The Furies: A Novel (16 page)

And that was what made me so angry. My mother had time to come to terms with what was happening to my father before he died. I did too, of course. It didn’t make it anything other than terrible, and his final weeks were a long, sad march of painkillers, palliative care and hopelessness. But we knew that he would die, and there was at least time, amongst everything else, to be reconciled to that idea.

With Luke, it was different. He was alive, complete, mine, and then he was gone. He was dead before I even knew he was hurt. And when the phone rang to tell me what had happened, it was his phone, only it wasn’t his voice: it was the voice of a passer-by, one of the three people who had run to help him, but could do nothing to stop the blood which flowed relentless from his chest.

They called an ambulance and then they called me, because mine was the last number Luke had dialled. If Luke had put a security lock on his phone, like I did, it would have been hours before I even found out what had happened. But of course he didn’t. He could never be bothered with things like that. He would give you his debit card and pin number if you were going out and he wanted some cash. So I answered the phone thinking it was him. And it was never going to be him again.

My overriding emotion, for months, was disbelief. I kept thinking there must have been a mistake, and that someone would rectify it, embarrassed by the error. Once that had passed, I couldn’t be helped. I couldn’t get to the person I wanted to hurt, so I hurt whoever was nearest. I rejected kindness and understanding and sympathy, because I wanted none of it. The only thing I wanted was not to need their pity, and it was too late for that.

I didn’t care who I hurt, because I knew that whatever I did, they would still be less injured than me, so what could they possibly complain about? And when I finally realised that neither my friends nor my family deserved this, I walked away, so I wouldn’t hurt them any more. I’d arrived in Edinburgh full of intentions to do something good, to make up for my cruelty. I didn’t manage that either.

4

In spite of their complaints, I was delighted to see all five of them had left their essays on my desk. Carly had written a story about two girls who are prepared to die for one another but end up surviving and living happily ever after. Romeo and Juliet would have married and lived to a happy retirement in Carly’s world. Annika proposed that Alcestis would have been better off as a single mother than married to Admetus, whom she considered a leech. I felt a rush of sympathy for Annika’s father, wondering if he knew how much contempt she had for him.

Mel wrote about her brother, wondering if she would have sacrificed her life as well as her hearing to keep him alive. Jono, of all people, produced a really good piece about the act of sacrifice in
Halo
, a video game I half-remembered Luke playing. The hero has to give up his life at the end of the game to save the universe. Mel and Jono’s essays were good, and not just for kids at Rankeillor, but for kids anywhere. Ricky, meanwhile, had pursued his belief in euthanasia for the over-fifties, which at least made it clear that he was thinking for himself, I decided, trying to look at it positively.

When I gave back their work, the kids were excited. They resisted any threat of homework, but they were thirsty for approval in the comments I wrote on the bottom of each essay. They read their own, and then leaned over to read each other’s.

‘Don’t we get a grade?’ asked Carly, turning her paper over to check I hadn’t hidden the mark.

‘No, you don’t. I wanted you to write about something which is meaningful to you, not to pass a test. I didn’t think marks would be appropriate. That’s why I wrote you quite a long comment at the bottom,’ I explained.

Mel’s face was glowing as she read hers, and Jono was trying to conceal the fact that he had gone bright pink.

‘Can I take this home, though?’ asked Ricky.

‘Of course, it’s your work.’

‘I want my grandparents to see that someone thinks I can do “a daring and original argument”,’ he said. I hoped they didn’t read the essay itself. Or, if they did, that they wouldn’t take it personally.

‘Well you can. I’m proud of you all.’

*   *   *

I meant it too. I hadn’t gone into the Unit expecting to like the job. I took it because I didn’t know what else to do. But even though things still went wrong, often, I felt I was beginning to make a difference. Robert was right about the kids at Rankeillor: as much as anything, they just wanted to be treated like normal kids, instead of unexploded hand-grenades. Everyone skirted round them: you only had to see them walking up the street on their way home at the end of the day. People would cross the road to avoid their squawky, swearing, unpredictable mass. I could understand the road-crossers – the kids often progressed from shouting to shoving and occasionally all-out fighting in the street, and we had several convicted muggers on the Unit, too – but it doesn’t take a leap of empathy to see that it isn’t much fun being feared by everyone.

