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scrubbed the mould away from the walls and the floor. The knots in the wood made it impossible to remove every trace, but at least I could get rid of the worst of it.
    *   *   *
    ‘It smells horrible in here,’ said Carly as she walked in at the end of the morning. ‘Has someone been sick?’ Today, her shiny orange hair had a dark blue streak down one side, like a technicolour badger. She’d matched it with a blue bangle and blue Perspex earrings.
    ‘It’s just bleach,’ I said, as three more of them trudged in. ‘Where’s Ricky?’
    Annika shrugged. It seemed that she spoke for them all.
    ‘Hasn’t anyone seen him?’
    ‘He’s not here,’ snapped Jono.
    ‘Is he ill?’
    He didn’t reply.
    ‘How did you get on with reading the play?’ I said. More shrugging.
    ‘We don’t feel like working today,’ said Carly.
    ‘Maybe you should make collages, then,’ I suggested. ‘You were the ones who said you wanted to do something more challenging.’
    ‘I know,’ she sighed. ‘But today it all just seems too high-maintenance.’
    ‘You must have spent an hour doing that eye make-up this morning,’ I replied. Carly blushed happily, and turned her face from one side to the other, so I could fully appreciate the light glinting off her gleaming turquoise brow-bone and blue-glittered lashes. ‘So I don’t think you’re afraid of being high-maintenance. But I take your point. Edinburgh isn’t much fun on days like today, is it?’ I said.
    I had clearly learned nothing. Did I want them to get side-tracked so we could talk about me instead of doing any work? I’ve thought about it hard, and I honestly don’t think so. But I did want them to like me, and perhaps that’s the same thing. I can only really be sure that I kept giving them openings like this, which they were incredibly good at exploiting – Carly especially.
    ‘So why did you come back to Edinburgh, then?’ she asked. ‘It wasn’t for the weather.’
    ‘I like the smell of yeast,’ I said, which was an obvious lie. Edinburgh isn’t as reekie as its nickname suggests it once was, but you can still smell yeast in the air on some days. It always reminds me of over-cooked food, of baked potatoes kept warm for so long that they’ve become nothing but thick, blackened skins.
    ‘No, but really?’ she said.
    ‘Robert asked me to come and teach you lot, when Miss Allen fell ill. And it’s impossible to say no to him.’
    ‘But what were you doing before?’ she asked.
    ‘I was directing plays.’
    ‘Really? Who was in them? Anyone famous?’
    ‘No, no-one famous. They don’t let you have a go on the famous people till you’ve practised on the ones no-one’s heard of.’
    ‘So why aren’t you doing that any more?’ asked Jono. ‘Were you rubbish at it?’ He was always like this, I was beginning to realise. I tried not to take it personally. And besides, when I was up in the staffroom yesterday, one of their other teachers had told me that he’d lobbed a brick through her car windscreen a couple of months ago, after she’d kept him behind for swearing at her. So if the worst I got from him was this default assumption of my incompetence, I’d take it.
    ‘I don’t think so. I just didn’t want to be in London any more. I wanted to come back to Scotland. And this job seemed like the right one. Maybe I’ll direct another play sometime. But not at the moment. I don’t have the time.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because I’m using all of it to find plays for you to read, so you can tell me you don’t feel like it because the weather’s bad.’
    ‘When you say it like that, it sounds like you’re cross with us,’ Jono said.
    ‘I’m not cross with you. I just think we should do what we set out to do today, which is to talk about Oedipus.’
    ‘Alright, if you insist,’ he sighed and reached down to his bag to find the book, still muttering. ‘If it makes you happy.’
    ‘I might try to make my happiness dependent on