The Furies: A Novel (9 page)

‘So the plague is a collective punishment for the whole city?’ I asked her.

She nodded, curling her hair into the neck of the reddish-orange sweater she wore. Rankeillor had a relaxed uniform policy. So long as the kids looked presentable, that was enough. Some of the girls, like Carly, were peacock perfect every day. But Mel mostly wore her own version of a uniform, much like I did: jeans, vests, t-shirts and a thick jumper. Sometimes two jumpers.

‘Yes, because he’s…’ She paused. ‘They keep saying “unclean”.’

‘Yes, you’re quite right. I’m impressed.’ She looked a little embarrassed. ‘He’s polluted the city because he’s a criminal who hasn’t been punished. Does that make sense to you? I know it’s a strange concept to us.’

‘No, it sort of makes sense,’ she replied.

Jono nodded slowly. ‘But is it all criminals?’ he asked. ‘I mean, if the city gets the plague every time someone does something bad and doesn’t get punished, it would have plague all the time.’

‘It’s because the crime of killing a parent – and marrying one –’ I ignored the look of disgust that passed over his face, ‘is so much more terrible than a regular crime,’ I said. ‘Do you want some paper, Ricky?’ Having covered his book, he had begun biroing the desk. He twitched guiltily. I passed him a few sheets of A4 from my desk. He was under-dressed for the weather again. I could see goose-bumps covering his forearms. Did his grandparents not notice?

‘Thanks.’ He reached over to take them, and began drawing a man bleeding from his ruined eye sockets. I hoped he wouldn’t show it around when he got home.

‘What do you think?’ I asked him.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, without hesitation.

‘You thought he was better off not knowing what he’d done,’ I reminded him.

‘Yeah, he should have just ignored that,’ Ricky said. ‘It’s only plague.’

‘But if he’d ignored it, then there would have been a revolution or something. People panic when they’re getting ill and dying. And it’s his job, isn’t it, as king, to sort this stuff out?’

He shrugged. ‘If you say so. I’d’ve left it.’

‘He’s better off at the end,’ Mel said. ‘He’s been living a lie, hasn’t he? And now he knows the truth. That bit about him being able to see clearly only when he’s blind – it’s right.’

‘So you think he’s better off knowing the depths of his crime rather than being ignorant of them?’

‘Yes.’

‘And do you think he’s a hero?’

‘Yes.’ She was quite certain.

‘Why?’

‘Because he steps up. I mean, when all the bad stuff is going on at the start, he tries to uncover the truth. And when the story comes out, he takes it. His dad, his mum, all of it. It keeps coming.’

‘Yes, you’re right. And everyone else who has responsibility for it is dead. There’s just him left, isn’t there? And he doesn’t kill himself like Jocasta does. He decides to live with what he’s done, which is much braver.’ I could hear the weight of each one of the words as it crashed from my mouth. Mel and Jono were both staring at me. Ricky was still scribbling away. I swallowed. ‘And I think maybe that’s important, for a hero?’

Jono shrugged. He’d lost interest again. Mel looked down at her nails as she thought before she answered.

‘Everyone has to live the life they have, don’t they? It doesn’t matter if it’s fated to be that way or if it just happens. You can’t say you have no responsibility for doing what you do. Even if you have no control over your life, you should live like you have a choice.’

I smiled at her. The star pupil.

And of course I agreed with her. I still do.

*   *   *

I don’t imagine it’s a question they will ask me. They’re not going to put a heading on the page and start making notes on whether destiny has any impact on how things work out. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is the very crux of it all: of what I did, of what happened in the end, and before all of that, of what Luke did. Because I really do believe we control how we live. I can’t believe that some people are fated to live and die as they do.

We’re all responsible for our actions, and that includes me. In retrospect, I did everything wrong, almost from the moment I arrived in Edinburgh. I was weak, thoughtless and self-centred. I believed I was helping them, or at least I persuaded myself that I was. But the undeniable truth is that if I had made even the slightest effort to look outwards at these children, instead of inwards, I could have changed everything that happened. No-one was destined to die at this point.

