‘Russell and Bromley,’ I said.
Annika shook her head, sadly.
‘Too expensive?’ I guessed.
‘Too old for you. Seriously, you must have been the youngest person in that shop by about fifty years. But better you bought them than some old woman, I suppose. You could get some new jeans to go with them.’
‘Not from Gap, though,’ said Carly. They looked at each other. Maybe Gap was too old for me as well. Or too young. Or too something.
‘We could take you shopping,’ said Carly. ‘After school one day. If you like, I mean.’ Then she went red.
‘Maybe next time I get paid,’ I said. ‘Now, shall we move on to Alcestis? Has anyone started reading it yet? Just Mel? OK. Thank you, Mel.’
‘I like it,’ she said.
‘How far have the rest of you got?’
‘Nowhere,’ said Jono. ‘Sorry, I forgot we had to read ahead.’
‘Me too,’ said Ricky. He was wearing the giant blue hoody, which I’d left on his chair.
‘Admetus was going to die, wasn’t he?’ Annika had remembered something from when we’d first discussed the play.
‘Oh yeah, that’s right. But then he doesn’t have to because his wife offers to die in his place,’ said Jono.
Between the two of them, they had now reconstructed what I had already told them. But I didn’t feel like having a row. At least they’d remembered one thing each.
‘OK. Let’s take it from there. Do you think Admetus will be pleased about that? Annika?’
Before she could reply, Ricky asked a question. ‘How do you remember all their names? They all begin with “a” and end in “s”.’
‘I suppose I’ve known the plays for longer than you,’ I said. ‘So the names are more attached to the characters for me. Anyway, Alcestis is the wife, and Admetus is the husband.’
‘Well, he must be made up,’ said Ricky. ‘If he thought he was going to die and now he isn’t.’
‘Yes, but his wife is. He’ll be a one-parent family,’ Carly pointed out. ‘Do they have children?’
I nodded.
‘Could he get someone else to die for him?’ Annika asked.
‘Like who?’
‘I don’t know. Who else is in it?’ She flicked to the cast list and scanned it. ‘His dad, Pheres,’ she said. ‘He’d do.’
‘He does ask his parents if either of them would be willing to die in his place,’ I told her. ‘But they both refuse.’
‘Seriously?’ said Ricky. ‘That’s harsh.’
‘Is it? That’s certainly what Admetus thinks.’
‘Yeah, of course it is. They’re old. They’ve had a kid, now he’s got kids. They could easily die and no-one would miss them,’ he said.
‘Wow. I hope they never let you run an old people’s home,’ said Jono. ‘You’re like Harold Shipman.’
‘Who?’
‘He killed a bunch of old people. He was a serial killer. Like Burke and Hare.’
‘I’m not saying they should all be killed,’ Ricky said, slowly enough to suggest he was certainly considering it. ‘Just that one of them could take one for the team.’
‘What does Pheres say when Admetus suggests that?’ I asked Mel.
She flipped pages. ‘“You want to live. Do you think your father doesn’t?”’
‘That’s your answer.’ I looked at Ricky. ‘His dad doesn’t see himself as old and about to die. He sees himself as deserving to live, just as much as his son.’
Ricky shrugged.
‘Who do you think is in the right?’ I asked Mel.
She thought for a moment. ‘None of them, really,’ she said. ‘Admetus is a selfish prick who thinks he’s more worthy of being alive than his family, the people he’s supposed to love. Pheres is just as selfish – all pleased with himself and coming to mourn for Alcestis when he could have sacrificed himself to save her, if he really meant what he was saying. And Alcestis is a bit pathetic, isn’t she? She agrees to die for him, but then she’s all poor-me about it. No-one made her offer to die, did they?’
‘She’s certainly not a great feminist figurehead – I agree with you there. But it’s a good question, isn’t it? Admetus is offered something we would assume everyone wants: a chance to escape an early death. But the price is to find someone else to die in his place, and the catch is that anyone who cares that much for him is someone he doesn’t want to lose.’
