2
Everything changed after that lesson, when I’d told them about Luke. The children hummed with curiosity, though a realisation that it would be tactless to ask me any more seemed to keep them in check for a while. But the next time we met they were, as so often, in no mood to work.
It must have been mid-February by then, and the weather was still testing my resolve. There are days when Edinburgh completely loses its skyline: craggy Arthur’s Seat no longer looms over you but disappears from view, covered in the same heartless grey as the sky. The Firth of Forth – glittering in the distance on a sunny day – is obliterated as you look north, and even the Castle, right in the middle of the city, becomes invisible. The city has no colour at all on those days. The buildings, the sky, the rain, the pavement, the faces, everything is grey. It can go on for days, sometimes for weeks.
When I couldn’t take it any more, I would walk around the corner from my flat down to the art galleries on Market Street. I’d wander round the rooms for half an hour or so, just to regain the rest of the spectrum by looking at bright colours on white walls. Still, on that day, by the time I’d walked back up Cockburn Street and down the South Bridge to get to work, the memory of colour had ebbed away again. At one point, the rain transformed into hailstones, so I stopped off at one of the charity shops to wait it out. The storm’s endurance was greater than mine, though, so I ran the last part of the journey. As I turned down Rankeillor Street the sky was like a headache, and I guessed the children would be jittery, as they always were on these dingy, oppressive days.
* * *
‘Let’s do something different today, before we start working on the next play.’
I was keen to move the focus back onto them, but it was becoming easier to work out which days were salvageable for learning purposes, and which ones were lost before they’d even arrived in the basement. Today was one of the latter. I was trying not to fight them when they were in this kind of mood: what would be the point? Rankeillor wasn’t a normal school, and it wasn’t like they had to sit an exam on Sophocles at the end of the year. Robert’s advice was starting to make sense to me. If I caught them on a day like this, I would just use the opportunity to get them to open up in a different way. This is what it meant to be doing a reasonable job at the Unit.
‘Remember when I first met you and you told me truths and lies about yourselves?’ They all nodded. ‘Tell me something else today, then.’
‘Like what?’ asked Ricky, rubbing his arms together as he spoke. He was happier when he didn’t think there could be a wrong answer. Education was something to be endured, for him. And once he’d been kicked out of school, the Unit simply filled its place, and he endured that instead. But even if his handwriting was that of a much younger child and his spelling was atrocious, he knew enough to cope with the outside world.
‘It’s freezing down here today, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘It’s always freezing down here, miss.’
‘Why don’t you take this?’ I offered him the hoody I had bought from the charity shop on my way in to work. I didn’t know if I was allowed to give things to the children, and I didn’t want to be seen to have favourites. But I couldn’t bear seeing him shivering at his desk every day, or dressed in Jono’s coat because he didn’t seem to have one of his own.
‘Thanks.’ He took it off me and put it on. It was a large size and he wrapped himself in its navy folds. ‘Did someone leave it in here?’
‘I think they must have,’ I said. I saw Mel looking at me. I hoped her lie-detectors were turned down today.
‘Does this sound OK to the rest of you? And we’ll start the new play next time?’
Annika shrugged. It was already, after only six weeks at Rankeillor, my fervent wish that no-one would answer a question with their shoulders ever again.
‘Then why don’t you tell me what you want to do when you grow up,’ I said. ‘Or when you leave school, I mean, since you’re quite grown up already.’
They all looked at the floor. No-one ever wants to go first. I raised my eyebrows at Carly.
‘Me?’ she said, entirely betraying that she was desperate to answer. ‘I want to be a make-up artist. I’m going to go to college when I’m seventeen and train as a beautician and then specialise in make-up. Then I’m going to go through to Glasgow and work in television there.’
I was impressed, not by the ambition itself so much as by the precision of her plan.
I tried to remember if I had been so self-possessed when I was their age, eleven years ago. I had left school knowing I wanted to work in theatre. And I knew I didn’t want to be an actor. But I didn’t know I wanted to direct: at my school, the plays were directed by the drama teacher. She chose the plays, she cast them, and she directed them. If anyone had even a hint of the sniffles, she would pack them off to the nurse and take the lead role too. If you wanted to get involved, you either had to act or paint the set.
So it was here in Edinburgh, only a few hundred yards from where I was standing now, in fact, when I had first realised that I could direct a play if I wanted. I started out with a small studio piece in my second term – Sartre’s Huis Clos – and built up to doing a huge version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Botanic Gardens in the summer of my final year. I stayed on to do a PGCE just so I could keep doing more plays.
The List pegged me as a talent to watch, and The Scotsman ran a piece on my rosy future after the Royal Court picked me for their Young Directors programme. In other words, everything was working out brilliantly. I moved to London with Luke; he did his law conversion course, and I got a bursary to do a dramatherapy course part-time while I worked at the Royal Court. I was living exactly the way I had dreamed I would: completely broke, but certain it wouldn’t last and that success would follow potential just like it does in a feel-good film. I was so stupidly, smugly happy that I used to give money to every beggar who asked, to try and avert the evil eye. I wanted to be sure no malevolent ill-wisher could ever say I didn’t know how lucky I was.
