‘Promises, promises.’
His eye suddenly caught the small wooden box on the bottom of the bookshelves.
‘What’s that?’ he asked. ‘Alex, it isn’t…? You haven’t brought…?
‘It’s nothing,’ I told him. ‘I mean, it isn’t nothing. It’s my engagement ring.’
‘Oh God, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry. I thought you’d brought his ashes up here in an ornamental tin, like some demented Russian widow.’
‘No. It’s just the ring.’
‘Don’t you want to wear it?’
‘No. Not really.’
‘I suppose it would remind you every time you looked at your hand,’ he said.
* * *
I didn’t cry now when I talked about Luke. For the first few months, I cried all the time. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean that the tears were ever-present in my eyes and required no provocation to make them flow. I don’t know what I expected grief to be like, even though I’d lost my father a few years before. When that was still a fresh wound, I used to cry suddenly and copiously, when something made me think of him or someone used some stupid phrase he used to say. Missing him would hit me like a well-aimed punch, so I would cry because it hurt.
But with Luke, it was different. I was never reminded of Luke because I never stopped thinking about him. All the time I was teaching, I would guess I was giving the kids, at best, seventy per cent of my attention. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about them. I wanted them to like me, wanted them to learn. I wanted to do the job well, or at least as well as I could. But the children never once had my undivided attention, until it all went wrong. And I do still wonder if that was – at least in part – why it all went wrong.
At the time, I didn’t know any of this, of course. And while I know that no-one can see the future, when I look back at that time, I realise I couldn’t even see the present. I listened to them talk, but I only heard part of what they were saying, because I was so consumed with carrying the weight of Luke. My lungs felt tight with it sometimes. The world was heavier without him in it, and slower, and darker, and it took energy, actual physical energy to move through it. And I didn’t want to let go of it, either. What other way did I have to keep him real? Carrying his dead weight was better than forgetting him. Grieving was better than waking up to realise I couldn’t remember which of his eyes had the brown fleck in it.
3
I took Robert’s advice and stopped in at Blackwell’s before I next saw the fourth-years. I bought a few more books – a collected Sophocles, The Seagull – trying to think what I would have liked to read when I was fifteen. My father was the theatre fan in our family, always booking tickets to every new play or revival. His shelves bowed under the weight of glossy theatre programmes and scripts. I couldn’t now remember how I’d chosen which ones I liked the look of: the titles, probably. But that was eleven years ago, and anyway, when I was their age, I was nothing like them – never in trouble with a teacher, let alone kicked out of a school. But there had to be one thing we could all connect to. I found myself scanning the shelves, trying to guess which one might be the charm.
One of the things I’d liked least about Edinburgh when I first moved there was how straight, ordinary roads kept changing their names, like a criminal with a roster of alibis. North Bridge became South Bridge, South Bridge became Nicolson Street, Nicolson Street became Clerk Street. I could never quite remember the points of conversion, so even a major bus route felt slippery and uncertain. I’d reached Clerk Street now, and felt my spirits drop as the empty shop fronts increased and even the charity shops thinned out. I turned left onto Rankeillor Street, and walked to the very end, gazing up at Arthur’s Seat, which sulked ahead of me, clouds shrouding its peak. The volcano was long dead, but its sullenness remained. The Unit was the last building before the end of the road, next to a tiny newsagent’s that must have made most of its money selling crisps and cigarettes to our kids.
I was relieved and surprised when all five of the fourth-years turned up.
‘Hello again.’
They mumbled and took the same seats as before.
‘As Annika suggested, I’ve brought you some plays,’ I said. Ricky gave a huge sigh, his tiny frame swamped today by a green football shirt which flattened onto his chest as he exhaled. He was hunched into it, clearly cold. His scabby elbows were raw and red.
‘I’m sorry, Ricky. I know you’d prefer to do art, but we’re going to have to do some drama. That’s what the majority of the group would prefer, and it is what I came here to teach.’
He looked around at his classmates, trying to work out who had stitched him up.