‘And he finds out that some people don’t care about him as much as he thought,’ Mel added.
‘That’s a good point. Would we really want to know how much the people we love value us? What if we don’t like the answer? Admetus clearly doesn’t. He’s saved from dying, but he loses his wife and he pretty much loses his parents, too, because he can’t forgive them for not being willing to sacrifice themselves to save him. Will you each write something about this for the next time I see you, please?’
They groaned, in unison.
‘It’s no good moaning. You all want to do something big with your lives – you told me so. And you should, because you’re all very smart. But you can’t expect to get places at college if you can’t write a short essay. Not even to do a course in something practical, Carly. Any college will want to know that you like to learn, and that you’re good at it. And for that to happen, you need to practise. So how about if you write me two sides of paper on sacrifice. It can be about the play or about yourself, or both, or neither. Think about who you might ask to die in your stead, if you were in Admetus’ position. Think about what’s at stake and what problems you might encounter. No live re-enactments, please. And I’ll take them in on Monday.’
DD,
I have news. I got back last night from seeing my dad. It was too late to write then, but I had a good time. He seems really happy, and he’s seeing someone but I didn’t have to meet her. That was a massive relief because my parents usually both think that if they like someone, I’m going to like them too, which is insane. For a start, why would I like someone whose only connection to me is that they’re having sex with one of my parents? You don’t need to be Oedipus to find that bizarre.
Also, my parents obviously describe me to people as their troubled, deaf daughter, which means meeting anyone they know is always a fucking nightmare. My dad’s girlfriends are always the same. They always have a special sad face they keep for when they meet someone disabled. And you can feel their saintliness from a mile away: they’re storing up how good they’re being by talking to a deaf girl. There was one last year who was absolutely toxic. She talked so slowly that I honestly thought she was taking the piss at first. It took ages before I worked out that she just couldn’t imagine I was cleverer than her. I thought I was going to have to break them up, for sure, but luckily he chucked her. Or maybe she chucked him. People don’t always tell the truth, after all.
The last one was awful too. She kept being really over-nice about my clothes and my stuff, like it was amazing that I didn’t just dress in a uniform from a care home, which is clearly where all deaf people live, in her world. There’s a limit to how much pity I can take from someone I’ve just met. So it was good to spend the weekend just with my dad.
But that’s not the big news. I mean, obviously it isn’t. The big news is that to get to Leeds, I have to get the East Coast train from Waverley Station. It’s the train that goes to London King’s Cross. But I get off at York, a couple of hours before it gets to London, and change trains there. Except this time I didn’t. I got on the train and found my seat in coach B. I like coach B. It’s not the quiet coach, so I can use my headphones without some uptight old bitch telling me off.
And it’s near the buffet. I never understand why people make jokes about the food on trains being bad. They have three flavours of crisps on that train. So I got up to go to the buffet car before we got to Berwick. And sitting at the other end of coach B is Alex. Yes, really. Sitting in a double seat, staring out of the window.
There’s no-one with her, and
she doesn’t have any luggage on the seat next to her, or overhead. Just the small bag that she always has, like a mini messenger bag, crossed over her body, like she’d just sat down with it on and hadn’t thought to take it off.
I was so surprised that I didn’t say anything. I just walked by her like I was going that way anyway, which I was, and on the way back I said hi as I went past. And here’s the weirdest bit – she didn’t react at all. She didn’t move a muscle when I said her name, she didn’t reply, she didn’t do anything.
At first I thought maybe she had headphones in that I couldn’t see under her hair, but she didn’t. She wasn’t reading a book. She didn’t even have a book. She was just gazing at the sea out of the window. And that’s fair enough, because it’s beautiful between Edinburgh and Berwick, where the train goes along the coast. But she didn’t ever stop looking out of the window, all the way to Peterborough. And most of that bit of the journey isn’t beautiful at all.
