The Furies: A Novel

by Natalie Haynes

  I stopped eating and drinking during the day, even though I was supposed to drink lots of water. Easy for the fucking doctor to say: I had to press my fists into my ears every time I swallowed anything, even just saliva, to try and dull the pain in the middle of my head, burning through my ears from the inside. If every time you had to swallow, it felt like someone was pressing a lit cigarette into your ear, you wouldn’t drink anything either. I said I felt like crying, but of course I couldn’t cry. Crying means swallowing, too.

  I couldn’t go away with my dad to Greece, which is what he suddenly decided we should do. I couldn’t go with my mum to see my grandparents. I couldn’t even go to see Carly, because I had to stay indoors in case of a secondary infection. The doctor was really stressed about it. He kept making eye contact with me for too long, and saying that if I wasn’t very lucky with the antibiotics, I could sustain further irreparable hearing loss. What I wanted to say, but couldn’t because my mum was sitting right there, was that I would have willingly swapped my remaining hearing if it would just make the pain stop. It would have been a fucking bargain.

  So, my hearing is worse than it was, but it will improve, he thinks. It might never get back to where it was last term, though. The scarring is pretty heavy at the moment, so it depends how that heals up. It was just about the worst possible combination of things: I was in Edinburgh, about two fucking miles away from Alex, and I have no idea what’s happening in her life. I haven’t seen her since June. Since June, for God’s sake, and now it’s August. After everything she’s been through, she’s probably spent the whole time on her own, which is the last thing she should be doing.

  I did try. When I was starting to get better, I walked up to where she lives. It was a warm day, so I thought I’d be OK. She stays somewhere off Blackfriars Street – I know that, because I asked her. She would have given me the address before the holidays, for sure, but Jono made some crack about stalking her, and she went all vague. But I already knew it must be around there, because she comes up either Nicolson Street or St Leonard’s to get to Rankeillor, so it must be somewhere between the two, mustn’t it? I’ve watched her coming and going from the Unit, she always goes that way. And she’s definitely near Waverley, because she walks that way out of the station when she comes back from London, and heads up Cockburn Street. But I still haven’t seen her all summer. I waited around for ages in a café on Blackfriars that one day, but nothing. I wandered round St Mary’s Street and near there for a bit. I couldn’t see her.

  I hardly even heard from Carly either. I couldn’t use the phone for weeks, and she prefers talking to typing. Plus, she’s always busy these days. She said she was helping her mum at work a lot, and then they were all going away to Spain for two weeks. Her mum loves Spain. She takes evening classes, that’s how much she likes it. But even when she was here, she wasn’t around. I don’t know if she’s dropped me, kind of, or if I’ve dropped her. Does that make sense? I mean, we’re still friends and everything, but not in the same way. The old Carly would never have been too busy to come and see me if I was ill. The old me would have called her even if I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I don’t know what happened exactly. I wonder if she could tell she’d annoyed me that day she wigged out at Alex last term. We still look like friends to anyone else, but it’s definitely not the same as it was.

  And the Fringe is in town now, so everywhere must be fucking rammed. I thought Carly might want to go and see something, but she didn’t seem bothered when I asked. And going on my own would be lame. Besides, the tickets aren’t cheap, so you have to pick something that isn’t going to be shit. But if we’d gone to see some shows, we might have bumped into Alex, and it would all have been worthwhile.

  Term starts again next week, though, which is a massive relief. I never thought I’d say that. But I’m so sick of being stuck with no-one to talk to. I’ve been so bored, I just want to see everyone again. My mum keeps asking about which college I want to go to next year. I keep telling her I’m thinking about it, which I’m not, but now she’s started asking about open days and all that shite. Ordering prospectuses. I have no idea where she gets these ideas, but once she’s got them in her mind, you can’t shake them.

  What she doesn’t understand, because she doesn’t ask, is that I don’t want to be anywhere except at Rankeillor. I don’t want to have to go somewhere new, I don’t want to meet new people and make new friends, which is what college will be like if you ask my mum. She says it will be a chance for me to make a fresh start. But I don’t want a fresh start. I just want this one to be better.