I knew exactly how lucky I was, right up until the whole thing was destroyed in three minutes. That’s how long it took Luke to die, they told me. One hundred and eighty seconds of increasing pain and fear before the blackness overwhelmed him. People used to say, as though I might be consoled, that at least he didn’t suffer. As though I needed their fucking consolation. As though you couldn’t suffer a lifetime in three minutes.
‘Really, a make-up artist? I didn’t know you were interested in that, Carly.’ How had I missed it? She turned up at Rankeillor every day looking more glamorous than I would have done at a black-tie event. She didn’t reply, merely held up one perfectly manicured hand with nails which looked like tiny paintings – dark, inky purple with silver stars on each one. ‘Wow. Those are really good. Did you do them yourself?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I could do yours, if you like.’
I looked down. The nails were chewed and uneven, and there were biro marks on two of my fingers. ‘You might have to give me a few weeks to grow my nails out. And my cuticles back,’ I said.
‘She could do your hair too,’ said Annika. Her eyes glittered behind her glasses.
I resisted the sudden temptation to reach up and smooth it down.
‘What’s wrong with her hair?’ asked Jono.
‘Nothing,’ said Carly, quickly. ‘It might just be nice to get it done.’
‘OK, well perhaps we could schedule my makeover for another day. Why do you want to do make-up for television, particularly?’
‘It’s a stepping-stone to film,’ she said. ‘I’m going to make sure I can do monster make-up – you know, zombies and stuff. Then you get to do the cool stuff.’
‘Do you know where you’ll study?’
‘Stevenson College,’ she said. ‘In Sighthill.’ I looked blank. Like too many students in Edinburgh, I had lived there for years without learning about the areas which undergraduates didn’t inhabit. Most of the suburbs and out
skirts were just words. She kept trying. ‘Near Heriot-Watt? They do a diploma in theatrical and media make-up. I’m going to do that.’
‘You’ve certainly done your research,’ I said.
‘Yes, Alex,’ she replied. ‘It’s what I want to do.’
‘Mel – what about you?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know yet,’ she said, looking rather embarrassed. ‘I haven’t decided. I like lots of things, so it depends, really.’
‘What’s your dream job?’
‘I’d be a journalist,’ she said. ‘And if that went well, perhaps I’d write books.’
‘Really? What kind of books?’
‘You know,’ she said. ‘Good ones.’
Unlike Carly, she didn’t seem comfortable discussing it, so I moved on. ‘Annika? How about you?’
‘Me?’ she said, blinking three times in rapid succession. It was one of the many mechanisms she used to convey irritation. ‘I’m going to be a designer.’
‘What kind of designer?’
‘Do you know anything about design?’ she asked.
‘No. I know about set design and that’s it. But you could tell us about it, and then I’d know more.’
She dug around in her bag and produced a sketchbook which she passed forward to me. It was filled with intricate pen-and-ink drawings of owls, swallows and starlings. On the later pages, she’d been converting the birds into geometric patterns.
‘Textile design,’ she replied.
‘These are amazing,’ I told her.
She smiled. ‘I know.’ She reached over to get her book back. ‘I’ll study in Stockholm. They’re very strong on graphic design and textiles there. I was thinking of London, but it’ll be too expensive.’
I nodded. That was two of the girls with the next five years of their lives fully mapped out. I was beginning to wish we’d talked about something else. Only Mel seemed to be as vague about her future as I felt.
‘What about you, Jono?’
‘I want to work for a video game company,’ he replied.
‘You’ll have to stop killing everyone else first,’ said Ricky, laughing.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked him.
‘He’s a flamer.’ This was self-explanatory to them, but foreign to me.
‘And a flamer does what?’
Jono grinned. ‘Kills other players.’
‘In the game, yes?’
‘Yes, Alex.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Obviously.’
‘I’m missing something. So you kill the other characters?’
‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘But the characters are avatars for real people. In Black Ops,’ he clocked my confusion, ‘I mean, in the game Call of Duty: Black Ops, lots of people can play online at the same time.’
‘Right.’
‘And he kills loads of them,’ said Ricky.
‘Because you’re on different sides?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Jono answered. ‘Because it’s funny.’
‘Then they start again.’ Ricky was laughing harder. ‘And he does it again.’
‘You keep killing the same person? So they can’t really play until you stop?’
‘Yeah. That’s what flaming is,’ he said.
‘So the plan is to convert this nihilism into creativity at some point, then?’
‘If you say so.’
‘And Ricky? What do you plan to do?’ I had half an idea what his answer would be. Artist, perhaps? Something visual, anyway.
‘I’m going to be a soldier, miss,’ he said, as if he thought it should have been obvious.
‘You want to join the army?’ I was horrified, though I don’t know why. It never occurred to me that anyone would want to join the army, I suppose, when there were soldiers dying on the news every week. ‘Why is that?’
‘My uncles were both in the army,’ he said. ‘It’s what Mal is going to do when he gets out of prison.’
