I haven’t really mentioned the other kids I worked with at Rankeillor. I’ve focussed on the older group because they were, to me, the most interesting. The younger ones were a mixed bunch, and I had a small older group, who were halfway out of the Unit already – their minds more on where they were going next than where they were now. I took five groups in total. Some were more articulate than others, some were nicer. Some were bullies and some were victims. Many were both. I didn’t discuss tragedy with any other group: either they weren’t old enough, or they weren’t interested. It never came up.
The younger ones liked making up stories and acting them out. They enjoyed swapping roles partway through the performance, changing perspective. They had no problem with doing the drama equivalent of collages, in other words. They would commit plenty of energy to writing a short play, or a scene about a situation they had found challenging or upsetting, and then they would design costumes and sets that they could make or build in the basement room.
I wanted our sessions to be fun as well as therapeutic. I had placed limitations on the amount of glue they could use, because even if they could inhale large quantities with no apparent loss of brain function, I couldn’t. But that was pretty much my only rule. I wanted them to feel safe and to leave the room happier than they’d arrived. I worked hard to make that happen, and for the most part, I think it did.
Like most ostensibly bad children, as Robert had long maintained, they didn’t want to be bad. They were keen to learn how to relate better to each other, to their families and friends. They wanted to be happier and less angry. They didn’t enjoy the tantrums they nonetheless felt compelled to throw so frequently. They could usually understand that just as they didn’t like being shouted and screamed at, other people didn’t either. And if they couldn’t always make the extra step from recognising that fact to acting on it, that didn’t make them desperately unusual, for teenagers.
The real difference between the youngest kids and the older ones was that they had more time. They didn’t have that sell-by date which the older kids felt: if they didn’t hurry up and learn something soon, it would be too late. Too late shouldn’t really exist when you’re a teenager. You shouldn’t feel like your options are closing off so soon. But for Annika, Carly, Mel, Jono and Ricky, the career clock was already ticking. Their lives would soon need to fit onto application forms, and they knew it.
My relationship with the older class, as the lawyers have been quick to emphasise, wasn’t normal. Our sessions were unusual. But I keep clinging to this in the face of everything that has been said since: that wasn’t my intention. I didn’t go to Scotland to teach Greek tragedy to impressionable and emotional teenagers – another phrase the lawyers use, as if there is any other kind. I went there to try to make my life better, because I thought I could make their lives better, and I believed doing that would help me to recover something I’d lost when Luke died. And with every other group on the Unit, that is what happened. I don’t deny for a moment that it is my fault that things went catastrophically wrong. I wouldn’t consider denying it. But I didn’t fail all of them, and that should count for something.
DD,
We did it. Me and Carly skived off on Friday and followed Alex to London. I knew that’s where she was going. I am a genius. OK, maybe not a genius. Like I said before, once you don’t get off at Peterborough, you have to go to London. But still, I knew it. Here’s what she did.
She got on the exact same train that I was on last Friday. She sat in the same seat. And, again, she didn’t have an overnight bag with her or anything to read or eat or drink. We sat in the next carriage. That was Carly’s idea – she was panicking that we’d get caught when we were supposed to be at the Unit that day. She was panicking we’d get caught for fare-dodging too.
She said it was different when I’d gone the week before, because I’d had Robert’s permission. Which was true, I guess. Except I don’t think Alex would have noticed if we’d been sitting right next to her. Carly didn’t see how she was that day. Totally impervious, you know. That’s the word. I looked it up.
So we sat on the train all the way to London. Having Carly there was way more fun. We read magazines and listened to music and she did my nails a really nice dark red with blue glitter in it. These two old women opposite got all huffy about the smell and moved tables. I offered to do hers back, but she did them herself instead. She’s got much steadier hands than me, even on a moving train, so you can’t blame her.
We pulled into London after about a million years. Carly had never been there before. Not once. She’s never actually been south of Bamburgh Castle. She said her parents never fancied taking them: they prefer Spain for their holidays, because when you get there it’s definitely warm and sunny.
When we got off the train, I thought Carly was going to have a seizure at the noise and the crowds and everything. Everyone walks too fast. They’re all so busy and cross all the time. Makes you wonder why they’re so keen to live there. We followed Alex, but she looks like a zombie when she’s in London. I thought she hated being in Edinburgh, and was just there because London makes her sad now her boyfriend’s dead. But I had it the wrong way round.
Sometimes in Edinburgh she smiles. She even laughs every now and then, when one of us says something she likes. In London she’s like the walking dead. But still, she knows where she is and where she’s going, she’s not like us. She walks like she’s got to get somewhere. There’s a difference, isn’t there, in the way people move when they are going somewhere compared with when they’re just going for a walk? And Alex is definitely doing the first one. But, even though she has somewhere to be, everything about her is sad: her shoulders are hunched over, even when she’s not standing in the cold. She wears these wristwarmers, pulled up over her hands, holding them shut like mittens. And she looks at the ground all the time. You’d think she’d walk into people, but they sort of flow around her, because they can’t make eye contact with her, so they move instead of expecting her to.
