‘He’ll kill his dad and shag his mum?’
‘Exactly, Jono. And, as you might expect, his parents didn’t want that to happen on several counts. So they tried to get around it. When Oedipus was still a baby, they sent him away with a servant who’d been ordered to leave him out on a hillside to die.’
‘Oh my God,’ said Carly, her pale red hair swinging as she also started tipping back in her chair. I could feel my jaw tense as I waited for the chair legs to come back to the floor. It was like watching a glass that someone had left balanced on the edge of a table, waiting for it to crash to the ground. ‘Isn’t that illegal?’
‘It is now, yes. So don’t get any ideas. But no, it wasn’t then. Besides, Laius was the king of Thebes, and Jocasta was the queen, so they could pretty much do what they wanted. And that isn’t all. Do you know what Oedipus means?’
They all shook their heads.
‘It means swollen foot. Because his feet were pinned together when he was taken out to the mountainside, so he wouldn’t be able to move.’
‘Jesus,’ said Jono. ‘How did they do that?’
‘I don’t know, exactly. I suppose the pins must have gone through the soft part of his feet.’
‘That’s horrible.’ Carly looked appalled.
‘Yes. But the servant who was sent to abandon him there couldn’t bring himself to leave a baby to die like that, so he gave him to a kindly shepherd instead.’
‘He wasn’t a paedophile, was he, miss?’ asked Ricky.
‘Not in Sophocles’ version, no. Or in any other version,’ I added, seeing his mouth begin to form another question. I wished he had a jumper or something. Pale red hairs were standing up on his bare arms.
‘The kindly shepherd and his wife took the child to Corinth, which is another town in Greece. It’s the skinny bit in the middle between the north, where Athens is, and the south, in case you’ve been to Greece.’
‘I’ve been to Chios,’ said Mel. ‘I went with my dad two years ago.’
‘Well, maybe if he takes you again, you could go to the mainland, instead of one of the islands. Or as well, if he’s feeling generous.’
She smiled at me. ‘Maybe I’ll ask him,’ she said, nodding.
‘Now, the king and queen of Corinth didn’t have any children, and they really wanted one. So they adopted this baby that the shepherd had brought to their city. But they never told him he was adopted. So when Oedipus grew up and heard rumours about his fate – that he was going to kill his father and marry his mother – he was horrified. He loved the people he thought were his parents and didn’t want to harm them in any way. He wanted to protect them, so he ran away from Corinth. Which way do you think he headed?’
‘Where you said the play was set,’ said Jono. He was biting the skin next to his thumb nail until a tiny globe of blood appeared and he stopped, apparently satisfied.
‘Thebes?’ asked Mel.
‘Exactly. And on his way there, at a crossroads, he was pushed aside by a rude old man and his servants. The rude old man hit Oedipus with his stick. In anger, Oedipus struck him back and killed him. He killed all but one of the servants, too. Five or six of them, I think.’
‘How did the other one escape?’ said Ricky. He was drawing a brontosaurus, grazing next to a caveman. At least I wasn’t supposed to be teaching him history.
‘He ran away. He turns up later, as the only witness to the fight that killed Laius. But that’s not till later. This is still all the background stuff which has happened before the action of the play starts.’
‘We’re not even at the beginning yet?’ Carly sounded faintly panicked.
‘Remember what I said about difficult and boring?’ Jono muttered.
‘When Oedipus got to Thebes, he found them living under the curse of the Sphinx.’
‘Like in Egypt?’ Mel asked. ‘I’ve always wanted to go there.’
‘Exactly like in Egypt, except this Sphinx isn’t made of stone. It’s real.’
‘It isn’t real.’ Jono rolled his eyes, as though he had to deal with this kind of nonsense every day. Looking at Ricky’s dinosaur, I guessed he might.
‘In the world of the play, the Sphinx is real. Like a dragon might be real in a story, right? Or a unicorn?’
He shrugged. Or perhaps his hunched shoulders just rebelled sometimes of their own accord.
