I wonder if any of the others have started writing like I have. Alex mentions it sometimes – we could make notes about the text we’re reading in our diaries, that kind of thing. No-one ever says they don’t have one. But then she never asks to see the notes. So maybe it’s just me doing it. But I’m the one who wants to be a journalist. I’m the one who’s going to make things happen.
And the second thing I have to report is this: Jono is sorry now that he was so vile to Alex. I hope she saw how clever I was. All this term we’ve been reading about Oedipus being, as Alex says, the architect of his own misfortune, and that’s just what Jono was. He’s always angry and obnoxious, exactly like Oedipus. What’s the word Alex uses? Hubris. Jono has a lot of that. So I made the story happen in the real world, sort of. And even if Alex doesn’t guess it was me, I still know.
It’s this side of things that I think I will struggle to explain to the lawyers when we eventually meet. Why wasn’t I afraid of these children? And did I really think that I was helping them by asking them to read Sophocles or Aeschylus? In which case, was I naïve, or actually stupid? I suppose I was both, and that’s what I will have to tell them.
Yes, I thought that the tragedies we were reading were better for them than other therapeutic stuff we could have done. I didn’t mind playing therapy games with the younger children. They loved acting and it was good for them, I think, the role-plays and so on. But this group, the group Mel was in, was different. They wanted to feel like grown-ups, and playing games would have been just another type of collage: the very thing they said they didn’t want to do any more. So, yes, studying serious plays by real writers was better.
Besides, I had lost patience with therapy after Luke died. I was referred to a grief counsellor who was every kind of idiot. Her capacity for trying to look on the bright side made my mother look like Sartre. I tried not to hate her and everything she stood for, but it was one struggle too many. I didn’t want to be cured of my grief, I wanted to wrap myself up in it like a comfortable old coat which I’d first put on when my father died.
I wanted to wear it every minute of the day, to sleep in it and wake in it, and never to be rid of it because it was the only thing keeping me warm. I gave up talking to my friends, to Luke’s friends, because everyone wanted to try to make me feel better, to talk about the healing qualities of time and what Luke would have wanted. But what Luke wanted didn’t matter any more. That’s what happens when you die. And I didn’t want time to heal my wounds. I wanted to pick at them until fat bubbles of dark blood formed on my skin, and then I wanted to watch them scab over and pick at them again.
* * *
‘Are there any Greek plays where everyone doesn’t die?’ Carly asked. I had brought in a pile of Penguin Classics for them to choose from.
‘Yes, of course. I don’t think anyone dies in Sophocles’ Philoctetes.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s about a man who has a bad foot, after he got bitten by a snake,’ I said.
‘Nah, we did a play with a bloke who had a sore foot already,’ said Jono.
He had calmed down after the last disastrous lesson. I had taken his broken console to Robert’s office and explained there had been an accident. Robert had called his parents, and Jono’s mother couldn’t have been nicer, apparently. She was happy to claim the console on her insurance, and had promised Robert that her son wouldn’t bring the replacement to the Unit. Jono still looked at Mel and Annika with thinly veiled suspicion, but he seemed to have accepted that whoever had set him up had done so too efficiently to get caught. I hoped he wasn’t biding his time to exact revenge.
‘It’s a different kind of sore foot. It won’t ever heal up, and his friends abandon him on an island so they don’t have to put up with him any longer.’
‘Jesus. Did Sophocles have more than one idea?’ he asked. ‘Or did he only write about a bloke with a bad foot getting abandoned?’
‘He wrote Antigone. I think you’d like that.’ I looked at Carly. ‘But lots of people do die in it, so maybe we should leave that one for now. We could do Euripides’ Helen. That’s a fun one. It turns out that Helen didn’t go to Troy after all, but to Egypt.’
‘Isn’t she called Helen of Troy?’ Annika said.
‘She often is, yes.’
‘Well, someone’s telling fibs, then,’ said Jono. ‘Let’s give that one a miss.’
