Mice Page 2

  I’ve often wondered, given how different they were and how the marriage was to end, why Dad chose her and why she let herself be chosen by him. I’ve no doubt he was attracted to Mum – her wedding photographs show how pretty she was, with her dark features and bashful smile. But I’m sure he also saw a challenge in conquering the heart of this awkward, stand-offish girl with her first-class degree and imposing reputation for procedural brilliance. Maybe after Mum’s experiences in London (her flat was burgled, her handbag snatched in broad daylight) she wanted someone strong like Dad to protect her. Perhaps she thought that his strength would magically rub off on her. It might just have been his good looks and smooth charm that won her over; Dad was always suave – even as a little girl I was jealously aware of the effect his easy smile had on other women.

  When I was born four years later, my dad insisted Mum give up work in order to stay at home and look after me full-time. He didn’t want his daughter being passed around from nanny to nanny like some parcel, he said; he didn’t want his daughter coming home from school to an empty house because both parents were out working, he said; his salary was more than enough for us to live on and there wasn’t any need for them both to work, he said. His insistence had nothing to do (of course) with the fact that Mum was on the verge of being made a partner herself. It had nothing to do (of course) with the fact that she was generally held to be the best lawyer in the firm and that her quicksilver mind often left him feeling inadequate and stupid.

  Mum dutifully did what he wanted. He knew best, after all; he was older, he was a partner, he was a man. How could she have resisted him, even if she’d wanted to? How can a mouse resist the cat? So she gave up the job she loved, and for the next fourteen years dedicated herself to looking after me and the house – cooking, shopping, washing, ironing – while my dad gradually worked his way up to become senior partner at Everson’s.

  When he walked out on her, she was forty-six years of age. Her legal knowledge was hopelessly out of date – withered away like fruit left to moulder on the tree. Her solicitor’s practising certificate hadn’t been renewed for fourteen years.

  The only job she’d been able to find was as a legal assistant at Davis, Goodridge & Blakely, a law firm in one of the seedy back streets in town behind the railway station. The partners used her long absence from the law as an excuse to offer her a laughable salary – ‘Take it or leave it’, they said – and, of course, she took it. She was given a desk in a small office that she shared with two of the secretaries, to make clear that she was seen as little more than another secretary rather than as a qualified lawyer in her own right.

  But the partners quickly realized how competent she was, and were astonished at the speed with which she caught up on what she’d missed. Blakely, the sleazy crime partner, unloaded a shameful number of his clients onto her and used her as a personal assistant and general dogsbody; Davis, the head of the personal injury department, began to pass her more and more of his problem files, the ones he’d got into such a mess he had no idea what to do with them next. By the end of her first year Mum was carrying some of the firm’s most difficult cases and being paid less than the secretaries.

  Brenda and Sally, the secretaries who shared Mum’s cramped office, thought her move out of town into Honeysuckle Cottage was a mistake and didn’t hesitate to tell her so. ‘Shelley’s nearly sixteen now, Elizabeth,’ Brenda said. ‘She’s going to want to meet up with friends in town in the evening—’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Sally. ‘She’ll be going out clubbing every weekend if she’s anything like my one. You’re going to spend your whole life going backwards and forwards to town dropping her off and picking her up.’

  Mum tried to keep her private life private – or as private as it was possible to keep it without offending Brenda and Sally, who were happy to offer up the most intimate secrets of their marriages without the slightest embarrassment.

  Mum just blushed and mumbled something about not minding it really and that she was sure Shelley wouldn’t take advantage. This had met with great cries of protest and derision: Elizabeth, you’re such a soft touch!

  Brenda and Sally were always saying this sort of thing to her – Elizabeth, you’re too nice! Elizabeth, why do you put up with it? Elizabeth, why don’t you stand up for yourself? They’d watched her meekly accept a pay rise that was downright insulting, they’d seen Davis and other lawyers in the firm dump their problems on her desk and barely thank her when she solved them, they’d seen Blakely regularly sidle up to her at five minutes to five and ask her to work late or to ‘look at this file over the weekend’ because he knew she was too weak to say no. A day rarely went by when either Brenda or Sally didn’t have cause to cry out, Elizabeth, you’re such a soft touch!

  She didn’t tell them the truth about me, of course. She didn’t say that I wouldn’t need lifts into town to meet my friends from school because I didn’t have any friends from school. Not a single one. She didn’t tell them that I’d been the victim of a bullying campaign so vicious I’d had to be withdrawn from school altogether and was now receiving tuition at home. She didn’t tell them that on the advice of the police, my new address had been withheld from my school in case the girls concerned discovered it.

  4

  The girls concerned. The three girls concerned: Teresa Watson, Emma Townley and Jane Ireson.

  They’d been my best friends ever since we were put in the same class at the age of nine. We played together every breaktime (skipping, hula hoop, hopscotch, granny’s footsteps), we sat together every lunchtime in the school canteen to eat our packed lunches. We regularly met up at each other’s houses over the weekends and during the long school holidays. We were an inseparable little clique, a club. We even gave ourselves a name, the JETS – an acronym made from the first letters of our first names.

