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For Dan
Sophocles Antigone 1 740
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Like anything of merit I ever do, this book wouldn’t have been written or published without help from all kinds of extraordinary people. Firstly, the research: I’d like to thank all the teachers and counsellors who gave up their time to talk to me, especially Carl Hendrick and Becca Howard for trips to their respective schools, and everyone at the Brent Centre for Young People. I also owe a deafening shout of thanks to the staff and students of Boroughmuir High School, especially Ailsa Stratton and David Dempster.
On the subject of deafness, thanks to Anita Doughty for the advice on hearing loss and hearing aids.
My Edinburgh friends answered endless questions, and hardly ever mentioned that they did have jobs to do. A million thanks to Corin Christopher, Mark Crossan and Susan Morrison for their help. The surviving mistakes are all mine.
I’m not sure I would have begun this book without encouragement from Rebecca Carter, continued it without kindness from Andrew Motion, or finished it without advice from Sarah Churchwell: thank you all.
Much of this book was plotted in Regent’s Park: the most beautiful place in London. And yet, keen park visitors will note that I have flattened the ground beneath The Hub, removed it and replaced it with a new building of my own invention. My apologies for the vandalism.
I’d like to thank everyone at Conville & Walsh for their ongoing brilliance, especially Alex Christofi, Alexandra McNicoll, Carrie Plitt, Henna Silvennoinen, Jake Smith-Bosanquet and Kinga Burger. Patrick Walsh is the best of all possible agents, and I don’t care who knows it.
When Patrick was finding a home for this book, I was blown away by the Atlantic crew. Many months later, I still am. Many thanks to everyone there: you are simply and objectively tremendous. My special thanks go to Sara O’Keeffe, the most thoughtful of editors. She never suggests anything without considering every possible consequence first: this book would be half as good without her suggestions and thoughts (at best). Thanks too to Hilary Teeman at St Martin’s, who also contributed excellent editorial advice. I’m lucky to have them both.
Thanks to Michelle Flower for the constant moral support and frequent pictures of rescue rabbits, which would raise anyone’s spirits. Christian Hill is always saintly and perfect in every regard, particularly running my website for all these years in exchange for the occasional gin.
My mother has read this book more times than I have, including when it was still a draft that only a mother could love. (And she loved it. She’s good that way.) My dad read the finished product and said all the right things, which was a relief as I’d lost track of how it would read for the first time by then. My brother, so far as I know, never reads any books I write beyond the acknowledgements, which means as long as I don’t screw these up, he’ll think it’s terrific. There’s a lot to be said for that.
And then, of course, there’s Dan Mersh. There is nothing I ever do that you don’t make easier and no fragment of my life that you don’t make better. Thank you.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Act One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Act Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Act Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Act Four
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Act Five
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Epilogue
Copyright
PROLOGUE
L,
So this guy came today, and he says you sent him. Did you? I’ll talk to him if you want, but he seems kind of annoying. He mostly talks in clichés. He’s all, tell me what happened, in your own words, take your time, whenever you’re ready.
He is pretty hot, though. So if you did send him, thanks for that. Let me know if it was you.
Love, D
ACT ONE
1
The first thing they’ll ask me is how I met her. They already know how we met, of course. But that won’t be why they’re asking. It never is.
I remember when Luke was training, he told me that you only ever ask a question if you already know the answer. Lawyers don’t like surprises, least of all when they’re on the record. So they won’t be asking because they want to know the date, the time, the address, all the little details. They will have done their homework, I’m sure. They’ve spoken to Robert, my old boss, already. So they know when I arrived in Edinburgh, and which day I started work. They probably have a copy of my timetable. If they wanted to, they could pinpoint our first meeting to the minute.
They won’t be asking because they want to know what I’ll say, they’ll just want to know how I say it. Will my eyes go right or left? Am I remembering, or inventing? They’ll be measuring my truth against the one they’ve built from other witnesses. Gauging whether I can be trusted, or whether I’m a liar.
So when they ask, I’m not going to roll my eyes and tell them they’re wasting my time. I’m not going to tell them that I can hardly bear to go over this again, that every time someone asks me, I have to live through it all over again. I’m not going to ask if they know what it feels like, holding up the weight of everything that happened. I won’t make a fuss. It wouldn’t help.
