Mice Read online

  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.

  It was the evenings at home with Mum in Honeysuckle Cottage that I enjoyed the most. When she got in from work, I’d make her a cup of tea and we’d sit at the kitchen table and chat. We adopted a custom we’d seen in a Michelle Pfeiffer film, The Story of Us, where a family take it in turns to describe the highs and lows of their day during the evening meal.

  My highs were usually things like getting a good mark from Roger, or reading a particularly exciting chapter in my novel, or doing a painting that turned out really well. Lows were feeling depressed about the scars that still clung to my neck and forehead, or thinking about my dad and feeling angry with him for walking out on us the way he did. Mum’s highs were settling cases successfully and being praised by grateful clients; her lows usually involved the odious Mr Blakely speaking rudely to her – sometimes he even swore at her – or trying to rub up against her in the photocopying room.

  Mum would always try to be encouraging, insisting that my scars were healing, and I’d try to be the same about Blakely, although there wasn’t much I could offer beyond platitudes. She couldn’t risk losing her job. She needed it. We needed it. But on the subject of Dad it was much more complicated. Not far beneath the surface of my anger towar
ds him there was a guilty pining. Those Greek soldiers were perilously close to pouring out of the Trojan horse’s belly and hacking into the bonds that tied me and Mum together, and I could see her stiffen when I mentioned him. I was terrified of hurting her, alienating her, acutely aware that I was friendless, that I’d be lost without her.

  After we’d had our tea, Mum would change out of her work suit and then we’d prepare dinner together. We both loved food and cooking, and we liked to try complex recipes from our countless cookery books. Sometimes we spent a good two hours in the kitchen chopping up vegetables on the heavy marble chopping board Mum had brought back from Italy one year, while the saucepans hissed and bubbled on the stove.

  After dinner we’d sit in the lounge with the central heating turned up high, and a fire blazing in the grate if it had turned really chilly outside. Usually we read our novels (although Mum often had reading to do for work) and listened to classical music. I’d grown up listening to classical music, as it was one of Mum’s great passions – she was a competent amateur pianist – and although I’d tried to like pop music, somehow it had never really taken root. We loved Mozart and Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Brahms, but our absolute favourites were the operas of Puccini. With no neighbours for miles around, we could turn the stereo up full blast and revel in the tragic beauty of La Bohème or Madam Butterfly.

  Apart from the news, we didn’t watch much TV. It seemed to consist of nothing but depressing documentaries on crack addicts in New York or Aids in Africa, cheap and badly acted soap operas, or reality TV shows that were facile beyond belief. But we did like movies, especially romantic comedies, and we always looked in the paper to see if any good ones were scheduled. Our favourites were oldies such as You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, and Hugh Grant classics like Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral, that sort of thing. We didn’t like the modern ones – they just seemed vulgar and crudely sexual, and I felt embarrassed watching them with Mum. We both had a soft spot for George Clooney and would happily put up with all the macho posing and incomprehensible plots of the Ocean’s Eleven series just to watch him. Every now and again he’d look a certain way or say something, and remind me a little – just a little – of my dad. I never mentioned this to Mum, of course, but I often wondered if she had the same thought.

  We got into the habit of having a mug of hot chocolate at around ten o’clock, and by eleven we were usually both falling asleep curled up together on the sofa.

  Lying dozing there with my head resting on Mum’s shoulder, a chocolate moustache drying on my upper lip, my novel slipping to the floor from my sleepy fingers, Brahms’s violin concerto or Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony unfolding exquisitely in the air around me, I’d luxuriate in the safe, warm atmosphere of Honeysuckle Cottage. And sometimes, as I watched the orange flames of the fire licking and crackling in the grate, I’d think about Teresa Watson and what she might be doing just then – dancing at a club, drinking lager in some crowded smoky pub, snogging her boyfriend on the back seat of his car, and I’d think: I wouldn’t change places with you, Teresa Watson, not for all the world. I know I’m a mouse and I know I’m hiding from the world here in my snug little nest behind the wainscoting, but my mouse’s life is full of all the good things there are in the world – art, music, literature . . . love.

  It might only be a mouse’s life but it’s a good life, it’s a rich life, it’s a wonderful life.

  10

  Spring came early that year. A mild February made way for a warm March. The cherry trees burst into frothy pink blossom, and a few days later we awoke to find the apple trees dressed in white. We made plans to bake pies when they bore fruit later in the summer, to eat with great dollops of vanilla ice-cream. As I’d promised myself, I learned the names of all the flowers in the garden, and one Sunday morning took Mum on a guided tour, introducing her by name to all its flowering inhabitants. I finished at the oval rose bed, announcing with a courtly flourish of my hand, ‘And last but not least, the hybrid perpetual, Rosa Hybrida Bifera . . .’

