The Furies: A Novel

by Natalie Haynes

  ‘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.

  ‘Don’t tell Jeff,’ he said, as he sipped it.

  Jeff was Robert’s other half, or ‘the moon of my existence’, as he liked to refer to him, having dismissed ‘boyfriend’ as being inappropriately youthful for men of their age.

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘I mean it, you know. Everything in Ricky’s life has been chaotic. I mean everything. Let him do what makes him feel happy and safe. That’s what matters most in his case.’

  ‘But the others are so…’ I gave up, before I said what I wanted to say. They were so hostile and aggressive and angry with everyone, especially me. Robert’s lack of concern was disconcerting. He couldn’t really think I’d done an adequate job today. But if he didn’t, he was faking it beautifully.

  ‘Your classes will all be fine. You’ve met most of them now, and you’ve got on with them perfectly well. So teach them all drama, if you think they’ll enjoy it. Or let them write and perform plays or role-plays if you and they prefer. They have other teachers for literacy and numeracy; your dramatherapy class is supposed to be somewhere they can learn some different things if they’re interested. They just need a space to express themselves creatively, if that doesn’t sound unspeakably poncey. And even if it does, frankly, that’s still what they need. They need to have a little control over their lives, and your classroom is a place where they can do that and, I hope, have some fun. They are teenagers, after all.’ He looked over his glasses at me.

  I held the cocoa mug higher in front of my face. ‘And the fourth-years?’ I asked.

  ‘Read some plays with them,’ he said. He waved a theatrical arm. ‘You know a lot about plays. You were directing at the Royal Court in London six months ago, for God’s sake, woman. You were one of my most promising students. And if you can inspire them to dream of being a little more than badly behaved children, you’ll have done everything I hoped you would. If you don’t, you don’t. There are plenty of teachers and therapists with bags of experience who would find it too challenging to work with these kids, and we all know that. A few of them work in this very unit, in spite of my best efforts. The board was happy to take a punt on you because I told them you were marvellous.’

  ‘And because it was an emergency?’

  He sighed. ‘Yes, of course. I had an art therapist, she got pregnant, I expected her to go on maternity leave at Easter, and suddenly she was in hospital with pre-eclampsia, and was told she should do nothing more taxing than rest in bed for the next three months. So, yes, it was an emergency. You were available with no notice, and someone is better than no-one. Especially if that someone is you.’

  I nodded. It was pathetic, the way I still wanted his approval all these years after he’d finished being my teacher.

  ‘Any expression of interest from any child in this building is gold, and you must treat it as such,’ he continued, growing more expansive with the brandy. ‘When they tell you they want to learn about something, take them at their word. You’ll gain their respect because you listened to them, and you might accidentally end up teaching them something.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘When are you next due to see them? What day is today? Thursday?’

  I nodded.

  ‘So you see them next on Monday? Tuesday? Take in some plays – let them choose one to read, and see where you end up. We don’t have an extensive library here, but I have plenty of texts at home – I’ll bring some in for you. Or you could go round to Blackwell’s and buy a couple – was it Blackwell’s when you were here? Or was it still a James Thin? I lose track of the way these bloody bookshops change names.’

  ‘The one on South Bridge? It was Blackwell’s by the time I got here.’

  ‘Keep the receipts,’ he said. I nodded. ‘Now will you stop crying? You know I don’t like crying.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I just felt like a fraud.’ I mopped my face one last time
with the tissue and dropped it in the bin.

  ‘But you aren’t. Have you got less professional experience than your predecessor? Yes. But things being as they are, you are the best woman for the job. The children will realise that as they get to know you. Why wouldn’t they? They’re naughty, they’re not stupid.’

  I raised my eyebrows at him, feeling the weight of my puffy eyelids stretching upwards. ‘Only you could describe Annika, a girl who apparently once threatened someone with a kitchen knife, as “naughty”.’

  ‘Well, I understand that he was a deeply annoying young man who had been harassing her for some time. If you will approach someone in a cookery lesson and annoy them when they’re using a knife, you can’t then be princessy about things. Anyway, her former school should have had a more robust bullying policy, in my opinion. Annika is impatient and rude because she’s clever and no-one challenges her.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s because of the knife thing?’

