Mice

32

Time lived up to its reputation as the great healer, and our life in Honeysuckle Cottage slowly returned to normal.

It began with small things, such as going back to eating our meals on the pine table in the kitchen, and re-establishing our old morning routine — two kisses in the hallway and the reminder to drive carefully, Mum’s glance back and wave as she drove away. We took the garden furniture out of the shed and sat out on the patio again. Over our evening meals we — cautiously at first — started to describe our daily highs and lows to one another like we used to. We ate spaghetti bolognese again. One Sunday morning we picked cherries in the back garden and made a gorgeous pie, which we ate with vanilla ice-cream — just as we’d planned to do before our uninvited guest arrived. We began to rent DVDs again and one Saturday night watched two George Clooney movies (O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Leatherheads) back to back as we munched our way through an enormous bowl of buttered popcorn.

On our weekly shopping trips into town, we gradually replaced everything that had been tainted that night and had ended up at the bottom of the mine shaft: we bought new curtains for the kitchen, new tea towels, a new mop and bucket. In response to an instinct too strong to resist, we often sought replacements that were markedly different from what we’d had before: a thin rubber doormat instead of another coir fibre one: brightly coloured — almost garish — wellington boots instead of black ones. And Mum didn’t look for another marble chopping board — she insisted on getting a cheap plastic one from a discount store.

As each tiny gap in the jigsaw was filled in — new bath towels, new nighties, new dressing gowns — I felt as if our home was being reconstituted, made whole again, and it surprised me how much this made me feel whole again. I’d never realized until then how important these small things were in our lives. The puzzle was finally complete when Mum found the miniature thatched cottage’s chimney in the bowl of potpourri and sat at the dining-room table one night and patiently superglued it back in place.

The bruises on my neck gradually faded away to nothing, and at last I was able to put away the scarves I’d had to wear whenever I was with Roger and Mrs Harris. The bruise on my coccyx also lost its angry red halo and shrank in size until it was no bigger than a charcoal-grey coin, and eventually disappeared altogether. Strangely, as my bruises went, my scars started to show real signs of improvement too. The burns to my left hand and right ear were invisible in all but the brightest lights, and even then showed as nothing more than sheeny patches on the skin. And the scars on my forehead and neck lightened from a dirty coffee colour to more of a honey tone, and were far less noticeable than before.

As my physical injuries healed, so too did my mental wounds. The flashbacks’ grip on me grew weaker and weaker. They didn’t stop (they’ve never stopped altogether), but they became less frequent. It was as if my mind had slowly begun to absorb, to accept, what had happened. The periods when I didn’t think about that night grew longer and longer — ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour, a whole hour. My ability to concentrate began to return. I could write a good essay at one sitting rather than in broken snatches over several days; I could lose myself in a movie; for long periods of time I could actually forget who I was, where I was and — miracle of miracles — what I’d done.

To my immense relief, the recurring nightmare eventually stopped too. After one final chilling performance it never came back again. I still had dark dreams (sitting astride Emma Townley on the floor of the school toilets, pounding her head into a red jelly with the marble chopping board), but the important thing was that I began to have normal dreams as well. I had anxiety dreams about my approaching exams (I couldn’t read the exam questions because the print was so minuscule; I’d been set the medieval history paper instead of the modern history paper I’d revised for); comic, surreal dreams (walking across the desert on stilts with a litter of baby hamsters squirming around down my shirt front; Mum turning into a giant hen able to lay eggs the size of cars). I had romantic dreams again too: flirting with George Clooney on the back seat of a New York cab after Mum and I had watched One Fine Day for the fifth time. (We were both talking on mobiles — ostensibly to other people, but really to each other. He said into his phone, ‘Do you want me to kiss you?’ and I said into mine, ‘I’d like that very much.’) I even had a romantic dream — I suppose erotic would be more honest — about Roger, of all people, a dream whose explicitness shocked me and left me feeling a little shamefaced around him for several days.

Another sign of my recovery was that my interest in the laptop began to reawaken.

I hadn’t gone near it since that night. I hadn’t wanted to touch it; I hadn’t even wanted to look at it. It was so caught up in all the horror (in some ways I even blamed it for everything that had happened) that the thought of taking it out of the sideboard was almost as repulsive as the thought of disinterring the burglar’s body.

As the weeks passed, however, I slowly started to overcome my aversion. I began to feel excited again by the thought of writing my essays on it, and being able to use the Internet without all the torturous delays and inexplicable glitches I had to endure with the beast. I was convinced the laptop would help drag my work out of the malaise it had fallen into. And my writing ambition, which had become so caught up with the whole idea of the computer, started to twitch back into life. I caught myself thinking with a callous egoism that even I found shocking: After everything I’ve lived through, surely I’ll be able to write something truly great? After all, how many writers actually know what it’s like to kill somebody?

Eventually I took the laptop out of the sideboard, where it had lain untouched since my birthday, and with Mum’s help, set it up on the dining-room table. At first I was worried it wouldn’t work, remembering how heavily it had fallen to the ground when I’d struck the knife between Paul Hannigan’s shoulder blades, but it flickered into electronic life at the first click of the switch on its side.

As I’d hoped, the laptop gave my revision a muchneeded boost. I stopped writing in longhand altogether and wrote notes, essays, everything, on it. I think I was actually able to type faster than I could write with the swirly girly hand I’d developed over the years at school. When Mum’s printer went on the blink, Roger was happy to take my memory stick home each day and print everything out for me on his computer. He refused to take any money for the paper or the ink that he used and I felt a huge gratitude towards him — more than gratitude, in fact, more like a warmth — and it reassured me to think that my capacity for friendship hadn’t been poisoned by what had happened with the JETS.