‘Now, the Sphinx had set a riddle, and no-one could pass her until he could answer it. The riddle was this: what has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?’
‘And what’s the answer?’ Annika asked. She was holding a pen poised above her notebook, midway between chewing it and writing with it. I realised she might be taking notes.
‘Maybe you could try and work it out,’ I suggested.
‘Nothing has a different number of legs at different times of the day,’ she said, tapping the end of her pen quickly and softly on her book.
‘OK, I’ll give you a clue. The morning in the riddle means when something is young. The evening is when that thing is old.’
All five of them stared at me.
‘None of you can guess? OK, well the answer is a person. We all used four limbs to get around as babies, when we could only crawl, right? Then we learned to walk and so we’re on two legs for most of our lives. Then when we get old, we might need a walking stick, right? So we become three-legged in the end. Kind of.’
‘And Oedipus worked that out?’ Jono snorted.
‘He did. And the people of Thebes were so glad that they let him marry the queen, who had been recently widowed. Guess who her husband had been.’
‘The old man at the crossroads?’ asked Mel.
‘Exactly right.’
She smiled again.
‘So Oedipus has killed his father and married his mother. And when they find out what they’ve done, Jocasta hangs herself, and Oedipus puts his eyes out with her brooch pins.’
‘Brooch pins? What the fuck?’
‘People did wear jewellery in the ancient world, Jono.’
‘They didn’t use it to stab themselves in the eye, though. Did they?’ he said.
‘Well, Oedipus does. And I think there’s another play where someone gets stabbed in the eye with brooch pins, now you mention it.’
‘But that’s not fair,’ Carly said. ‘Oedipus didn’t mean to marry his mother.’
‘You think something’s only a crime if you mean to do it?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Well, what about a car accident?’ I asked them. ‘If you ran someone over but didn’t mean to, they’d still be dead.’
‘But he didn’t know she was his mum.’ Carly wasn’t persuaded. ‘And she thought he was just some guy.’
‘If someone’s told you you’re going to marry your son, wouldn’t you avoid men young enough to be your son?’
‘But she thought her son was dead,’ said Mel.
‘That’s true. And maybe she had no choice?’ I suggested. ‘If she was fated to marry her son, and even sending him away to die on a hillside wasn’t enough to change that fate, maybe nothing could, and she had no free will at all.’
‘That’s really fucking bleak,’ said Jono, leaning onto the arm of his chair, which gave a quiet creak.
‘But no-one would believe that,’ said Annika.
‘Really? Do you read your horoscope?’ I asked her.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, frowning. Annika saw potential tricks and humiliations everywhere.
‘Then aren’t you agreeing to a world where your destiny for that day or week or whatever is dictated by your birthday?’
She shrugged.
‘So that’s what I want you all to think about before I see you again. Free will, and how much of it you think you have. Do you believe in destiny? Or do you think what happens in your life is entirely up to you? Try to read the first act of the play, or some of it at least. Then write me a side of paper.’
They groaned as they pu
t their things into their bags and headed out, but they had all stayed to the end. Maybe Robert had been right, I thought. Maybe I would be alright at this. Maybe I would even like it.
4
DD,
Everything’s changed, after Annika made her big scene last week. I don’t like her at all, most of the time. She’s such a bitch, and no-one ever calls her on it except Jono and me. Last week, when she stormed out of our first lesson with Alex, she called her a cunt. As she was leaving, I mean. She was walking right past her desk when she said it, and it was loud enough for me to hear even though she was facing away from me. Alex didn’t react at all, though. She just sat there like she couldn’t believe what she’d heard.
By the time we were out of the classroom, Annika had gone, left the Unit, I mean. I wanted to go after her and talk to her, because it just isn’t OK to speak to someone like that on their first day. But Carly wouldn’t let me, so we wrote an anonymous note and left it in Robert’s pigeonhole. I wonder if Alex noticed how much nicer Annika was being today? She doesn’t want to get kicked out of Rankeillor any more than the rest of us do, even though she’s always saying she does. She says she hates her mum and she doesn’t care what happens, but I bet that’s not really true.
