The Furies: A Novel (7 page)

4) I can hear music, but I need to adjust my aids for it, and it needs to have the bass turned up.

5) When my mum asks me to do something for the third time, she can’t say, ‘Are you listening to me?’ And I can’t say, ‘I’m not deaf.’ Usually, she goes with, ‘Why aren’t you paying attention to me?’ And I go with, ‘I’m not stupid.’ A lot of people think that deaf and stupid are the same thing. That’s because they are stupid.

6) I wasn’t born deaf. If I had been, I would probably use sign language as well as lip-reading, and I might not be able to speak properly. I know some sign language, but only the basic stuff.

7) Sometimes I get tired from the effort of listening. My head starts to ache from concentrating on your mouth, and blocking out the interference from everywhere else. When this happens, I take my aids out so I can just forget about hearing for a while. If I close my eyes, you could all be on another planet. You just disappear. You’re gone so completely that I wonder if you were ever really there.

8) I’d rather be deaf than blind. Have you ever noticed how much people use seeing words in normal speech? I see what you mean, I’ll look into it. Whereas hearing words are used for when people are arguing: listen, I hear what you’re saying. I don’t mind being deaf, but I would really hate to be blind. I’ve never met a blind person, but I’d like to know if they feel the same way as me, or the opposite.

9) I sleep with an alarm next to my pillow. If the fire alarm goes off, I won’t hear it, because obviously I take my aids out to sleep. So I have a special alarm that vibrates and strobes to wake me up. It’s connected to the fire alarm wirelessly, so it goes off if the main alarm goes off. This is so I don’t burn to death, because we live on the first floor, and it’s a long way down to the street, and also there are railings. I have to take it with me when I go to stay with my dad.

10) I’ll think of a tenth thing for next time.

It was a filthy day outside. The wind was up, so the sleet was falling diagonally, stinging and vicious. I had two routes to Rankeillor: I could either walk out of New Skinner’s Close onto Blackfriars Street, turn left onto the Royal Mile and left again onto the South Bridge. Then half a mile past all the bus stops and left onto Rankeillor Street. Or I could go the other way, out of the close at the bottom, turn left past the big Catholic church, then right up the hill, past the student union buildings on the Pleasance, then eventually turn right onto Rankeillor Street just before St Leonard’s police station. On wet days, I usually went for the former. Climbing into the rain was somehow worse than walking into it.

As I walked up Nicolson Street, sharp pinpricks of cold found the few exposed inches of my skin. I bunched my hands into my coat pockets. The buildings were dulled by the rain and even the cars driving past me were losing their colour, the sleet and dirt and road salt rendering them interchangeable with the road. The pavement was greasy underfoot with frost and salt; the broken paving stones were booby-traps, poised to spray freezing water on the feet of the unwary. Even wearing a sweater and a thick coat, I was bone cold. It was only just past seven a.m., but I’d woken at five and hadn’t been able to get back to sleep. And if I wasn’t going to sleep, I’d decided, I might as well swim.

I used to go to the Commonwealth Pool all the time when I was a student, until a zealous week in my final year when I went there three days in a row, and saw the same brightly coloured M&M carcasses ground into the changing room floor every day. After that, I couldn’t quite convince myself that the rest of the pool was any cleaner than the floors, and it put me off going back. But when I moved to London and swam in the tiny pool at my local gym, I found that I missed those fifty-metre lengths. And since returning to Edinburgh, I’d been thinking about going there again. I hadn’t swum for months. When Robert asked me what I was doing with my spare time, I’d told him I would be swimming, because it didn’t feel like a lie. I used to swim and maybe I would again.

And as soon as the doors swung open and I smelled the chlorine in the air, I knew I’d made the right choice. It was so quiet in there on cold mornings: only the most committed swimmers could face getting out of bed before six in the winter. And the water was cool, unlike my old London pool, where it felt like swimming in a bath. Here, it was all about long distance, and distance swimmers could keep themselves warm. I walked through from the changing room to the lanes, stopping under the showers on the way to get my goggles wet. I clocked the speed of the five swimmers using the lanes already. I didn’t trust myself to the fast lane when I hadn’t been in the water for months. So I splashed down into the middle lane and swam two freestyle lengths. My muscles hurt a little, but it was a clean pain. I checked the clock and began to swim again. I probably had time for twenty lengths before I needed to shower and head to the Unit.

