Mice.
There are eight glass tanks, two stacks of four, in the pet shop window. The pet shop is on the High Street, a couple of doors down from Xoom Clothing, which is where Julie’s due to meet David in five minutes. He’s persuaded her to come and look at a jacket he’s planning to buy. Because they left work early, it’s not like Julie could have made an excuse or said she planned something else, because right now she should be plonking Pepperoni Passions on tables and wiping sweaty blobs of salad dressing off plastic tablecloths. And what else is there to do? Luke’ll be asleep at this time of day and it’s not like Julie has any other friends.
All the mice are asleep, apart from one that’s moving around the glass cube with determination. It seems to be making a nest in the far right-hand corner; piling up bits of white stringy bedding probably made in a factory for exactly this purpose. Julie looks at the other tanks: the other mice all have nests in precisely the same corner, which is pretty weird, but then mice are a bit weird – like flies that only fly in geometric shapes.
Julie remembers once opening a cupboard in her old house in Bristol and seeing a biscuit packet with a perfect round hole cut into it. At first she thought it had been made by a machine. She was confused because who’d want to use a machine to make a perfect hole in a packet of Jammy Dodgers? Then she saw it. At the back of the cupboard, in the darkest spot, was a little ball of shredded paper – mainly bits of biscuit packet and most of a greengrocer’s paper bag. Julie poked it with her finger, and there was definitely something warm inside, but nothing happened and she was kind of scared. She didn’t poke it again. Later that night she saw a small brown creature run across the kitchen floor. The next day the nest was slightly larger, and the rest of the biscuits had disappeared.
Julie watches as the pet shop mouse tries to work out how to drink from the water bottle. She suddenly becomes aware that she is looking at a confined animal. How does she feel about that? Most people would look at an animal in a cage and instinctively feel that it should be set free. But this mouse seems pretty comfortable in the little tank, and seems to have everything it needs: food, water, a bed and some space to run around in. Julie wonders what choice the mouse would make if it was given one, if someone was able to communicate with it and say, ‘Hello, mouse, would you like to be set free? It’s a dangerous world out there, filled with predators, and you might starve or freeze to death or be eaten by a cat, but at least you’ll be free. Alternatively, you could choose to stay in your tank, where you’ll be kept safe, and cared for, and fed.’ Would that mouse choose freedom, which, in Julie’s opinion, is essentially a human concept (does the mouse know it’s not free in its cage?), or would it instead think, ‘No, my instincts lead me to safety and it’s safe in here.’ If there were no humans about and the cage was open, would the mouse even run away?
What would you prefer? A comfortable, safe, warm, cosy life in a cage; or an uncertain life of freedom? Julie would choose the cage, she suddenly realises, as long as her cage was safe; and fitted with a computer and modem, say, and satellite TV – and lots and lots of puzzles. She frowns, picturing herself in this comfortable cage. No matter how hard she tries, she can’t think of any reason why she wouldn’t want to live like that. In fact the vision of such a safe, comfortable life with everything provided for her suddenly makes Julie want to cry. It’s so beautiful.
‘All right?’ says David.
‘Oh, hi,’ Julie says, blinking and losing her perfect image. ‘I didn’t see you coming.’
He’s emerged from somewhere behind her. Now he’s standing next to her looking through the pet shop window, breathing steam all over the glass. It’s cold this afternoon, although they did forecast rain on the news this morning.
‘What are you looking at?’ he asks.
‘Mice. I’ve never really looked at mice before. They’re weird.’
David laughs. ‘Hey, maybe we could do a raid on the pet shop and set them free.’
‘Do you think they’d really want to be set free?’ she asks.
‘Yeah, of course,’ says David. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Nothing. Come on, it’s freezing out here.’
Xoom is one of those clothes shops that are kind of dark inside, with moody assistants and £200 price tags. Two local drug dealers own the shop and most of the clientele are already their customers and/or wannabe drug lords themselves; larging it in Stüssy and CP Company or whatever’s in fashion now. Julie hasn’t been in this shop for a few years but it hasn’t changed much.
The men’s stuff takes up most of the rail space: shiny shirts and slightly flared jeans and huge, fluffy, hooded tops. There is one rail of girls’ clothes, on which there are tiny T-shirts and dresses that you could almost imagine using to dress a doll rather than a person. Julie prefers Miss Selfridge and Top Shop for clothes. Her favourite style, at least to look at, is probably that recycled look with clothes from charity shops. It always looks great in magazines – suede jackets, frayed jeans, wool bags, second-hand jewellery and cowboy boots – but there’s no way she could wear something that belonged to a dead person, or, worse, something that someone could actually have died in. Whenever Julie goes into Oxfam, all she can think about is someone crying as they bundle clothes up – a mother usually, crying over her dead daughter’s things. The last time she went in, there were rails full of club-wear – rubber dresses, PVC trousers and little sequined tops. These clothes had obviously all belonged to the same person and Julie obsessed for about six months over what must have happened to her.
‘All right, mate,’ David says to one of the assistants.
‘Yo, bro,’ he says. He looks at Julie. ‘All right?’ he says.
Julie looks at him. ‘Uh, hi,’ she says.
‘It’s Julie, isn’t it?’ he asks. ‘Haven’t seen you for a while.’
David looks confused. ‘You know each other?’ he asks.
‘School,’ says Will. ‘You used to go around with, um . . .’
‘No one,’ Julie reminds him. ‘I went around on my own.’
Will looks uncomfortable. ‘Oh, right,’ he says.
David looks weirded-out. Julie knows that as far as he’s concerned she’s always been a bit of a loner and strange in some way. Maybe he’s freaked out to imagine her at school – at the same school as Will, who’s one of those guys that other guys seems to adore in a bizarre way, waiting for him to acknowledge them in the street, to nod his head or call out a Yo! Bro, or know their name or who their friends are. Maybe David’s just shocked because Julie’s not trying to be cool with Will. But Julie doesn’t want to be cool. She doesn’t want to belong to a social group like some sort of ant or insect and text message people and call them m8 and pretend to do drugs or know the right word for dope (it was ‘draw’ last time she checked, but that was about three or four years ago). She just wants to be on her own, or with Luke. A glass tank would be pretty good right now but it would have to be the sort of glass you can’t see through.
‘Didn’t you used to be blonde?’ asks Will.
‘No,’ Julie says.
There’s silence for a couple of seconds.
‘So anyway, what can I do you for, mate?’ Will asks David.
Fifteen minutes later, David has a new jacket. It’s grey and sort of shiny.
‘Do you want to get a drink or something?’ he asks Julie.
She looks at her watch. ‘I’m not sure . . .’
‘Come on, don’t be boring.’
Julie looks down at the pavement. ‘I like being boring.’
‘Yeah, I can see that. Go on. Just a quick one?’
‘Oh, all right. Rising Sun?’
David makes a face – it’s too grungy to be his kind of place – but they start walking in the direction of The Rising Sun anyway.