My urge for retribution delivered an unexpected memory

There was less sport to these games more scrimmage, which meant one day, when a pitch ricocheted wildly in my direction, I was able, amid the scuffle, to pick it up unseen. “Where’s it gone?” the curly-haired boy demanded. His voice was desperate. “Where’s it gone?!”

The idea formed itself in an instant. I clutched that fistful of rubber behind my back and pretended, like all the others, that its disappearance was a mystery. My skin prickled with danger, with the possibility I was only making my situation worse. But the boy and his friend had stolen me, stolen my joy of school, and here was a chance for me to steal something back.

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Once home, I imagined enjoying that brilliant ball all to myself, but one toss of it against the pale brick of our bungalow and Mum was there, insisting that I tell her where it had come from. An inquisition followed: me, seated on the centre cushion of the sofa, squirming, the slubby green fabric rough beneath my thighs; my parents standing over me, arms folded.

“Did you steal that ball?” they asked. I froze. I was a good girl, and good girls did not lie. But I had no vocabulary to explain why this was not a case of theft, it was justice. “No,” I told them. “I found it.” They knew I was lying. And I knew I was not a good girl after all.

My school-ground “mummy” and her curly-haired friend relinquished their grip on me, fearful maybe of what I might steal next, but I retained no sense of victory. I hid the ball at the back of our spidery shed and tried not to catch sight of it whenever I fetched my bike, else I be revisited by sickening guilt.

It is that sour, lingering aftertaste that likely, subconsciously, prompted me to write a book about revenge. I was after a different ending to my own story perhaps, one where my two school-ground captors are forced to look back at their actions with shame; a version where I no longer cast myself as the villain.

The spidery shed is long gone but the ball could have survived, migrating into my dad’s garage. Should I glimpse it again, I’ll see it as a souvenir of a time when I was clever, courageous. It’s a too-late forgiveness of my younger self but still, let there be some justice in that.

Little Nothings (Bloomsbury) by Julie Mayhew is out now.

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