She came out of King’s Cross and turned right. We followed her over the road and past the Harry Potter station, which I thought was supposed to be King’s Cross, but it isn’t, it’s next door. And then we went past the British Library, which looks pretty fucking massive for a library. There’s this huge statue of a man drawing something with a compass outside. And loads of posters up for an exhibition about beings from another world. I wouldn’t mind seeing that. Aliens in a library.
But she walked past there, and then over this massive road junction with about ten lanes of traffic from about six different directions. Carly had stopped talking, because she knows that when there’s this much stuff going on, I have to concentrate on the traffic. Then past more offices and some cafés and then we got to some fancy gates and she turned right and we went past these big white terraced houses that were fucking immense.
She crossed the road and we went into a little green park. We walked past a sign with a big map on it, and it turns out this is The Regent’s Park. It’s not a little park at all, even, it’s massive. We were just in the bottom bit. The Avenue Gardens, it said on the sign. No dogs allowed, next to a picture of a dog who looked all sad because he wasn’t allowed. Alex was still ahead of us. Even Carly had stopped flapping that she would turn around and see us. Alex barely stops for traffic. She just keeps going and going.
She crossed over a little road with a big fancy black and gold gate at one end. I wanted to see where that went, but we didn’t want to lose track of Alex. She walked past this tiny café, the Cow and Coffee Bean, and the toilets. Carly had to stop to use the loos, I waited outside to make sure Alex didn’t disappear. She walked up till we got to this big – actually, I don’t know what it was. It looked like a fountain, but it didn’t have any water in it. And then she took a path to the left and curled round this corner and suddenly we were walking alongside a zoo.
We could see some porcupines and sheep and goats. No lions and tigers and giraffes, but w
e saw some camels and a small kangaroo. There’s a fence between the path and the zoo, but it isn’t that high. We could have climbed in, easy. Then Alex turned left again, and she walked up to this big square building with huge windows around the sides.
We didn’t want to follow her inside, in case she saw us. That was Carly’s idea. So we hid behind a tree for a bit, and then I saw a bench and we sat on there, even though it was freezing now we’d stopped walking. It was windy in the park: the noise was really messing with my aids. I can still hear when it’s windy, but there’s just this really loud rumbling noise underneath everything, which I have to tune out to hear anything else. After a while it gives me a headache. I pulled my hat down over my ears, which made it harder to hear Carly, but at least I could think about something other than how loud the fucking wind was.
Carly was still worrying that Alex would notice us, but she was too far away, unless she had binoculars. Then Carly looked really worried, and I said there was no way that Alex had binoculars because who has binoculars for Christ’s sake? Bird-watchers and stalkers and that’s it. We sat there for ages. And it must be the most boring bit of the park. There’s loads of playing fields – all flat and empty. No-one was playing football on Friday, though. You couldn’t blame them, either. It started to drizzle, and then sleet.
In the end I walked round the side of the building so I could try and see what Alex was doing. It took me a while to make her out, but there she was, sitting at a table. I think it’s another café, this glass-sided box. It’s much bigger than the one by the toilets, though. She sat there with a cup for an hour. I walked back round to Carly and told her Alex was just sitting in this place on her own. She didn’t believe me, so I made her come with me to look. We went back to the bench in the end, and an hour after Alex had walked in, pretty much exactly, she walked out again.
She didn’t go back the way she’d come, though. She carried on down past the playing fields, and eventually she reaches a bridge over a tiny lake. There are these weird whirlpool things in the water, I don’t know what they are. Drains or something, I guess. It looks like sea monsters from above, anyway. Loads of fancy ducks, too. Not just the regular kind. Different-coloured ones. Ones with brown hair. Well, with brown feathers that look like hair in a quiff. Pretty cute. And loads of swans.
Then the park runs out, and she walks along this little road that curves right back round until she’s at the bottom of the park again. Then she walks along the park road, and then back onto the main road and all the way to King’s Cross. She gets back on the train at half past five, and that’s her whole trip.
It was fucking bizarre. She sits on a train for four and a half hours, and then walks miles to sit in a café on her own for an hour, and then goes all the way home again. Carly reckons she was waiting for someone who didn’t show up. Actually, Carly really thinks that this is where Alex and Luke used to come every Friday for romantic afternoons in the park. And she thinks Alex is coming back to re-live them on her own.
But then her next favourite idea is that Alex was waiting for someone – a man – who she likes. I said, didn’t it look kind of bad that he didn’t show up? Catch me waiting an hour for some no-show. But Carly thinks he got stuck somewhere and that he rang Alex and said sorry and that when she got back to Edinburgh he’d probably sent her flowers.
But I don’t think she looked like she was waiting. I watched her for about thirty minutes, and she didn’t check her watch, or look at her phone or do anything people usually do when they’re waiting for someone. She just sat there, dead-eyed, like when she was on the train. I don’t know what she was doing, but I don’t think she was there to meet somebody. She goes there because she needs something, but whatever it is, it doesn’t work. Actually, it makes her emptier, like she’s hungry and eating cotton wool, expecting to feel full. Does that even make sense?
