The Furies: A Novel by Natalie Haynes

think he headed?’
    ‘Where you said the play was set,’ said Jono. He was biting the skin next to his thumb nail until a tiny globe of blood appeared and he stopped, apparently satisfied.
    ‘Thebes?’ asked Mel.
    ‘Exactly. And on his way there, at a crossroads, he was pushed aside by a rude old man and his servants. The rude old man hit Oedipus with his stick. In anger, Oedipus struck him back and killed him. He killed all but one of the servants, too. Five or six of them, I think.’
    ‘How did the other one escape?’ said Ricky. He was drawing a brontosaurus, grazing next to a caveman. At least I wasn’t supposed to be teaching him history.
    ‘He ran away. He turns up later, as the only witness to the fight that killed Laius. But that’s not till later. This is still all the background stuff which has happened before the action of the play starts.’
    ‘We’re not even at the beginning yet?’ Carly sounded faintly panicked.
    ‘Remember what I said about difficult and boring?’ Jono muttered.
    ‘When Oedipus got to Thebes, he found them living under the curse of the Sphinx.’
    ‘Like in Egypt?’ Mel asked. ‘I’ve always wanted to go there.’
    ‘Exactly like in Egypt, except this Sphinx isn’t made of stone. It’s real.’
    ‘It isn’t real.’ Jono rolled his eyes, as though he had to deal with this kind of nonsense every day. Looking at Ricky’s dinosaur, I guessed he might.
    ‘In the world of the play, the Sphinx is real. Like a dragon might be real in a story, right? Or a unicorn?’
    He shrugged. Or perhaps his hunched shoulders just rebelled sometimes of their own accord.
    ‘Now, the Sphinx had set a riddle, and no-one could pass her until he could answer it. The riddle was this: what has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?’
    ‘And what’s the answer?’ Annika asked. She was holding a pen poised above her notebook, midway between chewing it and writing with it. I realised she might be taking notes.
    ‘Maybe you could try and work it out,’ I suggested.
    ‘Nothing has a different number of legs at different times of the day,’ she said, tapping the end of her pen quickly and softly on her book.
    ‘OK, I’ll give you a clue. The morning in the riddle means when something is young. The evening is when that thing is old.’
    All five of them stared at me.
    ‘None of you can guess? OK, well the answer is a person. We all used four limbs to get around as babies, when we could only crawl, right? Then we learned to walk and so we’re on two legs for most of our lives. Then when we get old, we might need a walking stick, right? So we become three-legged in the end. Kind of.’
    ‘And Oedipus worked that out?’ Jono snorted.
    ‘He did. And the people of Thebes were so glad that they let him marry the queen, who had been recently widowed. Guess who her husband had been.’
    ‘The old man at the crossroads?’ asked Mel.
    ‘Exactly right.’
    She smiled again.
    ‘So Oedipus has killed his father and married his mother. And when they find out what they’ve done, Jocasta hangs herself, and Oedipus puts his eyes out with her brooch pins.’
    ‘Brooch pins? What the fuck?’
    ‘People did wear jewellery in the ancient world, Jono.’
    ‘They didn’t use it to stab themselves in the eye, though. Did they?’ he said.
    ‘Well, Oedipus does. And I think there’s another play where someone gets stabbed in the eye with brooch pins, now you mention it.’
    ‘But that’s not fair,’ Carly said. ‘Oedipus didn’t mean to marry his mother.’
    ‘You think something’s only a crime if you mean to do it?’
    ‘Yes,’ she said.
    ‘Well, what about a car accident?’ I asked them. ‘If you ran someone over but didn’t mean to, they’d still be dead.’
    ‘But he didn’t know she was his mum.’ Carly wasn’t persuaded. ‘And she thought he was just some guy.’
    ‘If someone’s told you you’re going to marry your son,