The Furies: A Novel (28 page)

She walked back to the counter, with a sort of strut in her step, like she was really pleased with herself for taking tea to two pensioners so well. And then the other lady at the counter, with a headscarf on – the one called Noor – suddenly grabbed her left hand, and squealed. I thought maybe she’d seen a wasp or a bee or something. But then I saw her face and I realised it was a happy scream, not a frightened one. Katarina started laughing and tilting her hand at a funny angle to catch the light, and I realised what she was so fucking pleased about.

Thank God Alex wasn’t there.

5

The four of them had been scratchy all term, getting on each other’s nerves. Ricky never did return to the Unit, and despite Robert’s predictions, no new top-year kids had arrived yet. It was clear that the group no longer functioned. Annika used to be a lightning rod for any room she was in, the quickest route for tension to escape. But now she was refusing to take part in any discussions or hand in any work, she made the atmosphere increasingly uncomfortable. I tried to win her over – though I didn’t especially want to – but she was obdurate. And I had hoped that Jono’s relationship with Carly might blunt his sharp tongue, but the reverse was true: he would take any opportunity to reinforce their status as a couple. The newly minted tension it had created between her and Mel didn’t help either. Robert was sure there would be new arrivals soon and they couldn’t come soon enough. The class needed new blood.

We’d spent a couple more lessons talking and writing about
The Choephori
. Jono had produced a smart, funny flowchart of options available to the members of the House of Atreus, revelling in the impossibility of doing the right thing. I asked him if I could photocopy it and put it on the wall, and he hunched in embarrassment and agreed, if I insisted. I did insist. It was about time I started to make the room my own. I’d been here for almost a year. Carly was still a bit out of her depth, I felt, and her writing showed that. But Mel handed in a beautiful story, from the perspective of Electra. It was, I wrote at the bottom, the most moving thing I’d read in months. She had captured the wretchedness of passivity and the tragedy of action. She could have written it about Hamlet. I asked her to wait behind after the session.

‘That’s a wonderful piece of work, Mel.’

She frowned as I spoke, her eyes on my mouth. Then she smiled and nodded. ‘I spent ages on it,’ she said. She seemed to need to concentrate much harder to hear me this term. I wondered if she had spoken to her doctor about it.

‘I can tell. It’s your best writing, really it is. I think you should submit it to a short-story competition. I’ll look into it, if that’s OK.’

‘Yes, it is. Thank you.’ Her smile faded a little too fast.

‘Are you sure? You seem uneasy.’

‘No, I’d like it. I really would.’ The words almost fell on top of each other as she gabbled. Usually, she was such a precise talker, every syllable carefully rendered.

‘OK, well, if you’re sure,’ I said. She nodded again, and almost ran out of the basement.

I’d like to say that I realised then that there was something she was trying to tell me. But I didn’t, of course. I thought she was late for something, or desperate for a fag, or wanting to catch up with her friends before they left for lunch without her. I read her essays and watched her talking to her classmates, and I thought I knew how her mind was working. In fact, she was just as opaque to me as Annika was. I had no idea that she’d found out so much about me and Luke and everything that had happened. And I had no idea what she would do with that information.

As she left, I realised I’d come to a decision about Robert’s suggestion. I had been with these kids for less than a year, and I was making a positive difference to their lives. They were more articulate and more thoughtful this term. They were more capable of putting their hands up in a room of bright students, knowing they were equal to them. They were better prepared for the future and that was, in part, because of me.

So I was going to apply for the job, and do my best to persuade the governors to have me. I was going to help more children realise their potential, and I wasn’t going to think about London and my former life again. My mother would come to terms with it, and if she didn’t, she would forgive me, because that was in her job description. I walked up to Robert’s office and told him, before I left that afternoon, that I would apply in writing as soon as he announced the job was vacant. He beamed at me. Everything was falling into place.

DD,

Which is better: knowing or not knowing something you don’t want to know? It looks simple, right? Not knowing must be better.