‘If you want to draw or paint, you’re very welcome to do that. We’ll be discussing plays in class, but you’ll do some work in your own time as well, I hope.’
Jono’s eyebrows shot up, and I realised that hope was extremely slender.
I carried on talking to Ricky. ‘You can draw your homework for me. That would be brilliant, actually.’
‘Brilliant, actually…’ Though Ricky seemed placated, Jono was mimicking me under his breath. This would be the most difficult part of dealing with these kids, I was discovering. In order to gain ground with one, I inevitably antagonised another. Even when they were ostensibly friends. My other classes were the same, though they were usually easier to cope with than this one. Someone always felt things were unfair.
Ricky settled back into his seat, and began doodling on the back page of his exercise book.
‘We’ll pick a play and read it together. What do you fancy? Shakespeare? Molière? Chekhov?’ I held the books up to the room, one after another.
‘Those are just words,’ Ricky said. ‘Not even words, to be honest. Noises. What’s the difference?’
‘Are they hard?’ asked Jono. ‘We should do the easiest one.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’ll be the easiest one,’ he said. He shook his head like I was an idiot. I bet he did that to his parents. I must be at least ten years younger than his parents, and it made me feel old. I tried to explain myself.
‘What’s wrong with something hard? You’re smart. Everyone’s told me how clever you five are. Why would difficult be a bad thing?’
He stared at me blankly. I stared back. I was beginning to see that this was the way the kids in Edinburgh communicated. I’d come into Rankeillor expecting them to talk in slang, like London kids – a whole special patois, with no distinction between class or wealth, based entirely on their desire to speak in a language their elders couldn’t penetrate. But here, teenagers spoke so much more formally, it was like travelling back in time. I wondered if they spoke this way when there was no teacher in the room, or if the act of observing them made a difference. Either way, they seemed to have only two settings: adult speech, or staring and grunts.
‘It’s just common sense,’ he sighed. ‘Difficult means boring.’
‘Since when? Do you choose a video game because it’s the easiest?’
‘Obviously not. I’d have finished it in a day. They cost forty pounds, you know.’ This provoked a snigger from Ricky. Later, I would discover from the basic skills teacher that both boys were barred from the St James Centre, the dilapidated shopping mall over in the New Town, for shoplifting.
‘Well, let’s treat plays like that. Let’s assume that difficult doesn’t mean boring, it means something you have to work at a bit, which you’ll like better.’
‘Video games and work aren’t the same,’ he said. ‘Obviously.’
‘Humour me, and pretend they are, will you? Just for a while.’
I wondered if the lesson’s first walk-out was about to happen. But Jono stayed in his seat, pitying me, and Mel broke the awkward silence that had fallen. I wondered if she could sense the difference between good and bad silences, or if she just spoke when she was ready.
‘Not Shakespeare,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘We did Romeo and Juliet at my old school. Th
e hot guy dies halfway through.’
‘The hot guy is Mercutio?’ I wanted to be sure.
‘Yeah. Shakespeare just kills him off so that Romeo doesn’t look like such a loser in comparison.’
‘Is he the black guy?’ asked Carly. ‘He is hot.’
‘The black guy?’ I asked.
‘In the film. With Leonardo DiCaprio in it?’
‘Oh, yes. Mercutio is the black guy.’ Finally, they seemed to be interested in something, even if it was only the film adaptation.
‘I don’t want to do Shakespeare either,’ said Ricky.
‘OK, not Shakespeare.’ Of course they wouldn’t want to do Shakespeare. They’d probably been bored to tears trying to get through Macbeth at school. ‘Then how about someone modern?’
‘Like who?’
‘We could do Jerusalem.’ I picked up the newest play I’d brought for them. ‘It’s full of swearing. You might like it.’
‘What’s it about?’ asked Jono.
‘It’s about a man who lives in a caravan. The council wants to evict him.’
Jono reached over and took the book from me, lured by the red cover and the picture of a man smoking a joint.
‘Looks alright,’ he said as he flipped it over to read the back. ‘Wait,’ he continued. ‘It says, “A dark comedy about contemporary life in rural England.”’ His chubby finger jabbed at the words.