I haven’t really mentioned the other kids I worked with at Rankeillor. I’ve focussed on the older group because they were, to me, the most interesting. The younger ones were a mixed bunch, and I had a small older group, who were halfway out of the Unit already – their minds more on where they were going next than where they were now. I took five groups in total. Some were more articulate than others, some were nicer. Some were bullies and some were victims. Many were both. I didn’t discuss tragedy with any other group: either they weren’t old enough, or they weren’t interested. It never came up.

The younger ones liked making up stories and acting them out. They enjoyed swapping roles partway through the performance, changing perspective. They had no problem with doing the drama equivalent of collages, in other words. They would commit plenty of energy to writing a short play, or a scene about a situation they had found challenging or upsetting, and then they would design costumes and sets that they could make or build in the basement room.

I wanted our sessions to be fun as well as therapeutic. I had placed limitations on the amount of glue they could use, because even if they could inhale large quantities with no apparent loss of brain function, I couldn’t. But that was pretty much my only rule. I wanted them to feel safe and to leave the room happier than they’d arrived. I worked hard to make that happen, and for the most part, I think it did.

Like most ostensibly bad children, as Robert had long maintained, they didn’t want to be bad. They were keen to learn how to relate better to each other, to their families and friends. They wanted to be happier and less angry. They didn’t enjoy the tantrums they nonetheless felt compelled to throw so frequently. They could usually understand that just as they didn’t like being shouted and screamed at, other people didn’t either. And if they couldn’t always make the extra step from recognising that fact to acting on it, that didn’t make them desperately unusual, for teenagers.

The real difference between the youngest kids and the older ones was that they had more time. They didn’t have that sell-by date which the older kids felt: if they didn’t hurry up and learn something soon, it would be too late. Too late shouldn’t really exist when you’re a teenager. You shouldn’t feel like your options are closing off so soon. But for Annika, Carly, Mel, Jono and Ricky, the career clock was already ticking. Their lives would soon need to fit onto application forms, and they knew it.

My relationship with the older class, as the lawyers have been quick to emphasise, wasn’t normal. Our sessions were unusual. But I keep clinging to this in the face of everything that has been said since: that wasn’t my intention. I didn’t go to Scotland to teach Greek tragedy to impressionable and emotional teenagers – another phrase the lawyers use, as if there is any other kind. I went there to try to make my life better, because I thought I could make their lives better, and I believed doing that would help me to recover something I’d lost when Luke died. And with every other group on the Unit, that is what happened. I don’t deny for a moment that it is my fault that things went catastrophically wrong. I wouldn’t consider denying it. But I didn’t fail all of them, and that should count for something.

DD,

We did it. Me and Carly skived off on Friday and followed Alex to London. I knew that’s where she was going. I am a genius. OK, maybe not a genius. Like I said before, once you don’t get off at Peterborough, you have to go to London. But still, I knew it. Here’s what she did.

She got on the exact same train that I was on last Friday. She sat in the same seat. And, again, she didn’t have an overnight bag with her or anything to read or eat or drink. We sat in the next carriage. That was Carly’s idea – she was panicking that we’d get caught when we were supposed to be at the Unit that day. She was panicking we’d get caught for fare-dodging too.

She said it was different when I’d gone the week before, because I’d had Robert’s permission. Which was true, I guess. Except I don’t think Alex would have noticed if we’d been sitting right next to her. Carly didn’t see how she was that day. Totally impervious, you know. That’s the word. I looked it up.

