Free Mice by Gordon Reece Page A

healed up, I’d meet someone. Someone handsome like George Clooney but with the boyish innocence of a young Tom Hanks; someone loyal and sincere who wouldn’t leave you when your looks started to fade and the crow’s feet came . . .
    Something was stirring inside me, quickening into life in the same way that the garden of Honeysuckle Cottage was quickening into life outside my window in the gentle spring rain, sprouting green shoots, opening sticky buds, unfurling virgin petals. When I woke up I would be sixteen. Old enough to get married , Mum had said. I felt as though I stood on the threshold of exciting new experiences, new emotions, new relationships, and I yearned for them as the butterfly in the chrysalis yearns to spread its fragile wings and fly.
    Thinking these thoughts, I fell into a sweet, delicious sleep.

12
    My eyes snapped open and I was instantly wide awake. Even though I’d been sunk in the depths of a deep, deep sleep, the unmistakable pig squeal of the fourth stair had reached the part of the brain that never sleeps. I had no doubt what I’d heard, and I had no doubt what it meant: someone was in the house .
    The fluorescent display of the alarm clock on my bedside table said 3:33.
    I could feel my heart pounding in my chest like something with a life of its own, like a rabbit writhing and twisting in a snare that grew tighter the more it struggled. I strained to hear above the booming roar in my temples. My ears probed outside my bedroom door – the landing, the staircase – like invisible guard dogs, constantly sending back information: silence, silence, silence, there’s only silence: we can find nothing . Could I have been mistaken? But I knew I wasn’t. I’d heard the fourth stair scream under a person’s weight.
    Sure enough, after what seemed like an eternity of waiting there came the groan of another stair, a higher stair: s omeone was in the house .
    I was paralysed with fear. Since my eyes had opened I hadn’t moved a muscle. It was as if a primitive instinct – to keep absolutely still and not make a sound until the danger had passed – had taken control of me. Even my breathing had become so slow, so shallow that it made no sound, and didn’t move the quilt the tiniest fraction. I thought about the rounders bat I kept under the bed ‘in case of burglars’, but I was powerless to reach down to grasp it. Something stronger held me frozen and immobile. Keep still , it ordered, don’t make a sound until the danger’s passed .
    The footsteps continued up the stairs – louder now, as if the intruder had given up trying to be quiet. I heard a body bump heavily into the cabinet on the landing ( drunk? ) and a voice swearing ( a man ).
    I heard him open Mum’s bedroom door. I knew that he’d switched her light on, because the thick darkness in my room lightened infinitesimally. I heard Mum’s voice. Sleepy. Confused. Frightened. Then the man’s voice, a stream of aggressive, guttural grunts that sounded more animal than human. ‘Wait,’ I clearly heard Mum say. ‘My dressing gown.’ Then I heard them both walking towards my bedroom.
    My door shushed open against the thick nap of the carpet, and my light exploded into white blinding life.
    Even though they were both in my bedroom I still didn’t move ( keep still, don’t make a sound until the danger’s passed ). I lay as still and helpless as if my neck had been broken.
    Mum said my name to wake me, but I couldn’t answer. She said it again louder, closer to my bed. Finally she appeared in my vision. Her pale face was still battered by sleep, her hair wildly disordered in a way that would have been funny in other circumstances, her dressing gown pulled on hastily, its belt hanging loose. She saw that I’d been awake all the time and that I knew exactly what was happening.
    ‘Shelley, darling,’ she said, ‘don’t be frightened. He just wants money. If we do everything he says, he’s going to go away and leave us