‘Yes,’ I replied, not seeing the man-trap opening up beneath my feet.
‘And, “A bold and often hilarious State-of-England play.”’
‘It got very good reviews,’ I agreed. ‘Is that the one you’d like to do?’
‘Why would I want to read a play about England?’ he spat. ‘It wouldn’t have anything to do with us.’
‘Oh my God,’ said Annika, slamming her hand down on her desk. ‘Could you be any more pathetic?’
His face was glowing bright red. ‘Yeah, it doesn’t matter to you because you’re not fucking Scottish. So you wouldn’t understand, would you?’
‘Christ, could you stop being such a victim!’ she shrieked. ‘This poor-wee-Scotland-the-Brave mentality.’ For a girl whose first language was Swedish, she could parody the Edinburgh accent unnervingly well. ‘It’s just so…’ She cast around for the word. ‘Boring.’
She reached down to her bag. Ricky was doodling with increasing fervour, drawing himself out of the conflict.
‘Let’s not make a big deal out of it,’ I said, and their two furious faces both turned in my direction. I had to fight not to raise my hands. I had half a memory of a weeping supply teacher at my old school, and I knew I was heading that way myself. ‘It’s not life and death. It’s just a play. I thought you might like it, but it’s OK if you don’t, because we have plenty more to choose from. Mel, Carly – you’ve gone very quiet. Do you have any thoughts?’
I passed two more books to them. Mel leaned forward to take one. Her sleeves were much too long, I noticed. Even as she reached forward, her hand was half-covered by the pale blue cuff of her sweater.
‘This one,’ said Carly, as she looked at the jacket of a new version of The Misanthrope.
‘No,’ said Mel. ‘I can’t stand her.’ She pointed her thumb at the film star who had appeared in the recent London revival.
‘OK.’ My patience had worn through. ‘Which one are you holding?’
‘Sophocles, The Theban Plays,’ she replied.
‘Then shall we do one of those?’ I snapped. ‘It’s not set in England, it doesn’t have a hot guy dying halfway through, Keira Knightley has never appeared in it, and there are several scenes in it which I imagine Ricky would be able to draw. Will that do?’
Ricky jumped as I said his name, then continued cross-hatching whatever he was drawing when he realised he wasn’t in trouble. The others looked blank.
‘What’s it about?’ asked Carly, quietly.
‘We’ll read Oedipus the King. That’s the first play in the book. It’s about a man who’s destined to do something terrible and tries to escape his fate.’
‘What’s his fate?’ she asked.
‘He’s destined to kill his father and marry his mother.’
‘That’s disgusting,’ Ricky said, starting to laugh. The tension in the room relaxed very slightly. I felt my shoulders drop an inch.
‘It was even more disgusting to the ancient Greeks than it is to us,’ I said, trying to remember my first year as an undergraduate, when we’d read all these Greek plays: it must have been Robert’s way of weeding out the students he didn’t think were serious enough about his art. I had written piles of essays on the reception of Greek tragedy and its historical context, silently thanking my father for having dragged me to see some of them when I was at school. It was all in my head somewhere.
Annika was glaring through the window at the white wall outside, and Jono was still breathing heavily, though his cheeks were fading back to normal.
‘I don’t think so. They couldn’t think it was more disgusting than I do,’ Ricky said.
‘Honestly. Incest was a really big taboo in their world. And they didn’t care about loads of things we think are taboo, so it counts double, at least.’
‘What’s a taboo?’ he asked, still holding his pencil but no longer scribbling with it.
‘It’s something forbidden. Like incest or paedophilia or something like that.’
Ricky was giggling properly now. Even Jono smiled briefly.
‘The Greeks didn’t have a problem with paedophilia at all,’ I said, hoping this was the right way to go. ‘But having sex with your mother was very bad indeed.’
‘That’s fucking bizarre,’ said Jono.
‘Your mum’s not so bad,’ said Ricky. Jono turned to look at him. ‘Sorry, man, I didn’t mean that.’