  As the days grew longer we began to spend more and more time out of doors. We now took our after-work cup of tea onto the back patio, sitting on the white plastic garden furniture Mum had picked up in town for next to nothing. At the weekends we spent hours pottering about in the garden. We mowed the lawn – which was no small task since the gardens ran to nearly three acres and we’d allowed the grass to grow longer than it ever had under the iron reign of Mr Jenkins. I went back and forth dumping bins filled with cut grass onto the sweating compost heap at the back of the garden, remembering with a smirk how Mr Jenkins had presented the slimy pile to us with all the glowing pride of a proud parent.

  Mum got very excited about the vegetable patch and the idea of cooking vegetables that she’d grown in her very own garden. She wanted to grow even more vegetables than Mr Jenkins had planted, and she also wanted to grow herbs like rosemary and thyme to flavour her cooking. Since there wasn’t enough room in the existing plot, she decided to extend the vegetable patch back towards the cypress trees. So one Saturday morning, after a trip into town to buy shovels and a pitchfork, we set to work, turning over an area the size of two double beds until it was a rich brown porridge. We threw ourselves into the work with a will, glad to be doing something physical for a change, but we had no idea how exhausting we’d find it. When we woke up the next morning we could hardly move – even picking up the kettle hurt, while walking up or down the stairs was agony.

  In our silly moods, we played croquet on the front lawn or stretched a net between the fruit trees and played badminton. Mum, who was tall and rather gawky, was terrible at sports, and when she missed the hoop from just a few inches away, or swiped wildly at the spiralling shuttlecock and hit nothing but air, we would both collapse, helpless with laughter.

  It was so good to live in the country, and not to have any neighbours for miles around. You could talk, laugh, shout – scream even – at the top of your voice, and no one could hear you. It was such a change from the matrimonial home, where you always felt self-conscious when you went into the garden because it was overlooked on all sides, and where you had to whisper so that the neighbours – whose shapes you could see moving behind the bushes – wouldn’t hear you.

  In the evenings we played duets together in the lounge, something we seemed to have got out of the habit of doing since Dad had left. We had lots of music for flute and piano and one day, idly looking through them, I’d found one called Russian Folk Songs we’d never even opened. This became our absolute favourite and we worked our way through the entire book that March. The flute parts were catchy and quite easy to play, while the piano parts were tricky and tested even Mum occasionally. They were the sorts of tune that got stuck in your head and we’d both be whistling and humming them the next day. If I made a particularly horrendous mistake, we’d both get the giggles so badly it would take us half an hour just to work our way through a few bars. I really enjoyed these duets, and I was enjoying playing the flute – which I’d given up and started again countless times – more than I ever had.

  I would look at Mum sometimes as she stood on tiptoe struggling to free the shuttlecock from the branches of a cherry tree, or pulled a comic face as I sent her croquet ball bouncing away down the garden, and feel overcome with love for her. With her tall, awkward body, her large hands that she never seemed to know what to do with, her dark, frizzy hair no amount of combing could tame, she looked so . . . so vulnerable that I’d just have to run over and throw my arms around her and hug her as hard as I could.

  I knew money was tight, so when Mum started trying to find out what I wanted for my sixteenth birthday I just gave her a short list of books. When she asked incredulously if that was really all I wanted, I said, yes, that I had everything I could possibly want.

  This wasn’t exactly true, of course. There was something I wanted, but it would have been far too selfish to ask for it at that time. Mum was driving aroun
d in a car only fit for the scrap yard and going to work in suits more than fifteen years old. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d bought herself anything new. Meanwhile we always ate well, there was always money for new clothes and shoes for me, for a book or a magazine I wanted, a DVD or a trip to the cinema. I saw how she always put my needs before her own, and there was no way I was going to abuse that.

  But there was something I wanted. Something I wanted very much – as much, if not more, than I’d wanted a flute when I was a little girl. I wanted a laptop: one of those sleek new laptops I’d seen when I was out shopping with Mum that were so slim, so light you could slip one into a shoulder bag and it’d take up no more room and weigh no more than a file of papers.

  We already had a desktop computer in the small front room of Honeysuckle Cottage that Mum used as her office. This computer was nearly ten years old (Dad, of course, had taken the newer computer with him when he’d left), which made it prehistoric. It was already displaying the idiosyncrasies of the aged – it regularly froze up for no good reason, it often wouldn’t shut down properly, and it was slow, slow, slow! I used it when I needed to go on the Internet, but I never felt very comfortable when I was on it; I knew it was really Mum’s work computer, and I was terrified of accidentally deleting a client’s statement or a complicated schedule of damages that had taken her hours to work out. I preferred to write my essays in longhand rather than struggle with the beast, as we nicknamed it, but I knew how much easier having my own computer would make my homework. I’d be able to move paragraphs around, delete whole sections I didn’t like (rather than scribbling them out like a four-year-old), check my spelling and know exactly how many words I’d written at a glance, which would save a huge amount of time when Roger set a strict word limit.