Mice Read Free Page A

been renewed for fourteen years.
    The only job she’d been able to find was as a legal assistant at Davis, Goodridge & Blakely, a law firm in one of the seedy back streets in town behind the railway station. The partners used her long absence from the law as an excuse to offer her a laughable salary – ‘Take it or leave it’, they said – and, of course, she took it. She was given a desk in a small office that she shared with two of the secretaries, to make clear that she was seen as little more than another secretary rather than as a qualified lawyer in her own right.
    But the partners quickly realized how competent she was, and were astonished at the speed with which she caught up on what she’d missed. Blakely, the sleazy crime partner, unloaded a shameful number of his clients onto her and used her as a personal assistant and general dogsbody; Davis, the head of the personal injury department, began to pass her more and more of his problem files, the ones he’d got into such a mess he had no idea what to do with them next. By the end of her first year Mum was carrying some of the firm’s most difficult cases and being paid less than the secretaries.
     
    Brenda and Sally, the secretaries who shared Mum’s cramped office, thought her move out of town into Honeysuckle Cottage was a mistake and didn’t hesitate to tell her so. ‘Shelley’s nearly sixteen now, Elizabeth,’ Brenda said. ‘She’s going to want to meet up with friends in town in the evening—’
    ‘That’s right,’ said Sally. ‘She’ll be going out clubbing every weekend if she’s anything like my one. You’re going to spend your whole life going backwards and forwards to town dropping her off and picking her up.’
    Mum tried to keep her private life private – or as private as it was possible to keep it without offending Brenda and Sally, who were happy to offer up the most intimate secrets of their marriages without the slightest embarrassment.
    Mum just blushed and mumbled something about not minding it really and that she was sure Shelley wouldn’t take advantage. This had met with great cries of protest and derision: Elizabeth, you’re such a soft touch!
    Brenda and Sally were always saying this sort of thing to her – Elizabeth, you’re too nice! Elizabeth, why do you put up with it? Elizabeth, why don’t you stand up for yourself? They’d watched her meekly accept a pay rise that was downright insulting, they’d seen Davis and other lawyers in the firm dump their problems on her desk and barely thank her when she solved them, they’d seen Blakely regularly sidle up to her at five minutes to five and ask her to work late or to ‘look at this file over the weekend’ because he knew she was too weak to say no. A day rarely went by when either Brenda or Sally didn’t have cause to cry out, Elizabeth, you’re such a soft touch!
    She didn’t tell them the truth about me, of course. She didn’t say that I wouldn’t need lifts into town to meet my friends from school because I didn’t have any friends from school. Not a single one. She didn’t tell them that I’d been the victim of a bullying campaign so vicious I’d had to be withdrawn from school altogether and was now receiving tuition at home. She didn’t tell them that on the advice of the police, my new address had been withheld from my school in case the girls concerned discovered it.

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    The girls concerned . The three girls concerned: Teresa Watson, Emma Townley and Jane Ireson.
    They’d been my best friends ever since we were put in the same class at the age of nine. We played together every breaktime (skipping, hula hoop, hopscotch, granny’s footsteps), we sat together every lunchtime in the school canteen to eat our packed lunches. We regularly met up at each other’s houses over the weekends and during the long school holidays. We were an inseparable little clique, a club. We even gave ourselves a name, the JETS – an acronym made from the first