Free Mice by Gordon Reece

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