‘What about Alcestis?’ asked Mel. She was reading the back cover of the collected Euripides plays.
‘We can certainly do that next, if you like. It’s a different playwright, so the foot obsession shouldn’t be a problem. And it has a happy ending.’
‘It’s a tragedy and no-one dies?’ Annika asked, suspiciously.
‘Someone does die. But it isn’t permanent.’
‘How can you die and it not be permanent?’
‘You’ll have to read the play to find out.’
‘Can’t you give us the background? So that when we read it, we know what’s going on?’ asked Jono.
They were, in this regard, exactly like every other child in lessons anywhere in the country. They would seize any opportunity for me to do the work so they didn’t have to.
Mel read the back cover aloud. ‘“Alcestis, an early play in which a queen agrees to die to save her husband’s life, is cast in a tragic vein, although it contains passages of satire and even comedy.” That sounds alright, doesn’t it?’
Carly nodded. ‘So she doesn’t die? She just agrees to die?’
‘She’s dying at the start of the play,’ I said. ‘Her husband, Admetus, was supposed to get ill and die. But the god Apollo owes him a favour, and so he makes a bargain with the Fates. Admetus can live, if he can persuade someone else to die in his place. That’s where we are at the start of the play: Alcestis is dying because she wants to save her husband from dying.’
‘God, that is devoted,’ said Jono. ‘Would any of you die for me?’ He looked over his shoulder at the girls. ‘Anyone?’
‘I’d be as likely to die for you as to marry you,’ said Annika.
‘Great.’
‘Not really,’ she said.
‘You’ll come around.’ Perhaps he had decided she wasn’t the guilty one.
‘Dying to save the life of someone you love is a good reason to die, though, isn’t it?’ I asked them. I wanted to know if it was an idea that was meaningful to them, I suppose. There would have been no point doing the play at all if self-sacrifice didn’t seem like a potent motivator. After all, the first time I met them, they told me that dying for love, in Romeo and Juliet, seemed kind of lame.
‘I wouldn’t die to save anyone,’ said Jono. ‘Would you, miss?’
There was total silence. Carly blushed a deep maroon colour, clashing horribly with her hair. I had no idea how they had found out about Luke, but in that moment I knew that they had. Was Jono trying to hurt me, or did the words just come out that way? I thought about the question for a moment.
‘I don’t know, Jono.’ I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t even shocked that they’d somehow uncovered something I didn’t want them to know.
Would I have died to save Luke? I don’t know. I would have died to save me and Luke, the combination of us and our future together, but that was a logical impossibility, obviously.
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘But if you could have stopped him from dying?’ Mel asked, leaning forward to be certain she would hear what I said.
And I knew, I knew as I answered her that I was breaking a rule of conduct which was there to protect them and me equally. Therapists, teachers, doctors, nurses: none of them should share their personal lives with their charges. It isn’t appropriate or fair. They aren’t friends, even if they take your advice, even if they rely on it, even when they share their darkest thoughts and deepest wishes with you. You must never reciprocate and share your feelings, hopes and fears, because in doing so you damage your respective roles in each other’s live
s beyond repair.
I had never spoken to anyone about Luke’s death. Not my mother, not his parents, not our friends. Not even the useless grief counsellor: I would have rather shared my confidences with my mother’s dog. At least Pickle looked like she understood when you spoke to her. That was why I had come away to Edinburgh, because Robert didn’t ask any questions. He knew all he needed to from the newspapers, and he never mentioned it. It was the most precious thing which he, or anyone else, could have given me.
And yet now, months after it had happened, I found I wanted to tell someone. And not just anyone, but children for whom I was responsible. I was stepping over a boundary, and I knew as I did it that it was wrong. I didn’t realise afterwards, I knew right then, just before I opened my mouth.
‘Luke didn’t die. He was killed.’