Everything was quiet. My goggles and hat covered my ears so completely that they blocked out almost all the noise of the pool. The city outside seemed completely unreal in there. Just the taste of chlorine and the occasional splashing of another swimmer in the next lane over. I cut through the water, staying under the surface for as long as my lungs could bear it each time I pushed off from the wall. You move more quickly through water than over it. And the only thing that matters is the next breath.

I showered and dried my hair before I left the pool. It was far too cold to go outside with wet hair, and it would be for weeks. I still had the imprint of my goggles on my face, I realised, as I caught my reflection by the hairdryers, and I hoped it would fade by the time I got to the Unit.

The weather made a big difference to the mood at Rankeillor. The kids were always on edge on these cold wet days – Luke would have called them ‘baity’ – because they had to stay indoors all day. Even the Unit’s keenest smokers didn’t want to drown or freeze. And the basement itself was swampier than usual – I could smell the damp creeping into it as I climbed down the stairs. The earth wanted to reclaim Rankeillor Street. I wedged the door open, to try and reduce the mildewed smell. One of my second-years – who I was teaching that morning – had, I remembered reading, an allergy to mould spores. I wasn’t sure how the allergy manifested itself, but I worried that he would start coughing and scratching if he came into the basement in its present condition.

I saw the pile of plays which the kids had rejected on my desk, where I’d left them, and thought I should tidy up. I opened one of the cupboards under the front windows and blanched. The smell was coming from there. The wooden skirting boards curved away from the wall, the plaster was blistered, and all of it was covered in a thin layer of black mould. I looked at the small round clock behind my desk. I still had forty minutes before my first lesson, which was surely enough time.

I walked out to the hall and tried the door under the stairs. It was locked, but I had a pile of keys which Robert had given me on my first day, including a spindly brass one which opened the cupboard. As I’d expected, there was a bucket, mops and brooms next to a tiny sink. Under it was an industrial container of bleach. I filled the bucket with bleach and water, took rubber gloves and a mop, and scrubbed the mould away from the walls and the floor. The knots in the wood made it impossible to remove every trace, but at least I could get rid of the worst of it.

*   *   *

‘It smells horrible in here,’ said Carly as she walked in at the end of the morning. ‘Has someone been sick?’ Today, her shiny orange hair had a dark blue streak down one side, like a technicolour badger. She’d matched it with a blue bangle and blue Perspex earrings.

‘It’s just bleach,’ I said, as three more of them trudged in. ‘Where’s Ricky?’

Annika shrugged. It seemed that she spoke for them all.

‘Hasn’t anyone seen him?’

‘He’s not here,’ snapped Jono.

‘Is he ill?’

He didn’t reply.

‘How did you get on with reading the play?’ I said. More shrugging.

‘We don’t feel like working today,’ said Carly.

‘Maybe you should make collages, then,’ I suggested. ‘You were the ones who said you wanted to do something more challenging.’

‘I know,’ she sighed. ‘But today it all just seems too high-maintenance.’

‘You must have spent an hour doing that eye make-up this morning,’ I replied. Carly blushed happily, and turned her face from one side to the other, so I could fully appreciate the light glinting off her gleaming turquoise brow-bone and blue-glittered lashes. ‘So I don’t think you’re afraid of being high-maintenance. But I take your point. Edinburgh isn’t much fun on days like today, is it?’ I said.

I had clearly learned nothing. Did I want them to get side-tracked so we could talk about me instead of doing any work? I’ve thought about it hard, and I honestly don’t think so. But I did want them to like me, and perhaps that’s the same thing. I can only really be sure that I kept giving them openings like this, which they were incredibly good at exploiting – Carly especially.

‘So why did you come back to Edinburgh, then?’ she asked. ‘It wasn’t for the weather.’

‘I like the smell of yeast,’ I said, which was an obvious lie. Edinburgh isn’t as reekie as its nickname suggests it once was, but you can still smell yeast in the air on some days. It always reminds me of over-cooked food, of baked potatoes kept warm for so long that they’ve become nothing but thick, blackened skins.

‘No, but really?’ she said.