I’m going to take a small breath, look straight ahead, and tell them the truth. I can’t get nervous and start rattling on about how I didn’t plan to be in Edinburgh. I won’t ask them to remember what had happened to me, and why I’d had to run away from London, why I was in Scotland at all. I won’t remind them that I could have had no inkling of how terribly things would turn out. Besides, even if I had, I wouldn’t have cared. I didn’t care about anything then.
I’m just going to answer as simply as I can: I met them on the 6th of January 2011, in the basement room at 58 Rankeillor Street. And I wouldn’t have believed any of them could do something so monstrous.
* * *
That isn’t quite true, of course. Even by the standards of the Unit, they were a difficult group. But Robert had warned me that they would be challenging, so my expectations were low.
I went to meet Robert the day before term began, at the pupil referral unit on Rankeillor Street. The building was empty except for the two of us, but I had to pick up forms and files and registration lists, most of which were covered in Post-it notes linking children’s names to medical conditions. At first glance, at least half of them were allergic to something: nuts, pollen, air pollution, gluten, mould spores.
‘They don’t seem very sturdy,’ I pointed out, skimming the top few pages Robert had just given me. His office was a huge, high-ceilinged room whose elegant proportions had been sliced in two by a partition wall. One half had been
converted into his secretary’s office. It was lined with filing cabinets from the door all the way to the far wall. In front of these stood her symmetrical desk: a computer in one corner was matched in the opposite one by three wire trays balanced on top of one another and marked ‘In’, ‘Out’ and ‘Pending’; all of them were empty. Next to them was a picture of two young children, dark-haired and grinning in front of a loch in the pouring rain. The frame was clearly handmade – in bright, misshapen purple clay – presumably by one of the children it contained.
Robert’s office was the yin to Cynthia’s yang. Bulging files were piled up on every flat surface, including the floor. Torn scraps of paper with names or initials were balanced on top of them. Where Cynthia’s only light source was the greenish long-life bulb overhead, Robert’s room had two huge sash windows which looked out onto Rankeillor Street. Look up to the left, and you could see Salisbury Crags, the dark cliffs which glower down over Edinburgh, reminding you that there will be no nonsense here. The windows were framed with thick, theatrical curtains, their dark crimson folds coated with a thin film of dust, through which narrow, wandering tracks of curtain showed. Someone had taken an erratic vacuum cleaner to them but had lost the will before victory could be claimed.
‘Don’t believe a word of it,’ he panted, as he hunted around the desk, the table and the mantelpiece over the long-dead fireplace, trying to make sure he had gathered everything with ‘Alex’ or ‘A.M.’ written on or near it. ‘I mean, do believe it,’ he corrected himself. ‘Don’t test them by throwing peanuts at them, or asking an asthmatic one to run up the stairs. But rest assured, Alex, these children will not be felled by a mere allergen. These details come up when they’re assessed by doctors and social workers, of course, for their specific educational needs and challenges, and we have to keep full records of everything, even if it seems trivial. I doubt,’ he glanced down at the file he was holding, ‘if Jenny Stratton will meet a sticky end from her lychee allergy in your classroom. You’d have to go a long way to find a lychee anywhere in this city, come to that. It makes you wonder how they found out she was allergic at all. Most of them will be fine when they get to know you. Some of them might be less keen on doing drama or dramatherapy than others. Some of them are very confident, some are, you know, shyer.’
‘How many kids do you have here?’ I asked him, looking at the paper chaos. There couldn’t possibly be room in the building – a vast converted terraced house spread over four floors, its yellow bricks blackened with dirt – for the number of children needed to generate this many forms.
‘There are about thirty of them here at any one time, but they come and go, obviously. New children will be referred here from about the second week of term, I expect. And we’ll lose some of these ones as we go along.’
‘Lose them?’
‘Rankeillor Street is a charity. Children come here when nowhere else will take them. Thanks to our benefactors, we can take a few children out of the system which is failing them. Most of them have been expelled from at least one school, though we do take some children before that point.’ He began hunting around for something under the papers on his desk. ‘Their parents or guardians apply to us, and if we think we can help, genuinely help, we try and make space for them. Our admissions procedure was enshrined in the original gift of the building and the fund: we don’t take children who are simply struggling academically. There are plenty of other options available to them. Not all of them are good options, I know, but they do exist.’
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 a
t 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 Furies: A Novel Page 1
