The Furies: A Novel (27 page)

‘I don’t know. They might.’

‘Yes, they might. But I’m sure I can prevail upon them to see reason. It’s the perfect fit, Alex. I’m sure I can get them to agree. But I won’t try if I can’t get you to agree first. I don’t want you to answer now. I don’t even want you to think about it now. I want you to put it from your mind, look at your menu and order your dinner. We’ll discuss it again in a week or so, when you’ve had time to think it over properly. And you can’t do that on an empty stomach. So…’ He reached over and jiggled the menu I was holding, forcing me to look down at it. Robert never lost anyone’s attention for long.

*   *   *

Now I’m writing this down for Lisa Meyer, I realise I don’t know when the kids found out I was considering a permanent job at Rankeillor. They knew that their original art therapist, Miss Allen, had gone on maternity leave, and that she had been gone, by now, for almost nine months. I don’t know if they knew that her child had been born with a minor heart defect which caused her to reconsider her planned return to work and become a full-time mother.

When I first came to Scotland, at the start of the year, I thought that Rankeillor was a temporary measure. And then when Robert asked me to consider something permanent, I didn’t know what to make of it. I was afraid of making a decision. If I took him up on the offer, I could stay in Edinburgh. But I would also be giving up on directing, the only thing I had ever really wanted to do. And I didn’t want to become one of those people who haunts amateur dramatic societies, muttering about how I could have gone professional if only my life had taken a different path, in between storming out of rehearsals of
Hedda Gabler
because no-one knows their lines.

Was it possible to make a choice which didn’t cut off the other option entirely? Could I stay at Rankeillor in the short-term, and then go back to directing in a couple of years? I thought about it for a day or two before acknowledging that I could not. I couldn’t treat these kids as a fill-in, biding my time till what I really wanted came along. Even as I thought this, guilt prickled across my scalp. I had already seen them as exactly that. I had gone into their unit because I needed an escape and even now, nine months later, I was still thinking about what I wanted instead of what the children needed.

So I can tell Lisa Meyer one thing I remember: that night in September was the first time in over a year that I really thought about the future, mine or anyone else’s. It was also the first time I thought about the kids and what they might want. Not just Jono and Mel, Annika and Carly, but all the children I taught. It was the first time I really, properly thought about someone who wasn’t me, or Luke, since he died.

4

The 14th of October was the first time I’d travelled down to London since before the summer holiday. It was my mother’s birthday. I took the same train I used to get to King’s Cross, then the Underground to Waterloo, which was so crowded it made me gasp for air, then another train to Walton-on-Thames, to my mother’s parish. Luke used to tease her about the number of poor and needy people she could find in Walton-on-Thames, which she cheerily admitted was one of the wealthiest parishes in the country. Being my mother, of course, she saw a bright side to this. Certainly the designer clothes and bags which appeared at her bring-and-buy sales were enough to sustain her soup kitchen, her Sunday school refreshments, and plenty more besides. She maintained that fashionistas would trek down from the capital just to trawl through her stash of high-end frocks, all of which she priced up in the belief that charity began at the church hall, right next to the tombola.

When I arrived at the station, she was waiting for me, dog-collar on, dog-lead in hand. Pickle went crazy: I have never been greeted by anybody with even half the enthusiasm Pickle could generate for the postman, let alone a long-lost friend. I tried to hug my mother before dog saliva made the whole process gummily untenable.

‘Here you are, darling,’ said my mother. ‘At last.’

‘Happy birthday,’ I said, trying not to stiffen at the implicit criticism. We walked down a leafy side-road and past the church to reach her red-brick house, smaller and squatter than the old vicarage, which had been sold to a banker of vast fortune and indeterminate moral fibre some years before.

Her house smelled exactly the same as it had a year ago. Potpourri, dog hair and flowers battled for supremacy. I dropped my bag at the bottom of the stairs, noticed Pickle eyeing its rope handles, and picked it up again. I put it on a chair instead, and dug out the card and the wooden dog, the latter now wrapped in bright turquoise tissue paper, with a navy raffia bow adding a celebratory touch. I kicked off my boots, which were far too hot now I wasn’t in Edinburgh, and padded through to the kitchen.

