Mice Read online

  The only person I seriously thought of telling was my dad. Until Zoe came on the scene he’d always been protective of me. He’d even tried to ‘toughen me up’, as he put it, so that I’d be able to defend myself, nagging me to go running with him, even trying to persuade me to take up judo – compensating or over – compensating for what he saw as Mum’s ‘bad influence’. I indulged in fantasies of Dad springing into action to protect me now, coming to my rescue like a comic-book superhero.

  But I knew full well that Dad was no superhero. I remembered how boorish and arrogant he was towards the end, how secretly vulgar (I’d once found a Hot Sluts magazine hidden in his briefcase). I was sure Zoe would have been poisoning his mind against me (Shelley’s a whingy little namby-pamby mummy’s girl). And why wouldn’t she? She didn’t want to share any of his money with me. I doubted Dad would do anything to upset Zoe. I doubted he’d do anything to risk losing that provocative mouth, those porn-star breasts.

  I had a contact number for him in Spain and very nearly called him – but the thought of Zoe picking up the phone made my stomach turn over.

  Dad wasn’t in my life any more.

  6

  My silent submission didn’t save me. In time, my ‘best friends’ turned their aggression from my belongings onto me directly.

  The first time it happened was just after lunch one day. Jane held me by my hair while Teresa and Emma stuffed a bread roll down the front of my blouse. Then they wrestled with me, trying to squash the roll and make it as messy and uncomfortable for me as they could. When I tried to pull it out, Teresa slapped me hard in the face. The blow, the loud smack, took everyone by surprise – even Teresa – and I could have sworn she was about to apologize when her features suddenly hardened again. She greedily seized my hand and bent my fingers back. The searing pain choked my screams to silence.

  After that, it was easy for them. After that, physical violence became the norm.

  I wrote down everything they did to me in my diary, sitting in my room after school, a chair against the door in case Mum should try to come in. These entries make strange reading today, and not just because what happened on my sixteenth birthday – my very own 9/11 – makes them look trivial in comparison. I’m struck by how devoid of emotion the entries are, almost as if I’d been describing something that was happening to somebody else. In the same diary there are pages and pages full of emotional outpourings about Mum and Dad’s divorce, but as soon as the bullying starts the entries become shorter and more reticent, and as the intensity of the violence increases they grow even more clipped, almost matter-of-fact – a world of suffering reduced to the briefest of sound bites, the story of the crucifixion written on the back of a matchbox.

  May: Jane pushed me over the low wall on the way to art and into one of the prickly hedges . . . Emma called me a lesbian and pulled the hair clips out of my hair – with a lot of my hair too . . . Emma clicked her lighter in my face and threatened to set me on fire . . .

  June: Teresa tried to give me a ‘dead leg’. She kept missing the spot and made me keep still until she got it right. Have a massive bruise now. Mustn’t let Mum see it . . . Jane and Teresa threw one of my shoes behind the IT building. Teresa kicked me hard on the shin when she saw I’d got it back. Nearly passed out . . . Teresa jabbed me with a compass in the backside during geography. Went to the bathroom and there was blood in the back of my knickers . . .

  I recognize this somnambulant, hollowed-out tone now when I see the survivor of the landslide, the victim of the bomb blast on TV. There was a loud bang. There was a lot of smoke. I understand that the greater the trauma the less adequate words become until, I imagine, when we face the greatest test of all, only silence seems appropriate.

  But that June I almost found my voice. That June I almost threw off my paralysis and spoke out . . .

  School had finished for the day. I had to go to my flute lesson, but Teresa, Emma and Jane wouldn’t let me out of the classroom. They corralled me behind the desks, and when I made a dash for the door they caught me and pulled me to the back of the room.

  Jane got me in a headlock and, egged on by the others, tried to push my head into the sharp metal edge of the windowsill. I remember unexpectedly breaking free and running for the door again when something heavy – one of the huge physics textbooks – thumped into my back with such force that I bit my tongue.

  Just then, Miss Briggs came into the classroom and the girls quickly turned away from me and pretended to be busying themselves at the bookshelf. Miss Briggs picked up the papers she’d come back for and was turning to go when she noticed me – frozen to the spot, struggling to fight back the tears.

  ‘Is everything all right, Shelley?’ she asked.

  And that’s when I nearly told her. That’s when the confession nearly burst out of me on a flood of choking sobs. But then I caught Teresa’s eye – as cold and pitiless as a shark’s – and lost my nerve.

  ‘Yes, Miss,’ I said. ‘Everything’s fine, Miss.’

  I had to work hard to keep Mum from finding out what was going on. I wore long sleeves all the time to hide the bruises on my arms, and scarves to cover up the scratches on my neck. I had to wear pyjamas instead of my usual nightie, or she’d have seen the yellow and black bruises that peppered my shins and thighs like the symptoms of some horrible new disease.

  I also became adept at cleaning myself up before Mum got home from work. Locking myself in the upstairs bathroom, I washed the stains out of my jumpers and skirts where I’d been pushed over or held against a filthy wall – I even sewed back buttons that had been torn off when they were dragging me around by my shirt front. Time and again I methodically cleaned out my schoolbag with soapy water to remove whatever filth they’d smeared inside it. Luckily I’d always been rather scatty and forgetful, so Mum readily believed me when I told her I’d lost my lunch box or hair clips or coloured pencils.

