‘Hey! Monster!’
Something small and dry hit my arm and fell into the grass beside me. I looked up. Three boys were standing a few metres away, up to their knees in the grass and laughing. Callum Jenkins, Liam Harper, and a lanky boy I didn’t know.
‘Freak.’ Callum Jenkins bent to scoop up a handful of dry sheep muck and lobbed it in my direction. It showered dustily around me and I covered the mouse skeleton with my hand.
The boy I didn’t know laughed. It was high and grating, and seemed too loud in the still summer day.
‘What you wearing that cap for?’ asked Callum Jenkins. ‘Hiding your stupid hair?’
Because it’s sunny, you idiot.
I thought about leaving. I remember being so sorely tempted to get up, to give them the finger and stride away down the field towards home. I wanted to shut the door on them. But then I would have had to leave the mouse, and with the grass this overgrown, I knew I would never find it again.
‘Is she bald?’ asked the boy I didn’t know.
Callum Jenkins lobbed another round of sheep muck. ‘Basically.’
‘Nah,’ said Liam Harper, ‘she’s just a freak.’
I tried to ignore them. I focused on my mouse, how its tail curled back in on itself so its body formed an almost perfect oval, except for the head, which stuck forward as if it had wanted to get one last glimpse of the world, or as if it had been looking for a rescuer. The boys’ laughter was loud and spiralling. I tried to tune out their jeers, but they bored into me, deeper and deeper into my brain, and I could not shut them out.
The mouse, I thought, the mouse, the mouse, the mouse . . .
My hands shook. I could see, where my right hand extended over the beautiful skeleton, a tremor that travelled through my wrists, back along my arm and into my chest, till my whole body was shaking and I couldn’t make it stop.
And then, in the midst of it all, my mother.
She strode up the field, tramping down the grass in her wellies, her long skirt catching in her wake. She looked out of place here, in what I thought of as my domain, as if someone had taken an ornament from the mantelpiece and placed it on top of a mountain. But her face was pulled tight with a fierceness I had never seen before, and for the first time there was something broad and unwieldy about her. As she flattened the grass, I thought of a lorry veering across a motorway, crashing through the central reservation and levelling the traffic on the other side.
The boys saw her coming and made to scarper, but my mother was an unstoppable torrent, and she would not relinquish them so easily.
‘Oh no you don’t. Liam Harper and Callum Jenkins, you get back here right now.’
From my hollow I watched them turn, all their gleeful bigness gone, till they were only three pitiful boys, squirming under my mother’s glare.
‘And you,’ she said to the third boy, ‘I don’t know you.’
The boy turned red and stuffed his hands deeper in his pockets. He shuffled.
‘Well?’
‘He’s my cousin,’ Liam Harper said, not looking my mother in the eye.
She folded her arms across her chest, her shoulders heaving. ‘Well, let me make this very clear to the three of you. If I ever catch you being mean to my daughter again, I’m going to grab each of you by the ear, and I’m going to twist it till you can’t even hear yourselves crying – is that understood?’
The boys looked at their feet. I sat with my head barely over the grass, watching my mother’s face – the power and anger I had never seen in it before, the way it flared up when she said ‘my daughter’. My daughter. Like my collection, or the way I had thought earlier about my mouse, as a thing to be cherished and protected.
‘I said, is that understood?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not allowed to hurt us . . .’
My mother blazed like a rocket flare. ‘Talk back to me again, Callum, and I’ll make sure nobody in the shop sells you sweets for a year, you little shit.’
My mother’s swearing thrilled through me. It was as though someone had opened a treasure chest, and for a second I got to glimpse the glittering jewel inside.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘I’m going to go inside and phone your mothers. I think they’d like to know what you’ve been getting up to, don’t you? And I think it’d be a good idea if you were home and ready to explain yourselves by the time they’ve hung up.’
The boys teetered, fidgeting.
‘Go on!’
And suddenly they were gone, back across the field towards the stile and the lane, fleeing to escape the boundaries of my mother’s rage.
My mother was still there, larger than herself, and suddenly all mine. She turned towards me and something in her shifted. The rage diminished. She was not any smaller in that big field, but she was somehow softer, stiller, so that for the first time I could remember I wondered what it would feel like to hug her, the way other children hugged their parents when they were picked up from school. Instead I sat and watched her walking towards me.
An arm’s reach away, she crouched, bringing her eyes to my level. ‘Are you OK?’
I shrugged.
I was fine. I was better than fine.
I said nothing.
‘What were you doing out here anyway?’
I pulled away my hand to show her my mouse, but I must have knocked it in all the distraction, because its tail bones no longer aligned and it was no longer quite as beautiful.
My mother made a choked sound and stood up, pushing herself back from it.
‘It’s my mouse,’ I said. I tried to nudge the bones back into place with my little finger, to recreate that undisturbed oval.
‘Don’t touch it!’
I looked up. My mother looked as though she wanted to snatch the words back into her mouth. Instead, she glanced in the direction of the stile and the retreating boys, then frowned back at me. And there she was again. My mother, petite and disapproving, exactly as I expected her to be.
‘I’ve left the dishes in the sink.’ She turned to leave, then half turned back to me. ‘I’m just in the kitchen. If you need me.’
She hovered a moment, as though there was more to be said, but neither of us could think of anything. So I watched her walk away, an ungainly shuffle as she tried to stop her skirt from catching in the grass. I watched her go through the back gate and in the door, till I could see her again through the kitchen window, standing at the sink.
I sat there for the rest of the afternoon, till my legs itched from the grass and the bug life, and a rash had broken out along my calf. I coaxed the mouse skeleton painstakingly back into shape. And I watched my fierce and startling mother pottering around the kitchen.
*
My parents died in the Sickness. My mother first, my father twelve days later. He always was a little bit hopeless without her.
I didn’t visit. At the time, the Sickness hadn’t yet reached where I was living, and I wouldn’t be the one to help it spread. Instead, I moved out of the city, rented a ramshackle house that was really more of a shed at the edge of an out-of-the-way village. Told myself it was right. My parents would want me to isolate myself.
I read their emails – frequent at first, full of optimism and denial, then growing briefer and more sporadic. I didn’t reply.
Two