The Furies: A Novel (2 page)

He eventually found what he was looking for – a battered biro, which he used to scrawl a note on the file he held in his left hand. He didn’t even pause while he was writing. ‘We take the ones who don’t function well elsewhere, for whatever reason: they’ve been bullied, or they are bullies, or they don’t fit in, or whatever. The ones for whom we might actually be able to make a difference. But our aim is to get these children back into mainstream schools, if we possibly can. So really, we’re trying to get rid of them as soon as they get here. And sometimes it works, but not always. We also lose some because they can’t function here any more successfully than they did at other schools. Even safety nets have holes in them, you know.’

I nodded, wondering what he meant. Robert had always been like this: he tended to assume you were more attuned to his thought processes than you actually were. Than I actually was, anyway.

‘Not usually more than one or two each term,’ he added. ‘Unless it’s a very bad term.’

He looked over his half-moon spectacles at the papers I was now trying to arrange into a coherent order. ‘This class,’ he reached over and prodded one of the pages with the wrong end of his pen, ‘will probably be the most difficult for you.’

‘Why?’ The sheet listed only five names, a small class of fourth-years. I did the maths in my head: fifteen years old. He handed me three more files, which I slotted in to what seemed to be a sensible order. If I could control the paperwork, perhaps I could control a classroom. I now had one set of files for each class, and one class for each year-group, five in total. Looking at the lists of unfamiliar names, I wondered how long it would take to match them to children. Robert didn’t answer the question.

‘I think that’s the last of them, Alex,’ he said. ‘I won’t lie to you. They can be right little fuckers. But don’t worry. You’ll win them over in the end. I’m not giving you every sentence we have on every child: it’ll just stress you out, thinking you need to read it all. You have everything you need here. If you feel like you’re at sea with a particular student, come and ask for their full file; Cynthia will have a copy you can read. These children deserve to be more than their records, though, so please don’t ask unless you really need to know something.’

I wanted to ask him what kind of information might be in the files which I didn’t have, but he had already skipped on to talk about something else. Butterfly-brained, my mother would have called him: always lighting upon one topic, then fluttering off to another one before you could catch up. It should have been infuriating, but his enthusiasm was always so complete that he made you want to race to catch up with him instead of sulking that he’d gone off without you. He had always been like that, even when I was a student and he was teaching drama over in the University buildings on George Square, less than a mile from where I now sat perched on the balding arm of his tweed-covered chair. He was the teacher you always hope for: passionate, exciting, funny. His chubby frame gave him a cuddly appearance that he only fulfilled if you handed work in on time, fully referenced and neatly printed out. Though his reddish hair had now faded to a sandy grey, and his face had creased into a few more lines, he still looked like the actor he had been in his youth. Even today, before the Unit was officially open, he was wearing a three-piece suit with a tartan waistcoat, as though he might be a wedding baritone, temporarily missing the rest of his choir. And this was him dressed down. I looked at my jeans, which were now covered with specks of white paper, shed from the papers I held, like tiny dirty confetti.

‘Let me show you your classroom,’ he said. ‘Leave those.’ He pointed at the files, then looked round his office, trying to find an empty spot. ‘Perhaps put them on Cynthia’s desk,’ he said more quietly, as if she might appear and berate him. ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. Just for now.’

I dusted them off with my sleeve before placing them on her desk, then followed him out of the room. He took me down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor, then down again to the basement, and what was now my room. The stairs grew darker as we reached the hallway at the bottom. Two scratchy yellow bulbs threw a thin light onto the final steps and the industrial-green classroom door. It was like climbing down into a cold swamp. Edinburgh in the winter is dingy enough without going underground. It was barely warmer in the damp hallway than it was outside, in the sleeting rain.

‘The kids like it down here,’ he said, opening the door and stepping to one side so I could walk in. For a man who had once done a season at the RSC (one up from spear-carrying, darling, but it still counts), he was a terrible liar.

At least my predecessor had tried to make the place cosy. The back wall was a fiery orange, and the radiators were turned up to their highest setting, so the room itself was relatively dry. But the air smelled sourly of mildew, and as I scanned the warped doors of the cupboards which ran along the wall under the windows at the front of the building, I guessed that if I opened them, the smell would be stronger still.

