The Rehearsal

by Eleanor Catton

  “Isolde, he goes, I am a good teacher who is loved by my pupils. I gain their collective love by choosing a sacrificial victim on behalf of them all, not by currying favor with every individual student. It is a good method and I am a good teacher. I don’t want to give you an extension because your sister had sex and everyone found out and I feel sorry for you. I’ve explained my reasons. I’m sorry.”

  The lights fade back in. Isolde comes gracefully to an end and reattaches her saxophone to her neckstrap, ready for the lesson.

  “So you didn’t get an extension,” the saxophone teacher says as she rises.

  “No,” Isolde says. “He goes, What you need to learn, Isolde, is that life just isn’t fair.”

  Friday

  It is a new and popular tradition at this secular school to purchase short-snouted plastic Coca-Cola bottles from the tuck shop, and then retrieve with a fingernail the little blue disc with a stiff rim that sits snugly on the underside of the bottle’s cap. The girls hold this blue disc up to their lips and with their front teeth they bite a hole in the greasy plastic center to pierce the flesh. They are then able to rip out the middle of the disc so that only the rim remains. Gently they tug at this little translucent hoop of plastic, turning it around and around in their hands, pulling at it tenderly so it stretches wider and wider and the thin hoop becomes a pale band of ribbon through which they can slip their hand. The girls then wear these plastic ribbons on their wrists.

  Popularly they are known as “Fuck-me bracelets.” It is a mark of a girl’s daring to fashion such a bracelet for herself from the aqua seal of a Coca-Cola bottle neck, for whoever breaks the bracelet, however accidentally, thereby enters into a contract with the wearer. Sometimes at parties a boy will lean over to kiss a girl and with his free hand he will scrabble at her wrist to try to break the Coca-Cola seal. Most often the girl will feel him trying to snap the bracelet and she will pretend to struggle, knowing what the breaking of the seal will mean: she will feign resistance and twist her wrist away from him to make the bracelet snap the sooner. Once it has snapped they know that they must go through with it to the very end.

  It is a shameful thing to break your own bracelet. The girls snicker at the prospect, and alienate anyone clumsy enough to catch the side of the thin plastic band on a doorframe or on the buckle of her backpack so it snaps.

  One of the girls says, “They found a Fuck-me bracelet in Mr. Saladin’s tutorial room. Under the piano. It was broken.”

  This isn’t true.

  Monday

  “Thanks all for coming in, people,” says the counselor above the scraping and shuffling, raising his palms like he is a politician or a priest. “I’d really like to build on some of the issues that we raised in our last session. I thought that today we could talk about taking control.”

  Julia is sitting at the back, low down in her chair, with her arms folded and her ankles crossed and her hair falling across her face. She watches as the other girls trip in from the cold, linking arms with their favorite friends so they advance across the room in a rectangular squadron of favorites. They negotiate seating with whispers and nudges and a desperate narrow-eyed panic, always fearful of one day occupying the terrible seats on the periphery which force you to lean across and be forever asking “What? What’s so funny? What did she say?”

  Julia watches them slot into place around the current locus of popularity and wit with a feeling of contempt and mild jealousy. Most of the girls are seventh formers, contemporaries of the violated girl and infected only by vague proximity. The rest are the music students, more critically infected and so personally summoned by a solemn pink slip photocopied over and over and signed by the counselor in a delicate whispery hand.

  The door opens and Julia sees to her surprise the sister of the violated girl holding her pink summons gingerly in her fist and checking the brass numeral on the plate above the doorknob. Isolde is only in fifth form, too young for jazz band and orchestra and senior jazz ensemble, and as she enters the room she nods at a few of the girls who must be her sister’s friends. The counselor smiles approvingly as she enters, showing them all that he is terribly proud of her, in the way that one might be terribly proud of a mascot or a flag.

  Watching Isolde tuck her hair behind one ear and cast around sourly for a seat, Julia feels a flicker of interest in this girl, now thrust forever into her sister’s arched and panting shadow, and wonders what she’s thinking.

  As Isolde sits down, the girl sitting behind her leans forward and gives her shoulders a squeeze, slipping her thumbs into the hollows of Isolde’s collarbones and whispering, You okay? in a hot pitying whisper. Isolde squirms away from the girl’s hands, nodding, and says something in reply that Julia can’t quite hear. The girl shakes her head, gives Isolde a pat and retreats with a motherly sigh. She turns immediately to pluck at the sleeve of the girl on her left, who is already leaning in to listen.

  Julia watches the breathy whispers gather and spread up and down the row behind Isolde, and studies the hard impassive look on Isolde’s face.