6

DD,

What I would like to be able to report today is that I got a good mark for the Oedipus homework I did. I spent ages on it. Nearly an hour, actually. But I don’t know if Alex thought it was good, because she hasn’t given it back yet. And I can’t even look forward to getting it back, because I feel too guilty.

Yes, you read that right: I feel guilty. Because we gave our work in on Thursday morning. And I asked her when we would get it back. No-one else seemed interested, but I wanted to know. And Alex said she’d try to read them that evening and we could pick them up from her classroom the next day, even though we didn’t have a lesson.

So I thought she must be coming in on Fridays now. I figured whatever it was she used to do on Fridays was done, and now she would be at Rankeillor Street every day like the rest of us are. And so me and Carly went down to her room on the Friday – even though Carly had skipped the last lesson so didn’t have any work to get back – and she wasn’t there. It was weird being in there without her, actually. It looks exactly like it did last term. I mean, exactly: Alex hasn’t put up any posters or pictures, or anything. She doesn’t even have stuff on the desk or in the drawers or anything. Maybe I shouldn’t have been looking. But we wanted to know where she was, and we thought maybe she’d left the books in there or something. Besides, if I’m completely honest, I just wanted to see what she keeps in there. Here’s the answer: nothing at all. If she’s not in the room herself, it’s like she was never in it at all. Most of us leave traces of ourselves, don’t we? Even if it’s only a dip in the cushions. But not Alex. She’s like a ghost.

So we went upstairs to Robert’s office and asked if he had our books. He didn’t, and he didn’t seem even slightly worried that Alex wasn’t there, even though she’d said she’d give us our work today.

She doesn’t come in on Fridays, Melody, he said. She just made a mistake. She must have meant Monday.

But she said today.

She doesn’t come in on Fridays. I’m sure you’ll have your work on Monday. Who’d have ever thought you lot would be so desperate for your homework back? Alex is working miracles with you. I thought I’d be lucky if she could get you to stop fighting with each other, and ideally encourage you not to set anything or each other on fire. And now here you are, desperate for marked books. Amazing.

He’s only half paying attention to us as he says all this. He’s reading letters at the same time.

Why doesn’t she come in on Fridays, Robert? Miss Allen used to.

Miss Allen used to, yes. But Alex has other commitments on a Friday, so she can’t, I’m afraid.

But what other commitments? Does she have another job?

Of course she doesn’t have another job, Melody. She just has other commitments which are none of your business.

He’s smiling all the time he’s saying this. His eyebrows are way up in his hairline, and he’s looking at me over his reading glasses. He looks like a fat old fox. I mostly like Robert, but he can be really annoying. Patronising, I mean. Like it’s just adorable that we worry about her and wonder where she is. It makes me want to slap him till he tells me what I want to know.

Is she seeing someone, Robert? Is it her boyfriend?

No, it isn’t her boyfriend.

Doesn’t she have one? Why not? Someone must like her. If she did her hair properly. Carly’s trying to be nice. But that’s when he flips. Robert never shouts, I mean not properly. He does this actor thing of going all low and breathy and formal.

She is not seeing a boyfriend, and I would thank you both very kindly – he looks at Carly here. He’s seriously unimpressed that she mentioned Alex’s hair – not to say such cruel things about her. If it got back to Alex that you were gossiping and speculating about her, her feelings would be dreadfully hurt.

We only asked if she had a boyfriend.

I am aware of what you ‘only asked’. Robert does those air commas as he says that. I think that’s for my benefit, in case I can’t read his tone from his body language, from his face. Which obviously I can, because I’m not stupid.

I’m annoyed by him doing it, so I say, Then you don’t need to be so histrionic, do you?

And that’s what provokes him into telling us the truth. His face has gone dark red, like he’s about to have a heart attack, and he’s almost hissing out the words now.

Alex doesn’t have a boyfriend because she was engaged to be married until last year, to a man she loved very much. And then he died.

He takes a huge breath, like he’s been underwater.

I don’t say anything. The voice comes from next to me.

Died?