‘Let’s not over-relate, shall we?’ I realised that this lesson could be about to go wrong in a whole new direction.
‘Sorry, miss.’ He picked his pencil up again.
‘So we’re going to read Oedipus, then. I’ll make sure I have five copies by the end of today. You can pick them up from my desk before you leave.’
‘How do you know about all this stuff?’ asked Mel. She was rocking on her chair, leaning back to the furthest point she could go before it tipped up.
‘It’s what she did at college, isn’t it?’ Carly answered for me. She loved to gossip, about pupils and teachers alike. Learning was just an interlude from her real interest at Rankeillor. ‘You studied here, didn’t you? In Edinburgh? With Robert?’
‘Yes, I did. I came here in 2002, and I graduated five years ago. Then I did some postgraduate studying for a couple of years here and in London.’
She counted back. ‘So you left college in 2008?’
‘That’s right.’ In another world, I wanted to say.
‘Was Robert a good teacher?’ asked Mel.
‘Of course he was. He knows everything about acting and performance, because he used to be an actor.’
‘Didn’t you want to be an actor, miss?’
‘No, I suppose I didn’t, Carly. I’m not very comfortable in another person’s skin – does that make sense?’
She looked at me, and I wondered if she might point out that I didn’t look very comfortable in my own, either. But she thought for a moment and nodded. ‘So why did you leave Edinburgh then?’
‘Well, I suppose I wanted to go back to London.’
‘Is that where your family is?’
‘It’s near where my mother is, yes.’ I realised that I had fallen into another trap that we’d discussed when we were training – if you don’t give kids enough to do, their curiosity turns inevitably onto you. When I was at school, I remember, we were so fixated on a glamorous French teacher that we spent months trying to find out her first name. The Rankeillor kids were a lot more ambitious.
‘And what about your dad?’ she asked.
‘My dad died a few years ago.’
‘I’m sorry, miss.’ Carly flushed.
>
‘That’s OK.’
‘Doesn’t your mum miss you, though?’ She pressed on.
‘I don’t know.’ I could feel sweat starting to prickle on the back of my neck. I needed to move her back into safer territory.
‘You should ring her, miss. Tell her how you’re getting on.’ She nodded at me encouragingly, like you might do to a dog.
‘Thank you, Carly. I’m sure she’d agree with you. Shall we get back to Oedipus and his mum?’
‘OK,’ she said, happily. She only needed a small fix to sustain her.
‘First of all, you should know where this story happens. It’s in a city called Thebes.’
‘And when is this?’ asked Annika. She pulled off her glasses and cleaned them with the hem of her t-shirt, before returning them to her perfect nose.
‘Half twelve,’ Jono snapped.
She sighed loudly, and began to rearrange the pens and books on her desk into ever more perfect straight lines. ‘I mean what year or what century or whatever. Obviously.’
‘It’s the Bronze Age,’ I said.
‘And when’s that?’ she asked, just before I realised I didn’t entirely know.
‘Are there dinosaurs?’ Ricky asked.
‘Don’t be an idiot.’ Jono twitched, like he was trying to shake the words out of his head.
‘I was just asking.’
‘No, it’s later than dinosaurs,’ I told him. ‘Sophocles is writing in the fifth century BC, two and a half thousand years ago. And the time when this play is set is the mythic past to him, right? Like Robin Hood, or…’ I saw Jono’s eyebrows contract. ‘Or maybe William Wallace would be to us. So this play is set in the past, and it’s set in Thebes, which is where Oedipus was born. His father, Laius, and his mother, Jocasta, were delighted to have a baby son. But then they were told that Oedipus had this terrible fate predicted for him.’
‘Who by?’ asked Annika.
I couldn’t remember. ‘An oracle,’ I said, hoping this was true.
‘What’s an oracle?’ she said.
I was definitely going to need to do more reading before their next class. ‘It’s like a horoscope,’ I said. ‘And it predicts that he’ll commit two terrible crimes.’
The Furies: A Novel Page 4
