Gordon Reece - Mice

My greatest fear was that they’d start sending me abusive emails and Mum would find out what was going on that way. Although we’d rarely emailed each other, I knew they had my email address and I was terrified that one day Mum would open a message full of sick, foul-mouthed abuse. So every morning I’d get up early and slip downstairs to check the emails before Mum came down. But the girls concerned were too smart to get into cyber bullying. They knew an email could be seen by Mum and traced back to them, and they were having way too much fun to risk that.

They only broke their Internet silence once. One Saturday morning I opened a message from a sender I didn’t recognize, already fearing the worst. It was a pornographic photo — a man doing something disgusting to a woman — an image so vile that even today I don’t want to think about it. It was still on the screen when Mum came up behind me, asking if there were any messages. I only just managed to press Delete in time ( No, Mum. No new messages ).

I put it down to a Saturday-night Bacardi Breezer binge when they’d been too blasted to think straight, and it never happened again.

But in spite of my best efforts, I knew Mum sensed something was wrong. I could feel her antennae probing, trying to get inside my head and find out what it was about me that had subtly changed. If she hadn’t been so busy that summer with the Jackson file — a personal injury case Davis had shamefully neglected and then given to Mum to prepare for trial — I’m sure she would have worked it out.

I counted down the days for the school year to end and at last — at last! — the summer holidays arrived to save me.

At the end of July Mum and I left the claustrophobic greyness of the matrimonial home and went on holiday — two weeks in a self-catering cottage in the Lake District. We were blessed with glorious weather. We walked in the mountains, we hired bikes and followed the trails marked by splodges of red paint on tree trunks and boulders, we swam in the lakes. We wandered around the pretty villages looking at antiques and gorging ourselves on cream scones with jam in the library-quiet tea shops.

In the evenings we cooked extravagant meals together and read for hours. Mum worked her way through the cottage’s collection of dog-eared romances, stopping to read the funniest passages out loud to me. I read Macbeth , which was one of my set texts for my exams the following year, methodically noting down all the words I didn’t know in an exercise book I’d bought specially. I couldn’t help imagining the three witches with the faces of Teresa, Emma and Jane — those three unnatural hags had intervened in my life just as the three witches had in Macbeth’s. But what fate, I wondered, did my three witches have in store for me? As I read on, I was surprised to see that it was Lady Macbeth who had engineered King Duncan’s murder and not Macbeth as I’d thought, and I found myself wondering, in the light of what my ‘best friends’ had done to me, whether women were the gentler sex after all. Was it possible that women were actually crueller than men?

There were times on that holiday when I completely forgot about Teresa, Emma and Jane and their punches and insults and the sting of their kicks, when I completely forgot about the dad who’d walked out of my life when I’d still needed him so much. When Mum and I were swimming in one of the freezing lakes, giggling and screaming and whooping with the cold, or when I was following closely behind her as we climbed a winding mountain path, the nervous cows getting slowly to their feet at our approach, I actually forgot the painful details of my life and was happy.

But September soon came round again. As the time to go back to school came closer, I grew listless, headachy and feverish. Every time I thought about school my stomach burned acidly. I had no appetite, and at mealtimes I had to fight back the nausea and force myself to finish everything on my plate so that Mum wouldn’t get suspicious. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I couldn’t read two lines.

The night before school started I lay in bed unable to sleep, trying to steel myself for what lay ahead. Next year was exam year. If I did well enough, I’d be able to stay on at school and start working towards university in earnest. I was sure the girls concerned had no intention of staying on and would leave after the exams. That meant I just had to make it through one school year ( keeping very still, hoping not to be seen, scurrying along the skirting board searching for a safe place to hide ), and then it would be over. I was confident that I could survive one year.

I thought it was even possible that the bullying might have stopped when I went back, that the long six-week summer holiday might have broken up its momentum, like a firebreak can stop the fiercest forest fire in its tracks. After all, they had exams like I did and, even though they had no interest in going on to university, they still needed good grades if they wanted to get good jobs. Perhaps they’d be too worried about their results to concern themselves very much with me. Perhaps the bullying would lessen. Perhaps it would stop altogether. Perhaps. .

I was wrong, of course. From the first day back at school the bullying started again. If anything, it seemed that they’d missed their regular fix and were trying to make up for lost time.

The bullying ratcheted up yet another notch.

Dutifully, I recorded my shell-shocked telegrams from the front line of my secret war in my diary — my diary which had remained gloriously blank over the summer.

September: Teresa punched me in the face in the girls’ toilets. Had a really bad nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. Told Mum I fell over in the corridor. . they held me down and Teresa pulled my blouse and bra right up and took a video with her mobile. She said, ‘Your ugly tits are going to be all over YouTube’. . they pushed me up against the toilet block wall and took turns to spit in my face. .

October: Teresa hit me on the head with her bag when I was drinking from the water fountain.

Deep cut in the roof of my mouth. . they waited for me after school and beat me up. Teresa sat on top of me and farted right in my face. When I got back home I was sick twice. Managed to clean everything up just before Mum got back. .

What made me realize that I was never going to make it through a whole year — that I wasn’t going to make it through the first term — was an incident that happened later that October.

I began to notice a strange smell around my desk one morning after break — a faint sour smell that seemed to grow worse as the day went on. I could still smell it around me as I walked home and I started to suspect it was coming from my sports bag. As soon as I got home I sat on the lounge floor and emptied everything out — maybe my towel was fusty or I’d overlooked a dirty sock or something. But my gym stuff all smelled fine. I searched inside the bag, feeling around in all the pockets with my hand but I couldn’t find anything. I couldn’t work it out. I could still smell that sickly sour smell.

I’d picked up one of my gym shoes to see if the sole was soiled when something inside it became dislodged and dropped onto my bare leg. When I saw the blind black eyes, the gaping mouth, the rigid claws, I screamed and screamed and kicked my legs frantically until it slid off me onto the floor. I backed away into a corner and sat there hugging my knees tightly, sobbing uncontrollably, rocking back and forth on my haunches like a lunatic. It was a long time before I was calm enough to pick up the dead sparrow and carry it outside to the bin.

After that I knew they’d won; that’s when I knew I couldn’t endure the fear and the pain and the humiliation any longer.