‘Happy birthday,’ I said again, giving her the card and the present. I’d forgotten how slowly she opened things, as if there was a prize for coming last. No wonder the dog was so excitable: she must have a seizure every time she watched my mother spend three minutes opening a can of dog food.

‘Oh darling, it’s lovely,’ she said, tearing up a little as she finally burrowed her way through the tissue paper to the small wooden statue. ‘Wherever did you find it? It looks just like her.’

‘It’s from the craft fair they hold in the churchyard at St John’s,’ I told her. ‘Carved by a lady who lives up in the Highlands. She had birds and horses and things, but I thought you’d like the dog.’

‘I do, very much,’ she said, and gave me a hug.

We spent a while catching up, drinking coffee and eating cake. But there was too much space between us: I tried to explain my Edinburgh life to her, and I knew I was failing. I tried to follow the ins and outs of her assorted parish squabbles, but I couldn’t keep up. We weren’t just living at different ends of the country, we were living in parallel universes.

‘You look tired,’ she said, suddenly, and I knew she had noticed I wasn’t really listening. ‘I thought we’d go out for dinner,’ she added. ‘There’s a new Italian around the corner: I’ve only been a couple of times, but it’s very nice. Breadsticks, you know. Like the old days.’

‘OK.’

‘Why don’t you have a lie-down?’ she asked.

I went upstairs, not to sleep but just to rest from the effort of talking. My head was thrumming softly, and I lay down on a bed that wasn’t mine. My childhood home was long gone, my flat with Luke must have new tenants, my place in Edinburgh was on loan from a man who was avoiding Scotland as if he were a wanted criminal. But it certainly wasn’t mine, and he might come back and reclaim it any time, I supposed. I wondered if I should be worried about this, but all I found was a sense of relief that I didn’t have to be anywhere I didn’t want to be, at least not for long.

Pickle was never one to miss out on a prone body: it almost always meant she would be petted by someone who couldn’t be bothered to get up. She nosed her way round the bedroom door, then hopped up onto the bed. I scritched her between the ears, until she reached that Zen state that only dogs and Buddhists can achieve.

Even Pickle would know where home was, if she raced away from my mother in the park. And if a spaniel could acquire a sense of permanence, it shouldn’t be beyond me. I thought again about Robert’s offer, before dozing off.

*   *   *

Dinner with my mother started badly and grew worse. Her opening gambit was to ask when I was moving back to ‘the real world’. As patiently as I could, I explained that Edinburgh was as real as anywhere else. But that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She wanted to know when I would move back to London to reconnect with my old friends, and with Luke’s, to go back to working in the theatre, to give up on ‘children other people are better qualified to work with anyway’. Obviously, she was right about this, but it didn’t make it any less crass to say it.

Then we progressed to the ‘time-to-move-on’ conversation, which my mother felt compelled to have, now it was over a year since Luke died. Even more so, since she had started seeing someone over the past few months, who I would meet tomorrow, and who she was certain I would really like. Again, I tried to explain that while she was ready to move on from my father’s death several years earlier, I was not yet ready to consider doing the same thing myself.

The trouble with grief is that once people have survived it, they can develop a hardness, like rough skin: they made it through, so why can’t you? And the only honest answer is that you don’t know why, or even if you can’t move on. You just know you haven’t. The nadir came when she reminded me that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and I replied that this was not a very Christian idea. Arthritis won’t kill you, it only makes you weaker. What if grief works the same way?

By the time we got home, we were barely speaking, and we both went straight to bed. Even the dog ignored me. I got up on Saturday morning and told her I would be leaving a day early, because I knew that things couldn’t improve if I stayed. She started to cry, because I wouldn’t meet Andrew, and he was looking forward to meeting me. And I started to cry too, because I knew the visit had been a disaster, and that I wouldn’t return any time soon.

We hugged as I left, but with resignation rather than warmth.

DD,

Alex hasn’t been going to London this term. She’s been at Rankeillor on Fridays, and when I asked her why she came in on Fridays now, she said she has a couple of classes in the morning. Like that was the only reason, the only thing that was different from before. I went to the station and checked to see if she was going on Saturday a couple of times, and then on Sundays. I had to keep telling my mum I was going to the shops, even though she knows I don’t have much money. Lucky she’s too self-absorbed to think about me for very long. Then I thought I’d check Friday again, the day we broke up for mid-term. Just in case. And there she was, just like before.

