Mice Page 6

  My thoughts were already starting to move beyond A levels to university. A laptop would be a huge advantage with all the essays I’d be expected to write, and I even saw myself taking notes on it during lectures if I could learn to type fast enough.

  But what really excited me was the thought of how a laptop could improve my own creative writing. With a laptop, I might be able to embark on something really long – I might even be able to write my very first novel . . .

  I said nothing, though. I knew that if Mum had even an inkling that I wanted a laptop, she’d buy it for me – even if it meant she had to go to work with holes in her shoes and ladders in her tights.

  11

  March ended and April began. Our routine carried on pleasantly – Roger came in the mornings, Mrs Harris in the afternoons. I studied hard and was on course again to do well in the exams that were now only two and a half months away. Mum still did the work of three people and put up with Blakely’s rudeness and his wandering hands with meek resignation.

  My birthday grew closer, and I felt a little flutter of excitement at the thought of turning sixteen. I received money from my elderly grandmother in Wales, and some far-flung relatives sent birthday cards that Mum displayed on the sideboard. A really sweet card came from the hospital, signed by the nurses who’d looked after me there. I was stunned to get a letter from the police forwarding a cheery ‘Birthday Greetings!’ from my school, signed with ‘heartfelt best wishes’ by the head teacher. I tore it into pieces and threw it straight in the bin.

  Even though I tried not to, I couldn’t help looking out for something from my dad. But nothing came. This splinter of petty cruelty worked its way deep under my skin, and the harder I tried to ignore it the more it irritated me. I still couldn’t really believe that our relationship was over, that I was never likely to see him again. I knew he had our Honeysuckle Cottage address and I began to suspect that Mum had intercepted a present from him – I even scrabbled frenziedly through all the bins one day. But when I thought about it rationally I knew Mum couldn’t be hiding anything from me – the postman didn’t usually come until long after she’d left for work. The truth was that Dad hadn’t called me when I came out of hospital, so why should he get in contact just because I was turning sixteen? It was clear that as payback for taking Mum’s side and choosing to live with her and not him, he’d consigned me to the rubbish bin, that he’d choked off all the affection he used to lavish on me like turning off a tap.

  My birthday, April the eleventh, fell on a Tuesday that year. The night before, Mum rang around six to say she’d be home late – she’d been caught by Blakely, who’d asked her to see a client who could only come in after normal hours (you’re such a soft touch, Elizabeth!).

  I’d finished my homework early and had been drawing at the dining-room table, but instead of going back to it I decided to make myself useful and prepare dinner. I still hated lighting the gas after what had happened to me at school, but if I kept it down low I sometimes managed not to scream when I put the match to the burner. I cooked a spaghetti bolognese, which turned out really well and was just about ready to serve up when Mum put her key in the door.

  ‘What’s all this?’ She smiled as she came into the kitchen. ‘I thought it was your birthday tomorrow, not mine.’ She kissed me and her nose was cold on my warm cheek.

  ‘You’re freezing,’ I said, putting my hand up to the cold spot on my face.

  ‘Yes, it’s turning cold out there. It’s starting to rain.’

  I put on La Bohème while Mum got changed, set two places at the kitchen table, and lit some scented candles. I opened a bottle of red wine and poured out two glasses, then recorked the bottle and put it back in the rack in the pantry. I’d learned my lesson after the first time – one glass was quite enough.

  Mum came down in her tracksuit bottoms and her comfiest polo neck jumper just as I finished dishing up. We toasted my ‘nearly birthday’ and tucked in. We played our usual game of highs and lows. Mum had won a case against a local bus company that she’d never expected to win; Blakely had shouted at her in front of Brenda and Sally because she’d brought the wrong file to him at the magistrates’ court that morning (Mum said she’d brought the file he’d asked for). I’d struggled with the equations Mrs Harris had set me that afternoon, only getting three out of ten right; I’d taken down our book on Goya and copied one of his pictures called The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, and although I’d made the legs of the man who’d fallen asleep at his desk a little too short, I was really happy with the owls and bats and cats, the monsters, that were creeping menacingly up on him.

