The Furies: A Novel (11 page)

‘Get to fuck,’ Jono said, turning round to Carly. ‘Donnie Brooks isn’t a kid. He’s a wee scrote.’

‘So the punching is uncontested? He definitely hit another child?’ I wanted to be sure of the facts. Ricky was so spindly and quiet, I couldn’t see him as an aggressor.

‘Donnie Brooks has been asking for it since last term,’ Jono said. ‘Eventually he was going to get a crack. And now he has, and Ricky’s the bad guy who gets sent home for a week.’ He looked furious, again. Robert always reminded us, his teachers, that the children didn’t enjoy being angry. Jono had purple shadows under his eyes: maintaining this level of rage must be exhausting.

‘Wait. Is Donnie Brooks that tiny boy with the runny nose?’ I asked. I remembered seeing a cluster of third-years gossiping on the stairs when I’d come down to the basement earlier.

‘Don’t be fooled by appearances,’ said Jono. ‘He’s a little cunt. He’s been going after Ricky for weeks. Asking for a slapping. His brother knows Ricky’s brother. They’ve been fighting for years. Ricky tries to ignore him, but eventually it gets to him.’

‘OK. So Ricky finally cracked and punched him?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And now he’s not here till next week?’

‘Donnie’s parents complained to Robert,’ said Carly. ‘It was probably the trip to A&E that clinched it.’

‘That’s it,’ said Jono, his face darkening as they recounted the injustice. ‘Donnie’s parents don’t like hospitals. It must remind them of all the people their fucking kids have put in there. Anyway, it was only a broken nose. And only a fucking woman goes to hospital with a broken nose.’

‘Because women are…?’

‘You know what I mean, miss.’

‘I think I do. What a horrible situation. Poor Ricky. Has anyone spoken to him? Do you know if he’s OK?’

‘He’ll be fine,’ said Carly. ‘It isn’t the first time he’s been suspended.’

‘Could you be more of a fucking grass?’ Jono snapped.

‘Alex can see our forms anytime she wants,’ she replied. ‘Do you think she doesn’t know this stuff?’

‘Could we redirect this analytical zeal to Sophocles, please?’ I didn’t really care how this lesson went now. I just wanted to get through it without anyone punching anyone else, or storming out, or getting suspended, or, in my case, fired. I wondered if they were all making the same choice. Only Annika looked like she was actually enjoying herself. She loved a fight.

‘I’ll take that silence as a yes. We’ve mainly focussed on Oedipus up till now. So today, I’d like us to think about Jocasta. Do you think she suffers a worse fate than her son?’

There was a long pause. Jono was clenching and unclenching his hands. I looked over at the girls, hoping he’d calm down if I left him alone.

‘Yes,’ said Mel.

‘Because…?’

‘Because she lives with it for longer,’ she said. ‘She knows from the minute he’s born that something terrible is going to happen. She tries to get around it by getting rid of him, and that must have been awful. She must spend her whole life thinking about him, and what she and Laius have done. And then, when they find out what really happened, she kills herself. She can’t live with it.’

Carly shot her a look, which I couldn’t read. Mel didn’t notice, or if she did, she didn’t respond.

‘And her husband died,’ Annika added. ‘And she thinks her son’s dead, too. So she might be lonely?’

‘Those are really good answers,’ I said. ‘Both of you. Well done. Since there are four of you, and since we’re all in need of a bit of empathy today, I’d like you to each take on a different character. You can make notes for ten minutes, and then we’ll do it as a debate. Annika – you be Oedipus. Try to think about why he’s so angry and how his pride causes him harm, yes? Mel, be Jocasta. Jono, you can be Laius, and Carly, you be the shepherd. Work out why you’re the most tragic figure in the play, and be ready to argue your case. OK?’

They settled down to work without too much fuss. I could feel my bunched shoulders relaxing again. It was almost impossible not to have a physical response to the fury that spun between them most of the time. I wondered how the hell their former teachers had coped with them when they were in classes with thirty other kids.

DD,

Is it just because it’s February that everything is so awful? Maybe I’ve got that SAD thing, where you don’t see enough sunlight and you get depressed. It’s virtually dark when I leave home in the morning. And even if it isn’t raining, which it usually is, it’s not a nice walk across the Meadows from Bruntsfield to Rankeillor in the winter. The paths are frozen, so you have to walk on the grass and that’s all muddy and horrible.

