The Furies

by Katie Lowe

  ‘Hey,’ I said, taking a seat in the booth opposite.

  She looked up, blinked; became herself again. ‘Hey, bitch. What’s cooking?’

  ‘Nothing. What are you reading?’ I knew. I’d left it in the tower weeks ago for her to find, convinced she’d love it – a lurid history of the Manson murders, nauseating in its details. We’d found a shared obsession with sleazy true-crime stories and pulpy paperbacks. It was exactly the kind of thing she’d like.

  ‘Nothing interesting,’ she said, slapping it down on the table, spine cracked, facing upwards: the smile she gave ferocious.

  ‘Rumour has it,’ she began, slowly – teasing the words out, one by one. ‘Rumour has it that a certain best friend of mine started the festive season with a dirty hookup. With a certain friend of my boyfriend’s.’

  I felt my cheeks burn hot, a vicious swell of tears.

  ‘Oh my god, it’s true,’ she said, leaning forwards. ‘Did you two fuck in the park?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ My voice shook; cheeks prickled, nausea rising at the memory. Hands, mud, hair snagged and caught.

  ‘You do. Oh my god, you so do. Fucking hell. Never had you pegged as that much of a slut.’ She laughed, shaking her head. ‘I thought that was my bit.’

  She waved, and I turned to see Alex strolling through the door, throwing a teasing look at the washed-up musician lurking in the corner. He’d dedicated numerous songs to her over the last three months, all roundly ignored. Still, she liked to toy with him, mixing coquettish glances with an absolute rebuttal of his attentions, at which we would laugh, riotously, between hushed whispers and looks in his direction.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ I hissed, pleading with my eyes. ‘Please.’

  ‘Hey, slut,’ Robin said, her tone light, though her eyes were still fixed on mine. ‘How’s it hanging?’

  Alex launched, enthusiastically, into a tale of some culinary nightmare: a misadventure prompted by Grace’s inability to follow a recipe, and which ended – as all Alex’s stories tended to – ‘So we gave up, and opened a bottle of wine.’ It never failed to impress me, the way Alex was so casual about what seemed – to me, at least – to be mature, sophisticated tastes.

  She was a year older than the three of us, having spent a year in New York after her GCSEs, interning for a friend of her mother’s in some ultra-cool advertising agency. The way she made time for manicures (a habit strange and pointless to the rest of us, with our chipped, bitten nails coated in lurid paint), the fact she could drive, her ability to describe in detail the qualities of different types of wine, at least, as far as we knew, none of us possessing the knowledge to confirm or deny her sweeping statements, all gave her a maturity that we could only imitate, each privately peacocking our stolen quirks in front of our parents and peers.

  ‘Be right back,’ Robin said, sliding from the booth. ‘Got to see a man about a dog.’ She pointed to a man in a lurid, purple tracksuit, thin and pale, from whom I knew she bought powders and pills whenever Andy was indisposed, or out of favour.

  Alex and I sat for a moment, watching as she sidled over and struck up what seemed to be a casual conversation, with an ease I could only envy. I looked at Alex – the bitten curve of her lips, swoop of cool brow – and we laughed as she placed a hand on his arm; her mark added another coffee to his order, as we knew he would. With Robin, certain things were inevitable. It was part of her effect.

  ‘Violet,’ Alex said, softly. I turned to look at her, her eyes sparkling bright green, ringed with black, her lashes impossibly long. ‘I wanted to ask you something,’ she said, glancing back over at Robin. ‘I don’t suppose you know anything about a book going missing from my mom’s office, do you?’

  I blushed. I didn’t know, of course, but I could guess. ‘What book?’

  ‘Just one of my mom’s weird old ones – it’s kind of an antique. Leather-bound, gold edges, expensive-looking … It’s disappeared, and she’s pissed. She’s threatening to call the police if I don’t tell her where it is.’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘I mean, she won’t. It’s just a threat, I think.’

  I sipped my coffee, reaching for an excuse. ‘Maybe it was your neighbour,’ I said, the words strangled in my throat.

