Gordon Reece - Mice

I couldn’t tell the teachers because I was sure it would only make things worse for me in the long run. I didn’t want to give my persecutors an excuse for even more horrible outrages — I didn’t understand then that the cruel don’t need an excuse for their actions. I also had a queasy lack of faith in the school’s ability to protect me. I’d noticed how the teachers — even Miss Briggs — would turn a blind eye to Teresa, Emma and Jane’s behaviour, pretending not to have heard the swear word, not to have seen the flicked finger — anything for a quiet life.

I should have told Mum, I realize that now, but I was ashamed to. I was ashamed to tell her that I’d been singled out for this treatment, as if I carried some stigma that marked me as different from everyone else. What made it worse was that Mum knew these girls — she’d made them tea, she’d driven them home, she thought they were my best friends. I couldn’t bear the thought of her knowing how much they hated me. And I dreaded the questions she’d inevitably ask — What did you do? Did you do something to upset them? — because, deep down, I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow what was happening was my fault, that somehow I was to blame.

Besides, telling Mum or the school would have meant confronting my tormentors, and I was incapable of that. I just didn’t have it in me. I just didn’t have that sort of character. I was a mouse, don’t forget. It seemed more natural to me to say nothing, to suffer in silence, to stay very still and hope not to be seen, to scurry along the skirting board searching for a safe place to hide.

The only person I seriously thought of telling was my dad. Until Zoe came on the scene he’d always been protective of me. He’d even tried to ‘toughen me up’, as he put it, so that I’d be able to defend myself, nagging me to go running with him, even trying to persuade me to take up judo — compensating or over — compensating for what he saw as Mum’s ‘bad influence’. I indulged in fantasies of Dad springing into action to protect me now, coming to my rescue like a comic-book superhero.

But I knew full well that Dad was no superhero. I remembered how boorish and arrogant he was towards the end, how secretly vulgar (I’d once found a Hot Sluts magazine hidden in his briefcase). I was sure Zoe would have been poisoning his mind against me ( Shelley’s a whingy little namby-pamby mummy’s girl ). And why wouldn’t she? She didn’t want to share any of his money with me. I doubted Dad would do anything to upset Zoe. I doubted he’d do anything to risk losing that provocative mouth, those porn-star breasts.

I had a contact number for him in Spain and very nearly called him — but the thought of Zoe picking up the phone made my stomach turn over.

Dad wasn’t in my life any more.

My silent submission didn’t save me. In time, my ‘best friends’ turned their aggression from my belongings onto me directly.

The first time it happened was just after lunch one day. Jane held me by my hair while Teresa and Emma stuffed a bread roll down the front of my blouse. Then they wrestled with me, trying to squash the roll and make it as messy and uncomfortable for me as they could. When I tried to pull it out, Teresa slapped me hard in the face. The blow, the loud smack, took everyone by surprise — even Teresa — and I could have sworn she was about to apologize when her features suddenly hardened again. She greedily seized my hand and bent my fingers back. The searing pain choked my screams to silence.

After that, it was easy for them. After that, physical violence became the norm.

I wrote down everything they did to me in my diary, sitting in my room after school, a chair against the door in case Mum should try to come in. These entries make strange reading today, and not just because what happened on my sixteenth birthday — my very own 9/11 — makes them look trivial in comparison. I’m struck by how devoid of emotion the entries are, almost as if I’d been describing something that was happening to somebody else. In the same diary there are pages and pages full of emotional outpourings about Mum and Dad’s divorce, but as soon as the bullying starts the entries become shorter and more reticent, and as the intensity of the violence increases they grow even more clipped, almost matter-of-fact — a world of suffering reduced to the briefest of sound bites, the story of the crucifixion written on the back of a matchbox.

May: Jane pushed me over the low wall on the way to art and into one of the prickly hedges. . Emma called me a lesbian and pulled the hair clips out of my hair — with a lot of my hair too. . Emma clicked her lighter in my face and threatened to set me on fire. .

June: Teresa tried to give me a ‘dead leg’. She kept missing the spot and made me keep still until she got it right. Have a massive bruise now. Mustn’t let Mum see it. . Jane and Teresa threw one of my shoes behind the IT building. Teresa kicked me hard on the shin when she saw I’d got it back. Nearly passed out. . Teresa jabbed me with a compass in the backside during geography. Went to the bathroom and there was blood in the back of my knickers. .

I recognize this somnambulant, hollowed-out tone now when I see the survivor of the landslide, the victim of the bomb blast on TV. There was a loud bang. There was a lot of smoke . I understand that the greater the trauma the less adequate words become until, I imagine, when we face the greatest test of all, only silence seems appropriate.

But that June I almost found my voice. That June I almost threw off my paralysis and spoke out. .

School had finished for the day. I had to go to my flute lesson, but Teresa, Emma and Jane wouldn’t let me out of the classroom. They corralled me behind the desks, and when I made a dash for the door they caught me and pulled me to the back of the room.

Jane got me in a headlock and, egged on by the others, tried to push my head into the sharp metal edge of the windowsill. I remember unexpectedly breaking free and running for the door again when something heavy — one of the huge physics textbooks — thumped into my back with such force that I bit my tongue.

Just then, Miss Briggs came into the classroom and the girls quickly turned away from me and pretended to be busying themselves at the bookshelf. Miss Briggs picked up the papers she’d come back for and was turning to go when she noticed me — frozen to the spot, struggling to fight back the tears.

‘Is everything all right, Shelley?’ she asked.

And that’s when I nearly told her. That’s when the confession nearly burst out of me on a flood of choking sobs. But then I caught Teresa’s eye — as cold and pitiless as a shark’s — and lost my nerve.

‘Yes, Miss,’ I said. ‘Everything’s fine, Miss.’

I had to work hard to keep Mum from finding out what was going on. I wore long sleeves all the time to hide the bruises on my arms, and scarves to cover up the scratches on my neck. I had to wear pyjamas instead of my usual nightie, or she’d have seen the yellow and black bruises that peppered my shins and thighs like the symptoms of some horrible new disease.

I also became adept at cleaning myself up before Mum got home from work. Locking myself in the upstairs bathroom, I washed the stains out of my jumpers and skirts where I’d been pushed over or held against a filthy wall — I even sewed back buttons that had been torn off when they were dragging me around by my shirt front. Time and again I methodically cleaned out my schoolbag with soapy water to remove whatever filth they’d smeared inside it. Luckily I’d always been rather scatty and forgetful, so Mum readily believed me when I told her I’d lost my lunch box or hair clips or coloured pencils.