  “Would you jump off a bridge just because your friends were jumping off bridges?” the counselor is saying. It’s his favorite question and he asks it routinely, his voice ringing and triumphant as if he has just performed a marvelous checkmate.

  Julia watches Isolde shift slightly in her chair. She is staring at the counselor dully, frowning but not really listening, her lips slack and slightly pouted. She has the same round cheekbones and innocent round eyes as her sister, but while Victoria’s roundness is a fullness, unapologetic and open and challenging, on Isolde it gives her the plump candied expression of a spoiled child. Isolde wears her own face like it is a fashion accessory that she knows looks better on everybody else.

  “For some people,” the counselor is saying, “seduction is a means of gaining attention. Seduction is a cry for help, a last and desperate attempt to make a real connection with another human being.” He wags his plump finger at them all, ranged around him in a tartan half-circle with their neckties loose and their smooth velvet legs crossed at the knee. “These lonely and damaged people,” he says, “may seek out physical and sexual connections that they do not truly want but they cannot live without. These are the people you must beware of.” He pauses for effect. “Mr. Saladin was one of these people.”

  Julia looks over at Isolde but she is still staring at the counselor in the same blank way. Julia wonders if it is an act. She tries to think what it would be like to be Isolde, coming home from school each day like an envoy from a forbidden place, stepping around her sister, watching her across the dinner table as she mashes her potato into a glum paste, walking past the closed door of her bedroom, still with its faded peeling stickers and strip of stolen security tape, passing her toweled and dripping in the hall. Julia imagines a pinched weeping mother and a father picking at his tie as if it’s strangling him. She imagines urgent phone calls and people shouting in whispers and a damp shifting silence. She imagines Isolde in the middle of it all, trying to watch television or polish her school shoes or pick through the funny parts of the newspaper, alone and insulated by a patch of dead air like a ship in the eye of a storm.

  Julia watches as Isolde examines her fingernails serenely and nibbles at a cuticle.

  “This terrible case of child abuse,” the counselor is saying, “is a classic case of how seduction can be wielded as a means of gaining control. In preying upon this girl Mr. Saladin destroyed her right to the ownership of her own body. He abused his position of power as a teacher. He wielded his position of power to gain control.”

  He has moved the lectern aside, and leans casually against a desk edge, one hand in his pocket balled into a fist so it stretches the fabric across his pelvis and tugs gently at the zipper of his fly. With his other hand he plucks at the air as if he is conducting a piece that is very modern and very moving.

  “My goal for today,” he says smoothly, “is to talk about the ways in which I can help you guy
s to learn to take control. Does anybody want to say anything before we kick off?”

  They all shake their heads and smile at him, shifting in their seats like roosting hens. Then Julia says, “I do.”

  Everyone except Isolde turns to look at her in a rustling swoop. Julia blinks calmly and says, “I don’t agree that Mr. Saladin wanted to gain control.”

  The counselor frowns and reaches up to tug a tuft of hair at the nape of his neck. “You don’t,” he says.

  “No, I don’t,” Julia says. “Gaining control isn’t the exciting part. Sleeping with a minor isn’t exciting because you get to boss them around. It’s exciting because you’re risking so much. And taking a risk is exciting because of the possibility that you might lose, not the possibility that you might win.”

  The girls look her up and down, and marvel with a collective disgusted fascination. Their expression is the expression of any popular girl who takes time to regard an unpopular girl while she is speaking. They watch Julia as if she is a carnival act: intriguing, but it might make you feel a little sick.

  “It’s like gambling,” Julia says, even louder. “If you make a bet that you’re almost positively certain you’re going to win, it’s not going to cost you much adrenaline. It’s not that exciting and it’s not that much fun. But if you make a bet where all the odds are against you and there’s just a tiny, tiny glimmer of a chance that you might make it, then you’re going to be pumping. There’s a higher possibility that you might lose. It’s the possibility you might lose that gets you excited.”

  The girls start to shift and mutter, but Julia’s gaze stays fixed on the counselor, her eyes shiny and narrowed and hard. The counselor is looking at his shoes.

  “The fact that Victoria was underage and virginal or whatever wasn’t exciting because he could exercise more power over her,” Julia says. “It was exciting because he stood to lose so much more if anyone found out.” Julia has a way of cocking her head to emphasize the shock value. “He wouldn’t just lose her,” she says. “He would lose everything.”

  There is a small pause and then another rustling swoop as all the girls turn back to look at the counselor. He looks up, tugs again at his tuft of hair, and sighs.

  “I think we’ve deviated from the point,” he says. “What we’re concerned with here is the power imbalance. We’re concerned with the fact that, as a teacher, Mr. Saladin abused his position of power by seeking out a relationship with a student.”