But it isn’t simple at all. You might not want to know if you were dying, but it would be better to know, wouldn’t it? So you could say goodbye to people, and make a will, and finish things off properly. Not knowing would be worse. Definitely.

At least, I think it would. But then, take my mum. She didn’t want to know that my dad was getting married. She didn’t need to know, and once she found out, she went mad. She’s been in a foul mood ever since. She’s argued with her boyfriend about a million times, and she’s been furious with me about everything.

When she gets like this, I just take my aids out and close my eyes. This is what it must be like to be an astronaut walking on the far side of the moon, or in a submarine at the bottom of the North Sea. Totally dark, totally quiet. My mum hates it when I do this: she says it makes her feel like she’s seeing me buried alive. She grabs my arm and shakes it till I open my eyes. And then she apologises and starts crying and says she’s sorry and it’s not about me. It’s not about her, either.

So would it be better if she hadn’t found out about my dad? It depends. She would have found out eventually, like Oedipus does. And then, wouldn’t it have been terrible to find out that it had happened ages ago, and you were the only one who didn’t know? Being the last person to know something is embarrassing. That’s what Carly doesn’t seem to understand about us: I’m not mad about her and Jono, I’m just upset that she didn’t tell me until it had been going on for months. Like I didn’t deserve to know. Like we weren’t best friends. I mean, really, she can do what she likes with whoever she wants, that’s fine. It was just horrible of her not to say anything. Not that she cares. And nor do I, if that’s how she wants to be.

But maybe it’s just me who’d rather know things. Is it? Is Alex better off not knowing about the engagement? How will she feel when she finds out? Won’t it be worse the longer it takes? I thought it didn’t matter because it’s not like I could tell her. But then I realised I could tell her, and it wouldn’t even be that difficult. I just need to make someone else break the news.

The following week was the last time I saw the four of them together at Rankeillor. It must have been October the 26th. It was a Wednesday, a week and a half after the disastrous trip to see my mother. That’s not why I remember the date, obviously. I remember it because it was two days before.

I arrived at the Unit and hunted around in my bag for a key. Robert had decided that leaving the place open was no longer a viable option, ever since some twelve-year-olds had found an old man sitting in the ground-floor hallway drinking cider on a rainy day last month. Robert’s main concern, he explained in a staffroom stage whisper, was that the man might not be able to fight off Donnie Brooks and his little henchmen a second time. Thank goodness his poor old jakey blood was fortified with the Buckfast, he added. A death on the premises doesn’t look good.

As I drew out my key, my phone screen lit up. A text from Robert: ‘ALEX, see me URGENT’. Things must be serious if he was employing caps lock. I checked my watch. At eight fifteen the kids weren’t even there yet: how could there be trouble already? I walked straight upstairs, and knocked.

‘Who is it?’ he said, warily.

‘It’s Alex,’ I replied, and turned the stained brass handle. ‘Is everything OK?’

‘Alex,’ he sighed. ‘Come and sit down.’ He gestured vaguely in the direction of a chair. It was so unusual for him not to have total control over every muscle, right the way to his fingertips, I assumed something terrible must have happened. Had he met with the governing body and been told that they wouldn’t accept his resignation? Or that they weren’t happy at the prospect of me applying for his job? I didn’t want him to feel like he needed to protect me from bad news.

‘What is it?’

He looked up and met my eyes. He pushed a piece of paper towards me. It was a print-out of an article which had appeared in the
Daily Mail
the previous day. I hadn’t seen it. The headline read: ‘Lawyer’s Killer Gets Engaged…’ and then under it, in a smaller font: ‘… To The Woman He Was Beating Up When He Killed Our Hero Son’. The words began tangling together. I exhaled, realising I’d been holding my breath, growing dizzy. I tried to scan the prose as though I were about to summarise it for another, busier reader.