And when we have Alex’s lessons, we have to sit underground, like trolls. And by the time we get out and I walk home, it’s nearly dark again. I can’t remember what the sun looks like. And this is something no-one tells you about being deaf: you need light more than other people, so you can read them. This time of year, if Carly comes back to mine for tea, I can feel my head starting to ache from trying to read what she’s saying on the way home.

And it was horrible in class today without Ricky, even though he’s usually a waste of space. I felt like Alex was disappointed in us somehow. Like we’d all let her down because one of us got in trouble. Not that she said that. She just looked sad today. Sadder than usual. I don’t know if Jono’s apologised to her for shouting at her the other day. He had a go at Carly today, too.

Alex really believes we’d be better people if we read more Greek tragedy. She thinks it has these big truths in it, you know. And when we were doing this debate today – it was kind of lame, but fun at the same time – I thought she might actually have a point. The four of us were trying to work out who is the most tragic person in the play, and I realised this is exactly how my parents used to behave with each other. Who’s the most bereaved? Who’s the saddest? Who can make everyone else feel guiltiest? Who can run away the furthest? I wonder if she asked me to be Jocasta because I said she suffered the most, in the play. No wonder she let Annika be Oedipus when she has the shortest fuse in the world, apart from Jono. And he played Laius, who is so obnoxious that Oedipus kills him as soon as he meets him. Perfect casting, I reckon.

Though my mum is being nice at the moment, actually. She bought me this big illustrated book of Greek myths. I don’t know why. She said she could see I was really passionate about something at school (she always calls Rankeillor Street ‘school’, she never calls it the Unit), and she wanted to encourage me. It sounds a bit young for me, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. It’s not drawings, it’s pictures from vases and stuff: Jason and the golden fleece, Odysseus and the Cyclops, Theseus and the Minotaur.

It was nice of her, anyway. It’s because she’s going away this weekend (she says with friends, but I’m pretty certain it’s with this guy from work she’s been seeing) and she feels bad about it. I was supposed to be going down to see my dad, but now he’s busy, so I can’t. She worries if I’m here on my own, especially overnight. So Carly said I could spend the weekend at hers.

Her mum pretends to like me, but she secretly hates me, I think. She wishes Carly wasn’t friends with me, and she totally blames me for us getting chucked out of Bruntsfield and dumped in the Unit. She never believed Carly – she knew it was my fault and that Carly was just covering for me. But she can’t actually say that, because she’s posh, and she doesn’t want to discriminate against someone disabled. I think she’s worried they won’t serve her in Jenners if they hear she was mean to a deaf girl. Last time I went to stay, she took us to a signed performance of some fuck-awful play. I have literally never spoken to her in sign. I hardly know any, because most deaf people don’t use sign. They lip-read and have hearing aids, like I do.

The next morning, I stopped off to see Robert before I went down to the basement. I wasn’t able to shake off my concern about the fourth-years. Yes, there were other difficult children on the Unit. There were other personality clashes, fights and disagreements. But somehow the fourth-years seemed less happy than the other kids, and it was making me uneasy. They antagonised each other so much and they were targets for troublemakers, as Ricky’s suspension proved. I’d started the term thinking they had a problem with me. But now I was beginning to think something had been wrong with this group long before I arrived. I needed to do something, before a broken nose was the least of their misdemeanours.

‘Does he have a few minutes?’ I asked Cynthia, who was brushing dust from her trousers.

‘He does,’ she replied. Her usually neat hair was ruffled, and when I walked into Robert’s office, I could see why. Cynthia must have cracked and forced him to deal with the piles of paper that towered over him from every flat surface. His office had never been emptier, though two drawers in his filing cabinet now didn’t close. He was sitting over the shredder, with his tie clamped inside his waistcoat, filling a fourth bin bag with shreds. His hair was damp with sweat and annoyance.

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘It looks amazing.’

‘Thank you,’ he replied, looking around the room with grim pride. ‘We’ve been here since seven. How can I help?’

‘I’m worried about my group.’

‘I don’t need to ask which one, do I?’ he groaned. ‘Here.’ He shunted a second shredder in my direction, and thrust a pile of documents into my hand. ‘Slice while you talk.’