ACT TWO
1
The first meeting with the lawyers did not go well. They called me in for an hour this morning, and it turns out that I had been, as so often, worrying about the wrong thing. Because when I first heard that they wanted to speak to me, my main concern was that they wouldn’t be any good. Not good enough, I mean, to keep their client out of jail. How could they be focussing properly on their case, if they’d waited all these weeks before asking to speak to me? Besides, I was worried they’d have read the newspapers, and formed their initial judgements from there.
Luke used to hate going to parties, facing the questions people always asked. They would ask me what it was like directing someone famous, and they would ask him what it was like to defend someone you knew to be guilty. The last party we ever went to was no exception. I got cornered by a man who was quite certain that he had a great play in him, or that he would have, if only I would agree to meet him every week to help him write it. As I tried to explain that I was busy directing a play someone had already written, unassisted, I was also eavesdropping on Luke. I often did this at parties. I never really knew why we went to them when the person I most wanted to talk to was the person I already lived with. A small, stocky woman with dark hair and a top so low-cut that Luke was looking over her head to avoid eyeballing her cleavage was pointing at the air. Lawyers get a lot of those pointing talkers. I couldn’t hear her question, but I heard him say, if I have evidence they’re guilty, I submit it to the police. Otherwise I’d be breaking the law.
No, but you know what I mean. She was speaking more loudly now, jabbing the air with enthusiasm, smiling in a manner I imagine she thought was impish, the dim lights glinting in her dark eyes. From where I was standing, she looked too predatory for an imp. Luke was looking over at me and pointing at his watch, but she was too animated to notice.
If you had to defend a murderer, and you didn’t have evidence but you knew he’d done it, then how would you sleep at night?
Luke gave a tiny sigh and explained that he slept better knowing a mistrial wouldn’t be declared because he didn’t feel like doing his job that day.
But what if a guilty man walks free? The money shot.
He knocked back the last of his drink, and with it the last drops of his patience, and said, it’s better than an innocent man going to jail. That’s the price you pay. No system of justice is foolproof. Only God knows who’s guilty or innocent. I don’t, and neither does a jury and neither does a judge and nor do you. I do my job, which is to represent anyone who needs to be represented and try to keep them from being convicted. Because the other option is that someone makes you king and you decide. And I’m not comfortable with that.
He leaned down, kissed the air near her face, swung across the room to tell the man I was talking to that he should really send me a first draft when it was done, and then steered me out of the hall and into the night. We went to some cheap Indonesian place for dinner, where he railed about how tiresome he found that kind of person at that kind of party. I agreed, because I loved him too much to tell him what was then the truth, which is that I hoped only the innocent people got him, and I didn’t really care if the guilty ones got some shambles with a briefcase.
And then it was now, and I know that sometimes I do care, very much, that guilty people have good lawyers. At least, I care that one guilty person has a good lawyer. I finally see what Luke always knew, which is that guilt and blame and responsibility aren’t the same things at all. They’re not even close.
* * *
So, I was worrying that the lawyers would be incompetent. And because I was worrying about that, I didn’t even consider the alternative, which is that they’d be the kind who would do literally anything to make sure their client got off, no matter how unethical it was, and no matter which innocent people they tried to implicate on the way. That didn’t occur to me.
It used to baffle Luke how I had a superstitious belief in the preventative power of worrying. You’re worrying about something that might never happen, he would say. He never understood that I believed that there was every point in worrying about things which wouldn’t happen because, somewhere deep in my DNA, I believed that it was precisely by worrying about them that I prevented them from happening. It wasn’t a pejorative belief: I don’t think that people whose houses are swept away in floods or who succumb to a mysterious wasting disease weren’t worrying hard enough. The ones like me – the fretful and the fearful – were trying incredibly hard. But they focussed so hard on averting one disaster that another one snuck up on them anyway. The flooded house wasn’t caused by no-one caring, it was caused by someone caring too much about the wrong thing – an exam, a test result, whatever. They were worrying so hard about what didn’t happen that they weren’t even facing the same direction as the trouble which was coming for them all along.