The room was huge, easily bigger than the one-bedroom flat I was staying in down the road. It ran under the whole building, which had to compensate for standing on a hill. The windows at the back looked out over a yard which must have replaced the garden when the house had been converted into a pupil referral unit. Guessing from the litter, it was now mainly used for smoking. But at the front, where the ground had snuck up underneath it, the window looked out onto a whitewashed wall with a small door on one side. I noticed a large, dented keyhole and wondered if the door still opened. I had a brief vision of being locked in there by a class of jeering children who hated me, and shuddered. It had probably once been the coal-cellar, I supposed.

Way above head-height you could see the thick layer of pebbles in the space between the gate onto the street and the steps up to the front door of the building. I could just see the bottom of a few sorry shrubs in pots, which did nothing to change the Unit’s unloved face. Like so many buildings in Edinburgh, it was grand but tired at the same time.

Robert flicked the light switch next to the door and three weary lamps flickered on overhead, two over the chairs and tables at the front end of the room and one more over the dingy, empty space towards the back. I blinked, wondering if bulbs came in a lower wattage than forty, and if they did, why someone would use them in a classroom.

‘Carole – your predecessor – probably did most of her teaching here,’ he said, pointing towards the chairs. I nodded. If she wanted to make out the kids through the gloom, she would have had to. Even in the summer, I would discover, the lights needed to be on in this room. How on earth had Carole taught art lessons in here? Why hadn’t she asked for more lights to be fitted?

The chairs were old and mismatched. A battered brown leather chair stood behind the teacher’s desk, my desk, and the rest were fabric-covered in grimy reds, purples and maroons. The walls were decorated with bright collages and paintings, made by the children last term, I supposed. But the corners were already peeling up from the bottom of each picture, as though the room were trying to rid itself of any signs of life.

*   *   *

The following afternoon I was sitting in the basement, waiting for them. I’d taught three classes that morning, which had gone relatively well, considering that it was three years since I’d finished my PGCE. I’d run quite a few theatre workshops for children in the meantime, but I hadn’t taught, properly taught, a single lesson since I’d qualified. I knew perfectly well that if Robert hadn’t been my friend, I would never have got a job at Rankeillor Street – on merit, or experience. How many people are given a job on the strength of a phone call? Robert had blustered something about an unexpected vacancy and short-term contracts being hard to fill, but he could easily have found someone better than me. I couldn’t even bring myself to feel guilty about all the people he must have overlooked.

I’d met the rest of the Unit’s staff over lunch upstairs, as they gossiped over sandwiches and microwaved pots of soup. One thing was clear: the class Robert had warned me about was indeed unpopular with almost every teacher. Eyes rolled when I asked why they were so much worse than the other kids. ‘How long have you got?’ snapped one irritable woman, settling herself against a cushion before she began her litany. But Robert, whose bat-like ears missed nothing, swooped in and told everyone to stop frightening me.

‘If she leaves,’ he hissed, ‘someone’s going to have to cover her classes.’ He looked round at the rest of the staff. ‘All her classes,’ he emphasised.

So, as the classroom door opened, I was remembering the conversations that I used to have with my housemates when we were all teacher-training: one in maths, one in history, and me in drama and dramatherapy. Children are like animals, we agreed. They can sense fear. Like pack animals. Like hyenas. They know when you’re afraid and they use it against you, taking advantage of their superior numbers to destroy you. We really did see our charges as interchangeable with wild dogs. No wonder I’d given up as soon as I’d qualified: no audience was ever as frightening as a classroom, and besides, the director doesn’t have to face the audience. We – I should say, they – can hide behind the actors.

*   *   *

I could smell them before I saw them; fresh smoke clung to their clothes as they came in. Whatever else they were allergic to, it wasn’t cigarettes. As the five of them slunk into the room – they were late, of course – it was a small, scrappy, red-haired boy who voiced what they were all thinking. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘Come in, sit down,’ I replied, gesturing at the chairs in the middle of the room. I was leaning against the front of my desk, trying to look casual. It was the first of many things I got wrong. I didn’t need to befriend them, I needed to look like an authority figure. That’s why they give teachers the biggest desks.

