Mice

22

When Roger had finally gone, I fell back against the front door and slid slowly down until I was sitting on the carpet with my legs stretched out in front of me. Those three hours had completely drained me. I’d never felt so exhausted in all my life.

My eyes felt swollen in their sockets, my vision strangely unequal, as if I were seeing more out of my right eye than my left. The spaghetti bolognese had started to come back, and every time I got the taste of it in my mouth I felt nauseous. It was as if all the horrors of the previous night were distilled into that taste of minced meat and tomato sauce. My stomach churned and groaned alarmingly. My head spun. I sat there in the hallway for a long time, holding my head in my hands, staring at the hall carpet, hoping that if I kept very still the nausea might pass, that I might still manage not to be sick.

Then I remembered the bloodstain. I had to get rid of the bloodstain before Mrs Harris arrived.

I dragged myself up and staggered to the kitchen and rubbed at the handprint with some damp kitchen towel. It didn’t come off easily — it had embedded itself in the cracks in the paintwork and I had to scrub hard. I had no strength in my wrists and the vigorous exertion made me feel even more nauseous. I began to have cold sweats and my mouth filled with bitter saliva, which I knew full well was the final stage before the sickness came. When I looked at the smear of clotted blood on the kitchen towel, it was the final straw.

I made it to the bathroom just in time.

I lay on the sofa in the lounge, but was too feverish to fall into a deep sleep. I tossed and turned in a kind of delirium, my mind racing at a million miles an hour, a train of confused, paranoid, guilty thoughts that went round and round the same tiny track at dizzying speed.

We hadn’t buried the burglar properly; we’d left his right arm protruding stiffly out of the soil. Or if it wasn’t his arm, it was his foot, the foot without a shoe in its threadbare green sock. I had to go out and cover him properly, I had to go out and bury him properly, or Mrs Harris would see him when she drove up to the house. . Or we hadn’t actually killed the burglar, somehow he’d regained consciousness and hauled himself out of the ooze of his temporary grave. Like a B-movie monster of mud and hacked flesh, he was calling me on his mobile phone as he limped towards the cottage, calling to torment me, to taunt me, to terrify me. .

I sat up screaming when the phone rang. I stared at it in horror and let it ring, too scared to pick it up. But as my head cleared and the ridiculous thought that it was the burglar was slowly dispelled, my next thought was that it was the police. God knows how many times I let it ring before I finally snatched up the receiver.

It was Mum.

She was very guarded. She was working on the assumption that someone, somewhere, might be listening to our call, and so I did the same.

‘Are you having a lovely birthday?’ she asked cheerily.

‘Yes, wonderful, Mum,’ I replied without the slightest trace of irony in my voice. ‘Roger bought me a beautiful edition of Rebecca.’

‘Wonderful! How did your class go?’

‘Fine, thanks — we did the origins of the First World War. It’s Roger’s special subject — you should hear him, there’s nothing he doesn’t know. He really should write a book.’

We talked without really saying anything for five minutes or so, but by the end of the conversation Mum had reassured herself that I was OK and that the police hadn’t come to the cottage. . yet.

She said she’d try to get home early.

I was sick again a little later, but there was hardly anything left in my stomach to bring up. I went upstairs and washed my face in cold water and brushed my teeth and gargled with some mouthwash to get rid of the acidic aftertaste. As I stood at the basin, the desire to sleep was overwhelming; sleep called to me like a siren, like the pipes of the Pied Piper, and I would have gone to bed (damning all the consequences to hell) if I hadn’t heard Mrs Harris’s car pull into the drive at just that moment.

Mrs Harris was far easier to cope with than Roger. She had no interest whatsoever in the fact that it was my birthday, and when she saw Roger’s card and present she merely commented coldly that if she bought a present for every one of her pupils on their birthdays she’d be bankrupt by now. Unlike Roger, Mrs Harris had little curiosity in what was around her, and probably wouldn’t have noticed if the entire sideboard had been removed from the dining room. Nor did she ever want a cup of tea, preferring to drink cups of black coffee from the small Thermos flask she always brought with her.

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.