Gordon Reece - Mice

The dull flat surface of that lesson was only disturbed once, briefly, but with a violence that shocked us both.

Mrs Harris had poured herself a cup of coffee and was carefully unwrapping the cling film from her digestive biscuits.

‘I’ve just taken on a new pupil who lives very close to here,’ she remarked, ‘a girl about your age. Her father’s a farmer — his fields must come up to the rear of your property. Jade’s her name. Jade , if you can believe it!’

I said nothing, merely glanced at my watch to see how much longer was left of the lesson.

‘She’s yet another so-called victim of bullying,’ Mrs Harris went on, dusting the biscuit crumbs from the tips of her fingers. ‘In other words, she prefers to stay at home rather than be inconvenienced by the tiresome business of going to school.’

I’d let remarks like this pass several times before; I knew Mrs Harris’s views on mice all too well. But this time, before I even realized what I was doing, I was speaking out.

‘ How dare you? ’ I hissed at her, unconsciously screwing up the piece of paper I’d been writing on.

Mrs Harris stared at me, completely stunned, as if her docile lapdog had suddenly bitten her finger right to the bone. I could feel my face twitching and contorting with uncontrollable anger.

‘How dare you?’ I shouted it right into her face. ‘I suffered eight months of hell at the hands of bullies! I was attacked day in and day out. I was set on fire! I could have been killed! What do you mean, another so-called victim?’

My anger was so great that my words couldn’t keep pace with it. I had so much pent-up rage to vent that now the floodgates were open it was impossible to know how to shape it all into words. My outburst fizzled out in tongue-tied incoherence.

Mrs Harris’s reaction took me completely by surprise. I expected her to bridle with haughty indignation, to unleash a venomous, withering rebuke that would reduce me to tears in a matter of seconds. But instead of flaring up in self-righteous fury, she put her fingers to her lips as if she couldn’t believe what had just escaped them.

‘I’m sorry, Shelley. I–I’m so sorry!’ Her freckled hand made an awkward, conciliatory move towards me across the table before retreating back to her lap. ‘I didn’t mean to belittle what you’ve been through. It was a stupid, tactless thing to say. I just forgot who I was talking to, honestly I did.’

My rage gradually subsided and we carried on with the lesson, but we were both distracted by what had happened and hugely relieved when four-thirty finally came around. At the door Mrs Harris apologized again, and wished me a very happy birthday.

I watched her driving away and even in the midst of all the trauma of that day there was room to feel pleased with myself for having stood up to her at long last, for having worsted such a tough old bird. I knew she’d probably only backed down because she was worried that her cynical view of the ‘shirkers’ and ‘wimps’ she taught might find its way back to the local authority and they’d stop her fat monthly pay cheques, but nevertheless I’d won the day. She’d left the field in disarray, in ignominious defeat; the imposing Mrs Harris had turned out to be just a paper tiger after all, I thought to myself, and smiled triumphantly — but as my gaze wandered towards the front garden the smile wilted on my lips.

It was only when I was on my own in the house again that I remembered the burglar’s wallet.

The urge to know his name was irresistible. And it was more than just curiosity now. I felt that if I knew his name, the thought of him lying out there in our garden wouldn’t fill me with so much terror.

A name, after all, would anchor the burglar in mundane reality. He’d be Joe Bloggs or David Smith, one person, one individual — and a pathetic one at that. Without a name it would be as if he had no boundaries; he’d be able to leak into all areas of my life like some poisonous fog, contaminating everything. He’d become a bogeyman, a repository for all the fears that would haunt me for the rest of my life. If I could just find out his name, I felt it would be like switching on all the lights in the middle of a scary movie.

I knew Mum wouldn’t be home for hours, so I didn’t have to hurry.

I went upstairs and into the spare room. I knew the bag with the dressing gowns, the one with the wellington boots and the one with the red sports bags. I was looking for the first one, the one with the broken dishes and the doormat. I soon found it, wedged behind the mop and bucket. Mum had tied one of her vicious little knots in it that took me ages to unpick. All the time my emptied stomach growled loudly. My appetite, which nine hours earlier I thought had been extinguished forever, was pacing hungrily back and forth inside its cage.

I had to move the doormat to see inside the bin bag. The wallet was there, right at the bottom. There was something on the doormat, a gelatinous grey goo that must have leaked from the back of the burglar’s head as we’d dragged him out of the kitchen. I couldn’t bear to look at it and turned my head away to the wall, reaching in for the wallet without looking, like a blind person. My fingers closed around it first time and I pulled it out.

It was a weird sensation to hold in my hands something that had belonged to the burglar — something that had been in his pocket when I’d stabbed him. It was like resurrecting him in a way. I could almost feel his presence in the air around me, and I was suddenly anxious to get out of the spare room as quickly as I could.

I clicked open the press stud with trembling fingers and a racing heart. There was a pocket lumpy with loose coins and another packed tightly with cards. I recognized the pinkish edge of one as a driver’s licence, and tried to tease it out with my fingernails. As it worked loose, I found myself looking into the cold grey eyes of the burglar. Another queasy wave of nausea passed over me and I caught a faint taste of the spaghetti bolognese. The hair may have been a little shorter, the cheeks a little less gaunt, but there was no mistaking that face: it was the man Mum and I had killed in the kitchen the night before.

I looked for his name, and there it was.

Paul David Hannigan.

I slipped the driver’s licence into my jeans’ back pocket, snapped the wallet shut and tossed it back into the bin bag. I retied it, trying to replicate Mum’s tight little knot as best I could. I couldn’t see any stains on my hands or sleeve, but I washed my hands anyway and put on another top just to be on the safe side.

With my stomach gurgling and squeaking with hunger, I went to the kitchen and heated myself a small bowl of vegetable soup and sliced some baguette. I took it into the lounge on a tray and ate it in front of the TV, watching the cartoons. It was strange to watch Tom chasing Jerry round and round the kitchen (‘ We’re playing musical chairs now! We’re playing musical chairs now! ’), bringing the frying pan down on his head and flattening Jerry like a pancake while the music raced jovially along and the comic sound effect — boing! — rang out again and again. Violence in bright colours. Violence without blood. Violence without death. It wasn’t like that in real life. I remembered Mum lining up the blow with the chopping board, tightening her grip, taking a deep breath before she raised it high above her head like a diver about to submerge to the darkest depths. I remembered the sound the board had made when she’d brought it scything down. . and it hadn’t been boing.

I lay down on the sofa and examined the burglar’s driver’s licence in more detail. Paul Hannigan’s driver’s licence. I looked at the date of birth and worked out that he’d been twenty-four years old, older than I’d thought. Eight years older than me. There was his signature — a back-sloping child’s hand with a ridiculous flourish as if he were a person of importance. His address on the licence was a city in the north with a reputation for high unemployment and drug-related gang crime. Just the month before, a fourteen-year-old boy working as a drug courier had been shot and killed there in broad daylight. So, I meditated drowsily, Paul Hannigan was a rat out of that rat hole. Or at least he had been. The licence was four years old; the chances were he’d been living locally when he came to burgle Honeysuckle Cottage.