Mice

5

The bullying began around March of my fourth year in secondary school. We were still living in the matrimonial home at the time — Dad had left us more than six months before — and our move to Honeysuckle Cottage was still some ten months away.

I’ve never really understood precisely what triggered it. I know I won the school short-story competition around that time, and was presented with a small silver cup at morning assembly. I know we were weighed and measured in physical education then, too, and I’d been the heaviest girl in the class. I know I was very teary that March as my dad’s custody application was on the twenty-fourth, and even though Mum’s lawyer assured me it wasn’t going to happen, I was still terrified that the judge would order me to go and live with him and Zoe. Our form teacher, Miss Briggs, who knew all about the divorce, was very attentive to me over that period — if she saw I was upset she didn’t hesitate to put her arm around me and take me off to her office to talk my spirits back up over a cup of peppermint tea. Perhaps they were jealous of this attention, perhaps they were jealous because I’d won an important school prize, perhaps being officially the fattest girl in the class I suddenly lost all right to be treated like a human being. . I don’t know. I have no idea. Perhaps cruelty just has a logic all of its own.

It began slowly with wisecracks and put-downs which could have been seen as leg-pulling at first, but pretty soon lost any trace of good humour and were revealed for what they were: hostile, mean, designed to hurt. I was shell-shocked. After so many years of friendship, the fact that my best friends didn’t like me any more left me reeling, bewildered. I tried to keep my distance from them, but I was their entertainment now, a new diversion they’d discovered to help get them through the tedium of school. They came looking for me at break and lunchtime, and although I tried desperately to hide they would invariably find me. In a grotesque mockery of the games we used to play together, they’d dance around me, their arms linked so I couldn’t escape, shouting the worst insults they could think of until they’d succeeded in making me cry: Your dad left ’cause you embarrassed him, you fat retard! Shelley’s mum puts her tampons in for her!

But this name calling quickly bored them. They needed to raise the level of spite a few notches for the game to keep their interest.

They started to vandalize my personal property. Every day I came back after break to find some new intrusion, some new violation: all my coloured pencils snapped in two; a piece of history homework I’d spent hours on scissored into ribbons; Tippex poured onto the neat brown-bread triangles of my sandwiches; the contents of the wastepaper bin emptied into my schoolbag; a worm as long as a shoelace squashed inside my English exercise book; ‘pizza face’ and ‘fat pig’ scrawled in black marker on the back of my wooden ruler; all my lucky troll’s mauve hair pulled out and his face scribbled over with biro; two hard pieces of dog turd stuffed inside my Hello Kitty pencil case.

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.