The Furies. Katie Lowe

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СКАЧАТЬ I raised my hand. He sighed again. ‘Yes?’

      ‘… Blake finds morality and religion too … Too restrictive. He thinks it goes against the spirit of man.’ I blushed, furiously, realizing as I spoke what I’d done. The silence was cool, relentless – one of the many weapons, I would learn, that the students of Elm Hollow possessed.

      He paused. ‘And you are?’

      ‘Violet,’ I whispered, my betrayal hanging heavy on the air.

      He cupped a hand to his ear. ‘Excuse me?’

      ‘My name is Violet,’ I said again, a little louder: a croak.

      He nodded, and went on, as I shrank into my chair.

      ‘Man is a wild and occasionally savage, sexual thing,’ he said, affecting his previous drone which seemed designed to counteract the content of his words, the emphasis falling always on the wrong beat. I looked around, surprised at the absence of titters or comments in response to the mention of sex, but the class was silent. Only then did I see the girl from before – the girl with the bright, red hair – three seats away, staring back.

      I looked back down at the desk, names and doodles carved into the wood. When I finally met her eye she raised an eyebrow and smiled. I felt myself about to become a punch-line – but, unable to see anyone else watching, braced for the laughs, I returned a dim half-smile, a weak attempt at nonchalance.

      She pointed at the tutor, rolling her eyes, and smiled; mouthed ‘dickhead,’ and turned back to face the board. She slid lower into her chair, and began rolling a cigarette from a tin hidden on her lap beneath the desk, perfectly still, but for the dexterous, whipping movement of her pale, thin fingers, chipped black nails catching tobacco scraps beneath.

      I lost myself in thought, the class dull, air growing thick with impatience. By the time the bell rang, I was in something like a trance. As I slid my notebook and pen back into my backpack, I looked around, feeling myself watched. But it seemed I had been forgotten, my presence no longer of interest – and the girl with the red hair was gone.

      Wednesday afternoons were reserved for extra-curriculars, and as I had none, I spent the rest of the day exploring my new campus, wandering by the grand Great Hall where the choir practised some mournful, gorgeous song.

      I walked the long, high-ceilinged corridors of the Arts building, where drama students lurked in thickets, launching into soliloquies, echoes overlapping. In music rooms violinists practised beside pianists, the same rippling passages played time and again, while the warm autumn breeze whistled through the trees outside, shaking leaves which fell in lazy arcs. I can still see them falling like outstretched hands, hear them crunching underfoot. It is a scene, a mood, still fresh and bright in my mind, recalled with the bittersweet taste of youth, of lilacs and lavender in the air: the campus entirely idyllic, and utterly charming.

      Except, that is, for the dining hall. There is good reason why this area is never shown on the prospectus or to visiting parents: it is the underbelly of the school, necessary and crude, one of the few parts of campus where function is allowed to outweigh form.

      The fluorescent-lit canteen rattled and hissed, emitting the rancid tang of meat in rendered fat; the vending machines rang and rattled with constant use. Students gathered in heaving clusters around laminate tables, surrounded by an odd mixture of cheap plastic chairs and a repurposed pew dragged up from the basement for a drama rehearsal several years before. It is still in place now, decades later, more cracked and bruised still.

      I settled into a corner, watching my classmates hungrily, mining them as one might an anthropological study – this approach perhaps indicative of one of the many reasons why, while not entirely isolated at my previous school, I had still found it a struggle to make friends.

      I looked at the casual way they’d adapted their uniforms – all made, it seemed, from materials designed to scratch and needle the skin beneath – Doc Martens, black, red and tan; butterfly clips in pastel shades holding fraying braids. Tartan, denim jackets tied tight at the hips. Velvet headbands, earrings, strings of beads and silver chains, all signifying personalities and secrets which I – wearing my uniform simply as the handbook prescribed – seemingly did not possess. I felt woefully underdressed, and hid lower behind my book (a novel whose simpering heroine I had begun to find irritating, and which I would soon abandon, never to be finished).

      Still, it seemed I had not gone entirely unnoticed. I felt the eyes of the girls on me, though each time I looked up, they’d already looked away; heard, too, the whispered words ‘She looks like …’ passing from one group to the next. I could imagine their thrust. Some creature, a farm animal: dog, pig, or cow. As the clock tower rolled one slow minute to the next, the whispering seemed to grow louder still, a growing hiss, a menace, as I blushed and sat lower, longing to disappear.

      As I blinked away tears, staring blankly at the words on the page, three figures passed by the large windows at the other side of the cafeteria. My eyes followed the shock of red hair as the girl bobbed alongside two others, who smiled and talked as they kicked the fallen leaves underfoot.

      I imagined them turning back to look at me; willed the girl to give me the same, playful smile she’d offered earlier, and shuffled in my seat, my pose determinedly relaxed.

      But she didn’t turn back, and they walked on, disappearing into the sunlight, their shadows trailing tall and proud behind.

       Chapter 2

      The studio was covered in creamy paper, pastel drawings crawling from corners like creeping clouds of smoke. I felt a cool smudge at my elbow, a violet stain smeared across the cuff of my shirt.

      Over the course of the week, those of us in the practical classes had filled the space, until it was impossible to leave the room without a coating of pink and blue chalk on our uniforms. Our hands left pastel prints in homage across the school: library books with green thumbs, a peach palm around a test tube, blue lips printed on coffee cups and each other’s cheeks. The lesson, I suppose (Annabel, the art tutor, rarely leading us to an obvious conclusion – or any conclusion at all) was that the artist leaves her mark on everything she touches. It would be many years before I would realize just how true that would turn out to be.

      She sat on the edge of the desk, feet swinging just above the floor, while those of us in her Aesthetics class sat breathless, waiting for her to begin. Dressed entirely in black, her hair in silvery curls that hung heavily over her shoulders, she seemed drawn from another world. Even in memory, she seems possessed of a wordless authority: the power of one who could silence a room with a single breath.

      ‘Oscar Wilde,’ she began, at last, ‘described the discipline of Aestheticism as “a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.” And that is what we are here to do. Make no mistake. You may be young, and time may seem to be endless, but you’ll learn – hopefully before it’s too late – that those singular moments of illumination are what make life worth living. It is up to you to seek them out, to see them for what they are. And the sooner you begin, the richer your life will be.’

      The door clicked open, a short, blonde girl in sports colours muttering a hushed apology as she entered. She sat in the empty seat beside me, mouthing ‘hi.’ I smiled numbly back, surprised to be greeted at all. Annabel looked at her coldly, and the girl looked away, abashed.

      ‘You СКАЧАТЬ