‘You know who she is,’ one of the girls hissed at the red-headed boy. ‘She’s Robert’s friend. Miss Allen’s gone on maternity leave early, hasn’t she?’

He shrugged and nodded. The five of them took their seats – three girls, two boys.

‘I’m Alex Morris,’ I said, ‘and I’m very glad to meet you.’ I read from the sheet Robert had given me: ‘You must be Annika, Mel, Carly, Ricky and Jono.’

They stared at me. The two boys were sitting together. The one who had asked who I was looked much younger than the other four. He had to be at least fourteen, but he looked no older than the twelve-year-olds I’d taught in the morning. He was skinny, with short, almost shaved ginger hair. His pale scalp shone through in patches, as if the hair had been hacked off against his will. He wore a huge hoody over his shirt and tie; he must have borrowed it from the boy he sat next to, who was several inches taller and much bulkier.

The larger boy had greasy dark hair hanging down in front of his face. The buttons of his school shirt strained when he sat down and his shoulders were slightly hunched, either because he spent a lot of time leaning over a computer, or because the shoulders of his shirt were as tight as the chest and it was the only way he could fit into it. His cheeks were pink and freckled. The notes I’d cribbed over lunch told me they were the same age, though it didn’t seem possible.

‘Are you Ricky?’ I asked the dark-haired one. He rolled his eyes and pointed at the scrawny redhead.

‘You must be Jono, then,’ I continued. He shrugged. I added them to my mental list, as I had been doing with all the other children that day. Ricky – red hair. That was easy. I couldn’t think of an alliteration for Jono. I’d have to rely on his dead-eyed stare to jog my memory.

Two of the girls were also sitting together. The one who had spoken to Ricky was also a redhead, but her hair was a beautiful pale orange colour, like a pedigree cat’s. I couldn’t tell if it was dyed or natural, but it framed her face, curling under her jaw in neat wings. I had worked with actresses who didn’t have such a perfect blow-dry. Her eyes were lined in a bright emerald green, and she had added some green eyelashes in among her own. I looked the question at her.

‘I’m Carly,’ she said. A small, neat voice to match her small, neat frame. ‘And this is Mel.’ She put her arm round the slender blonde girl next to her and squeezed her shoulders, smiling. The blonde girl said nothing, just tilted her feathery head a little and looked at me. Clear blue eyes shone out from under her fringe. I tried to remember what I’d read about Mel or Carly, but I came up blank. I had memorised as many children as I could that day, and the details were starting to get fuzzy. This was already the busiest day I’d had in weeks: meeting all the staff and students and learning all their names was beginning to overwhelm me.

‘Hello,’ I said to them both.

Mel waved the fingers of one hand at me. I guessed she was trying to convey that she was not hostile, but not interested either. I wished I could do the same. So the girl sitting alone was Annika, long-limbed, golden-haired and dark-eyed. She wore big glasses with thick black frames. Only a girl who knew she was beautiful would wear something so deliberately ugly. They made her look like a seventies spy. Without them, she would be only one fur hat away from a Russian novel. Annika Karenina, I thought. Another easy one to remember.

‘So you must be Annika?’ I asked her, smiling.

‘Yes, well done. Five out of five.’ She flicked her blonde mane as she turned away, like an ill-tempered racehorse. I felt the smile freeze on my face. This was what one teacher had told me earlier. Annika is a right cow, she had said, succinctly. Whatever you say or do, she will punish you for it. Don’t take it personally. None of the rest of us do.

I took a breath and began. ‘I know you usually do art therapy in here. But this term, I’d like us to do some dramatherapy instead, if that’s OK with you.’

‘Fuck off,’ said Ricky, without malice. ‘Art’s the only thing I like.’ He picked up his bag, lifted it onto his spindly shoulder, then stood up and slouched out of the room. The remaining four stared at me. I had no idea what to say.