  My greatest fear was that they’d start sending me abusive emails and Mum would find out what was going on that way. Although we’d rarely emailed each other, I knew they had my email address and I was terrified that one day Mum would open a message full of sick, foul-mouthed abuse. So every morning I’d get up early and slip downstairs to check the emails before Mum came down. But the girls concerned were too smart to get into cyber bullying. They knew an email could be seen by Mum and traced back to them, and they were having way too much fun to risk that.

  They only broke their Internet silence once. One Saturday morning I opened a message from a sender I didn’t recognize, already fearing the worst. It was a pornographic photo – a man doing something disgusting to a woman – an image so vile that even today I don’t want to think about it. It was still on the screen when Mum came up behind me, asking if there were any messages. I only just managed to press Delete in time (No, Mum. No new messages).

  I put it down to a Saturday-night Bacardi Breezer binge when they’d been too blasted to think straight, and it never happened again.

  But in spite of my best efforts, I knew Mum sensed something was wrong. I could feel her antennae probing, trying to get inside my head and find out what it was about me that had subtly changed. If she hadn’t been so busy that summer with the Jackson file – a personal injury case Davis had shamefully neglected and then given to Mum to prepare for trial – I’m sure she would have worked it out.

  I counted down the days for the school year to end and at last – at last! – the summer holidays arrived to save me.

  At the end of July Mum and I left the claustrophobic greyness of the matrimonial home and went on holiday – two weeks in a self-catering cottage in the Lake District. We were blessed with glorious weather. We walked in the mountains, we hired bikes and followed the trails marked by splodges of red paint on tree trunks and boulders, we swam in the lakes. We wandered around the pretty villages looking at antiques and gorging ourselves on cream scones with jam in the library-quiet tea shops.

  In the evenings we cooked extravagant mea
ls together and read for hours. Mum worked her way through the cottage’s collection of dog-eared romances, stopping to read the funniest passages out loud to me. I read Macbeth, which was one of my set texts for my exams the following year, methodically noting down all the words I didn’t know in an exercise book I’d bought specially. I couldn’t help imagining the three witches with the faces of Teresa, Emma and Jane – those three unnatural hags had intervened in my life just as the three witches had in Macbeth’s. But what fate, I wondered, did my three witches have in store for me? As I read on, I was surprised to see that it was Lady Macbeth who had engineered King Duncan’s murder and not Macbeth as I’d thought, and I found myself wondering, in the light of what my ‘best friends’ had done to me, whether women were the gentler sex after all. Was it possible that women were actually crueller than men?

  There were times on that holiday when I completely forgot about Teresa, Emma and Jane and their punches and insults and the sting of their kicks, when I completely forgot about the dad who’d walked out of my life when I’d still needed him so much. When Mum and I were swimming in one of the freezing lakes, giggling and screaming and whooping with the cold, or when I was following closely behind her as we climbed a winding mountain path, the nervous cows getting slowly to their feet at our approach, I actually forgot the painful details of my life and was happy.

  But September soon came round again. As the time to go back to school came closer, I grew listless, headachy and feverish. Every time I thought about school my stomach burned acidly. I had no appetite, and at mealtimes I had to fight back the nausea and force myself to finish everything on my plate so that Mum wouldn’t get suspicious. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I couldn’t read two lines.

  The night before school started I lay in bed unable to sleep, trying to steel myself for what lay ahead. Next year was exam year. If I did well enough, I’d be able to stay on at school and start working towards university in earnest. I was sure the girls concerned had no intention of staying on and would leave after the exams. That meant I just had to make it through one school year (keeping very still, hoping not to be seen, scurrying along the skirting board searching for a safe place to hide), and then it would be over. I was confident that I could survive one year.

  I thought it was even possible that the bullying might have stopped when I went back, that the long six-week summer holiday might have broken up its momentum, like a firebreak can stop the fiercest forest fire in its tracks. After all, they had exams like I did and, even though they had no interest in going on to university, they still needed good grades if they wanted to get good jobs. Perhaps they’d be too worried about their results to concern themselves very much with me. Perhaps the bullying would lessen. Perhaps it would stop altogether. Perhaps . . .

  I was wrong, of course. From the first day back at school the bullying started again. If anything, it seemed that they’d missed their regular fix and were trying to make up for lost time.

  The bullying ratcheted up yet another notch.

  Dutifully, I recorded my shell-shocked telegrams from the front line of my secret war in my diary – my diary which had remained gloriously blank over the summer.

  September: Teresa punched me in the face in the girls’ toilets. Had a really bad nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. Told Mum I fell over in the corridor . . . they held me down and Teresa pulled my blouse and bra right up and took a video with her mobile. She said, ‘Your ugly tits are going to be all over YouTube’ . . . they pushed me up against the toilet block wall and took turns to spit in my face . . .

  October: Teresa hit me on the head with her bag when I was drinking from the water fountain.