I know because I did it all the time with Luke: take care, I would say, whenever he left me. And I meant, take care crossing the road because there are so many idiots driving while texting, take care when you get on the Tube that no-one looks too bomby and get off the damn train if they do. Take care of jostling crowds by busy roads, take care of slippery stairs on frozen mornings, take care of falling stowaways landing on west London from the flight path overhead. I never once meant, take care not to walk into the malice of a stranger, so that, of course, is what he did. And I was facing the wrong way.
* * *
There were two lawyers. The important one was a man in a suit which looked like it cost more than my mother’s car. He was in his mid-thirties, I suppose: short dark hair with tiny flecks of grey round the edges, to match his tie. His tan spoke of a man who, if he had been to Edinburgh to interview his client, had done so only very briefly, en route to some winter ski resort.
When actors are training, they’re often asked to think animalistically: which animal are you, how can you convey that without words, and so on. Much leaping about the room channelling an inner rabbit ensues. But on that cold, damp morning, when I walked into his Gray’s Inn Road office, Charles Brayford made me think that if he had ever decided to search for his inner bunny, he would have eaten it. Any actor playing him would have realised he was a great white: a born predator who would die if he ever stopped moving, able to smell blood at homeopathic levels of dilution.
We talked for nearly an hour, and by the end of it my jaw hurt from clenching it. I didn’t know if I’d been grinding my teeth or trying to stop them from chattering. I was shivery but not cold. He was never rude, at least not quite. His eyebrows conveyed an easy scepticism at every answer I gave, which I presumed was his equivalent of a poker face. If you treat everything someone says as though it is probably a lie, even when you’ve only asked them the time, you leave them with no idea whether you believe anything they’ve said, or not. It was quite clever. I wondered if Luke ever made people feel like this, and hoped that he didn’t.
It was a slow process. After an hour of my talking and his scornful eyebrows we had only discussed the first few times I’d met the children, and what I had said or done on each of those occasions. No-one but a fantasist or a liar remembers exactly what they said on
a particular day over a year ago. Yet my failure to do so was somehow suspect in his eyes, something he might be able to use against me. When the clock reached eleven, he glanced at his colleague: a man in his twenties, not much younger than Luke. I guessed it was probably considered a privilege in this legal practice to assist Charles Brayford in his pageant of self-delight. Geeky, bespectacled Adam must be a favoured son here, even if he looked like he might shatter into pieces if you shouted at him. Perhaps his father was a partner.
I have another meeting, Charles Brayford declared, jerking his head back as he stood up to tell me that I should do the same. We’ll have to speak again, Miss Morris. My client’s case is obviously complex, and we’ll need to ask you a few more questions. The same time next week? I nodded. Adam will see you out, he said, and strode past me. Adam pushed his glasses up his nose, more from habit than necessity, as they scarcely shifted. This way, he said, holding the door and standing to one side, before walking me back to the lifts. Every time we came to a junction I would have to wait for him to tell me which way to go, because every corridor looked identical, like in an anxiety dream. He would then slide back to walking just behind me, having clearly been told this was polite. It made me want to yell that since he knew where we were going and I didn’t, chivalry was not really a priority, but as no-one spoke above a hushed whisper in this office, I didn’t dare. No-one made eye contact with us at all: no secretary at her desk, no assistant hurrying past with a messenger envelope under his arm.
In the lobby, a bored receptionist was signing for a parcel from a motorbike courier, whose helmet was pushed back onto the top of his head. Adam pressed the lift button for me and waited till it pinged to announce its imminent arrival. Here you are, Ms Morris, he said, carefully correct, as I stepped past him. He looked back up the corridor to the main office and then over to the reception desk where the courier was still talking, in no rush to share the lift with me. Adam looked back at me. You need to get a lawyer, he said, quietly, as the lift doors sliced shut between us.
The Furies: A Novel Page 10