  The beginning of term in Edinburgh came early. School holidays in Scotland mystified me: why did they finish so early in the summer, and then drag the kids back to school in the middle of August, when the festivals were all in full swing, and the city was full of stuff for them to do?

  ‘It’s because it usually rains less in July,’ said Jono, when I asked them on the first day back.

  ‘Did you go to see your shows, Alex?’ Carly was sitting very close to Jono. I guessed their summer holidays had largely been spent together.

  ‘I saw a few, yes. There are some very good plays at the Traverse, if you can persuade your parents to let you go.’

  ‘You could take us,’ said Mel.

  ‘Please,’ said Jono. ‘We’re a bit past school trips, aren’t we?’

  ‘Besides, Alex already saw the shows, didn’t she?’ Carly was quick to slap her down, I thought.

  And Mel agreed, I guessed, as she reddened slightly. She looked tired, I thought. And she’d lost weight over the summer too: she was always slim but now she was gaunt. There were dark creases beneath her eyes that I hadn’t seen before.

  ‘We could go and see a play,’ I said, trying to cheer her up. ‘If the four of you would like to, I mean. There’s still two more weeks of the Fringe: I’ll look into what we could see when.’

  ‘Thank you, Alex.’

  As I looked around the classroom, it wasn’t just Mel who’d changed over the summer. Jono seemed to be inches taller: for the first time I thought if I walked past him on the street, I wouldn’t have guessed he was still at school. Carly had either dyed her hair or covered it with a jet-black wig. She was wearing a pale-blue vintage dress covered in dove-grey beads. If anyone needed a 1920s flapper-girl, she was ready for their call. Even Annika, eyeing Carly’s new look with astonishment, had exchanged her glasses for contact lenses. At least I hoped that was plastic, glinting in her eyes.

  When Robert had questioned her about the thefts at the end of the summer term, she hadn’t even pretended she wasn’t guilty. She’d shrugged her slender shoulders and said that if he would just throw her out, her mother would give in and take her away from Edinburgh for good. She would do anything to make that happen: and he could let her go now, or she would continue doing whatever it took to force his hand. She wouldn’t be participating in classes till he gave in and promised to let her leave. He’d explained to her that while he was happy to meet with her mother and discuss her concerns, he wouldn’t be blackmailed.

  All of the stolen objects – the hoody, the purse, my bag, and whatever else she’d lifted from other staff – had found their way to the first bin she passed on Clerk Street as she went home each day. She didn’t want any of the things she took. She just wanted to take them away. Robert asked her to apologise to me, in writing, on the first day of the new term. When I checked my pigeonhole before I went down to teach their first class, I found a torn page on which she had written: ‘Dear Alex, Sorry about your bag. I hope you’ve bought a better one now. Annika’. In reciprocation, I scrunched it up as I walked down the stairs, and when I finally reached the basement, I threw it straight into the bin.

  ‘Did you all have good holidays?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, I s’pose,’ Jono said, yawning as though he was still working his way through jetlag. ‘I went away to stay at my grandparents’ for a bit, in Inverness. It was OK.’

  ‘And Carl
y?’

  ‘I went to Spain,’ she said, happily, shrugging her shoulders and shaking back her newly black hair so I could admire what I presumed were her holiday earrings, in the shape of tiny martini glasses, bubblegum-pink plastic representing their contents. ‘You can see what’s left of my tan, can’t you?’ She had indeed turned a pale gold colour, which was nonetheless peeling.

  ‘Did you burn?’ I asked her.

  She nodded. ‘I always do. A Scottish suntan is bright red, Alex, you must know that.’

  ‘Annika?’ I didn’t really care what she’d done with her summer, but I didn’t want the rest of the class to know that.

  ‘Stockholm,’ she said. I saw Mel look across, waiting for her to say more, but one word was all we were getting.

  ‘And what about you?’ I asked Mel. She curled her lip into an elegant snarl.