Still, Annika being a bitch paid off in some ways. I’ve been at Rankeillor for three months now, and all we’ve done is basic skills and key skills and the rest of it has all been music therapy, art therapy, personal development, anger management. It’s been bothering me – aren’t we going to be behind when we go back to proper school, or to college or whatever? But now we’re reading a play by Sophocles, who I hadn’t even heard of last week. Alex wants us to think about whether we have a destiny. So is it my destiny that I can’t hear? Or can I just not hear?
Since I’ve decided I might want to be a journalist, I’ve been reading more blogs and stuff. And here’s what I’ve noticed: they’re all about the writer. I mean, they seem to be about something else – something the writer is, or likes, or cares about – but those are just ways for the writers to talk about themselves. It’s a bit fake, I think. I’m not going to pretend I’m talking about something else when I’m talking about me. I’ll just talk about me when I want to.
So here are ten things you might not know about being deaf:
1) I can’t hear you if we’re outside and there is a lot of traffic. The traffic is always louder than your voice, and because it’s lower-pitched, I can hear it more easily than I can hear your voice.
2) I can’t hear you if you don’t enunciate properly. Mumbling at a deaf person is really fucking rude.
3) I can’t always hear you if you don’t face me. I know it’s weird talking to a deaf person, because hearing people look at your eyes, while deaf people mostly look at your mouth. But if you look away, I can’t read your lips, and even though I have hearing aids, I lip-read too. My audiologist says that everyone lip-reads a bit, even people with perfect hearing, but most people don’t realise they’re doing it.
4) I can hear music, but I need to adjust my aids for it, and it needs to have the bass turned up.
5) When my mum asks me to do something for the third time, she can’t say, ‘Are you listening to me?’ And I can’t say, ‘I’m not deaf.’ Usually, she goes with, ‘Why aren’t you paying attention to me?’ And I go with, ‘I’m not stupid.’ A lot of people think that deaf and stupid are the same thing. That’s because they are stupid.
6) I wasn’t born deaf. If I had been, I would probably use sign language as well as lip-reading, and I might not be able to speak properly. I know some sign language, but only the basic stuff.
7) Sometimes I get tired from the effort of listening. My head starts to ache from concentrating on your mouth, and blocking out the interference from everywhere else. When this happens, I take my aids out so I can just forget about hearing for a while. If I close my eyes, you could all be on another planet. You just disappear. You’re gone so completely that I wonder if you were ever really there.
8) I’d rather be deaf than blind. Have you ever noticed how much people use seeing words in normal speech? I see what you mean, I’ll look into it. Whereas hearing words are used for when people are arguing: listen, I hear what you’re saying. I don’t mind being deaf, but I would really hate to be blind. I’ve never met a blind person, but I’d like to know if they feel the same way as me, or the opposite.
9) I sleep with an alarm next to my pillow. If the fire alarm goes off, I won’t hear it, because obviously I take my aids out to sleep. So I have a special alarm that vibrates and strobes to wake me up. It’s connected to the fire alarm wirelessly, so it goes off if the main alarm goes off. This is so I don’t burn to death, because we live on the first floor, and it’s a long way down to the street, and also there are railings. I have to take it with me when I go to stay with my dad.
10) I’ll think of a tenth thing for next time.
It was a filthy day outside. The wind was up, so the sleet was falling diagonally, stinging and vicious. I had two routes to Rankeillor: I could either walk out of New Skinner’s Close onto Blackfriars Street, turn left onto the Royal Mile and left again onto the South Bridge. Then half a mile past all the bus stops and left onto Rankeillor Street. Or I could go the other way, out of the close at the bottom, turn left past the big Catholic church, then right up the hill, past the student union buildings on the Pleasance, then eventually turn right onto Rankeillor Street just before St Leonard’s police station. On wet days, I usually went for the former. Climbing into the rain was somehow worse than walking into it.
