hazel eyes staring back at me. I’d never been as close to Dad as I was to Mum, but when we had tender moments, when I was a little girl and he held me high in the air above him as if trying to see
right through me in the bright sunlight, somehow it was even better.

  I kept this secret from Mum, of course, as it would have hurt her deeply. But as long as we stayed in the matrimonial home that treacherous temptation persisted, and if Mum and I argued for any reason it would suddenly grow stronger. With the move, I was hoping this Trojan horse emotion would weaken and eventually disappear altogether.

  Honeysuckle Cottage was a refreshing new start. I loved the kitchen with its old-fashioned pantry, terracotta-tiled floor and scrubbed pine table – it was always warm and cosy no matter how bleak the weather outside, so that we ended up eating all our meals there. I loved the way the lounge ran into the dining room without a dividing wall, so even when we were doing different things I always felt Mum was close. I loved the open fireplace with its chimney breast of craggy grey stone, the varnished oak mantelpiece, the neat little lozenge shapes of the mock-Tudor windows. I loved the worn wooden staircase, with the fourth stair from the bottom that squealed loudly no matter where you placed your foot on it. I loved my bedroom with its exposed beams and the built-in window seat, where I could sit and read for hours in the purest, clearest light I’d ever known. I loved opening the curtains in the morning and seeing a patchwork of ploughed fields, instead of the identical red-brick ‘executive homes’ of suburbia, each with its BMW or Mercedes parked on the drive outside. Most of all, I enjoyed being able to drag a chair into the back garden, where I’d sit and watch the clouds slowly forming and re-forming in the sky above me like melting wax in a lava lamp.

  Staring up at the sky, I liked to imagine that I lived in a simpler, more innocent time – ideally a time before there were any human beings at all, when the earth was one vast green paradise and cruelty, hurting for the pleasure of hurting, was completely unknown.

  3

  Mum had been a brilliant young lawyer, headhunted by a top London law firm while she was still at university. She’d taken the job on graduating, but it hadn’t worked out for her. She’d hated living in London, with the aggressive crowds, the packed rush-hour tubes, the drunken winos with their bloodied faces (London is no place for a mouse to live), and after four years she’d decided to move to the country. She took a job at Everson’s, the largest law firm in town and that was where she’d met my dad, eight years her senior and already a partner. After dating for little more than six months, he’d asked her to marry him.