  ‘I stayed here,’ she said, flatly. ‘It was fine. I wanted to go away, but it didn’t work out.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Where would you like to have gone?’

  She tilted her head to consider it. It looked like she was trying to get water out of her ears. ‘A Greek island, or something.’

  ‘Lesbos?’ Jono suggested, his face dangerously straight.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she replied. ‘Sorry, Alex.’

  ‘Let’s try and keep things civil, shall we? I haven’t seen you all summer. It’d be a shame if we spent today arguing.’ I looked over at Jono. I could already see that a relationship between him and Carly was going to make things more difficult than they had been.

  ‘Sorry,’ he muttered.

  ‘That’s OK. So, are we going to carry on where we left off?’ I asked them. ‘We finished Agamemnon last term, so shall we move on to The Choephori?’

  ‘The what?’ asked Jono.

  ‘The second play in the trilogy,’ I explained. ‘Choephori are libation-bearers.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Bearers are people who bear things. So that clears things up perfectly. Or at least, it would, if you mentioned what a libation is?’

  ‘An offering,’ Mel said. ‘A religious offering.’

  ‘Very good.’ I smiled at her. I knew it was wrong to have favourites, but she tried so much harder than the others. It was impossible not to feel grateful for her enthusiasm, especially with Annika glowering two seats away from her. ‘You’re absolutely right. It’s a ritual offering of a drink to the gods.’

  She grinned smugly at the others. Perhaps the truce was more of a détente.

  ‘Oh right,’ said Jono. ‘This doesn’t sound like one of your more exciting plays, Alex.’

  ‘Well, it’s about what happens after Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon. It gets pretty exciting. The libation-bearers are just the chorus: a bunch of old women who go with Electra to pour a libation on her father’s tomb. Remember Electra? We talked about her before: she’s the second daughter of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. Sister to Iphigenia.’

  ‘Iphigenia is the one Agamemnon murdered?’ said Carly.

  ‘That’s her. Electra is the remaining daughter. She’s been living with her mother, Clytemnestra, and her mother’s boyfriend, Aegisthus.’

  ‘And those are the ones who killed her dad in the last play?’ Jono asked, squinting as though he were trying to identify a distant face. ‘Don’t roll your eyes, Alex, I’ve had a busy summer.’

  ‘You’ve still remembered it perfectly. So Electra hates living with her mum because she misses her dad, and she blames her mother for that. And she goes to lay an offering at her father’s tomb. And when Electra gets to the tomb, she finds someone else has already left offerings there. And that person turns out to be her brother Orestes. He’s been in exile since Agamemnon’s murder. But now he’s returned to avenge the death of his father.’

  ‘How’s he going to do that?’ asked Annika, her interest finally roused by the prospect of revenge against a parent.

  ‘Good question. Orestes has an impossible decision to make, which we know often happens to characters in Greek tragedy, right? He is honour-bound to kill the person who killed his father – an eye for an eye, and all that. But he’s also honour-bound not to harm his parents, like any good son. You remember last year, when we did Oedipus, how important it is that he’s killed his father, even by accident?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mel.

  Carly and Jono exchanged another glance. It took me a moment to identify the expression on Carly’s face, because I’d never seen contempt there before. I needed to add some more students to this class, and I needed to do it before the first new arrivals blew into the Unit over the next few weeks. Would it be possible to merge this class with the year below, or would Robert’s timetable implode under the pressure? I carried on, hoping that if I kept talking, the atmosphere wouldn’t deteriorate further.

  ‘Orestes is in a bind. His mother is his father’s killer. So what does he do? Does he do his duty to his father’s honour, and kill his mother, or does he decide he’d rather be a good son to his mother, and leave her alone? What do you think, Jono?’

  ‘He probably kills her, to be honest with you, Alex. Unless this play is a lot shorter than the others.’

  ‘He decides to kill someone else first.’

  ‘Aegisthus,’ said Mel. ‘Her boyfriend.’

  ‘Quite right, Mel. You must have been reading ahead over the holidays.’ She smiled and nodded. I wanted to reward her, but I kept my eyes on Jono instead.

