Mice

7

I remember the attack that could have killed me far less clearly than most of the others.

I’d gone to the girls’ toilets at break as I’d been having really bad period cramps all morning. I thought I heard Teresa and Emma talking, but when I came out of the cubicle there were just some younger girls mucking around by the paper-towel dispenser. I went to wash my hands. The water was cold and I let it run to warm up. I’d just squeezed some turquoise liquid soap into the palm of my hand when I was suddenly grabbed around the neck and jerked violently backwards.

I caught a brief glimpse of Jane’s flushed face and the terrified juniors running away as I was swung round hard into the cubicle door. My forehead cracked against the doorframe and, completely stunned, my head ringing, stars exploding in front of my eyes, I slid on some soggy tissue paper and ended up in a sitting position on the wet floor.

I was aware of Emma and Teresa kneeling close beside me, holding me still, almost as if they were trying to help me. I heard a click-clicking sound close to my face and Emma’s voice say: This is how you cook a pig. Teresa and Jane burst into throaty laughter — and then they were gone.

I sat dazed on the floor for what seemed like a very long time. I dabbed at my nose, which had started to bleed, and felt a strange prickling sensation creeping over my scalp. I was getting unsteadily to my feet when one of the juniors came in and saw me. She let out a piercing horror-movie scream, then turned and ran out again.

Managing to stand upright, I walked slowly, shakily, towards the mirror to clean myself up before the next class. But when I looked for my reflection, I wasn’t there. There was a girl my shape and size wearing the blouse and skirt I’d put on that morning — but she had no face. Instead of a face there was a swirling ball of orange flame.

I still hadn’t recognized the horror in the mirror when Mr Morrison burst in. He came running towards me (I saw it all in slow motion), roaring like a soldier charging into battle (but I couldn’t hear anything), and tearing off his jacket (that’s when I knew the girl in the mirror was me), he held it up like a blanket (I called out for Mum) and threw it over my burning head (but no sound came).

And then everything went black.

While I was in hospital, Mum found my diary. She was looking for my favourite baby-blue pyjamas when she stumbled on it. She broke the lock open and read everything. Appalled and horrified, she took it straight to my school and showed it to the head teacher.

Mum told me later that the head had ordered the three girls to his office, insisting that Mum stay while he conducted the interview (I could just imagine how she must have squirmed, as reluctant to confront them as I had been). Apparently Teresa, Emma and Jane weren’t the slightest bit intimidated by his summons; to them the head was little more than a joke, an obese, bumbling clown straight out of a third-rate sitcom. Nor were they fazed when they saw Mum. She said they slouched, sniggering and grinning, in their chairs, eyeing her with contempt, all memories of her past hospitality and kindness to them forgotten.

The head read out some of the most damning extracts from my diary and then demanded, ‘Well? What do you have to say about this?’

And they had a lot to say, according to Mum. All shouting out at the same time, they angrily denied bullying me and protested that they’d been nowhere near the girls’ toilets when I was attacked. I could hear their three voices entwining like a cat’s cradle into one: She’s just trying to get us into trouble! She’s a freaking weirdo! It’s all a pack of lies!

This was the only time Mum said she spoke. It pained me to imagine how much it would have cost her. How with red face and trembling lips she’d managed to say: Shelley doesn’t lie.

Emma immediately snapped back at her, ‘If it’s all true, then how come she never told you?’ And Mum had fallen silent again.

Leaning forward in her chair towards Mum, Teresa said with a barely concealed smirk, ‘Maybe Shelley went into the girls’ loos to have a smoke and had some sort of accident with her lighter. Maybe she’d gone into the toilet to light up, Mrs Rivers.’ Emma and Jane had to cross their legs and bite their cheeks so as not to burst out laughing at her wicked joke.

Later the same day, they were interviewed by the police. They took these interviews much more seriously. Each girl was led separately into one of the soundproofed rooms at the local station, where a detective questioned them about the attack.

I could see it all: the three of them denying everything in teary, frightened voices while their parents held their hands and comforted them, convinced that their precious daughters were incapable of doing anything as barbaric as setting another girl’s hair on fire. The three of them telling lie after lie, carefully repeating the alibi they’d worked out together beforehand, while their solicitors sat tensed like jack-in-the-boxes, ready to jump up and object to any question they deemed inappropriate for their vulnerable young clients; demanding absolute fairness for girls who didn’t even know the meaning of the word.