  During the meal, I became aware of Mum’s gaze lingering on my face.

  ‘What?’ I asked. Since my face had been scarred, I’d become sensitive to being looked at too closely.

  ‘Nothing,’ she replied dreamily. ‘I just can’t believe that my little girl is going to be sixteen tomorrow. Sixteen! It seems like only yesterday that I was breastfeeding you.’

  ‘Please, Mum, I’m eating!’

  ‘The time goes by so quickly.’ She sighed, slowly shaking her head. ‘You always had a good appetite, you never said no to the breast.’

  ‘Mum, you’re not going to go off down memory lane again, are you?’

  ‘No, no, not if it embarrasses you – I promise I won’t go down mammary lane . . .’

  I was in the middle of swallowing a mouthful of wine, and nearly choked laughing. When I’d recovered, she still had that dreamy look in her eye.

  ‘We’ll have a proper celebration tomorrow, Shelley. We’ll go out somewhere really nice.’

  ‘There’s no need, Mum.’

  ‘Yes, there is.’ She circled her index finger pensively in a little pool of red wine on the table. When she spoke again her eyes were moist.

  ‘I want to say I’m sorry, Shelley.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For letting you down. For not protecting you from those awful, awful girls.’

  My reply was so strangled it barely carried to her. ‘You didn’t know.’

  ‘But that’s just it. You should have been able to come to me.’

  I drew patterns in my spaghetti sauce with the tines of my fork.

  ‘Why do you think you couldn’t tell me, Shelley?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I shrugged. ‘I felt – I was sort of – paralysed. And embarrassed.’

  ‘That hurt me more than anything else, you know – that you didn’t feel able to confide in me. It was my fault. I was still feeling sorry for myself after the divorce and I was preoccupied with work. I closed you out.’

  I knew it wasn’t Mum’s fault – I decided to keep the bullying secret from her – but at the same time it was deeply comforting to hear her take the blame on herself.

  ‘I wish – sometimes – that you weren’t so much like me, Shelley.’

  ‘Don’t say that, Mum.’

  ‘I mean, I wish that you’d turned out more – I wish that I could have been more—’ She couldn’t find the right words. Whatever she wanted to say, it was too complicated, too sensitive. She abandoned the attempt and looked pleadingly into my eyes. ‘The world is such a hard place, Shelley!’

  She wiped away what could have been a tear from her cheek and tried to smile, but then her expression changed as if she’d been struck by a thought so weighty it forced her to collapse slack-shouldered into her chair. ‘Maybe I was wrong to move us out here. Maybe I was wrong to take you out of school. It might have been better if we’d tried to face—’

  ‘No!’ I was seized with panic. ‘I don’t want to go back to school!’

  Mum reached across the table and took my hand in both of hers. ‘You don’t have to,’ she soothed me, ‘you don’t have to.’

  She pressed my hands so tightly that they hurt. ‘I won’t let you down again, Shelley. I promise you that.’

  I found the piercing intensity of her expression disconcerting and I had to look away. When I looked up at her again, I was
relieved to see it had given way to a gentle, reflective smile.

  ‘I want you to know how proud I am of you,’ she said, ‘how proud I am of the way you’ve dealt with all the terrible things that have happened to you.’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘No, I mean it. You’ve been amazing. Calm, sensible. No hysterics, no self-pity. We’ll go somewhere really nice. A really swanky restaurant. OK?’

  No self-pity. I remembered the belt from my towelling dressing gown, the beam in the garage where Dad used to hang his punchbag . . . but decided to let it go.

  ‘OK, Mum.’ I smiled. ‘OK.’

  After dinner we played another duet from our Russian Folk Songs, something called ‘The Gypsy Wedding’ that had a fast stomping beat I just couldn’t keep up with. Every time Mum reached the halfway point, I was woefully behind and in fits of giggles. I was making hundreds of mistakes, and the more mistakes I made the harder we both laughed.

  We were both very sleepy that night; Mum was dropping off even before the ten o’clock news came on. It was full of some boring political scandal that I couldn’t face sitting through. I gave Mum a hug and a kiss and climbed upstairs to bed.