As I walked up Nicolson Street, sharp pinpricks of cold found the few exposed inches of my skin. I bunched my hands into my coat pockets. The buildings were dulled by the rain and even the cars driving past me were losing their colour, the sleet and dirt and road salt rendering them interchangeable with the road. The pavement was greasy underfoot with frost and salt; the broken paving stones were booby-traps, poised to spray freezing water on the feet of the unwary. Even wearing a sweater and a thick coat, I was bone cold. It was only just past seven a.m., but I’d woken at five and hadn’t been able to get back to sleep. And if I wasn’t going to sleep, I’d decided, I might as well swim.
I used to go to the Commonwealth Pool all the time when I was a student, until a zealous week in my final year when I went there three days in a row, and saw the same brightly coloured M&M carcasses ground into the changing room floor every day. After that, I couldn’t quite convince myself that the rest of the pool was any cleaner than the floors, and it put me off going back. But when I moved to London and swam in the tiny pool at my local gym, I found that I missed those fifty-metre lengths. And since returning to Edinburgh, I’d been thinking about going there again. I hadn’t swum for months. When Robert asked me what I was doing with my spare time, I’d told him I would be swimming, because it didn’t feel like a lie. I used to swim and maybe I would again.
And as soon as the doors swung open and I smelled the chlorine in the air, I knew I’d made the right choice. It was so quiet in there on cold mornings: only the most committed swimmers could face getting out of bed before six in the winter. And the water was cool, unlike my old London pool, where it felt like swimming in a bath. Here, it was all about long distance, and distance swimmers could keep themselves warm. I walked through from the changing room to the lanes, stopping under the showers on the way to get my goggles wet. I clocked the speed of the five swimmers using the lanes already. I didn’t trust myself to the fast lane when I hadn’t been in the water for months. So I splashed down into the middle lane and swam two freestyle lengths. My muscles hurt a little, but it was a clean pain. I checked the clock and began to swim again. I probably had time for twenty lengths before I needed to shower and head to the Unit.
Everything was quiet. My goggles and hat covered my ears so completely that they blocked out almost all the noise of the pool. The city outside seemed completely unreal in there. Just the taste of chlorine and the occasional splas
hing of another swimmer in the next lane over. I cut through the water, staying under the surface for as long as my lungs could bear it each time I pushed off from the wall. You move more quickly through water than over it. And the only thing that matters is the next breath.
I showered and dried my hair before I left the pool. It was far too cold to go outside with wet hair, and it would be for weeks. I still had the imprint of my goggles on my face, I realised, as I caught my reflection by the hairdryers, and I hoped it would fade by the time I got to the Unit.
The weather made a big difference to the mood at Rankeillor. The kids were always on edge on these cold wet days – Luke would have called them ‘baity’ – because they had to stay indoors all day. Even the Unit’s keenest smokers didn’t want to drown or freeze. And the basement itself was swampier than usual – I could smell the damp creeping into it as I climbed down the stairs. The earth wanted to reclaim Rankeillor Street. I wedged the door open, to try and reduce the mildewed smell. One of my second-years – who I was teaching that morning – had, I remembered reading, an allergy to mould spores. I wasn’t sure how the allergy manifested itself, but I worried that he would start coughing and scratching if he came into the basement in its present condition.
I saw the pile of plays which the kids had rejected on my desk, where I’d left them, and thought I should tidy up. I opened one of the cupboards under the front windows and blanched. The smell was coming from there. The wooden skirting boards curved away from the wall, the plaster was blistered, and all of it was covered in a thin layer of black mould. I looked at the small round clock behind my desk. I still had forty minutes before my first lesson, which was surely enough time.
I walked out to the hall and tried the door under the stairs. It was locked, but I had a pile of keys which Robert had given me on my first day, including a spindly brass one which opened the cupboard. As I’d expected, there was a bucket, mops and brooms next to a tiny sink. Under it was an industrial container of bleach. I filled the bucket with bleach and water, took rubber gloves and a mop, and scrubbed the mould away from the walls and the floor. The knots in the wood made it impossible to remove every trace, but at least I could get rid of the worst of it.
The Furies: A Novel Page 5