Read The Furies: A Novel for Free Online Page B

do some work in your own time as well, I hope.’
    Jono’s eyebrows shot up, and I realised that hope was extremely slender.
    I carried on talking to Ricky. ‘You can draw your homework for me. That would be brilliant, actually.’
    ‘Brilliant, actually…’ Though Ricky seemed placated, Jono was mimicking me under his breath. This would be the most difficult part of dealing with these kids, I was discovering. In order to gain ground with one, I inevitably antagonised another. Even when they were ostensibly friends. My other classes were the same, though they were usually easier to cope with than this one. Someone always felt things were unfair.
    Ricky settled back into his seat, and began doodling on the back page of his exercise book.
    ‘We’ll pick a play and read it together. What do you fancy? Shakespeare? Molière? Chekhov?’ I held the books up to the room, one after another.
    ‘Those are just words,’ Ricky said. ‘Not even words, to be honest. Noises. What’s the difference?’
    ‘Are they hard?’ asked Jono. ‘We should do the easiest one.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because it’ll be the easiest one,’ he said. He shook his head like I was an idiot. I bet he did that to his parents. I must be at least ten years younger than his parents, and it made me feel old. I tried to explain myself.
    ‘What’s wrong with something hard? You’re smart. Everyone’s told me how clever you five are. Why would difficult be a bad thing?’
    He stared at me blankly. I stared back. I was beginning to see that this was the way the kids in Edinburgh communicated. I’d come into Rankeillor expecting them to talk in slang, like London kids – a whole special patois, with no distinction between class or wealth, based entirely on their desire to speak in a language their elders couldn’t penetrate. But here, teenagers spoke so much more formally, it was like travelling back in time. I wondered if they spoke this way when there was no teacher in the room, or if the act of observing them made a difference. Either way, they seemed to have only two settings: adult speech, or staring and grunts.
    ‘It’s just common sense,’ he sighed. ‘Difficult means boring.’
    ‘Since when? Do you choose a video game because it’s the easiest?’
    ‘Obviously not. I’d have finished it in a day. They cost forty pounds, you know.’ This provoked a snigger from Ricky. Later, I would discover from the basic skills teacher that both boys were barred from the St James Centre, the dilapidated shopping mall over in the New Town, for shoplifting.
    ‘Well, let’s treat plays like that. Let’s assume that difficult doesn’t mean boring, it means something you have to work at a bit, which you’ll like better.’
    ‘Video games and work aren’t the same,’ he said. ‘Obviously.’
    ‘Humour me, and pretend they are, will you? Just for a while.’
    I wondered if the lesson’s first walk-out was about to happen. But Jono stayed in his seat, pitying me, and Mel broke the awkward silence that had fallen. I wondered if she could sense the difference between good and bad silences, or if she just spoke when she was ready.
    ‘Not Shakespeare,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘We did Romeo and Juliet at my old school. The hot guy dies halfway through.’
    ‘The hot guy is Mercutio?’ I wanted to be sure.
    ‘Yeah. Shakespeare just kills him off so that Romeo doesn’t look like such a loser in comparison.’
    ‘Is he the black guy?’ asked Carly. ‘He is hot.’
    ‘The black guy?’ I asked.
    ‘In the film. With Leonardo DiCaprio in it?’
    ‘Oh, yes. Mercutio is the black guy.’ Finally, they seemed to be interested in something, even if it was only the film adaptation.
    ‘I don’t want to do Shakespeare either,’ said Ricky.
    ‘OK, not Shakespeare.’ Of course they wouldn’t want to do Shakespeare. They’d probably been bored to tears trying to get through Macbeth at school. ‘Then how about someone modern?’
    ‘Like