  I lay awake for a long while, listening to the light rain falling against my window, enjoying the dying moments of my life as a fifteen-year-old. In the morning I would be sixteen. Sweet sixteen and never been kissed, that’s what they always said. And for me, that was true. I never had been kissed.

  And for the first time in my life I felt that I wanted to be. I wanted to have a boyfriend. I wanted to be kissed. Perhaps when I was sixteen, when my scars had all healed up, I’d meet someone. Someone handsome like George Clooney but with the boyish innocence of a young Tom Hanks; someone loyal and sincere who wouldn’t leave you when your looks started to fade and the crow’s feet came . . .

  Something was stirring inside me, quickening into life in the same way that the garden of Honeysuckle Cottage was quickening into life outside my window in the gentle spring rain, sprouting green shoots, opening sticky buds, unfurling virgin petals. When I woke up I would be sixteen. Old enough to get married, Mum had said. I felt as though I stood on the threshold of exciting new experiences, new emotions, new relationships, and I yearned for them as the butterfly in the chrysalis yearns to spread its fragile wings and fly.

  Thinking these thoughts, I fell into a sweet, delicious sleep.

  12

  My eyes snapped open and I was instantly wide awake. Even though I’d been sunk in the depths of a deep, deep sleep, the unmistakable pig squeal of the fourth stair had reached the part of the brain that never sleeps. I had no doubt what I’d heard, and I had no doubt what it meant: someone was in the house.

  The fluorescent display of the alarm clock on my bedside table said 3:33.

  I could feel my heart pounding in my chest like something with a life of its own, like a rabbit writhing and twisting in a snare that grew tighter the more it struggled. I strained to hear above the booming roar in my temples. My ears probed outside my bedroom door – the landing, the staircase – like invisible guard dogs, constantly sending back information: silence, silence, silence, there’s only silence: we can find nothing. Could I have been mistaken? But I knew I wasn’t. I’d heard the fourth stair scream under a person’s weight.

  Sure enough, after what seemed like an eternity of waiting there came the groan of another stair, a higher stair: someone was in the house.

  I was paralysed with fear. Since my eyes had opened I hadn’t moved a muscle. It was as if a primitive instinct – to keep absolutely still and not make a sound until the danger had passed – had taken control of me. Even my breathing had become so slow, so shallow that it made no sound, and didn’t move the quilt the tiniest fraction. I thought about the rounders bat I kept under the bed ‘in case of burglars’, but I was powerless to reach down to grasp it. Something stronger held me frozen and immobile. Keep still, it ordered, don’t make a sound until the danger’s passed.

  The footsteps continued up the stairs – louder now, as if the intruder had given up trying to be quiet. I heard a body bump heavily into the cabinet on the landing (drunk?) and a voice swearing (a man).

  I heard him open Mum’s bedroom door. I knew that he’d switched her light on, because the thick darkness in my room lightened infinitesimally. I heard Mum’s voice. Sleepy. Confused. Frightened. Then the man’s voice, a stream of aggressive, guttural grunts that sounded more animal than human. ‘Wait,’ I clearly heard Mum say. ‘My dressing gown.’ Then I heard them both walking towards my bedroom.

  My door shushed open against the thick nap of the carpet, and my light exploded into white blinding life.

  Even though they were both in my bedroom I still didn’t move (keep still, don’t make a sound until the danger’s passed). I lay as still and helpless as if my neck had been broken.

  Mum said my name to wake me, but I couldn’t answer. She said it again louder, closer to my bed. Finally she appeared in my vision. Her pale face was still battered by sleep, her hair wildly disordered in a way that would have been funny in other circumstances, her dressing gown pulled on hastily, its belt hanging loose. She saw that I’d been awake all the time and that I knew exactly what was happening.

  ‘Shelley, darling,’ she said, ‘don’t be frightened. He just wants money. If we do everything he says, he’s going to go away and leave us alone.’

