Gordon Reece - Mice

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.

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: s omeone 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 ).