And she didn’t eat or drink or use the loo or anything. She just sat there, like she was made of marble. I know, because I stayed on the train at York. My dad was at work anyway, and I was just going to go to the shops for a bit when I got to Leeds, before I got the bus out to his house. So I stayed on the train instead. The next stop is Peterborough, and I got out there, because Alex didn’t, which meant she must be going to London, because there aren’t any more stops after Peterborough. I really wanted to stay on and see where she went when she got there. Maybe she’s visiting her mum at last? Or maybe she was going somewhere else, and that’s where she goes every Friday. I’m going to find out.
But I didn’t want to go all the way to London this time, because I wouldn’t have made it back to Leeds in time to beat my dad home, and then he would have worried. As it was, I got some shitty conductor telling me I’d stayed on too far and trying to charge me a penalty fare. Cheeky fucker. Then the guy opposite me – wearing a suit and kind of a dick, I thought, up till then – stepped in. Told the conductor that it wasn’t my fault I couldn’t hear the station announcements when they were ‘so wilfully indistinct’ and, if anything, he should be apologising to me for the fact that I’d missed my stop. His sister was deaf, he said. He knew how hard it was to adjust your aids to hear something which is loud but muffled. It was brilliant. The conductor went red and started grovelling about how he hadn’t meant to be insensitive and all that bollocks.
And even though this was happening in the same coach as Alex was in, she didn’t seem to notice anything. It was fucking bizarre. So I got off at Peterborough and the conductor explained to a guy at the station that I needed to go back to York, and they put me in First Class, which was amazing. You get free Coke and everything. But Alex stayed on. I texted Carly to tell her to go to Waverley that night and check if Alex came off a London train at around the same time we saw her the other week. She said I was being mental, but she still went.
And guess what? Carly saw Alex get off the train at ten fifteen, just like before. She goes to London and comes back in the same day. She must only be there for, what, three hours. It’s a really long way to go for such a short time. Is she going all that way just to see her mum for a couple of hours?
Rage appeared in unexpected quarters after Luke died. Unexpected to me, at least. People sprang up all over the net, demanding that his killer be killed in turn, advocating all kind of torments for the person who had taken Luke from us. No-one had taken Luke from them, of course. These were complete strangers: not Luke’s friends, and not mine. Yet they were a more virulent lynch mob than everyone who had known Luke could possibly have been. They united around their sincere desire to punish wrong-doers with death, ideally from torture. He was so innocent, you see. People were as angry as if a child had died.
When it had only just happened, when his body was yet to be released to his parents, the internet was filled with these hate-fuelled, terrifying semi-literates howling for blood and retribution. I was too numb to howl for anything. I just used to wonder how they could possibly be so angry. They couldn’t have been more outraged if Luke had been their own son or brother or husband. Though, of course, Luke’s parents had been calm and restrained on the news, his mother weeping wordlessly as his father made the obligatory plea for witnesses, his hands and voice shaking as he read out the police statement.
I would say that I feared for the safety of Luke’s killer in the days before he was arrested. But I didn’t. At that point, I would have killed the man who killed Luke with my bare hands. I wouldn’t have hesitated. And if someone else decided to do that on my behalf, I would have cheered them on.
One of the things that most frightened my mother, in the aftermath of Luke’s death, was how quickly her daughter changed into a Fury. In her world-view, that’s not what’s supposed to happen when disaster befalls you. When my father died, my mother sought consolation from God. That path to redemption, she understood. But as I became angry, unforgiving and withdrawn, it rendered me incomprehensible to her.
If faith could save her, why couldn’t it save me? It seemed obvious to me. I was younger than my mother, and Luke and I had lost our future more than our past. Of course, she might well have felt the same way about losing my father in his mid-fifties. Fifty-four is not old. But Luke wasn’t even twenty-six when he died. We weren’t yet married, we didn’t yet have children. We had barely even been on holiday together, thanks to a perpetual combination of work and no money. We believed everything was still ahead of us, because it was. And then suddenly, it wasn’t.
And that was what made me so angry. My mother had time to come to terms with what was happening to my father before he died. I did too, of course. It didn’t make it anything other than terrible, and his final weeks were a long, sad march of painkillers, palliative care and hopelessness. But we knew that he would die, and there was at least time, amongst everything else, to be reconciled to that idea.
