The Furies: A Novel (3 page)

‘Does anyone else feel that strongly about art?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Carly, smiling again. She and Mel made eye contact, and they both started laughing. I tried not to redden, wondering if it was a joke at my expense.

‘Good,’ I said, too loudly. Any fragment of authority I might have possessed had walked straight out of the room with that boy.

‘Will we be putting on plays?’ Carly asked, still giggling. I caught another glint of green from the outer corner of her eyes, as her false lashes caught the light.

‘We can do, of course.’ I looked round the vast room. We were only using about a third of it, so there was plenty of room for performing if they wanted to. Though I would have to find some way of lighting the rest of the space. ‘Is that something you’d like to do?’

More shrugs.

‘Maybe we should try to get to know each other a bit better?’ I suggested, trying not to sound desperate. I thought of the years that had passed since my teacher-training year, and knew that I was now paying the price for never having taken it seriously enough. Teacher-training was something I’d chosen to endure so I could keep on directing student plays. I must have sat through hours of discussion about difficult students and conflict resolution, but I could remember none of it. Maybe the directing could help me instead. I cast around for a game or something to break the ice.

‘Let’s try this. I want each of you to tell the rest of us two truths and one lie. We’ll try and work out what the lie is, and by the end of it, I hope I’ll know a bit more about you all.’

They looked sceptical.

‘I’ll start,’ I said. ‘I’m from London, I have a degree in English and Drama, and this is my first time in Edinburgh.’

‘You’re definitely from London,’ said Carly, her pale red hair tipping to and fro as she nodded. ‘You sound it. What do you think’s the lie?’ She looked at Mel, who frowned, then shook her head.

‘Why are you in our unit, then?’ asked Annika. She shook loose a few hairs that had caught the edge of her pink lip-gloss. ‘Are you even qualified?’

‘Yes, thank you. I’m a trained teacher and I have a postgraduate qualification in dramatherapy,’ I explained.

‘Oooh,’ she said, with contempt. She reached into her pockets and pulled out a pair of white headphones, fitting them carefully into her ears. I heard a faint, tinny sound and wondered what to do. Challenge her and risk losing another student in the first five minutes of the lesson, or ignore her and risk looking like I was scared of her? Which I was, as the whole room must have realised. I was more embarrassed than upset at this point. I looked at Carly, hoping she’d continue to play the game.

‘Then it’s not your first time here. That’s the lie,’ she guessed. ‘And that’s how you know Robert.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘You got me. I did my degree here. Robert was one of my tutors. Now your turn.’

‘I’m Carly Jones,’ she said. ‘Can that be one of my three things?’

I shook my head.

She thought for a moment and tried again. ‘I’m fifteen. My favourite colour is blue. And…’ She paused. People always pause before the lie. ‘I like cats.’

‘She hates cats,’ said Jono, instantly. ‘She’s allergic to them.’

‘Now you,’ I said to Jono.

‘This is fucking pathetic,’ he replied. I waited, hoping he couldn’t smell my desperation over the sweaty odour which was coming from his bag. Did he have a gym kit? I didn’t think they did PE at the Unit.

‘Fine. I’m fourteen, I wanted a PS3 for Christmas, but my parents got me an Xbox, because they’re too stupid to know the difference. And I hated art therapy. If I never see another fucking collage as long as I live, that’ll be fine.’

‘Is an Xbox so bad?’ I asked.

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I suppose. But the PS3 is obviously better. They just don’t listen.’

We had already passed the limits of my knowledge of games consoles. I was relieved when Carly spoke again.

‘He’s not fourteen, he’s fifteen,’ she said. ‘Miss Allen brought in a cake.’

I felt a grudging respect for my predecessor. Perhaps that was how to win them over.

‘So you really hated making collages?’ I asked Jono.

‘It’s the glue,’ he said. ‘It stinks. I can still smell it now.’ Once he said it, I realised that he had identified the chemical tang beneath the stench of damp that filled the basement, which I hadn’t been able to place. ‘You can’t even sniff it,’ he added, ‘because it’s safety glue.’

‘Not that you would sniff glue, since it’s dangerous and illegal.’ I was trying to smile, but my face felt tight.

‘Of course not, miss.’ He didn’t smile back.

‘You don’t have to call me miss,’ I said, quickly. ‘Alex is fine.’