Meanwhile, I lay in Lavender Ward, a twelve-bed women’s ward in the local general hospital. According to the consultant, I’d been very lucky. He tried to explain what had happened, but I hadn’t followed him very well. I’d been saved by the fact that the flames had shot upwards, pulling all my hair up with them. This had been helped somehow by a draught coming in through one of the toilet windows. It meant that the fiercest heat of the fire was above my head rather than on my face. It also seemed that my hair had only been on fire for a short time: it had felt so much longer, he told me, because I’d been in shock and shock slows time down to a snail’s pace.

Miraculously, I’d only sustained second-degree burns to my neck, forehead, right ear and left hand — which I must have put into the flames without realizing what I was doing or feeling any pain. My eyes and hearing were completely unaffected. Not even all of my hair had been burned. One visit to a good hairdresser to trim it into a new short style and, apart from a raw red patch at the back, it would be as if the attack had never happened. There were scars, of course — an ugly red-and-white marbling across my forehead and neck — but he assured me that these would fade in a relatively short period of time.

I was given painkillers and several injections; the burns were smeared in a cold, sweet-smelling cream and lightly dressed. I could have gone home that afternoon, but the consultant said that since I’d gone into shock and passed out, he wanted to keep me in for a few days just to be on the safe side.

It took a long time to get off to sleep that first night with all the unfamiliar noises and activity going on around me. The truth is that a hospital doesn’t really sleep at night; it just rests a little, that’s all. The night nurses passed up and down the ward attending to the patients who’d buzzed them or called out for them in hoarse whispers; patients slopped back and forth to the bathroom in their slippers; a new patient was brought in on a gurney at three o’clock in the morning; screens were wheeled into position around the bed of an elderly woman at the far end of the ward and my consultant briefly appeared, red-eyed and unshaven, to tend to her. Even if the ward had been completely silent, the light from the main corridor that blazed away all night would have made falling asleep difficult.

Yet strangely — in spite of the trauma I’d been through and the uncomfortable freezing sensation on my face, neck and hand — I felt happier lying under those tightly tucked-in sheets than I had for months. Everything was out in the open now. Mum knew. The school knew. The police knew. The hospital knew. It was as if the enormous burden I’d been struggling to carry all on my own had suddenly been lifted by a sea of helping hands. It was other people’s concern now — adults, professionals, experts in this type of thing. I was free from it at last.

I felt wonderfully at peace in the special atmosphere of the hospital. I loved the regularity of the routine (a cup of tea at three, visiting time at five, dinner at seven); I loved the nurses in their neat white uniforms who always stopped to have a little chat with me, knowing I was the youngest patient on the ward. I even loved the sharp pine scent of the disinfectant that pervaded everything, and the muzak they played for the elderly ladies in the afternoons — bland, woozy tunes from another time that were somehow strangely comforting. I enjoyed the company of the other women, who fussed over me and made me laugh with their outrageous jokes and bad language. They spoiled me terribly, insisting that I have the sweets and chocolates their relatives had brought in for them and refusing to take no for an answer.

There were plenty of other mice in the ward — maybe that’s why I felt so at home. There was Laura in the bed next to me, a fifty-one-year-old mouse, whose husband had beaten her with a baseball bat because she’d burned his dinner. There was eighteen-year-old Beatrice in the bed opposite, whose joky banter was darkly contradicted by the heavy bandages on her wrists. We all shared the same secret bond, what I called with bitter irony the fellowship of the mouse. I liked to amuse myself by imagining the fellowship’s badge that we’d wear on our breasts: a mouse in a trap with a broken neck, and our motto ‘Nati ad aram’ in a curling scroll — born with the victim gene. Was that Mum’s real legacy to me?

Sitting in my bed flicking through a magazine or idly doodling in my sketchbook, I felt relaxed and optimistic about the future. In their sadistic desire to hurt me, Teresa, Emma and Jane had ended up hurting themselves more. They were likely to be prosecuted for what they’d done to me — they could even end up being sent to prison. At the very least, they’d be expelled from school. Either way, they’d disappear from my life forever. I’d return to school and everything would go back to normal.

Normality! Glorious, dull, mundane normality! I couldn’t think of anything more wonderful!