The Furies: A Novel (12 page)

‘She turns up every day. She seems engaged.’

‘Then don’t worry. Please don’t. Meet me after work and we’ll have a drink somewhere nice.’ His face crumpled as he pleaded with me. I knew when I was beaten.

*   *   *

The following Monday, Ricky was first into the classroom. He was almost bouncing: I guessed he had returned to the Unit a hero. Donnie Brooks, I now knew from the building grapevine, was not a popular boy.

‘Ricky, I’m glad you’re back.’

‘Hello, miss.’ He grinned. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘I understand you were conducting your own epic battles on the stairs?’

‘Not really. Donnie went down after one punch. I can’t wait till he gets bigger. It’ll make it so much easier—’

‘Ricky, I feel sure that if I don’t know what the end of that sentence is, I won’t ever have to admit it to the police.’

‘Yes, miss. Sorry.’ He smiled again and sat down.

The others straggled in behind him. Having them for the first lesson of the day always meant that the first ten minutes were a bust. Carly and Mel turned up together, Annika was late and Jono later still. When he finally arrived, he was sweaty and harassed.

‘Nice to see you, Jono.’

‘Sorry.’ He was panting.

‘Is everything OK?’

‘Not really, I can’t find… It doesn’t matter.’

He sat down heavily and there was a small cracking sound. I hoped his chair wasn’t going to collapse. Annika sniggered, but said nothing.

Jono looked down at his feet, and let out a cry of anger. ‘It’s here. I…’

‘What is it?’

‘Which one of you fucking cunts did this?’ He was on his feet, and turned away from me to the girls.

Annika was smirking, Mel was reading the back of her book. Carly cracked first.

‘What exactly is it you think we’ve done?’ she asked.

‘This.’ He reached down and lifted the chair leg. A shattered plastic games console was beneath it. ‘My PSP. That’s why I was late. I couldn’t find it and that’s because one of you took it and left it here so it would get broken.’

‘It’s hardly our fault you’re so heavy,’ said Annika.

‘That isn’t either helpful or pleasant, Annika.’ I had to step in. I’d never seen him so upset. ‘The weight of anyone would have cracked it. I’m so sorry, Jono. Let me take it to Robert’s office at break. I’ll see if it’s covered on the Unit’s insurance.’

‘It won’t be,’ said Annika. ‘We’re not supposed to bring that stuff to school.’

Jono’s darkening face was now plastered with his damp hair, the sweat was dripping onto his shoulders.

Ricky pawed at Jono’s arm. ‘Leave it, pal. It wasn’t any of them. Why would they do something like that?’

‘Who else would have done it?’ Jono turned his fury on Ricky, who didn’t reply.

I answered him. ‘None of us knows who did it, Jono. I’m really sorry it’s broken. But I don’t think you can just fling accusations at everyone. Let me take it to Robert. I’ll see what I can do.’ I reached over and touched his arm. He flinched and so did I. For a moment, I thought he might hit me. I looked up into his eyes: I hadn’t really noticed before that he was taller than me. ‘Please.’

His face suddenly morphed from almost-adult to child. In a second you could see what he must have looked like when he was a toddler, all round face and screwed-up eyes, trying so hard not to cry.

He opened his hand, and I took the broken plastic from him. The screen was completely shattered. It was someone’s perfect revenge.

DD,

Today, I have two things to report. The first is that I’ve found out something else about Alex. I spent the weekend at Carly’s. Which was brilliant, actually. Her mum was less weird than usual. Maybe she’s getting used to me. We went there together on Friday, after we finished at Rankeillor.

It’s a nice walk over to Carly’s: across the North Bridge, then over to Princes Street, to the shops so Carly could buy some hair extensions and I could get some nail varnish, even though I’ve broken three nails so they look like shit at the moment. Then we head down Dundas Street, which is all fancy little shops with ornaments and stuff. For rich old people. At the bottom of Dundas Street the shops run out and we get to Inverleith Row, which is where Carly lives, in one of those big terraces. It must be amazing living right by the Botanics. I love going there. They’re the most beautiful gardens in Scotland, Carly’s mum says, and she might be right. I haven’t been to any others, so I don’t know for sure.