‘Alright, “Alex”,’ he said, as if I might be lying about my name.

I turned to Annika and raised my eyebrows. ‘Perhaps you could take your headphones out and switch your music off,’ I said.

‘Oh, have you started to say something interesting?’ she said, all mock-surprise. ‘Because if you’re still bleating on about getting to know us, I’m not going to waste my time.’ She was flipping through screens on her phone.

‘I’ll do three things for her,’ said Mel, the quiet blonde girl. It was the first thing she’d said since she walked through the door. Her voice was unexpected, but I couldn’t work out why. Was the emphasis on the wrong word? Her accent was impossible to place. She continued. ‘Her name’s Annika, she’s Swedish, and she’s a total bitch. Wait, did you say one of them should be a lie?’

‘Fuck you,’ said Annika as she switched from one song to another.

‘You now,’ I said to Mel.

‘I’m Mel Pearce,’ she said. ‘I’m in the Unit because I got chucked out of my old school. I’m deaf, and I wish I wasn’t.’

There was another awkward silence. They were all watching, waiting to see what I might say.

‘The last one’s the lie? You like being deaf?’ I asked her.

She nodded. ‘It’s everyone else who doesn’t like me being deaf,’ she said.

‘OK, maybe that’s something we could talk about later in the session.’

‘Yeah, because that sounds interesting,’ said Annika.

‘Don’t be such a fucking bitch,’ said Carly, her soft Edinburgh accent blunting the force of the words only a touch.

‘Shut up, you stupid cunt,’ snapped Annika. She jumped out of her seat.

‘Don’t start on her, Carly,’ said Jono, delighted to see the lesson collapsing around him. ‘She might go for you with a knife.’

‘Christ, I didn’t go for anyone with a knife. I was slicing bread and he started pissing me off. It was the school’s stupid knife.’ Annika grabbed her bag and stalked towards the door. She opened it, and turned back to me. ‘And next time, “Alex”, maybe we could talk about something that isn’t how someone feels. I am so fucking bored of talking and hearing about everyone’s feelings. This is the only education we’re going to get, you know.’

‘It’s the only education you’re going to get because you got kicked out of your school for threatening someone at knife-point,’ Jono muttered, but quietly.

‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be… twenty, and not know more than I know now.’ Twenty, it seemed, was the greatest age she could consider being. ‘If you’re so qualified, teach us something. Otherwise it’s all just,’ she looked back at Jono, ‘fucking collages.’

‘OK. Do you all feel that way?’ I asked.

They nodded.

‘We’re not stupid,’ Carly said. ‘We can do anything they do in normal schools.’

‘Alright then. We’ll do that. There will have to be some feelings involved though.’ I turned back to Annika, who still stood with one hand on the door handle. ‘That’s part of what plays are for. They should change the way you feel about things, otherwise they’re not good plays.’

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘So long as it’s about something that isn’t these fucking losers.’ She jerked her head back at her classmates as she walked out. The door banged shut behind her.

‘OK, well, this is a dramatherapy session,’ I said to the remaining three. ‘So, for homework, I’d like you all to start keeping a diary, if you don’t do that already.’ They stared at me. ‘You don’t have to bring it in to the Unit, you don’t have to tell anyone what’s in it, I just want you to write something every day, that you learned, or noticed or thought or felt. Then you can try and write scenes based on your diary entries later in the term, if we feel like it?’

‘Yeah, we’ll think about it, miss.’ Jono was up out of his seat already. ‘I’ll definitely tell Annika you want her to note down her feelings in a book.’ He sniggered as he lumbered past.

The two girls collected their things too. They’d simply decided the lesson was over, and I’d barely kept them in the room for twenty minutes, half of the session time.

‘Don’t worry,’ Carly said, kindly. ‘You might do better next time. What shall we tell Ricky?’

The whole thing had gone as badly as it could possibly have done, and I knew it was because I was incapable of coping with the kind of children I was supposed to be teaching here. These weren’t the middle-class London children I was used to, coming to a theatre workshop on a Saturday morning because their mothers thought it sounded fun and it gave them a couple of hours to spend drinking lattes in peace.

I thought for a moment. ‘Ricky said he liked art, didn’t he? Tell him to draw me a picture.’

As Carly and Mel came past my chair, Mel looked at me. ‘You told two lies,’ she said.