So we sat on the train all the way to London. Having Carly there was way more fun. We read magazines and listened to music and she did my nails a really nice dark red with blue glitter in it. These two old women opposite got all huffy about the smell and moved tables. I offered to do hers back, but she did them herself instead. She’s got much steadier hands than me, even on a moving train, so you can’t blame her.

We pulled into London after about a million years. Carly had never been there before. Not once. She’s never actually been south of Bamburgh Castle. She said her parents never fancied taking them: they prefer Spain for their holidays, because when you get there it’s definitely warm and sunny.

When we got off the train, I thought Carly was going to have a seizure at the noise and the crowds and everything. Everyone walks too fast. They’re all so busy and cross all the time. Makes you wonder why they’re so keen to live there. We followed Alex, but she looks like a zombie when she’s in London. I thought she hated being in Edinburgh, and was just there because London makes her sad now her boyfriend’s dead. But I had it the wrong way round.

Sometimes in Edinburgh she smiles. She even laughs every now and then, when one of us says something she likes. In London she’s like the walking dead. But still, she knows where she is and where she’s going, she’s not like us. She walks like she’s got to get somewhere. There’s a difference, isn’t there, in the way people move when they are going somewhere compared with when they’re just going for a walk? And Alex is definitely doing the first one. But, even though she has somewhere to be, everything about her is sad: her shoulders are hunched over, even when she’s not standing in the cold. She wears these wristwarmers, pulled up over her hands, holding them shut like mittens. And she looks at the ground all the time. You’d think she’d walk into people, but they sort of flow around her, because they can’t make eye contact with her, so they move instead of expecting her to.

She came out of King’s Cross and turned right. We followed her over the road and past the Harry Potter station, which I thought was supposed to be King’s Cross, but it isn’t, it’s next door. And then we went past the British Library, which looks pretty fucking massive for a library. There’s this huge statue of a man drawing something with a compass outside. And loads of posters up for an exhibition about beings from another world. I wouldn’t mind seeing that. Aliens in a library.

But she walked past there, and then over this massive road junction with about ten lanes of traffic from about six different directions. Carly had stopped talking, because she knows that when there’s this much stuff going on, I have to concentrate on the traffic. Then past more offices and some cafés and then we got to some fancy gates and she turned right and we went past these big white terraced houses that were fucking immense.

She crossed the road and we went into a little green park. We walked past a sign with a big map on it, and it turns out this is The Regent’s Park. It’s not a little park at all, even, it’s massive. We were just in the bottom bit. The Avenue Gardens, it said on the sign. No dogs allowed, next to a picture of a dog who looked all sad because he wasn’t allowed. Alex was still ahead of us. Even Carly had stopped flapping that she would turn around and see us. Alex barely stops for traffic. She just keeps going and going.

She crossed over a little road with a big fancy black and gold gate at one end. I wanted to see where that went, but we didn’t want to lose track of Alex. She walked past this tiny café, the Cow and Coffee Bean, and the toilets. Carly had to stop to use the loos, I waited outside to make sure Alex didn’t disappear. She walked up till we got to this big – actually, I don’t know what it was. It looked like a fountain, but it didn’t have any water in it. And then she took a path to the left and curled round this corner and suddenly we were walking alongside a zoo.

We could see some porcupines and sheep and goats. No lions and tigers and giraffes, but we saw some camels and a small kangaroo. There’s a fence between the path and the zoo, but it isn’t that high. We could have climbed in, easy. Then Alex turned left again, and she walked up to this big square building with huge windows around the sides.

We didn’t want to follow her inside, in case she saw us. That was Carly’s idea. So we hid behind a tree for a bit, and then I saw a bench and we sat on there, even though it was freezing now we’d stopped walking. It was windy in the park: the noise was really messing with my aids. I can still hear when it’s windy, but there’s just this really loud rumbling noise underneath everything, which I have to tune out to hear anything else. After a while it gives me a headache. I pulled my hat down over my ears, which made it harder to hear Carly, but at least I could think about something other than how loud the fucking wind was.