The other thing that’s good about them is that it’s always so quiet there. They’re so big that you can wander round for hours and not hear anything. But everywhere’s quiet to me, right? That’s another myth about deaf people I can put right. Hearing aids mean that I spend a lot of my time hearing too much. Sirens are the worst thing. It’s like someone drilling into my head when a police car comes past. And they’re not even emergencies half the time. I once saw an ambulance driver, all guns blazing, going up Nicolson Street eating a doughnut. If it’s a real emergency, you don’t have time to stop and buy a cake. They just like using the siren. But I would honestly rather get run over than have to hear them coming.

So on Saturday we went to the Botanic Gardens and walked round the hothouses and the rock garden. That’s the best part – it’s so high up there. You can see all the way over Edinburgh. I love that.

But I’m getting ahead of the story, because it was Friday when we saw her. On Friday night, we went out for pizza in the Old Town. There’s a new place that Carly’s mum had been to with some people from work and she thought we’d like it there. And we did, actually: the garlic bread was all crispy and oily. It was really good.

Then on the way home we went down curly little Cockburn Street so we could look in the windows. They have loads of cool stuff there – proper shops, you know, where you can buy clothes and bags and those cute little Japanese dolls that Carly loves. I bought her two of them for Christmas. Then we walked up past Waverley Station. I don’t like going down a hill and then up one if you don’t have to, but the North Bridge was rammed with people on Friday evening: hen nights, stag nights, the lot. All with their matching t-shirts and hilarious Jimmy wigs. Carly’s mum doesn’t like crowds, so we went the hilly way instead.

And it was lucky we did, because as we went past the station we saw Alex coming out of there. If it had been even a few seconds earlier, we’d have missed her: the airport buses all wait there, so you can’t usually see across the road. But the bus had just pulled away, and the next bus hadn’t pulled up into the space yet, and there she was. She didn’t see us, though. Carly wanted to go and say hello, but I stopped her. Alex looked really tired and really sad, so I thought we should leave her alone.

But still, this means we know where she goes on a Friday. Actually, it doesn’t. As Carly pointed out, it means we sort-of know where she went on one Friday. And since no-one would go to Waverley for a look round the shops, all we really know is that she goes somewhere by train on Fridays. Or on one Friday.

But that’s more than we knew before, isn’t it? Carly thinks she goes to London to visit the grave of her fiancé. That’s a bit lame, I admit, but it is romantic. And I reckon Alex is the romantic kind. Or why does she like all those plays so much? I know they’re not romantic like I-pine-away-for-the-love-of-you bollocks. But I don’t think that’s all that romantic, actually. You know who pined away for the love of someone who died? Greyfriars Bobby, and he’s a fucking dog.

Tragedies are romantic because they’re about people fucking up their own and other people’s lives even though they’re often trying really hard not to. And happy endings are much less romantic than fuck-ups, aren’t they? Carly thinks I’m mental for believing this. We talked about it in her room that night. She wants everyone to kiss and live happily-ever-after. I bet she does that, actually. I bet she meets a boy who really loves her and they do just fall in love and be happy forever. He’d better not be a dick, is all I can say. I’ve seen enough of that with my mum.

I wonder if any of the others have started writing like I have. Alex mentions it sometimes – we could make notes about the text we’re reading in our diaries, that kind of thing. No-one ever says they don’t have one. But then she never asks to see the notes. So maybe it’s just me doing it. But I’m the one who wants to be a journalist. I’m the one who’s going to make things happen.

And the second thing I have to report is this: Jono is sorry now that he was so vile to Alex. I hope she saw how clever I was. All this term we’ve been reading about Oedipus being, as Alex says, the architect of his own misfortune, and that’s just what Jono was. He’s always angry and obnoxious, exactly like Oedipus. What’s the word Alex uses? Hubris. Jono has a lot of that. So I made the story happen in the real world, sort of. And even if Alex doesn’t guess it was me, I still know.

It’s this side of things that I think I will struggle to explain to the lawyers when we eventually meet. Why wasn’t I afraid of these children? And did I really think that I was helping them by asking them to read Sophocles or Aeschylus? In which case, was I naïve, or actually stupid? I suppose I was both, and that’s what I will have to tell them.