‘What?’ I thought I’d misheard her. She spoke so softly, and when I first met her, I thought that was odd. I suppose I must have thought deaf people would be more likely to shout, because they couldn’t judge their own volume. I’d never given it much thought.

‘You said we had to tell two truths and one lie. But you told two. You lied about not having been in Edinburgh before, and before that, you lied about being glad to meet us.’

I wanted to correct her, but I could see it would be no use. There was no point lying to her again.

‘You don’t want to be here with us,’ she said. ‘So why would we want to be here with you?’

2

I climbed the stairs to Robert’s office, tripping on a step as I went. I heard the sound of sniggering behind me, but I didn’t turn round to see who it was. I walked into Cynthia’s office and asked if I could see him.

‘I think you better had,’ she said. ‘The first day is always the hardest.’

I nodded, wishing she wouldn’t be nice. It’s always kindness that makes me cry. I knocked on Robert’s door, and went in.

‘Alex,’ he said, investing a single word with both pleasure and alarm. ‘What happened?’ He looked at the telephone receiver he was holding in one hand, and returned it to its cradle.

‘They saw right through me. And they walked out. I’m really sorry. I told you this would happen. You should have hired someone who knew what they were doing.’

Robert sighed. ‘They didn’t see through you. They’re children. They don’t have psychic powers and they don’t have x-ray vision.’

He got up and walked over to the corner of his office where he kept a microwave, a toaster and a kettle. Pouring hot milk and cocoa into a cup, he blitzed it for a couple of minutes while I dug through my bag for a tissue. He handed it to me and went over to the filing cabinet. The cup was so hot that I almost dropped it. Taking my burned fingertips off it, I balanced it on my knee, hoping the denim would insulate my leg. He opened the drawer marked ‘B’, removed a small, almost full bottle of brandy, and walked back to me. He slugged the cocoa.

‘Don’t give me that look, young lady,’ he said. ‘I’ll have none of your bourgeois, no-drinking-at-three-o’clock nonsense here. It’s dark out. That makes it time for a drink.’

‘It’s dark out between October and March in Edinburgh.’

‘Which is precisely why you need to leave your puritanical teetotal ideas south of the border,’ he replied. ‘Alex, you are having a very difficult year. Anyone would be upset if they had been through what you have been through in the past few months. But you are a good, kind, clever person, and you will be an inspiration to these children, if you can simply resist the urge to fall apart. Can you do that? For me if not for yourself?’

‘I don’t know.’ I had no idea what the honest answer was. I felt like I was falling apart already, and the bell hadn’t even rung for the end of my first day. ‘They say they don’t want to talk about feelings. Apparently they’re bored of therapy. Except for Ricky, who says art was the only thing he enjoyed. He walked out first.’ I could feel myself losing control, and pulled a tissue from my pocket. I blew my nose, while Robert looked away and pretended I had a cold.

‘Oh, let him,’ he said, airily. ‘He’s functionally literate and mostly numerate, which, considering the skills he had when he arrived here last year, is not bad at all. He’s made friends here and he is, largely, a good influence on Jono, who was – and this isn’t exactly what it says on his form – a total fucking nightmare before he met Ricky. So if you want to teach drama to the others while Ricky draws or paints, that’s fine. They need some creative lessons in the timetable, and they need a therapeutic outlet. Honestly, I don’t care what he does so long as he’s not out on the streets, and he’s not in a fight anywhere.’

‘Really?’ I wasn’t sure if he was being serious, or just trying to make me feel better. Although, after the complete failure of my last lesson, either was OK.

Robert crouched down in front of me, resting his hands on the arms of my chair to keep his balance. His eyes were level with mine.

‘I gave you a lot of files to read, and you can’t memorise them all in one day. Ricky lives with his grandparents. His father has never been on the scene, his mother is either in prison or in rehab, depending on which day of the week it is, and his big brother is in jail, too. He was so badly nourished when social services gave him to his grandmother that he will always be a little wee scrap. He has nothing going for him at all, except that he is actually quite a sweet boy, even if he does get in the occasional rammy, as we used to say in my youth.’

‘A what?’

‘A fight,’ he said.

At least I’d learned something today, even if the fourth-years hadn’t.

Robert looked hard at the mug of cocoa, which I was drinking as quickly as I could, relying on its volcanic heat to mask the taste of the brandy. He levered himself back to standing and made a second cup for himself.