5
‘So, what? Alcestis dies, but then she comes back from the dead?’ Ricky hadn’t managed to read to the end of Alcestis and was piecing it together from the others’ descriptions.
‘Yup,’ said Jono. ‘Hercules turns up and mugs Death to get her back.’
Ricky looked mutely at me. I nodded. That summed things up pretty well.
‘So they bury her? Alcestis? Because she’s dead?’
‘Yes,’ I told him.
‘And then Death comes to get her, and he’s like a person?’
‘Pluto, the god of the dead, yes.’
‘And Hercules is who?’
‘He’s a superhero,’ said Annika. ‘But he doesn’t have a cape.’
‘He sort of does, actually,’ said Mel.
We all turned to her.
‘Does he really?’ I felt guilty. My students shouldn’t know more about a subject than I did.
‘Yes. It’s like a lion skin or something. It’s in pictures of him, on Greek vases and things.’
‘You’re absolutely right. Well done. You know, we should go to the Museum of Scotland one day and look at the Greek pots they have there.’
‘Lame.’ I should have known Annika wouldn’t be keen.
‘So, he’s a superhero?’ Ricky was still waiting to hear the end of the story.
‘Yeah. He hides behind a tombstone and then jumps out and chokes Pluto till he gives in and lets Alcestis come back to be alive again.’ So Jono had read the whole play. It wasn’t just Mel who was interested in this stuff.
‘Oh. OK.’ Ricky nodded.
‘Do you think it’s a good ending to the play?’ I asked Jono, since he’d had more time to think about it than Ricky.
‘Kind of.’
‘You’d like it better if she stayed dead?’
‘No,’ said Carly.
‘Yes.’ Jono and Mel disagreed.
‘Why?’
‘It’s cheap,’ Mel said. ‘If someone kills themselves to save someone else, and then they come back a few pages later, it spoils it.’
‘It reduces the value of her sacrifice, you mean?’
‘Yes. What’s the point in dying for someone if they get you back again? And anyway, she might not have wanted to come back.’
‘You think she’d rather be dead?’ I asked. ‘Even after the big speech she gives before she dies about her children and how they’ll grow up without a mother?’
‘Yes,’ Jono agreed. ‘Maybe. I mean, she might not want to go back to Admetus. He was happy enough for her to die in his place, wasn’t he? She might prefer someone else now.’
‘And no-one asks her, do they?’ Mel added. ‘She makes this big sacrifice, and everyone’s talking about how amazing she is and how sad it is that she’s died. And then Hercules decides that because the servants are sad about her dying, and because Admetus is miserable, that it’s the right thing to go and get her back. Which is fine and everything, but no-one asks if it’s what she wants. They just sort of assume it is, don’t they? Because that’s what they would want if they’d sacrificed themselves – to be alive again. But they weren’t the kind of people who’d be prepared to die for someone else, so they aren’t the same kind of person as she is. They don’t know what she would want. Hercules gets her back to make his friend feel better. But no-one asks Alcestis.’
I was impressed, and a little smug. She was learning a lot from me, I thought.
‘You’re completely right, Mel. Alcestis is treated like an object, isn’t she, in this part of the play? Hercules goes to get her back, as though she were a glove that Admetus had dropped or something. What do you notice about her when she returns?’
They all looked at each other, clearly hoping one of the others knew.
‘She gives that great speech in the first half of the play, doesn’t she? And then what does she say when she comes back?’
‘Nothing,’ said Annika, skimming through the pages to check. ‘She doesn’t say anything at all.’
‘Why is that?’ asked Mel. ‘Hercules says it’s some religious thing – that she can’t talk till she’s been back for three days
or something?’
‘That’s right. She’s still sacred to the gods of the underworld. There has to be a ritual of some kind to allow her to re-enter our world fully, and that takes a few days. Till then, she can’t speak. So why does Euripides say this, about the ritual?’ I asked them all.
‘So we never know what Alcestis thought about what happened to her?’ guessed Mel.
‘Yes, exactly. So we’re left to decide for ourselves how she must have felt, and whether she was happy with it or not.’
‘I think she’d have preferred to stay dead,’ Mel said.
‘Of course she wouldn’t.’ We all jumped. I’d seen temper from a lot of the Rankeillor kids, but never from Carly. Her face had flushed a dark pink, clashing with the amethyst purple she’d put on her eyes. She was driving her green nails into the palms of her hands, trying not to cry. ‘Everyone wants to be alive instead of dead. Everyone.’ The tears were coming anyway, falling in dirty indigo streams down her cheeks. ‘Who wouldn’t rather be with their friends instead of lying in the ground? All this stuff you’re saying,’ she looked around at us, ‘it’s complete rubbish.’
‘Really? You’re doing this now?’ Annika asked. ‘Are you going to storm out and slam the door like he does?’ She jerked her head at Jono, but since he’d turned the other way to look at Carly, he didn’t notice.
‘Thank you, Annika. Ever helpful. Carly, are you alright? I’m sure none of us meant to upset you.’
She nodded and snuffled, and dug in her pockets to find a tissue.
‘I’m sorry, Alex,’ she said. ‘I don’t like this play at all. I think it’s horrible.’
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