‘I wonder if I should break them into two groups.’ I’d been thinking about this since the previous lesson. It was the only solution I’d come up with. ‘They really don’t get on well, and I think—’

‘Let me stop you right there.’ Robert ran his hand across his forehead. ‘It can’t happen. The timetable takes a week to devise at the start of each term. They don’t have much space structured into their days, because when we tried that, their behaviour deteriorated considerably. You’ll have to keep them as they are.’

‘It wouldn’t be possible to—’

‘Alex…’ He shredded a page to emphasise his dramatic pause. ‘It can’t be done. Fitting your classes into four days nearly broke me. I can’t do any more. I’m sorry.’

I acknowledged the guilt trip, but I couldn’t let it slide. I tried again. ‘I’m just worried that—’

He waved the sheaf of papers he was about to shred. ‘You’ll be fine. They’ll be fine.’

‘But they aren’t fine. Ricky’s been suspended, hasn’t he? Fighting on the stairwell isn’t a sign that he’s coping well, is it?’ I could hear my voice becoming shrill, but I couldn’t help it. I didn’t think Robert was listening to any of my concerns.

He sighed. ‘Ricky, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, has some problems when he’s provoked. He isn’t unique among the children here. We’re trying to teach him negotiation skills, and he’s improved a great deal. A very great deal. Sometimes he falls off the wagon. It happens.’

‘But Jono—’ Surely we could both agree that Jono was getting nothing out of lessons with me. He could barely stay in his seat.

‘Jono is a very difficult boy. He was thrown out of school for causing criminal damage. If he isn’t setting fire to the basement, you’re doing fine.’

He wasn’t taking this anywhere near as seriously as I’d anticipated he would. ‘The basement is too damp to burn,’ I pointed out, but he ignored me. I tried a different tack. ‘He has a very antagonistic attitude to the girls.’

‘Well, he knows better than to pick on Carly,’ he said.

‘What does that mean?’

‘Carly was bullied very badly at her previous school: malicious texts and pictures and so on. One day she was in a classroom on her own. Another girl, whom she’d accused of bullying her before, entered the classroom. A few moments later so did Melody. Next thing anyone knew, the nameless bully was semi-conscious on the classroom floor. She was never prepared to say who had done what, but in the school’s estimation, someone had slammed a desk lid on her head several times. Hard enough to fracture her skull in two places.’

‘Seriously? Mel and Carly did this? I had them down as the well-behaved ones.’ Well, them and Ricky, until he’d been suspended.

‘The school interviewed Carly and Mel separately. Mel took her hearing aids out and refused to answer any questions. Carly said Mel had done nothing. The girl, as I say, refused to give any statement other than that she couldn’t remember and might have fallen. Carly and Mel were handed over to my custody, or care, or whatever it is we provide here, after one of the teachers at Bruntsfield – was it Bruntsfield they were at?’ I shrugged. I was catching it from the kids. ‘Yes, Bruntsfield,’ he continued. ‘One of their teachers is friends with one of the Rankeillor Charity trustees, and she – rightly – thought they might benefit from coming here.’

I was shocked. I’d begun to think of Mel and Carly as – for want of a better word – my allies in the group. I liked them. They didn’t have much time for Annika, for a start, which made a big difference to our lessons. If either of them had gone along with her bitching, Annika would have undermined my authority completely by now. Mel stood up to Jono, without deliberately baiting him, which I admired. I found it hard to imagine either of them doing anything even close to what Robert had described. But then, perhaps bullying could provoke anyone into extreme behaviour. I shouldn’t judge them when I only knew half of the story.

The pile of forms and photocopies which Robert had given me before I started at Rankeillor covered only the most basic information on each child. He had more detailed paperwork in his office, but you had to apply with a good reason to read any of it. The Unit had stern views on data protection, which Robert was happy to enforce, determined that the children shouldn’t become prisoners of their files and of the low expectations that accompanied them. Only a child’s pastoral supervisor or social worker had full access to Robert’s filing cabinet. Mostly people simply swapped gossip in the staffroom instead. I supposed this story must have been old news before I arrived here.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. I blurted, ‘But Mel seems so normal. They both do.’

‘And that’s because she is normal. She’s certainly normal for here. She has, like all of them, some difficulty controlling her temper. But she likes you. She’s behaving well in lessons, isn’t she?’