The Furies: A Novel (34 page)

Authors: Natalie Haynes

BOOK: The Furies: A Novel

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Her face is motionless, so I have to look to Charles Brayford and Adam to see if they’re interpreting that as good news. They’re both smiling. Charles Brayford raises one hand up to head-height. It is possible that he is considering a high five, I think. As Adam turns away to put papers in his briefcase, Brayford morphs the gesture into tidying an imaginary stray hair. I find myself wondering if Dominic Kovar’s lawyers would have done the same thing, celebrated their triumph, last year.

Mel smiles at her mother. She leaves the court without speaking, and she managed to get through the entire hearing without ever looking at either her counsel or her father. By the time we get downstairs, her father has left. Her mother is across the lobby, sitting on a bench, sobbing. I don’t want to interrupt, so I leave her to her boyfriend, who is standing awkwardly next to her, holding a small plastic cup of water which I doubt she can even see. He holds it for a little longer, and then he starts sipping it himself.

I duck into the Ladies, to feel cold water on my hot hands. When I come out, there’s a clerk looking for me. Mel would like to speak to me before she leaves, he says. She’s waiting behind the courtroom.

I follow him down one corridor, and then another. She’s waiting for me, next to a grey-haired man whose creased face suggests that he spends more time laughing than I would ever have guessed from his expression.

‘You have two minutes at the very outside. And only because you asked nicely,’ he tells her sternly. And then he pats her shoulder. ‘I’ll be listening,’ he says.

She looks at me, and I realise it’s the last time I’ll ever see her.

‘I just wanted to say goodbye,’ she says.

I nod. I don’t want to cry, because I know she must be sick of everyone crying at her by now.

‘Thank you,’ I tell her. ‘For making things…’ Not easier. She certainly hasn’t made my life easier. I think for a second, though I know we don’t have long. ‘Thank you for keeping them from hurting me,’ I say.

She gives me that smile that used to raise my hopes in the classroom, the one which shows she knows she understands something better than anyone else in the room, and that I have noticed.

‘Bye, Alex,’ she says. ‘I’ll always remember you.’

The guard looks at me, and taps his watch.

I have run out of words. I make my right hand into a ball. I place the underside in front of my heart and make a circular movement. It’s the only piece of sign language I know.

‘I’m sorry too,’ she says.

EPILOGUE

It’s three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, and I am in the theatre café, which is deserted, because there’s a children’s show going on in the auditorium, and everyone is in there. There’s the faint sound of tinny music bleeding out through the double doors. The café looks like a piñata has been smashed overhead: there are bits of brightly coloured sweets and icing and crayon pieces and plastic everywhere. Laura, who has a master’s degree in behavioural psychology and is running our café until the job market catches up with her, is surveying the room.

‘Is it worth cleaning up now?’ she asks. ‘Will they all come back here in the interval?’

‘They will.’

‘Then I’m just going to do the tables,’ she decides. ‘The floor can wait till all the buggies have gone.’

Adam walks in five minutes later.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ he says, shaking my hand firmly like I might be interviewing him for a job. ‘The train was held up at East Croydon.’

‘It’s fine,’ I tell him. ‘What can I get you?’

He asks for coffee, and I head over to the counter to make it, but Laura beats me to it. I carry the two cups over to the table that looks least like a crèche.

‘Sorry.’ I sweep a few stumps of coloured pencil into a plastic container.

‘No problem,’ he says. ‘Children’s show?’

‘No, it’s a touring production of
Coriolanus
.’

He looks briefly alarmed, then smiles. ‘You’re teasing me.’

‘Yes.’

‘Because you’re wondering when I’m going to stop the small-talk and tell you why I asked you to meet me?’

‘Yes.’

Laura comes over with a small plate and two cookies. She puts them down in the most theatrically subtle way possible, a performance that would not have gone unnoticed by the toddlers in the main house. He thanks her, and she goes back to cleaning the tables.

‘I have a letter for you,’ he says. ‘A final duty to discharge for my client.’ He reaches into the messenger bag he has parked on a seat.

‘Here,’ he says, and hands me an envelope on which is written the single letter ‘L’.

I reach over and take it, but I misjudge and my fingers touch him instead of the paper. It falls on the table.

‘Sorry,’ I say, and pick it up quickly. I turn it over, and notice that it’s not sealed. The flap has simply been slipped inside the back. I begin to slide my fingers under it.

‘Stop,’ he says, and I drop it on the table. ‘Sorry, I mean, please would you do that later?’

‘Why?’

‘She asked me to ask you. She asked me to bring the letter in person, and she told me to ask you to wait until I’d gone before you read it.’

‘Why didn’t she just post it?’

‘She’s not allowed to write to you any more.’ He begins the process of dismantling the cookie into individual crumbs of raisin and oats. I wonder if he ever eats anything which is still solid. ‘Well, rather, I should say, she’s agreed that it’s best if she doesn’t contact you any more. The staff at the secure unit believe that she can make real progress there. She’s studying. She’s doing well.’

‘OK.’