So I followed her. Fare-dodging was easy. I recognised the guard at Waverley, and I know how he works: he starts at the back of the train and moves forwards. He likes to treat himself to First Class at the end. And he never starts till after Berwick, because otherwise he has to check everyone again after Newcastle, and he can’t be bothered. I just hid in the toilet when he did my carriage, and he never came back through again. Like I said, easy.

But nothing else was easy. It was fucking peculiar. Alex didn’t go the way she always goes when she gets off the train. And she had a bag with her, which she doesn’t normally have. A bigger one, I mean, a tote. She went to the Underground station. I tried to follow her, but she has one of those blue card things, and I didn’t have one, and the queue to buy a ticket was about a thousand people long.

I didn’t know what to do. So I decided the best thing would be to walk to the park the way she usually goes, and maybe she’d turn up there in a bit. The Underground must go there, right? So I walked the same old walk past the Harry Potter station and the library and everything, and I wondered if she’d maybe just got tired of going on foot. It isn’t a nice walk, it’s too noisy. The traffic, I mean. I took my aids out, like I always do when I’m walking down a big road, because otherwise they just rumble and rumble and it makes me feel a bit dizzy after a while, and sick.

So I reached the park, only then I realised that there isn’t an Underground station in there. So she’d have to walk through the park the same way as usual, to get to the café. I walked past the zoo again – I saw one porcupine, two goats, a camel and three wallabies, which might be a record. It was really warm in London, much warmer than at home. And the park is pretty in October: the leaves are all bright red and orange, and even if it wasn’t warm you’d feel warm. They’re plastered all over the ground, like that decoupage thing Carly’s mum does. It feels like walking on carpet, they’re so thick.

I turned left at the top of the park. They have parrots and stuff in secret cages at the back of the zoo. They must be in quarantine or something. They go crazy watching the other birds flying around free in the park, flapping and squawking like mad. I turned my aids back on, actually, to see if I could hear them. There’s one small green one like a broken piano: he belts out the same few notes all the time, starting high, dropping low. Shouty fucker, the other birds must hate him. I could hear him all the way to the café, and even while I stood by a tree on the far side, while I decided what to do. Go in, and risk Alex seeing me? Or stand outside all afternoon?

I pushed the door, and nothing happened. You’d think after all the times I’ve seen Alex go in, I’d know that the fucking thing pulls open. But there was no sign of her. I was kind of relieved, because I have no idea what I would have said if she’d been there. I could hardly have pretended to be just passing, could I? I would have to have explained, and it might have sounded odd. But she wasn’t there, so it was all fine.

I sat at a table and ordered a Coke, which cost three fucking pounds, by the way, which is deranged. Three pounds for a can of juice. I drank it really slowly, partly to get my money’s worth, and partly to see if Alex turned up later. Maybe the Underground is slower than walking. After half an hour, I stopped being relieved and I started to get worried. Where could she be? What if she’d got lost? Had she gone back to Richmond, where she used to live, or to see her mum, or something? I don’t even know where that would be. You get used to a person doing the same thing all the time, you know. And then they do something weird. I couldn’t think what to do except to go back to King’s Cross and get the five-thirty train she always gets and hope she’s on it.

I was just starting to get ready, and then I saw her. Not Alex, I mean. Katarina. She came out from behind the counter with a pot of tea and two cups and saucers for this old couple who were blethering on to each other about something. I couldn’t hear what: they were too low-pitched and indistinct. She wasn’t there before, when I ordered my Coke. She must have been on a break, because this was definitely Katarina. She looked really happy, grinning away at the old people like they were her long-lost parents or something. I bet Alex didn’t grin like that even when she was happy. She’s too vague. But Katarina was really definite, right there in the room with her bleached ends and dark roots and thick eyebrows and pale skin. She’s tall, and she wears heels, even though her feet must ache after a day waiting tables. She has watery grey eyes, like dirty pools.