  ‘I doubt it,’ she said, leaning back. ‘She’s too drunk to read most of the time as it is. And anyway, I can’t imagine she’d be interested in ancient rituals and occult practices.’ She looked down at my palm; instinctively, I balled it into a fist and tucked it under the table.

  I laughed, faintly. ‘You never know.’

  She smiled. ‘I have a feeling – don’t quote me on this, obviously – but I have a feeling Robin took it. We were talking about it that night at my place, and then, by “complete coincidence”, it was gone the next day.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ I couldn’t remember talking about it with the others. I thought it was just Robin and me. You were drunk, I told myself. It was probably while you were asleep.

  Silence fell between us. ‘Well,’ I began, nervously. ‘If she says anything about it, I’ll let you know. But … Well, she doesn’t seem like the stealing type, does she?’

  Alex snorted. ‘So she does have it. God, Violet. You’re a terrible liar.’

  ‘Ready, bitches?’ Robin said, leaning over the table.

  Alex smiled at me. ‘Ready,’ she said, sliding out from the booth and walking towards the door, leaving me trailing, as ever, behind.

  Chapter 7

  Nicky pointed at the group of girls lingering beside the wych elm. I imagined Ms Boucher, burning as the women around her – the girls, like me – screamed and clasped their hands and begged the pain to stop. The Dean and Headmaster wrangled with fence poles and tape, creating a temporary cordon around the blackened trunk, its branches now split and hanging thanks to a lightning strike during the winter break.

  ‘I’m sure it’s a rumour, obviously – you know what this place is like. But I heard she gave Patrick Chase a blow job in the stairwell after the party. Which is weird, because I thought she was kind of a prude.’

  I liked Nicky or, at least, still didn’t quite understand why the other girls didn’t. She seemed nice enough – a gossip, yes, though I’d found this a useful trait in learning the who’s who of the rest of the school, a kind of crash course in the secrets shared between my fellow students, who still, for their part, seemed to view me as the ‘new girl’.

  ‘But anyway, that’s nothing compared to what I heard about Victoria Riley – you know, the girl whose family own the stables? Looks the part – long face, big thighs? Well, Anna said that she’d been seen …’ I drifted off, watching the girls whispering, mocking the Headmaster as he wrangled with a pole which bent against the solid earth below.

  ‘And Robin who you hang out with, too—’

  ‘Wait, what?’ I said, yoked back to Nicky’s chatter by the mention of a familiar name.

  ‘She was there last year, too.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the clinic. Melanie Barker was in there with her.’

  ‘What clinic?’

  Nicky narrowed her eyes. ‘Were you listening to anything I just said?’

  ‘Sorry, yeah. I mean, I was, but I got distracted. Go back a bit.’

  She sighed. ‘Okay, so: Melanie Barker – you know, the one who looks like Madonna, except if Madonna was ugly and kind of fat?’ She spoke slowly, as though trying to communicate with someone in another language.

  ‘Right,’ I said, though I didn’t.

  ‘So she’s bulimic, although you’d never know it to look at her. And last year she got into buying these diet pills, through a friend of a friend or … whatever. Anyway, they were like speed. Sent her completely nuts.’ I wondered if Nicky had ever taken speed. Doubtful. She seemed suddenly naive, though I couldn’t quite determine whether that was an altogether bad thing, the welt in my palm still hot and crisp.

  ‘Obviously she got busted by her parents, and
they sent her off to the Appleyard. It’s like the Priory, I guess, except instead of celebrities, it’s full of rich kids who drink too much, or, like, steal their mum’s Valium, or whatever.’

  ‘Okay.’ I fingered the bracelet on my wrist, trying to act uninterested. ‘So what’s that got to do with Robin?’

  ‘They were there at the same time. Melanie and Robin, I mean. Not that they sit around bonding about it, or anything.’

  ‘What was she in there for?’

  She shrugged. ‘No idea. Drugs, booze, food, mental problems, whatever – it’s like a one-stop-shop for that kind of thing. But apparently one day your buddy lost it. Like, literally, lost it. Started walking down the corridors screaming about how they’d never find Emily Frost, and they’d never find the body, and it was all her fault, blah blah blah. Anyway …’ She moved on to another story, something involving Melanie, truth or dare, and a wine bottle, the end of which I felt no desire to know.