‘But she said there were a couple of things outstanding, so she wrote this and gave it to me when I saw her last week.’

‘Will you see her again?’

‘Not for a while, no. The firm will continue to advise her over parole and so on, as and when it comes up. But she may prefer a lawyer who’s closer to her geographically.’ He looks at the second cookie, which is wearing a fine dusting of the first. ‘Did you want that?’ he asks. I shake my head. ‘It certainly slows things down, having to travel up there from London.’

‘Yes, of course. It was kind of you to bring it. I mean, I would have understood if you’d just posted it.’

‘Ah. You might have understood, but Miss Pearce is made of less forgiving stuff,’ he says.

‘You’re honest, for a lawyer,’ I tell him.

‘I’m sure it won’t hold me back. Actually, it might. But I hope it doesn’t. When does
Coriolanus
finish?’ He glances at the clock on the wall above the counter.

‘The interval’s at four.’

‘OK, well, then I might leave you to the melee,’ he says.

‘Thanks again, for bringing this.’ I pick the envelope up again.

‘My pleasure,’ he says.

‘Did you read it?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘She gave it to me like that. I promise.’

‘I believe you. Bye, then,’ I say. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Laura gesticulating frantically, but I look away. I put out my hand.

‘Bye, Alex.’ He takes my hand, but he doesn’t shake it. Instead, he leans in and kisses my cheek.

‘This is going to sound odd,’ he mumbles into my ear. ‘But I will kick myself all the way back to Clapham if I don’t say it. So I’m just going to do it and hope you don’t laugh. I’ll be here on the first Saturday of next month, at the same time. If you want to meet me for coffee, I’d like that very much. If you don’t, I’ll wait for an hour, and then I’ll piss off and you can have the place to yourself. If you don’t show up, I won’t come again. I’ll leave you alone, because one thing you don’t need is another stalker.’

And he turns around, gives Laura a jaunty wave, and walks out.

Dear Alex,

This is my last letter to you. But I bet Adam’s told you that already. I have to do all those therapeutic things they talk about: move on, draw a line in the sand. Is it any wonder I still like your Greek plays when everyone else talks in clichés? See, now it sounds like I’m being a bitch, and I’m not really. They’re good to me here. And I want to get better. Scratch that, I want to be better. And for that to happen, I’m going to give some of their clichés a try, just in case they’re clichés because they’re true.

So here’s what’s going on in my life. My mum is less upset than I thought she’d be, with how everything worked out. She’s realised I won’t be gone for as long as I might have been, so she’s counting her blessings, she said (you see what I mean, about everyone using them?). I don’t see her too often, but she comes every other week or so, and we’re getting on way better than we did before.

I haven’t spoken to my dad. He rings the secure unit sometimes, but I don’t want to talk to him yet. They’re great about that kind of thing here. They just tell him I’m taking my time (another one) and all that stuff. Maybe next year, huh?

You really did get obsessed over my diary. OK, I’ll put you out of your misery. I never had a proper diary, like Anne Frank or whatever. I mean I didn’t use an actual book, because I didn’t have one. I just wrote it on sheets of paper from a pad. I kept them in a folder, because I didn’t want to lose the pages. But I didn’t want my mum or someone else reading it, obviously. So even before that day in London, I’d started taping the pages into the illustrated Greek myths book my mum bought me last year.

When she said you were asking after it, I thought I’d get found out. So I asked her to bring a few things in, including the book. I knew she wouldn’t look in it. She hates all that stuff. She thinks it warped my mind. I told her it takes more than a play to warp a mind, but she’s adamant. Anyway, she brought it, and she never knew. And as for what happened to it next, me and my room-mate Rhiannon used it for roll-ups. I know, my precious diary, right? Literally gone up in smoke. And not literally like they say on the news. Actually literally. And I don’t mind telling you, Alex, those cigarettes were fucking inky. Though that’s more likely to be from the illustrations than from the diary, I guess. But don’t feel sad, anyway, because I am going to start a new one for my therapy in here. Probably I will, anyway.

I might be given a new identity when I get out. Isn’t that odd? I could give up being Mel Pearce and become someone completely new. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. What would I like to be called? At the moment, I think I’d go with Amber. Do you know what the Greek word is for Amber? It’s Electra.

I’m going to ask Adam to bring this to you. He totally likes you. Do you remember what Jono said never happens in your plays, Alex? No-one ever lives happily ever after. But you know what I think? I think we will, you and me. I don’t know if you believe it yet. But I bet you I’m right.

Love, D

www.stmartins.com

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Haynes, Natalie, 1974–

[Amber Fury.]

The furies : a novel / Natalie Haynes. — First U.S. edition.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-250-04800-4 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4668-4830-6 (e-book)

1. Teachers—Fiction. 2. Teenagers—Fiction. 3. Canon (Literature)—Fiction. 4. Grief—Fiction. 5. Edinburgh (Scotland)—Fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PR6108.A9686A63 2014

823'.92—dc23

2014016596

First published in Great Britain under the title
The Amber Fury
by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

First U.S. Edition: September 2014

eISBN 9781466848306