  I didn’t believe her and I could tell from the trembling of her hands and the catch in her voice that she didn’t believe it herself. When a cat gets into the mouse hole it doesn’t go away leaving the mice unharmed. I knew how this story was going to end. He was going to rape me. He was going to rape Mum. Then he was going to kill us both.

  With a tremendous effort, I finally managed to move my left leg to the cold outer edge of the bed. With that, the millennia-old spell was broken and I was able to sit up and reach for my dressing gown.

  The burglar was younger than he’d sounded. He was a weedy youth of no more than twenty with a thin weasel face and long black hair that hung in his eyes and coiled around his neck in greasy rats’ tails. He wore a scruffy olive-green bomber jacket and filth-encrusted jeans that hung so low on his hips they seemed on the point of falling down.

  From five feet away I could smell the stink of alcohol that surrounded him like an invisible mist. He was clearly drunk, but he was more than drunk. He was unsteady on his feet and his unhealthy pale face oozed with sweat. He was barely able to stay awake; his eyelids kept drooping, flickering wildly with the effort to remain open. His eyes glazed over and rolled up into his head and he seemed to be on the point of passing out, when he suddenly came to with an ugly jerk of his shoulders, looking all around him as if trying to recollect where he was.

  He held a huge knife in his right hand – the type hunters use to gut rabbits.

  He stood at the top of the stairs, swaying crazily from side to side like a man on the deck of a storm-tossed ship (would he fall? Please God, let him fall down the stairs and break his neck!) but he didn’t. He motioned with the knife for Mum and me to go down.

  Trembling and terrified, we obeyed him.

  I went first, the floorboards ice-cold beneath my bare feet. Below me I could make out the front door at the bottom of the stairs. Outside was the safety of the darkness, a hundred places to hide. If I made a dash for it, could I get out in time? The chain was pulled across. If I fumbled with that . . . and he was right behind Mum with that savage knife.

  I stepped off the last stair, and the chance – our last chance? – was gone.

  He herded us into the lounge and switched on the lights. I was freezing after the warmth of my bed, and began to shiver uncontrollably. Instinctively Mum wrapped her arms around me and started rubbing me vigorously to warm me up, but my shaking didn’t stop. I realized I wasn’t shaking with cold. I was shaking with fear.

  ‘Stay here,’ he grunted. ‘Don’t do anything or you’ll get this!’ and he jabbed the knife violently at Mum, the serrate
d edge passing just a few inches from her left eye.

  He negotiated the half-dozen paces into the dining room with difficulty, as if the floor he walked on was banked sharply at forty-five degrees, and he was evidently relieved when he reached the table and could steady himself against it. Mum and I stood hugging each other in the middle of the lounge, Mum whispering to me over and over again, ‘It’ll be all right, Shelley, it’ll be all right.’ I buried my face in her neck and squeezed my eyes tight shut. Please let this all just be a nightmare , I prayed, please say this isn’t really happening!

  I could hear him talking incoherently to himself as he rifled through the drawers in the sideboard and the antique writing desk. As his searching grew more frantic, I heard the bowl of potpourri get swept to the floor, the birthday cards slapped into the air like a flock of cardboard birds, the vase of dried flowers shatter into pieces on the parquet. All the time, he kept up a nonsensical, babbling commentary punctuated with fits of childish giggles and explosions of vicious swearing.

  ‘What’s he looking for, Mum?’ I whispered.

  ‘I don’t know, darling. I’m not sure he knows. Don’t worry. He’ll be gone in a minute.’

  Listening to that stream of gibberish coming from the dining room, I had the sickening realization that the burglar wasn’t really there with us in Honeysuckle Cottage at all, that he was tripping on whatever cocktail of drink and drugs he’d taken. All this – Mum and me standing shivering in our dressing gowns, the drawers he was casually yanking from the writing desk and emptying onto the floor – for him, all of this was merely a dream. It wasn’t real at all. He could stab us with his hunting knife and it would mean nothing to him because we didn’t exist, we were just phantoms in a dream, his mind, his reason, was elsewhere – drugged, asleep. And I knew very well what the sleep of reason produced.