‘And you aren’t afraid of…’ I trailed off.
‘Of dying? No, not really,’ he said. ‘I might die in Edinburgh, if I stayed, mightn’t I?’
He was right, of course. You can die anywhere. ‘What kind of soldier would you be?’
‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘My grandparents took me to that recruitment office on Shandwick Place. There’s a few things I could do. They help you choose when you apply.’
He didn’t seem old enough to join the army. He wasn’t even old enough to drive. Well, not legally. The thought of him in a combat uniform made me feel awful. How could he lift a gun? How could he kill someone? In he came every week in that huge green Hibs t-shirt, his red hair giving it an oddly festive look. He was so small. But he was still old enough to sign up.
When the lesson came to an end, he peeled off the hoody and offered it back to me.
‘Why don’t you keep it?’ I said. ‘No-one’s asked for it, so I think it might be going spare.’
He thought for a moment. ‘I’ll leave it down here,’ he said. ‘Then if someone does come looking for it, I won’t have taken it.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘And if no-one claims it by the end of the week, it’s yours if you want it.’
DD,
Alex was just like normal today. How weird is that? She tells us that Luke – the love of her life – was killed, I mean killed, and then she just turns up to teach us like nothing had happened.
I suppose she’s used to it now. I mean, it’s not news to her, is it? Just to us. No wonder she always looks sad. She’s one of those people whose face changes completely when she speaks. Do you know the kind of face I mean? Her eyes almost shut when she smiles – it takes up her whole face. She doesn’t just smile from the mouth, I mean. It goes right across her.
But when she’s not talking, when she’s just listening, or thinking, she looks sadder than anyone I’ve ever seen. Sadder than my mum, even, when Jamie died. I think it’s because she wears it all the time. She doesn’t have anyone she needs to be brave for, like my mum did. She couldn’t cry all the time, because there was me and I needed her to be my mum, even if she wanted to just curl up and cry for a year.
But Alex doesn’t have to hide her feelings, so she doesn’t. I felt kind of bad when Carly agreed with Annika about Alex getting her hair done. We all expect Annika to say something obnoxious, but then Carly went along with it. I mean, they had a point. You can’t even see what it was supposed to look like when it was cut. Carly says she’s done her fringe with kitchen scissors, which is why it’s so uneven. I bet she just cut it when she couldn’t see any more.
I don’t think Alex was offended when Carly said it, though. She just shrugged, like she was agreeing, but she was never in a million years actually going to walk round the corner to Cheynes and get a cut and blow-dry. The same with her hands – when Carly said she’d do her nails, Alex was looking for a way to say no that sounded like she was saying yes. You can’t just give up biting your nails when they look like that – she must have been doing it her whole life. So she seems to agree that Carly can do them, but it won’t ever actually happen.
I liked finding out what everyone’s going to do when they leave school. I almost felt bad that I didn’t have a proper answer. What I should have said is that I’ll have to try harder than they will when we leave, because lots of people won’t employ someone who’s deaf. My audiologist gives me a lecture about this every time I see him. About a fifth of deaf people are unemployed, because employers think they’re stupid, or they think it’s too expensive to fit out their offices for a deaf person. Even though installing an induction loop doesn’t cost that much.
That’s why it would be good if I could be a journalist. I wouldn’t need an office to do that, really. I’d be out doing interviews and stuff, and then I could write those up anywhere. And I’m good at thinking of stories. My mum says I get that from my dad. He used to be brilliant at telling stories, ones he’d made up, I mean. He used to write them down in a book for me, when I was little, and do little drawings at the side of each page. They were reall
y good. Then he said I’d got too old for them, so he stopped. But I still have all the old ones on my shelf.
He emailed earlier. He’s wondering if I can go down to see him in a couple of weeks, because he was away when I was supposed to go before. I bet I can skive off a day from Rankeillor – Robert won’t mind if it’s just this once, to see my dad. Then I can go early, on a Friday.
I wonder what she meant when she said ‘killed’.
3
I finally gave in and bought new boots when my first paycheque came through from Rankeillor. I had made that mistake that southerners always make about Scotland, even when they know better, like I should have. London barely has seasons, and even in the few years I’d been away, I’d forgotten what winter really means in Edinburgh. In London I was warm enough anywhere with a coat, boots, scarf and a hat.
Once I moved back to Edinburgh, I remembered what it’s like when a pair of boots gets so wet that they take two days to dry, even if you fill them with balled-up newspaper and park them next to a radiator. Edinburgh is a city where you need two of everything – two coats, two pairs of boots, two umbrellas. One to wear and one to dry out, while your whole flat smells like a wet dog, and you hope it’s from the wet clothes, not you.
When I walked into class, Carly noticed straight away. ‘You’ve got new boots,’ she said. ‘They’re lovely.’
Annika and Mel both looked over to check.
‘Thank you. I think they’re giving me blisters, though.’ They were black with a buckle on the side – biker boots for the bikeless. I could feel the pressure on my toes as well as my heel.
‘Where are they from?’ she asked, scrutinising my feet.
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