  Looking back now, I can see that things had started to go wrong between me and the other three long before the bullying started.

  When we were eleven, twelve, thirteen, we would have been seen as good girls. We took our schoolwork seriously – comparing our answers after the weekly spelling test, colouring in every map as if it were the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, ringing each other up after school to discuss difficult homework. I always came top of the class in English and art; Emma (nicknamed ‘Pippi Potter’ for her bright ginger hair and round glasses respectively) seemed to have a gift for maths; Jane, the most serious of the four of us, played the cello and was in the school orchestra and a Saturday musicschool orchestra as well; Teresa, with her pretty eyes and strawberry blonde hair, wanted to be an actress and was mad about drama. We talked in class, I’m sure, like all children, but we were terrified of the teachers; we would never have dreamt of answering back and I can’t remember any of us getting into serious trouble.

  At around fourteen, however, the others started to change. And I didn’t.

  Emma exchanged her glasses for contact lenses and had her beautiful hair cut into a punk style – shaved close above her ears, a crest of flaming red spikes on top. Jane gave up music and just seemed to stop caring about her schoolwork altogether. She started dyeing her hair black and painting her nails to match. She filled out and grew big-breasted, and when she was made up she could easily have passed for eighteen. Jane was constantly getting into trouble with the teachers, but nothing they did – not detentions, not suspensions – seemed to bother her in the slightest. It was as if she’d rejected everything to do with school and was like a convict in prison, just bitterly counting the days until her release.

  But it was Teresa Watson who changed the most. She shot up to five foot nine seemingly overnight. She went from being pudgy and cute to thin and sullen-faced. Her body became lean and bony and hard-looking, her face gaunt, her angular cheekbones jutting out like ledges of rock. She started to wear clothes that brazenly challenged the school’s dress code – green ten-up Doc Martens, low-cut hipsters, skimpy crop tops that left her long, pale midriff bare. She wore a
silver stud through her left eyebrow even though the head teacher told her again and again she wasn’t to come to school like that. She grew her hair long and wore it parted in the centre and pressed flat to her scalp. As her body took on this spare hardness, so something hard appeared in her green eyes, something hard and unforgiving. Something vaguely threatening.

  In light of what happened next, I’ve often thought about the way their looks changed around the same time that their behaviour towards me started to change. And I’ve wondered if there was any connection. Does the way we look affect our personality? Or does our personality affect the way we look? Does the warpaint turn the tribesman into a fierce warrior? Or does the fierce warrior put on the warpaint to advertise his cruelty? Does a cat always look like a cat? Does a mouse always look like a mouse?

  Whatever the truth might be, the fact was that I didn’t change. I still worked hard in class and crammed for my tests and coloured my maps. I still came top in English and art, but now I often finished top in history, French and geography as well. I still jumped out of my skin if a teacher shouted in class. I kept my hair in the same style I’d worn it in since I was nine – straight, shoulder-length, with a fringe. I grew a little taller but didn’t lose my puppy fat – I still had rolls on my belly, and my thighs rubbed together when I walked. I didn’t start wearing make-up to school like they did, as Mum was always telling me it wasn’t good for my skin. When I did get spots I left them (Mum said squeezing them left scars), while the other girls dug theirs out with their sharp varnished nails and smeared over the tiny wounds with foundation. I didn’t wear earrings, necklaces, bracelets and rings as they’d started to, as I was allergic to anything that wasn’t pure gold, and I didn’t really like jewellery – it just seemed to get in the way, and I was scared of losing it. I wore the same plain blouses, jumpers and skirts to school that I always had, with the same clumpy shoes with side buckles (Teresa called them my ‘orthopaedic shoes’), while the others grew increasingly obsessed with the clothes they wore and the way they looked.

  I noticed that they never seemed pleased to see me any more when I sought them out in the schoolyard or in the canteen. When we were together now the atmosphere was different, as if they were enjoying a joke I was excluded from. They seemed to look me up and down with vague disgust, and for the first time in my life I began to feel self-conscious about how I looked, embarrassed by the doughy fat bulging over the waistband of my skirt, my little-girl fringe, the crop of whiteheads on my chin.

  It was seeing the way they looked at me, the withering expressions on their faces, that gave me the first inkling – an inkling I still wasn’t ready to believe – that my best friends had started to find me repulsive.

  We didn’t play games together any more at break, even though I would have liked to, as they considered it babyish. Instead, they wanted to slump apathetically behind one of the classrooms, where the teachers couldn’t see them, and play on their mobile phones, increasingly contemptuous of me for not having one (Mum couldn’t afford one for herself – I was hardly going to ask her for one of my own). When they weren’t playing on their mobiles, they seemed to talk almost exclusively about subjects I had no interest in – pop music, clothes, jewellery, make-up. And more and more they talked about boys.