  I looked back towards the wych elm, where the teachers had finished their work. The Dean stepped back, shielding his eyes against the silvery light needling through the branches. The Headmaster said something to the girls, and they laughed. The Dean shook his head, turned, and walked away, hands clenched in tight fists. He saw me looking, released them as though caught; he waved, briefly, and disappeared under the arches, head bowed in thought.

  Annabel sat, cross-legged in the winged armchair, while the four of us lounged on sofas, books piled around us, sipping spiced tea and listening. The ancient radiators in the Campanile cracked and wailed like a chorus; the women on the walls looked on. Our study had turned to the archetypes of women, the origins of what Annabel called the ‘feminine myth’. I hid behind my book, having fallen too far behind on the reading, it seemed, to catch up. The books I’d opened over the break had sat abandoned and unread, scattered on surfaces among ashtrays and half-drained bottles, both Mum’s and my own, the two of us clutching our oblivion like a shield.

  Endless stanzas of Greek and Roman literature – supposed to give us a grounding in the figures that dominated the art we were to study – seemed to swim, listlessly, in front of my eyes, their rhythms brittle and awkward.

  ‘Women, though maligned in Athenian society – relegated to a second-class status, alongside outsiders, and slaves – are emboldened and empowered in tragedy,’ she said, smiling. ‘One need only consider Medea, to whose speech our own leaders have referred time and again, as indicative of our plight. “Most of the time, a woman is full of fear, too weak to defend herself or to bear the sight of steel – but if she happens to be wronged in love, hers is the blood-thirstiest heart of all.” She was the ultimate threat: the woman wronged by man, seeking a vengeance that its audience – almost entirely male, remember – would be hard-pressed to argue with.’

  Grace nodded. I could see Robin craning, a little, trying to catch my eye.

  ‘I still can’t believe you did that, you whore,’ she had said as we walked to class, referring once again to my ‘dirty hookup’, a subject she’d refused to let drop. ‘It’s going to take me months to recover.’

  ‘Me too,’ I had replied, coldly, surprised to see a flicker of recognition pass across her face. But before she could respond, Grace had joined us, and the conversation had drifted elsewhere. Since then, she’d been offering awkward grimaces, apologetic smiles. Still, I couldn’t meet her eye.

  ‘What else were men afraid of? Let’s look to the tragic form – the home of all their most unimaginable fears. The worst that might happen, performed in front of their very eyes on the stage. Sisterly relationships, so the plays seem to suggest, are fine – Antigone and Ismene, Electra and Chrysothemis – they have affection, warmth for one another, which tragedy seems happy to allow. The choruses, too, were often presented as women, and were, in general, favourably disposed to female characters.

  ‘But unsupervised, private female friendships? Oh no. Women, alone together, without the supervision of men, almost always caused disaster in their households, and the wider community, these freedoms resulting in madness, anger, sexual desire, or jealousy resulting in death. Women are not to be left alone, together, or tragedy will surely follow.’

  She tapped the bruised textbook open on her lap. ‘Consider the critic who says, and I quote: “Women become tragic figures by men’s absence or mismanagement”,’ she said, her voice practically hissing with derision. ‘In Sophocles, “Antigone’s actions begin after her uncle Creon refuses to bury her brother Polynices. In the Oresteia, it is only after her husband has been fighting in Troy for ten years that Clytemnestra takes power in Argos” – murdering him for sacrificing her daughter, among other abuses, I might add. “And Medea becomes the aggressor when her husband abandons her for a marriage he believes will improve his social standing, leaving her and her children to starve.” This,’ she said, closing the book and placing it on the table, ‘is your primary text, in the study of the Classics. And yet any of us would struggle to find fault with these women’s actions, extreme as they are. It is the actions of men that make them vengeful, not through mismanagement or absence, as the text says, but out of cruelty and selfish desire.’

  She stood, as she always did when reaching her point, and walked to the window, her back to us. A screwed-up ball of paper landed in my lap; I looked up and saw Robin pointing to it, eyes glinting, willing me to open it.

