The Furies. Katie Lowe

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СКАЧАТЬ later, when I returned to clean the house after her death, everything remained as it was that day. Wallpaper greying, carpets scorched with wear. The same books on the shelves, same VHS tapes unboxed under the old TV, still emitting a low, static hum. Same tie hanging in a loose knot on the bedroom door, same crumpled papers in the bin, the same last words abandoned mid-sentence on a yellowing page.

      ‘Perhaps we might consider an alternative approach,’ my dad’s last recorded thought in smudged, black ink. Everything was placed there with memories attached, my dad’s fingerprints and sister’s laugh still covering everything, like a skin that wouldn’t shed.

      I, however, felt nothing. Leaving the hospital, nothing; throwing a clod of damp soil into the pit, soft thump on varnished pine, nothing. Mum weeping on the sofa, clawing at my hair, pressing damp, hot palms to my face, clinging to my life: still, nothing.

      Weeks later, I woke on the sofa to find her staring at me as one might take in a half-expected ghost, lip bitten to the jelly beneath. ‘I thought she was … I thought you were gone too,’ she said, her eyes wet with tears, pointing at a face on the screen that looked like mine, but for the details. Hair dull blonde, hers shining, mine textured, split, like old rope; eyes close as one might find to black, but for a chink of amber in her left iris; lips round, always a little too full for lipstick, which gave me the distinct look of a circus clown. Mine were chipped and ridged white with medicinal balm, a compulsive picking I couldn’t shake, hers blush pink, smooth and smiling to reveal white, un-chipped teeth. I thought, watching her face flicker on the screen, that she was a better version of me – the one I longed to be. The artist’s ideal, brush softly smoothing my faults, delicate touch between the lines.

      ‘Renewed concerns for the missing teenager Emily Frost, who disappeared exactly one month ago today. Her whereabouts remain unknown, and her family have issued a new appeal for any information relating to her disappearance.’

      I watched the stock footage, the familiar cliffs, the too-familiar edge. Nobody bothered to count the suicides these days. Emily had last been seen walking there, at the highest point.

      ‘Mum, I’m here. That isn’t me. She’s just a jumper,’ I said, reaching for the remote. ‘They always are.’

      ‘We just want you to come home,’ her dad said, staring down the lens. ‘We miss you, Emily. Please, please come home.’

      I changed the channel and went back to sleep.

      If there can be said to be an up-side to miraculously surviving a car wreck, apart from the immediately obvious, it’s that nobody expects you to go to school.

      ‘Not until you’re ready,’ Mum said. The therapist nodded sagely behind, a cornflake stuck to his moustache, a fat fingerprint smudge on his glasses. ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Just take your time.’

      And so I did. I took my time: skipped school right through to my final exams, declaring myself ‘home-schooled’. I sat in a silent hall, surrounded by people I knew, my former classmates whispering as I walked in and right out again: ‘I thought she was dead,’ one said, pointing at me with a bloody, bitten nail.

      I had already planned my future, or at least, had drawn a basic sketch. I would leave – though where to, I wasn’t sure. I’d get a job. A waitress in a quiet café, where interesting visitors would tell me thrilling lies. A bookshop clerk, offering new worlds to bored children; an assistant in a gallery, maybe. I could learn to sing, or play guitar. I could write a book, life ticking quietly along around me. It wouldn’t be glamorous, sure, but it would be enough. Anywhere, really, would be better than here, this town in which the greys of the old houses, sky and sea seeped into your heart and turned irreparably it black.

      But on the day of my results, I came home to find Mum at the kitchen table, papers clenched in white-knuckled fists. ‘It’s what they would’ve wanted,’ she said, handing me the entry forms for Elm Hollow Academy – a private girls’ college on the outskirts of town. ‘It’s a privilege,’ she said: one afforded to me by the unspeakably large settlement offered by the haulage company under whose articulated truck our car had been crushed.

      School, to me, was all taped-up windows, boxy buildings cracking at the edges, grey even in sunlight; freezing portacabins, graffitied bathroom mirrors and the loamy stink of teenage sweat. ‘I don’t want to,’ I said, and left.

      She didn’t argue. But the papers sat on the kitchen table for weeks, and each time I passed I found myself drawn to the glossy pictures on the cover of the brochure: looming, red-brick buildings set against a too-blue sky, sunlight needling through pearly clouds behind a Gothic arch. There was a decadent, honey-sweet richness to it – one that I knew wasn’t for me, but seemed, in the flickering kitchen light, the stifling damp in the air, to be another world entirely.

      And so – reluctantly, at least as far as my mum was concerned – I agreed to give it a try. Our dilapidated Volvo purred behind me at the gates, and I turned to wave her away, though she – thinking herself unobserved – was staring down at the steering wheel, grin a steely rictus beneath strings of dirty hair. I winced, and turned away, catching the eye of a passing girl watching, embarrassed for us both.

      I walked towards the school quickly, looking up at the looming clock tower – the Campanile, I would soon be corrected, inspired by the reds and creamy whites of Tuscan cousins, gleaming in sunlight – and dipped under the arches, into the main building. Students gathered on the steps in clusters, whispering.

      I passed wholly unnoticed, and told a stout, grey-haired woman – Boturismo made flesh – my name three times. She stared at me, blankly, through the glass partition, muddy with prints and unsettling scratches. Without a word, she slid a sheaf of papers through the gap and pointed to a row of seats. As I sat staring numbly at the endless list of extra-curricular activities and advanced classes, none of which I had any interest in taking, a girl loped by, hair bottle-red, ladders torn artfully into her tights. She waved with two fingers and smiled, a rolled-up cigarette teetering on the edge of her lip. I stared until the last second before she disappeared into the crowd, when I at last mustered a weak, lost smile.

      She must’ve been smiling at somebody else, I thought. But as I looked around, back to the wall, this seemed unlikely. I sat, dazed, among the marble busts and gloomy portraits of long-dead headmasters until the bell rang, and the crowd dispersed. I waited, peering down the empty corridors, wondering whether I might have been forgotten.

      A door creaked behind; I heard my name, and stood. The man in the doorway was tall, though not imposingly so, a little pot-bellied; tweed and sweater, horn-rimmed glasses; skin possessed of the waxy paleness common to those who spend too much time indoors. He stared at me, blinked, coughed; held out a hand, fingers clubbed and ink-stained. ‘Come on in,’ he said, softly.

      He moved a stack of books and spilled papers from a wide, worn armchair next to the desk and I took a seat. The office was warm, if a little stuffy, books piled high under sediment layers of dust, framed prints of medieval etchings covering the walls. ‘Cup of tea?’ he said. Caught staring, I shook my head and picked at a loose thread on my folder.

      ‘So, let me begin with my usual spiel, and then we’ll get to know each other,’ he said, taking a seat by the desk and leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees. He took a deep breath: tang of stale coffee on it, sour.

      ‘On behalf of the faculty of Elm Hollow, I’d like to welcome you to our student population.’ He paused, smiling. ‘We’re a small school with a varied and prestigious history, and we’re proud to have among our alumni leaders across a range of disciplines, including the sciences and the arts.’ There was a brief pause as he waited for me to СКАЧАТЬ