  I was the only one who didn’t have a boyfriend. I was fourteen, about to turn fifteen, but I still didn’t really understand the attraction. Most of the boys at my school were rough and uncouth. They played football as if it was a mania and fought vicious brawls in the corridors; they swore all the time in a desperate effort to sound tough, and tried to embarrass the girls with their gross sexual suggestions. For years we’d disliked boys and kept away from them. Now Teresa, Emma and Jane all had boyfriends and talked about them endlessly. They talked about their tattoos, the apprenticeships they were doing, the cars they were customizing, the injuries they’d picked up from fights or from sport. But what they liked discussing most was what they were planning to do with their boyfriends on the weekend – what films they were going to see, what club they were going to try to get into, how they’d wear their hair, the bag they were going to buy to match the jeans they were going to buy. At the end of some lunchtimes I’d realize I hadn’t spoken a single word during the whole hour that we’d been together.

  I know now with hindsight that I should have stopped hanging around the three of them much sooner than I did and tried to make new friends. I should have just accepted that we’d grown apart. But it wasn’t so straightforward at the time; although I knew things were changing between us and I could sense their growing hostility towards me, I didn’t grasp just how serious it was – after all, we’d had plenty of little spats over the years that had quickly blown over. And besides, it was impossible to imagine school life without them. I had no other friends at school – I’d had no need to make other friends. I’d always had Teresa, Emma and Jane. We’d been best friends since we were nine. We’d loved each other like sisters. We were the JETS.

  I had no idea how toxic their feelings towards me had actually become. And I had no idea how much danger I was in.

  5

  The bullying began around March of my fourth year in secondary school. We were still living in the matrimonial home at the time – Dad had left us more than six months before – and our move to Honeysuckle Cottage was still some ten months away.

  I’ve never really understood precisely what triggered it. I know I won the school short-story competition around that time, and was presented with a small silver cup at morning assembly. I know we were weighed and measured in physical education then, too, and I’d been the heaviest girl in the class. I know I was very teary that March as my dad’s custody application was on the twenty-fourth, and even though Mum’s lawyer assured me it wasn’t going to happen, I was still terrified that the judge would order me to go and live with him and Zoe. Our form teacher, Miss Briggs, who knew all about the divorce, was very attentive to me over that period – if she saw I was upset she didn’t hesitate to put her arm around me and take me off to her office to talk my spirits back up over a cup of peppermint tea. Perhaps they were jealous of this attention, perhaps they were jealous because I’d won an important school prize, perhaps being officially the fattest girl in the class I suddenly lost all right to be treated like a human being . . . I don’t know. I have no idea. Perhaps cruelty just has a logic all of its own.

  It began slowly with wisecracks and put-downs which could have been seen as leg-pulling at first, but pretty soon lost any trace of good humour and were revealed for what they were: hostile, mean, designed to hurt. I was shell-shocked. After so many years of friendship, the fact that my best friends didn’t like me any more left me reeling, bewildered. I tried to keep my distance from them, but I was their entertainment now, a new diversion they’d discovered to help get them through the tedium of school. They came looking for me at break and lunchtime, and although I tried desperately to hide they would invariably find me. In a grotesque mockery of the games we used to play together, they’d dance around me, their arms linked so I couldn’t escape, shouting the worst insults they could think of until they’d succeeded in making me cry: Your dad left ’cause you embarrassed him, you fat retard! Shelley’s mum puts her tampons in for her!

  But this name calling quickly bored them. They needed to raise the level of spite a few notches for the game to keep their interest.

  They started to vandalize my personal property. Every day I came back after break to find some new intrusion, some new violation: all my coloured pencils snapped in two; a piece of history homework I’d spent hours on scissored into ribbons; Tippex poured onto the neat brown-bread triangles of my sandwiches; the contents of the wastepaper bin emptied into my schoolbag; a worm as long as a shoelace squashed inside my English exercise book; ‘pizza face’ and ‘fat pig’ scrawled in black marker on the back of my wooden ruler; all my lucky troll’s mauve hair pulled out and his face scribbled over with biro; two hard pieces of dog turd stuf
fed inside my Hello Kitty pencil case.

  I couldn’t tell the teachers because I was sure it would only make things worse for me in the long run. I didn’t want to give my persecutors an excuse for even more horrible outrages – I didn’t understand then that the cruel don’t need an excuse for their actions. I also had a queasy lack of faith in the school’s ability to protect me. I’d noticed how the teachers – even Miss Briggs – would turn a blind eye to Teresa, Emma and Jane’s behaviour, pretending not to have heard the swear word, not to have seen the flicked finger – anything for a quiet life.

  I should have told Mum, I realize that now, but I was ashamed to. I was ashamed to tell her that I’d been singled out for this treatment, as if I carried some stigma that marked me as different from everyone else. What made it worse was that Mum knew these girls – she’d made them tea, she’d driven them home, she thought they were my best friends. I couldn’t bear the thought of her knowing how much they hated me. And I dreaded the questions she’d inevitably ask – What did you do? Did you do something to upset them? – because, deep down, I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow what was happening was my fault, that somehow I was to blame.

  Besides, telling Mum or the school would have meant confronting my tormentors, and I was incapable of that. I just didn’t have it in me. I just didn’t have that sort of character. I was a mouse, don’t forget. It seemed more natural to me to say nothing, to suffer in silence, to stay very still and hope not to be seen, to scurry along the skirting board searching for a safe place to hide.