Mice

11

March ended and April began. Our routine carried on pleasantly — Roger came in the mornings, Mrs Harris in the afternoons. I studied hard and was on course again to do well in the exams that were now only two and a half months away. Mum still did the work of three people and put up with Blakely’s rudeness and his wandering hands with meek resignation.

My birthday grew closer, and I felt a little flutter of excitement at the thought of turning sixteen. I received money from my elderly grandmother in Wales, and some far-flung relatives sent birthday cards that Mum displayed on the sideboard. A really sweet card came from the hospital, signed by the nurses who’d looked after me there. I was stunned to get a letter from the police forwarding a cheery ‘Birthday Greetings!’ from my school, signed with ‘heartfelt best wishes’ by the head teacher. I tore it into pieces and threw it straight in the bin.

Even though I tried not to, I couldn’t help looking out for something from my dad. But nothing came. This splinter of petty cruelty worked its way deep under my skin, and the harder I tried to ignore it the more it irritated me. I still couldn’t really believe that our relationship was over, that I was never likely to see him again. I knew he had our Honeysuckle Cottage address and I began to suspect that Mum had intercepted a present from him — I even scrabbled frenziedly through all the bins one day. But when I thought about it rationally I knew Mum couldn’t be hiding anything from me — the postman didn’t usually come until long after she’d left for work. The truth was that Dad hadn’t called me when I came out of hospital, so why should he get in contact just because I was turning sixteen? It was clear that as payback for taking Mum’s side and choosing to live with her and not him, he’d consigned me to the rubbish bin, that he’d choked off all the affection he used to lavish on me like turning off a tap.

My birthday, April the eleventh, fell on a Tuesday that year. The night before, Mum rang around six to say she’d be home late — she’d been caught by Blakely, who’d asked her to see a client who could only come in after normal hours (you’re such a soft touch, Elizabeth!).

I’d finished my homework early and had been drawing at the dining-room table, but instead of going back to it I decided to make myself useful and prepare dinner. I still hated lighting the gas after what had happened to me at school, but if I kept it down low I sometimes managed not to scream when I put the match to the burner. I cooked a spaghetti bolognese, which turned out really well and was just about ready to serve up when Mum put her key in the door.

‘What’s all this?’ She smiled as she came into the kitchen. ‘I thought it was your birthday tomorrow, not mine.’ She kissed me and her nose was cold on my warm cheek.

‘You’re freezing,’ I said, putting my hand up to the cold spot on my face.

‘Yes, it’s turning cold out there. It’s starting to rain.’

I put on La Bohème while Mum got changed, set two places at the kitchen table, and lit some scented candles. I opened a bottle of red wine and poured out two glasses, then recorked the bottle and put it back in the rack in the pantry. I’d learned my lesson after the first time — one glass was quite enough.

Mum came down in her tracksuit bottoms and her comfiest polo neck jumper just as I finished dishing up. We toasted my ‘nearly birthday’ and tucked in. We played our usual game of highs and lows. Mum had won a case against a local bus company that she’d never expected to win; Blakely had shouted at her in front of Brenda and Sally because she’d brought the wrong file to him at the magistrates’ court that morning (Mum said she’d brought the file he’d asked for). I’d struggled with the equations Mrs Harris had set me that afternoon, only getting three out of ten right; I’d taken down our book on Goya and copied one of his pictures called The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, and although I’d made the legs of the man who’d fallen asleep at his desk a little too short, I was really happy with the owls and bats and cats, the monsters, that were creeping menacingly up on him.

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.