The journalist had received an anonymous tip-off about the engagement. He’d called Luke’s parents for a quote and hit pay-dirt: they’d given him a full interview demanding that Luke’s murderer be deported when he’d served his sentence, and that his fiancée be deported sooner, ideally now. There was a quote from a lawyer explaining why this wouldn’t happen. Then a hand-wringing inset editorial about the perils of allowing people from violent, lawless territories to enter Britain without controls. And the final sentence that had punched me in the gut so often a year ago that I stopped reading papers altogether: ‘Luke Jameson was survived by his fiancée, Alex Morris.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Robert said, very quietly. I nodded. I couldn’t speak.

‘Alex, there’s something else.’ Wasn’t there always?

‘This page was placed under my office door yesterday evening. I left early for a governors’ meeting. Cynthia would have been here till five or so. But when I came in this morning, this had been slipped under the door. I’ll speak to Cynthia when she gets in, and see if she can shed any light.’

I nodded again. It didn’t seem remotely important to me where it had come from.

‘Alex, I’ll leave you alone for ten minutes. I’ll unlock the place, and then we’ll see if you’re up to your timetable today. I’ll understand if you need to go home. Equally, if you prefer company, we’ll be very happy to have you here.’

I nodded again, and he left.

A few moments later, I heard hushed voices murmuring on the other side of the door. Cynthia had arrived, and Robert was quizzing her on the previous evening. He came back in and shut the door behind him.

‘Cynthia was at her desk till five, Alex, but she did go up to the staffroom a couple of times. It must have been delivered then.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘But who would—’ Seeing my face, he broke off. ‘It doesn’t matter now, though.’

‘I’ll go down to the basement.’ As I stood up, the blood sank from my head, and I drove my nails into my palms.

‘Are you absolutely sure, Alex?’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

His arms were spread awkwardly wide, like an action figure missing its prop. But today, as so often, I knew that it would be kindness that floored me. The hugs would have to wait till it hurt. They couldn’t help now. I patted his arm gently as I walked past, hoping he understood.

I walked down to the ground floor, then down again to my room. The stairs reeked of cleaning fluid, which meant that someone had either thrown up or bled on them yesterday after I’d left. Possibly both. The bulb had been replaced in the light-fitting at the bottom of the stairs: it must have been from a new supplier. The final flight of stairs was now brighter, but greyer than the rest, as if someone had carved out a window onto a vile winter’s day.

I sat completely still at my desk, trying to breathe myself calm. In through the nose, out through the mouth, like all those warm-ups that actors do. I pressed my fingers against my thumbs in order – index, middle, ring, little – and then started again, trying to squeeze everything into the space between them, and then squeeze that into nothingness.

By the time the children arrived, I was calm enough. The rumour was racing around the school that I might be replacing Robert at the end of the school year. The smaller children were full of it, excited by the prospect of manageable change. The older ones didn’t mention it at all. Stupidly, I thought they wouldn’t be bothered, since they would have left by the time I took over anyway.

By lunchtime, I was beginning to share Robert’s curiosity. Who wanted me to know about Dominic and Katarina? Why would any of these kids want to upset me?

I didn’t come close to guessing the truth. I’ve never been stupider than I was that week.

I have never come close.

*   *   *

Lisa Meyer has had her hair cut into a blunt fringe. On another woman it might look coquettish. On Lisa Meyer, it looks as if she moonlights as an assassin.

I like your hair, I tell her, as I sit down in her gunmetal chair.

Thank you, she says, and she swooshes it, so I can see how shiny it is, reflective, almost metallic.

Have you made time to do some of your research? she asks. I like that Lisa Meyer doesn’t even consider the notion that time might not do my bidding.

I’ve made notes on everything I remember. Well, everything that seems relevant.

I hand her a stack of notes, which I have made over the past week, typed because I want them to be as neat as all her other paperwork.

Good, she says. I’ll go through it this afternoon and see what strategy we can develop.

I’ve always despised people who use words like ‘strategy’, but from Lisa Meyer it makes sense, because she views this, and every case, as though it were a war. She leafs through the pages, and stops on the final one. A small line appears across the bridge of her nose. She flips the page over, to check she hasn’t missed anything on the back. The line becomes infinitesimally deeper.

Alex, this account finishes on October 26th. I need the last day, too. I need the 28th.