Yes, I thought that the tragedies we were reading were better for them than other therapeutic stuff we could have done. I didn’t mind playing therapy games with the younger children. They loved acting and it was good for them, I think, the role-plays and so on. But this group, the group Mel was in, was different. They wanted to feel like grown-ups, and playing games would have been just another type of collage: the very thing they said they didn’t want to do any more. So, yes, studying serious plays by real writers was better.

Besides, I had lost patience with therapy after Luke died. I was referred to a grief counsellor who was every kind of idiot. Her capacity for trying to look on the bright side made my mother look like Sartre. I tried not to hate her and everything she stood for, but it was one struggle too many. I didn’t want to be cured of my grief, I wanted to wrap myself up in it like a comfortable old coat which I’d first put on when my father died.

I wanted to wear it every minute of the day, to sleep in it and wake in it, and never to be rid of it because it was the only thing keeping me warm. I gave up talking to my friends, to Luke’s friends, because everyone wanted to try to make me feel better, to talk about the healing qualities of time and what Luke would have wanted. But what Luke wanted didn’t matter any more. That’s what happens when you die. And I didn’t want time to heal my wounds. I wanted to pick at them until fat bubbles of dark blood formed on my skin, and then I wanted to watch them scab over and pick at them again.

*   *   *

‘Are there any Greek plays where everyone doesn’t die?’ Carly asked. I had brought in a pile of Penguin Classics for them to choose from.

‘Yes, of course. I don’t think anyone dies in Sophocles’
Philoctetes
.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘It’s about a man who has a bad foot, after he got bitten by a snake,’ I said.

‘Nah, we did a play with a bloke who had a sore foot already,’ said Jono.

He had calmed down after the last disastrous lesson. I had taken his broken console to Robert’s office and explained there had been an accident. Robert had called his parents, and Jono’s mother couldn’t have been nicer, apparently. She was happy to claim the console on her insurance, and had promised Robert that her son wouldn’t bring the replacement to the Unit. Jono still looked at Mel and Annika with thinly veiled suspicion, but he seemed to have accepted that whoever had set him up had done so too efficiently to get caught. I hoped he wasn’t biding his time to exact revenge.

‘It’s a different kind of sore foot. It won’t ever heal up, and his friends abandon him on an island so they don’t have to put up with him any longer.’

‘Jesus. Did Sophocles have more than one idea?’ he asked. ‘Or did he only write about a bloke with a bad foot getting abandoned?’

‘He wrote
Antigone
. I think you’d like that.’ I looked at Carly. ‘But lots of people do die in it, so maybe we should leave that one for now. We could do Euripides’
Helen
. That’s a fun one. It turns out that Helen didn’t go to Troy after all, but to Egypt.’

‘Isn’t she called Helen of Troy?’ Annika said.

‘She often is, yes.’

‘Well, someone’s telling fibs, then,’ said Jono. ‘Let’s give that one a miss.’

‘What about
Alcestis
?’ asked Mel. She was reading the back cover of the collected Euripides plays.

‘We can certainly do that next, if you like. It’s a different playwright, so the foot obsession shouldn’t be a problem. And it has a happy ending.’

‘It’s a tragedy and no-one dies?’ Annika asked, suspiciously.

‘Someone does die. But it isn’t permanent.’

‘How can you die and it not be permanent?’

‘You’ll have to read the play to find out.’

‘Can’t you give us the background? So that when we read it, we know what’s going on?’ asked Jono.

They were, in this regard, exactly like every other child in lessons anywhere in the country. They would seize any opportunity for me to do the work so they didn’t have to.

Mel read the back cover aloud. ‘“
Alcestis
, an early play in which a queen agrees to die to save her husband’s life, is cast in a tragic vein, although it contains passages of satire and even comedy.” That sounds alright, doesn’t it?’

Carly nodded. ‘So she doesn’t die? She just agrees to die?’

‘She’s dying at the start of the play,’ I said. ‘Her husband, Admetus, was supposed to get ill and die. But the god Apollo owes him a favour, and so he makes a bargain with the Fates. Admetus can live, if he can persuade someone else to die in his place. That’s where we are at the start of the play: Alcestis is dying because she wants to save her husband from dying.’

‘God, that is devoted,’ said Jono. ‘Would any of you die for me?’ He looked over his shoulder at the girls. ‘Anyone?’