‘Robert asked me to come and teach you lot, when Miss Allen fell ill. And it’s impossible to say no to him.’

‘But what were you doing before?’ she asked.

‘I was directing plays.’

‘Really? Who was in them? Anyone famous?’

‘No, no-one famous. They don’t let you have a go on the famous people till you’ve practised on the ones no-one’s heard of.’

‘So why aren’t you doing that any more?’ asked Jono. ‘Were you rubbish at it?’ He was always like this, I was beginning to realise. I tried not to take it personally. And besides, when I was up in the staffroom yesterday, one of their other teachers had told me that he’d lobbed a brick through her car windscreen a couple of months ago, after she’d kept him behind for swearing at her. So if the worst I got from him was this default assumption of my incompetence, I’d take it.

‘I don’t think so. I just didn’t want to be in London any more. I wanted to come back to Scotland. And this job seemed like the right one. Maybe I’ll direct another play sometime. But not at the moment. I don’t have the time.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m using all of it to find plays for you to read, so you can tell me you don’t feel like it because the weather’s bad.’

‘When you say it like that, it sounds like you’re cross with us,’ Jono said.

‘I’m not cross with you. I just think we should do what we set out to do today, which is to talk about Oedipus.’

‘Alright, if you insist,’ he sighed and reached down to his bag to find the book, still muttering. ‘If it makes you happy.’

‘I might try to make my happiness dependent on something other than what you read in the average week, Jono.’

‘But, are you happy?’ It was Mel who asked. It was such an unexpected question that I felt a reflex answer coming. Then I remembered that she’d called me out for lying to her the first day I met her. I thought for a moment and told her the truth.

‘Not really,’ I said.

She nodded, her blue eyes fixed on mine. ‘Me either.’

‘Aw, babe,’ said Carly, and reached over to her. Mel leaned into the hug, and patted Carly’s arm as she did so, but she didn’t break eye contact with me.

‘Oh God, really?’ said Annika. Her whole body was taut with annoyance. ‘Could you just not?’

‘Fuck you,’ said Mel, finally turning her head to look at her. Annika paid no attention.

‘Seriously, I’m asking.’ Annika took off her glasses to glare at me. ‘Are we bleating on about you and Mel being a bit sad today, or are we talking about something I might give a shit about?’ She began flipping her pen in her hand. ‘Because if it’s the first one, say so now and I’ll go and do something else. I’ve only just met you, so I don’t really give a fuck how you feel, to be honest.’

‘We’re talking about Oedipus.’ I was growing tired of Annika. ‘Whether you give a shit about it or not is entirely up to you. Now, are you staying or going?’ She shrugged again. ‘Then I’ll assume you’re staying. Have you read the first act?’

No-one said anything. Jono drummed his fingers on the back cover of his book. Carly smoothed invisible stray hairs back into place.

I’d had some awkward scenes in my other classes, but I was beginning to feel like I could set my watch by Annika’s temper, and this was only the third time I’d met her.

‘OK, so, where did we get to last time?’

‘We were talking about fate, and destiny. Are they the same thing?’ Mel asked.

‘I think they are, really. The ancient Greeks had three Fates, called the Moirae – the singular is Moira.’

‘I have an Aunt Moira,’ said Jono. I didn’t know if he was trying to ease the tension in the room, or just offering up information. ‘She lives near Berwick.’

‘Is she a sinister old crone who spins the thread of men’s lives and is feared by the gods themselves?’ I asked.

‘Pretty much.’ He grinned. He had a chipped tooth, I noticed, like a fang. Was it a new injury or had I just not seen him smile before?

‘And the Moirae are a sort of triple incarnation of Fate: three women, like the witches in
Macbeth
, who see the future as it will be. Which is why
Oedipus
is such a difficult story – does he deserve his fate? Does anyone?’

‘Some people are just born unlucky,’ said Mel.

‘Really?’ I asked her. ‘That’s what you believe?’

‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘None of us has any control over most of what’s happened to us. We don’t have a say in anything. Annika doesn’t want to live here, you see, but her parents make her, and that’s why she’s such a bitch.’

‘Fuck off,’ said Annika as she stretched her arms over her head to elongate her spine. The age-softened chairs at Rankeillor wanted you to sit on them forever, and eventually your back rebelled. She didn’t disagree, however.