  Deep cut in the roof of my mouth . . . they waited for me after school and beat me up. Teresa sat on top of me and farted right in my face. When I got back home I was sick twice. Managed to clean everything up just before Mum got back . . .

  What made me realize that I was never going to make it through a whole year – that I wasn’t going to make it through the first term – was an incident that happened later that October.

  I began to notice a strange smell around my desk one morning after break – a faint sour smell that seemed to grow worse as the day went on. I could still smell it around me as I walked home and I started to suspect it was coming from my sports bag. As soon as I got home I sat on the lounge floor and emptied everything out – maybe my towel was fusty or I’d overlooked a dirty sock or something. But my gym stuff all smelled fine. I searched inside the bag, feeling around in all the pockets with my hand but I couldn’t find anything. I couldn’t work it out. I could still smell that sickly sour smell.

  I’d picked up one of my gym shoes to see if the sole was soiled when something inside it became dislodged and dropped onto my bare leg. When I saw the blind black eyes, the gaping mouth, the rigid claws, I screamed and screamed and kicked my legs frantically until it slid off me onto the floor. I backed away into a corner and sat there hugging my knees tightly, sobbing uncontrollably, rocking back and forth on my haunches like a lunatic. It was a long time before I was calm enough to pick up the dead sparrow and carry it outside to the bin.

  After that I knew they’d won; that’s when I knew I couldn’t endure the fear and the pain and the humiliation any longer.

  One Thursday night I sat in my bedroom and thought it all through quite matter of factly. Even if, by some miracle, I did summon up the courage to tell on them, I was still convinced it would only make my situation worse; the head would summon them to his study and they’d deny everything. There was no direct evidence against them (no one in my class would dob on them) so it was my word against theirs. Without proof, the head, who was weak and ineffectual, and paranoid about any kind of bad publicity for the school, wouldn’t take any action. If I told on them, they’d be free to persecute me with even greater determination, greater viciousness. It was too late to transfer to a new school with only two terms left before my exams. And besides, even if I did transfer, they knew where I lived.

  They could easily wait to ambush me or, even worse, they might decide to bring their campaign of hatred into my home – my home! – the only place where I still felt safe from them. I couldn’t bear the thought of Mum finding some obscenity stuffed through our letterbox. Anything, anything, other than that.

  There didn’t seem to be any way out of the miserable existence I found myself living. Or rather, there seemed to be only one.

  I planned it all out sitting at my desk, as if it was just another homework assignment. I decided to do it two days later, on the Saturday, when Mum went to do the big weekly shop at the supermarket just outside town. I usually went with her, but this time I would plead a headache. After a great deal of thought, I settled on the best way to do it (the beam in the garage where Dad used to hang his punchbag; the thick belt from my towelling dressing gown) and tore a sheet of paper from an exercise book to write a final message to Mum.

  But even though I sat there for more than half an hour, the words just wouldn’t come. I still couldn’t bring myself to tell her about the bullying, not even in a note, a note she wouldn’t read until after I was dead. I didn’t really understand why I couldn’t confide in her. All I could think was that no matter how close we are to someone else, there are limits, frontiers between us that we just can’t cross, things that touch us so deeply they can’t be shared with anyone else. Maybe, I thought, it’s what we can’t share with others that really defines who we are.

  I’d been doodling unconsciously while turning the still-born phrases over in my mind, and when I looked down at the piece of paper I couldn’t help smiling bitterly when I saw what I’d drawn. It was a mouse. And around its neck was tied a thick hangman’s noose.

  I knew I was timid; I knew I had a tendency to cry easily – to tremble and lose my voice at the smallest reprimand or sign of aggression. But it had taken the months of bullying for me to understand finally that this was what I was: a mouse, a human mouse. And at the same time, I
realized that this drawing was the most eloquent statement I could leave behind me. I folded the sheet over, wrote Mum on it and left it in my top drawer, where it would be easily found.

  And that’s how my life would have ended, like the lives of so many other weak little mice before me – hanging from a home-made noose, my feet turning in smaller and smaller circles, my hands twitching spasmodically – if my tormentors hadn’t sprung their cruellest trap the very next day.

  That vicious attack, ironically, saved my life.

  7

  I remember the attack that could have killed me far less clearly than most of the others.

  I’d gone to the girls’ toilets at break as I’d been having really bad period cramps all morning. I thought I heard Teresa and Emma talking, but when I came out of the cubicle there were just some younger girls mucking around by the paper-towel dispenser. I went to wash my hands. The water was cold and I let it run to warm up. I’d just squeezed some turquoise liquid soap into the palm of my hand when I was suddenly grabbed around the neck and jerked violently backwards.

  I caught a brief glimpse of Jane’s flushed face and the terrified juniors running away as I was swung round hard into the cubicle door. My forehead cracked against the doorframe and, completely stunned, my head ringing, stars exploding in front of my eyes, I slid on some soggy tissue paper and ended up in a sitting position on the wet floor.

  I was aware of Emma and Teresa kneeling close beside me, holding me still, almost as if they were trying to help me. I heard a click-clicking sound close to my face and Emma’s voice say: This is how you cook a pig. Teresa and Jane burst into throaty laughter – and then they were gone.