Yes, Carly, he died. Alex has come to teach you and to make your lives a little better. Perhaps you might return that courtesy by trying just a tiny bit not to make her regret that decision profoundly because she finds you’ve been prying into her personal life. Could you, please?

And it’s then that we realise, that I realise: he isn’t telling us off any more. He’s pleading with us. He knows he shouldn’t have told us about Alex’s boyfriend, no matter how angry we made him, and now he’s worried that we’ll tell Alex and make things worse. So of course we tell him yes.

We don’t want to upset Alex, because she’s ours now. She has been for almost three weeks. And she’s sad, and we didn’t see. And so now I feel guilty, really guilty. Because we weren’t all that nice to her when she first came to Rankeillor. And she’s only ever been nice to us, even though she must want to cry all the time.

That’s what I remember most about Jamie, you see. Not Jamie himself, just my mum crying every day for what seemed like forever. And my dad locking himself in the bathroom, so I wouldn’t see him cry, then coming out with big fat eyes that wouldn’t fool anyone. That’s what Jamie meant to me, in the end: everyone I loved crying. And the shouting. People think when you’re deaf that you can’t hear arguments. But it’s not like that at all. I can’t hear some sounds. But I could always hear the shouting, right up till my dad moved out.

The next time I saw them, they were eerily well behaved, at least at first. All five turned up on time. They unpacked books and pencil cases and placed them neatly on their desks. They faced the front, in total silence. No pushing, no muttering, not even Jono drumming on the desk. I wanted to enjoy it, but I was having a tough day: I’d slept badly the night before, and my morning lessons had been filled with squabbles and ill will which had, in turn, made it impossible to achieve anything. I wanted to go home, and I was clock-watching through this last hour till I could head back and get some sleep. I tried to focus on the final lesson of the day, then remembered that two of them had been missing from our last session.

‘Are you all alright?’ I looked at Carly.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Well, you weren’t well last week, were you?’

I realised as I asked this question that I had no idea if it was actually true. I’d reached my fourth week at the school, and I was beginning to see that many of the children at Rankeillor considered lessons to be largely optional. You were as likely to be missing a few of them as to have the full set, like I did today. This wasn’t merely true for my lessons, but for every class. Some children were persistent truants from the Unit, like Ricky and a couple of kids in the year below. Some were in the building somewhere, but not always in lessons. All of them could pull a sickie: there were days when someone was visibly hung-over, and days when they just didn’t make it in at all. Carly was so amenable, I didn’t know which category she fitted into. But I only had Mel’s word for it that Carly had had the flu. She might have spent the day shopping on Princes Street for all I knew.

‘Yes, I’m fine now,’ she said, dipping into her pink pencil case and choosing a pen, which she then held poised in one hand, as though about to take dictation in an old film.

‘I’m glad to hear it. Now, I have books for a couple of you. Perhaps the rest of you might write something for me tonight, since you missed the deadline on this one.’

Jono nodded awkwardly. His big frame made small gestures look odd, almost spasmodic. I was wondering how long it would be before one of them told me what all the good behaviour was for.

‘So in today’s lesson, I thought we could look at the defining characteristic of Oedipus. What would you say that was?’

‘He fucked his mum,’ said Jono.

‘That’s maybe his defining behaviour, but it’s not really a characteristic, is it?’ He reddened and looked away. I tried not to sigh, knowing I’d upset him. He wouldn’t make eye contact for the rest of the lesson now. ‘If you had to describe him to someone – I mean, what kind of person he is – what would you say?’

‘That isn’t motherfucker?’ he said, his gaze firmly on the patch of floor between us.

‘Let’s go for adjectives, shall we? Clever or stupid?’

‘Clever,’ said Annika. ‘I mean, it takes him a while to catch on, but that’s because he doesn’t want it to be true.’ She volunteered information like a disinterested spy: her chin on her hand, her mouth barely opening.

‘You’re absolutely right,’ I told her. Where another child would smile, she nodded, grateful to discover I had finally come round to the correct way of thinking.

‘What else?’ I said. Ricky was blinking fast, desperate not to be called on. ‘Is he patient or impatient?’