Gordon Reece - Mice

When I was born four years later, my dad insisted Mum give up work in order to stay at home and look after me full-time. He didn’t want his daughter being passed around from nanny to nanny like some parcel, he said; he didn’t want his daughter coming home from school to an empty house because both parents were out working, he said; his salary was more than enough for us to live on and there wasn’t any need for them both to work, he said. His insistence had nothing to do (of course) with the fact that Mum was on the verge of being made a partner herself. It had nothing to do (of course) with the fact that she was generally held to be the best lawyer in the firm and that her quicksilver mind often left him feeling inadequate and stupid.

Mum dutifully did what he wanted. He knew best, after all; he was older, he was a partner, he was a man . How could she have resisted him, even if she’d wanted to? How can a mouse resist the cat? So she gave up the job she loved, and for the next fourteen years dedicated herself to looking after me and the house — cooking, shopping, washing, ironing — while my dad gradually worked his way up to become senior partner at Everson’s.

When he walked out on her, she was forty-six years of age. Her legal knowledge was hopelessly out of date — withered away like fruit left to moulder on the tree. Her solicitor’s practising certificate hadn’t been renewed for fourteen years.

The only job she’d been able to find was as a legal assistant at Davis, Goodridge & Blakely, a law firm in one of the seedy back streets in town behind the railway station. The partners used her long absence from the law as an excuse to offer her a laughable salary — ‘Take it or leave it’, they said — and, of course, she took it. She was given a desk in a small office that she shared with two of the secretaries, to make clear that she was seen as little more than another secretary rather than as a qualified lawyer in her own right.

But the partners quickly realized how competent she was, and were astonished at the speed with which she caught up on what she’d missed. Blakely, the sleazy crime partner, unloaded a shameful number of his clients onto her and used her as a personal assistant and general dogsbody; Davis, the head of the personal injury department, began to pass her more and more of his problem files, the ones he’d got into such a mess he had no idea what to do with them next. By the end of her first year Mum was carrying some of the firm’s most difficult cases and being paid less than the secretaries.

Brenda and Sally, the secretaries who shared Mum’s cramped office, thought her move out of town into Honeysuckle Cottage was a mistake and didn’t hesitate to tell her so. ‘Shelley’s nearly sixteen now, Elizabeth,’ Brenda said. ‘She’s going to want to meet up with friends in town in the evening—’

‘That’s right,’ said Sally. ‘She’ll be going out clubbing every weekend if she’s anything like my one. You’re going to spend your whole life going backwards and forwards to town dropping her off and picking her up.’

Mum tried to keep her private life private — or as private as it was possible to keep it without offending Brenda and Sally, who were happy to offer up the most intimate secrets of their marriages without the slightest embarrassment.

Mum just blushed and mumbled something about not minding it really and that she was sure Shelley wouldn’t take advantage. This had met with great cries of protest and derision: Elizabeth, you’re such a soft touch!

Brenda and Sally were always saying this sort of thing to her — Elizabeth, you’re too nice! Elizabeth, why do you put up with it? Elizabeth, why don’t you stand up for yourself? They’d watched her meekly accept a pay rise that was downright insulting, they’d seen Davis and other lawyers in the firm dump their problems on her desk and barely thank her when she solved them, they’d seen Blakely regularly sidle up to her at five minutes to five and ask her to work late or to ‘look at this file over the weekend’ because he knew she was too weak to say no. A day rarely went by when either Brenda or Sally didn’t have cause to cry out, Elizabeth, you’re such a soft touch!

She didn’t tell them the truth about me, of course. She didn’t say that I wouldn’t need lifts into town to meet my friends from school because I didn’t have any friends from school. Not a single one. She didn’t tell them that I’d been the victim of a bullying campaign so vicious I’d had to be withdrawn from school altogether and was now receiving tuition at home. She didn’t tell them that on the advice of the police, my new address had been withheld from my school in case the girls concerned discovered it.

The girls concerned . The three girls concerned: Teresa Watson, Emma Townley and Jane Ireson.

They’d been my best friends ever since we were put in the same class at the age of nine. We played together every breaktime (skipping, hula hoop, hopscotch, granny’s footsteps), we sat together every lunchtime in the school canteen to eat our packed lunches. We regularly met up at each other’s houses over the weekends and during the long school holidays. We were an inseparable little clique, a club. We even gave ourselves a name, the JETS — an acronym made from the first letters of our first names.

Looking back now, I can see that things had started to go wrong between me and the other three long before the bullying started.

When we were eleven, twelve, thirteen, we would have been seen as good girls. We took our schoolwork seriously — comparing our answers after the weekly spelling test, colouring in every map as if it were the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, ringing each other up after school to discuss difficult homework. I always came top of the class in English and art; Emma (nicknamed ‘Pippi Potter’ for her bright ginger hair and round glasses respectively) seemed to have a gift for maths; Jane, the most serious of the four of us, played the cello and was in the school orchestra and a Saturday musicschool orchestra as well; Teresa, with her pretty eyes and strawberry blonde hair, wanted to be an actress and was mad about drama. We talked in class, I’m sure, like all children, but we were terrified of the teachers; we would never have dreamt of answering back and I can’t remember any of us getting into serious trouble.

At around fourteen, however, the others started to change. And I didn’t.

Emma exchanged her glasses for contact lenses and had her beautiful hair cut into a punk style — shaved close above her ears, a crest of flaming red spikes on top. Jane gave up music and just seemed to stop caring about her schoolwork altogether. She started dyeing her hair black and painting her nails to match. She filled out and grew big-breasted, and when she was made up she could easily have passed for eighteen. Jane was constantly getting into trouble with the teachers, but nothing they did — not detentions, not suspensions — seemed to bother her in the slightest. It was as if she’d rejected everything to do with school and was like a convict in prison, just bitterly counting the days until her release.

But it was Teresa Watson who changed the most. She shot up to five foot nine seemingly overnight. She went from being pudgy and cute to thin and sullen-faced. Her body became lean and bony and hard-looking, her face gaunt, her angular cheekbones jutting out like ledges of rock. She started to wear clothes that brazenly challenged the school’s dress code — green ten-up Doc Martens, low-cut hipsters, skimpy crop tops that left her long, pale midriff bare. She wore a silver stud through her left eyebrow even though the head teacher told her again and again she wasn’t to come to school like that. She grew her hair long and wore it parted in the centre and pressed flat to her scalp. As her body took on this spare hardness, so something hard appeared in her green eyes, something hard and unforgiving. Something vaguely threatening.