  ‘So Orestes kills Aegisthus, because he has no qualms about doing that. This man helped to kill his father, after all.’

  ‘And he’s doing his mum,’ Jono added.

  ‘Well, yes. That adds an extra resonance, for sure. But then Orestes and Electra want to kill Clytemnestra, too, which is more problematic.’

  The bell rang, and they picked up their bags with the weariness I’d grown used to over the past two terms. Even when they were bored, they considered the actual process of moving to a different classroom to be an exhaustion too far.

  ‘OK, for next time, you could read the play through for me. Those of you who haven’t already done so. And maybe you could each write me a side of A4 about Orestes’ decision. What should a character do when faced with two irreconcilable evils?’

  ‘Seriously, Alex? It’s the first day back.’ Jono believed the very idea of homework to be an infringement of the Geneva Convention.

  ‘You can refer to any video game you like in your essay. Tell me what your character chooses to do when there are only bad options available.’

  3

  DD,

  My gran always says you should be careful what you wish for, which is just about the most depressing sentence anyone’s ever said. Shouldn’t wishes be one of the things you don’t worry about? Wishing isn’t like crossing the road, you don’t need to look both ways before you do it. But I spent the whole summer wishing I was back at Rankeillor, because not being there was so horrible. And now I’m back, it’s horrible there too.

  For a start, we had a lecture from Robert on the first morning back, about new students arriving during the term. Only about half of us start the school year at Rankeillor. The rest get sent here once they’ve fucked up their chances everywhere else, so it’ll be a week at least before the first ones arrive, and then they’ll drip through all term. He gave us the whole you-were-new-here-once talk, about making new arrivals feel welcome and keeping an eye on them and all that bollocks. I could see Jono calculating how many phones he’d be able to swipe from the newbies when they turn up. He’s so predictable.

  And Carly is still being weird. She’s going out with Jono now, apparently, even though she always said she thought he was an idiot. I don’t want to talk about it, though. I mean, who wants to know about kissing Jono?

  And then there’s Annika. Something’s going on with her. She was caught stealing last term, you know. Carly told me. But that doesn’t explain why she’s barely speaking to any of us. And there’s more: I think she must have stolen Alex’s bag. I saw that Alex had a new one,
and I was going to tell her I liked it, but as soon as she walked in to the classroom, she put it in her desk drawer. She didn’t say anything about it. But she looked straight at Annika as she shut the drawer and then she threw something in the bin. Annika didn’t notice any of this, because she was playing with her phone. But I saw it.

  I waited for everyone to leave the classroom before me, and I swiped the paper out of the bin. It’s basically the least sincere apology anyone’s ever written. Typical Annika. I’m going to try and think of some way to get back at her.

  On top of everything else this past week, my mum has gone absolutely bug-fucking mental. Seriously, there are people in asylums who are less demented than her. She spent the whole summer being all saintly because I was ill, and now the lunacy has arrived, right on cue. And it’s all down to my dad, who, it turns out, wanted to take me to Greece so that we could ‘have a serious talk’. Only we didn’t, because I was ill. So he decided to mail instead, because it’s just that bit less trouble than coming to see me to tell me that he’s getting married again. To someone I’ve never met, obviously. Which he’s sort of managed to make sound like it’s my fault: like if I hadn’t been ill, he could have introduced me to Lucy. Lucy is twenty-three. She’s seven years older than me. It’s beyond gross.

  At least I don’t have to go to the wedding, because they’re getting married at Christmas in Bali. Where the fuck? And since when did my dad turn into the kind of person who does things like this?

  So I told my mum, even though I knew what she’d do, which is to make it all about her, when it has nothing to do with her at all. She hardly even talks to him now. She hasn’t even seen him for two years, when she drove me down to stay with him when she was on her way to a conference somewhere and I wasn’t old enough to get the train yet – in her view, anyway. So, basically, she used to know my dad, but doesn’t now. Whereas he’s still my dad, so even though I don’t see him all that often, he’s my dad. So when he decides to just marry someone I’ve never even met, it’s a big deal to me.