  ‘You look sad,’ it said, her handwriting large and jagged, all but crawling off the page. I thumbed the soft, torn edge of the page, searching for the words.

  ‘Picture a society in which this is the foundational idea: that men’s actions are eminently reasonable, while women’s are, by their very nature, irrational and wrong. I shouldn’t think that’s too difficult to imagine, no?’

  I picked up my pen, and began to write. ‘I am sad,’ I wrote at last, and threw the ball back. Annabel turned to us and smiled. The thin, wintry light seemed her colour; she stood, proudly, like the women of whom she spoke. I imagine her now, when I do the same: feeling myself performing, as I suppose she did, too.

  ‘Melanippe, though, says this – though of course, through the words of Euripides, a male playwright: “Men’s criticism of women is worthless twanging of a bow-string and evil talk. Women are better than men, as I will show … Consider their role in religion, for that, in my opinion, comes first. We women play the most important part, because women prophesy the will of Zeus in the oracles of Phoebus. And at the holy site of Dodona near the sacred oak, females convey the will of Zeus to inquirers from Greece. As for the sacred rituals of the Fates and the nameless Ones – ‘the Erinyes’ – all these would not be holy if performed by men, but prosper in women’s hands. In this way women have a rightful share in the service of the gods. Why is it, then, that women must have a bad reputation?” She has a point, and makes it well.

  ‘Even with this fragment, however, it seems that women are doomed to two fates. It is our lot to be seen as either unpredictable and irrational mortals, maligned and repressed by the actions of men, or sacred beings, goddesses of a higher realm, among the Fates and the Furies.’

  The large hands of the clock faces ticked in unison, reaching five to the hour. Annabel sighed, looked at each of us in turn, and sat back in the armchair, as though exhausted. As though the force of her words had been too much.

  ‘That’s all for today, girls,’ she said, softly. ‘Don’t wreak too much havoc before our next class.’

  As we reached town, the moon full and bright, streetlights and arcades burning in the darkness, Robin hooked her arm around mine, and we walked to the mermaid in silence.

  ‘They’re all bastards,’ she had simply said. I rested my head on her shoulder a moment, her hair soft and smoke-sweet. The shift had been wordless, Robin’s sudden understanding drawing the colour from her skin, hands trembling, slightly, as we sat together on the bus. As Alex and Grace walked away, she squeezed my hand, tight, and while the black, creeping mass in my gut remained, it seemed a little light
er, its power lessened, shared.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ I said, softly.

  She nodded.

  ‘Do you know Melanie Barker?’ I hadn’t planned to ask – and yet, now, I couldn’t help myself. She looked straight ahead, barely reacted at all. After a pause, she turned to me.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Melanie Barker.’ Another pause. ‘The one that looks like Madonna, except fat and ugly.’

  ‘No.’ The silence weighed heavy between us, filled by the distant cry of gulls above the pier. I took a deep breath, pushed a little more. ‘Nicky told me she was in some clinic place. She said you knew each other.’

  ‘And you believe her?’ she said, icily.

  ‘I … I don’t know.’

  ‘Seriously, Violet. Don’t believe a word any of those bitches say. They make shit up just to make their boring lives interesting.’ She paused. ‘I don’t know why you talk to her, anyway. Especially as she was the one spreading the rumour about you and …’

  I blushed furiously. Who else knows? I thought, a wave of shame bubbling to the surface. I felt around for a change of subject, a distraction.

  ‘What’s up with the others?’

  ‘Who?’

  I turned to her, making a face: Who else? At the mermaid, Grace and Alex had left without a word, though Grace had given me a brief, imploring look, willing me to follow. When I’d hesitated, Alex had rolled her eyes while Robin smiled, a flash of what I thought might be victory behind her eyes. I’d picked a side during this split second of indecision, in a fight I didn’t quite understand.

  She laughed, bitterly. ‘Oh, you know.’

  ‘The book?’

  She pulled a spool of bubble gum from her jacket and rolled a section around her finger. ‘How do you know about that?’

  I said nothing, waited for her to go on. She pulled the gum off with her teeth, leaving a red trail where she’d bitten down, white at the nail.