With Luke, it was different. He was alive, complete, mine, and then he was gone. He was dead before I even knew he was hurt. And when the phone rang to tell me what had happened, it was his phone, only it wasn’t his voice: it was the voice of a passer-by, one of the three people who had run to help him, but could do nothing to stop the blood which flowed relentless from his chest.
They called an ambulance and then they called me, because mine was the last number Luke had dialled. If Luke had put a security lock on his phone, like I did, it would have been hours before I even found out what had happened. But of course he didn’t. He could never be bothered with things like that. He would give you his debit card and pin number if you were going out and he wanted some cash. So I answered the phone thinking it was him. And it was never going to be him again.
My overriding emotion, for months, was disbelief. I kept thinking there must have been a mistake, and that someone would rectify it, embarrassed by the error. Once that had passed, I couldn’t be helped. I couldn’t get to the person I wanted to hurt, so I hurt whoever was nearest. I rejected kindness and understanding and sympathy, because I wanted none of it. The only thing I wanted was not to need their pity, and it was too late for that.
I didn’t care who I hurt, because I knew that whatever I did, they would still be less injured than me, so what could they possibly complain about? And when I finally realised that neither my friends nor my family deserved this, I walked away, so I wouldn’t hurt them any more. I’d arrived in Edinburgh full of intentions to do something good, to make up for my cruelty. I didn’t manage that either.
4
In spite of their complaints, I was delighted to see all five of them had left their essays on my desk. Carly had written a story about two girls who are prepared to die for one another but end up surviving and living happily ever after. Romeo and Juliet would have married and lived to a happy retirement in Carly’s world. Annika proposed that Alcestis would have been better off as a single mother than married to Admetus, whom she considered a leech. I felt a rush of sympathy for Annika’s father, wondering if he knew h
ow much contempt she had for him.
Mel wrote about her brother, wondering if she would have sacrificed her life as well as her hearing to keep him alive. Jono, of all people, produced a really good piece about the act of sacrifice in Halo, a video game I half-remembered Luke playing. The hero has to give up his life at the end of the game to save the universe. Mel and Jono’s essays were good, and not just for kids at Rankeillor, but for kids anywhere. Ricky, meanwhile, had pursued his belief in euthanasia for the over-fifties, which at least made it clear that he was thinking for himself, I decided, trying to look at it positively.
When I gave back their work, the kids were excited. They resisted any threat of homework, but they were thirsty for approval in the comments I wrote on the bottom of each essay. They read their own, and then leaned over to read each other’s.
‘Don’t we get a grade?’ asked Carly, turning her paper over to check I hadn’t hidden the mark.
‘No, you don’t. I wanted you to write about something which is meaningful to you, not to pass a test. I didn’t think marks would be appropriate. That’s why I wrote you quite a long comment at the bottom,’ I explained.
Mel’s face was glowing as she read hers, and Jono was trying to conceal the fact that he had gone bright pink.
‘Can I take this home, though?’ asked Ricky.
‘Of course, it’s your work.’
‘I want my grandparents to see that someone thinks I can do “a daring and original argument”,’ he said. I hoped they didn’t read the essay itself. Or, if they did, that they wouldn’t take it personally.
‘Well you can. I’m proud of you all.’
* * *
I meant it too. I hadn’t gone into the Unit expecting to like the job. I took it because I didn’t know what else to do. But even though things still went wrong, often, I felt I was beginning to make a difference. Robert was right about the kids at Rankeillor: as much as anything, they just wanted to be treated like normal kids, instead of unexploded hand-grenades. Everyone skirted round them: you only had to see them walking up the street on their way home at the end of the day. People would cross the road to avoid their squawky, swearing, unpredictable mass. I could understand the road-crossers – the kids often progressed from shouting to shoving and occasionally all-out fighting in the street, and we had several convicted muggers on the Unit, too – but it doesn’t take a leap of empathy to see that it isn’t much fun being feared by everyone.
The Furies: A Novel Page 12