  Robert ignored me. ‘I took this job on to make a difference, Alex. It might be a cliché, but it’s still true. I could have stayed at the University until I retired, spending my days with lovely, hardworking girls like you. These children need us. I know it sounds mad when it’s your first day and I’ve already turned you to drink, but you’ll see. It feels good to be needed.’

  And, of course, he was right. Everyone wants to be needed. Even me, even then.

  Dear Diary,

  Christ, I did not write that. Is this the worst idea anyone’s ever had? Keeping a diary is lame. She asked us to, so this is kind of like homework. But she said we didn’t have to bring it in to the Unit, so how would she even know if I was doing it?

  I don’t need a diary to keep my secret thoughts in, because I don’t really have any. I do like writing though. I won a prize for creative writing at Bruntsfield, my old school. I wrote a short story about this old jakey woman you see on the Links sometimes. I used to notice her when I was heading into town. So I made up some stuff about her, and they gave me a book token for twenty quid.

  We don’t get to do much of that at Rankeillor. No wonder Annika’s bored. I haven’t decided yet, but I think I might want to be a journalist one day. I used to write for the school paper, when I was at Bruntsfield, but we don’t have anything like that now. It’d be a big waste of time. I mean, what would Ricky do with a school paper? Fold it into a hat?

  So that’s what I’ll do with this diary. Practise being a journalist, and write about actual stuff I’ve noticed or found out.

  Let’s start with the new teacher, call-me-Alex. She’s a state, that’s for starters. We were trying to work out when she last had her hair cut. I think two years ago, minimum. She doesn’t look, you know, grimy. She doesn’t smell bad, or anything. I’m just saying, she doesn’t make much of an effort: jeans, jumper, and not a fucking hairbrush in sight. We’re trying to work out if she overslept or if that’s how she usually looks. She might be pretty if she made an effort. She’s probably twenty-five, or maybe thirty. She’s got brown hair, which she used to dye, definitely, because the ends are a completely different brown from the roots. And she doesn’t have any make-up on at all. So I guess she isn’t trying to impress anyone at Rankeillor. Not that there’s anyone to impress, since Robert is clearly a poof and all the other teachers are female.

  She’s from London, she isn’t very good at teaching, and she likes plays. That’s all I know at the moment.

  Robert came round to my flat that evening with a pile of play texts. He looked less harassed now than he had done in the afternoon.

  ‘You smell nice,’ I told him, as he kissed me on both cheeks.

  ‘New cologne,’ he said, happily. ‘Jeff chose it. Now, how are you settling in?’

  He bustled past me in the narrow hallway, his shoes tapping on the pine flooring that peeped through the bright, moth-bitten rugs.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks. It’s a lovely building. Thanks for sorting it out for me.’

  Robert had arranged everything about my move to Edinburgh except the train ticket. The flat I was renting belonged to an actor friend of his, currently touring South Asia with a physical-theatre production of Crime and Punishment – described by Robert, who had been to the press night, as ‘both of the above’.

  New Skinner’s Close was one of those tiny secret pockets that lurk in Edinburgh’s Old Town, completely hidden unless you were looking for it. You could get into it through a narrow, cobbled passage off Blackfriars Street, one of those small, steep roads that cut down the hill between the Royal Mile and the dingy bars and student haunts of the Cowgate, beneath the huge South Bridge in the Old Town. Every weekend you could hear weary clubbers shriek with horror as they sheltered from the weather while they argued about where to go next and then discovered they had swapped the rain for some unidentifiable liquid that was now dripping down on them from the bridges above. They would stay at the youth hostel opposite the entrance to New Skinner’s Close, which announced its presence with a sign in the shape of a hat-wearing red cow. You could hear music pulsing through the windows at night. The rest of Blackfriars Street catered to older visitors: Highland tours could be booked a few doors up. Otherwise it was all small cafés, and shops which sold felted knitwear and silver jewellery.

  You could also reach the little close from the other side, through a tiny archway which stood almost hidden between sandwich shops on the Royal Mile. Even though the street was a tourist trap, drawing visitors up to the Castle or down to Holyrood, it wasn’t busy in the winter. It was lined with shops which sold cashmere, tweed, tartan, small furry toys of the Loch Ness monster, and dozens of kinds of malt whisky, all waiting for visitors to arrive later in the year. And hiding behind them was New Skinner’s Close.

  Whichever direction you came from, you wound down to a cobbled courtyard, with this tiny, turreted building in the middle, surrounded by washing lines and potted plants. No-one was mad enough to try drying their washing in Edinburgh in January, so the lines stood empty but for some sturdy clothes pegs. Only a few small heathers were surviving the winter in their terracotta planters, some of which had cracked open from the cold, spilling soil onto the frozen paving stones. My flat was on the second floor, and to reach it I had to climb a spiral staircase carved from old, grey Scottish stone. I was only a few missed haircuts from being Rapunzel.

  It was a one-bedroom flat with a living room that opened out into a small kitchen. The bedroom was opposite the front door and looked out over another little courtyard at the back of the building. The tiny bathroom was decorated with a jaunty nautical theme: blue tiles round the bath, fish on the shower curtain, a few shells from the beach in a glass dish on a shelf. I guessed they’d come from Portobello, a couple of miles away to the east. I used to go there in the summer when I was a student, and I’d had a collection of seashells too.

  The living room was a little bare. Robert’s friend had left minimal furnishings: a TV, a digital radio, a gate-leg table at which I ate porridge every morning, and a small desk. I’d brought only what I could carry from London: one bag of clothes, a laptop and almost nothing else.

  ‘Christ, Alex,’ Robert said as he walked into the living room and caught sight of the empty shelves on the far wall. He squeezed my arm the way people had taken to doing in the last few months, like they needed to check I was really there. ‘Are you living like a monk for a reason?’

  ‘No.’ Even as I said it I could hear how defensive I sounded. ‘I just didn’t want to bring more than I could carry.’

  ‘Where are the rest of your things? I thought you’d moved out of the flat in…’ He paused, trying to remember. ‘Richmond, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was, and I did. Luke’s parents have the rest of it.’

  ‘They took your things as well as his?’

  ‘Yes. I was going to chuck it all, but they didn’t want me to. I told them if it was important to them, they could have it, but I didn’t have anywhere to put it. So they said they’d take it and keep it for “
when I was ready”.’

  ‘Was that really what you wanted?’

  ‘I didn’t want anything. I just wanted not to be in London. And because of you, I’m not.’

  Robert sighed. ‘Well, it’s lucky I brought you these, then,’ he said as he dropped the books on the table. ‘At least you’ll have one shelf to keep you going.’ He looked down at the pile and back at the shelves. ‘I’ll bring you some more tomorrow. Don’t for God’s sake let me bring Jeff here, or you’ll have to move in with me for a week while he decorates the place.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I took the books.

  ‘Do you just watch TV every evening, Alex?’ He was still looking around the room, as if he were expecting hobbies or magazines to leap from the walls.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I come home and I turn on the news and make dinner. Then I watch silly costume dramas which sometimes have someone I know in them, playing a housemaid or the third daughter of a duke or something, and I think how funny it is that I used to be part of that world and now I’m not. Then I go to bed with the radio on, and I listen to it as I fall asleep. Sometimes I fit some ironing into the mix.’

  ‘Fun, fun, fun,’ he said. ‘What will you do at weekends?’

  ‘I’ll swim, and walk, and go to the National Gallery. What do you do at the weekend?’

  ‘Drink, mainly,’ he replied. ‘They’re long weeks.’

  ‘These are great.’ I was looking at the spines of the books he’d brought. A complete Shakespeare in four volumes, and A Man For All Seasons that was losing some of its pages as the glue on its spine had splintered away. A dilapidated copy of The Caretaker, a dog-eared Candide, with the part of Pangloss underlined in pencil, and at the bottom of the pile, Lorca’s Blood Wedding.

  ‘We’d better go out for dinner,’ he said, looking around again. ‘So I don’t feel like I’m in prison all evening.’

  ‘OK, OK. I’ll buy a picture, or something, if it’ll cheer you up.’

  He looked at me. ‘Will it cheer you up?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I’ll buy you one. A nice poster of a Highland coo or the Loch Ness monster, if you’re lucky.’