  “We’ve only deviated from your point to my point,” Julia snaps. “And anyway, isn’t every relationship a power imbalance in some way?”

  The counselor quickly turns back to the group before Julia can open her mouth to say more. “What do you guys think?” he asks, trying to make eye contact only with the least combative and least articulate girls in the room. “Any thoughts? Agree? Disagree?”

  A few girls raise their hands and begin to speak, and Julia loses interest immediately. She scowls at the counselor, and then fishes a biro out of her pocket and begins to doodle on the back of her hand as if she doesn’t care. After a while she looks up, and to her sudden thudding surprise Isolde is looking at her. Her expression is no longer childish and candied. Her head is turned slightly so she is looking half over her shoulder like a cold and careless queen with her neck all standing out in ropes.

  Julia flushes under her collar and censors herself too late. Her heart is beating very fast. All of a sudden she feels too big for her own body, clumsy and stupid and lumpish, and the feeling washes over her all at once in a horrible thrill.

  They hold each other’s gaze for a moment, and then Isolde looks away.

  Saturday

  Isolde and Victoria are watching television. Isolde is curled in the cat-furred hollow of the armchair with her legs hugged to her chest and her head upon the arm. Victoria is lying on the sofa with one leg cocked and the remote control held lightly between her finger and her thumb. Their father has just come through the room and crumpled Isolde’s toes in his big hand and said, Goodnight, slugs. Their mother has just called out from the stairway, Bed by eleven please. Their counterpointed footsteps, light and heavy, have just dwindled away up the stairs, and they have just shut their bedroom door with a faint and knuckled click.

  Victoria says, “What about that group of boys you used to hang out with? Are they still pissing about with you guys?”

  She speaks with the unrequited prerogative of an older sister’s demand for the whole truth. As the elder, Victoria’s perspective on her little sister’s life is always that of a recent veteran, knowing and qualified and unshockable. It is as if, at each new stage, Isolde merely picks up another hand-me-down costume that Victoria has grown out of and cast behind her, and as she struggles with the arm-holes Victoria is entitled to enter the dressing room and watch. When Isolde gets her first period, fits her first bra, plants her first kiss, chooses a dress for her first ball—at all these milestones Victoria is, or will be, present. If not, the elder sister is then always entitled to ask, Why didn’t you tell me, Issie, why?

  By contrast, little Isolde would never dare ask Victoria what really happened behind the tiny pasted window of the rehearsal-room door. She would never dare ask for details—the life under his clothes, his breath, the touch of him. She would never ask, Was he nervous, Toria? or Who reached out first? or Did you talk together first, for weeks and weeks—about yourselves, about what you wanted and what you didn’t have? All these are questions Isolde is not allowed to ask. She could not ask, Why didn’t you tell me? when Victoria snared her first lover, began her first affair, broke her first promise, or shed, for the first time, tiny blossom-drops of virgin blood, for all of these slender landmarks are part of a terrain in which the younger sister does not yet belong.

  Later, when Isolde is Victoria’s age, and Victoria is still two steps ahead, at university maybe, and living elsewhere, smoking her first papered twist of weed, walking home from her first one-night stand with her sandals slung over her wrist, for the first time deciding what, in truth, she is going to be—then, perhaps, Victoria might tell her what really happened. Not every detail, because by then Victoria will be airy and deliberately removed, waving her hand and saying, “I just think Mum and Dad were cunts about that whole thing,” or “God, that was ages ago.” She might say, “We were going to run off together, but in the end he went back to his old girlfriend. I ran into him on the street a few months ago. He’s fatter than he was.”

  But speaking of it now would be impossible. Isolde thinks that it would be like flipping a chapter ahead in a book that she was reading, to press Victoria for a detail, or an answer, or a map. Victoria’s life will always be two paces ahead, now and forever, and if Isolde saw the road before she had to walk upon it herself she would simply be a cheat.

  “Yeah, but it means you’ll never make the same mistakes as me,” Victoria says, unwilling to let Isolde feel she has the poorer lot.

  “No,” Isolde says, “I will make the same mistakes, but by the time I do they won’t seem interesting because you’ll already have done it, and I’ll only be a copy.”

  “Yeah… no,” says Victoria. “You’ve got it better. Mum and Dad are way stricter with me than they are with you. They waste all their energy on me and by the time you come along their standards have dropped and they can’t be bothered any more.”

  “Yeah… no,” says Isolde. “I have to pretend to be the baby, and that sucks.”

  “Yeah, but when I was six I was getting crayons and chalk for Christmas, and when you were six you got a pink tennis racket in a pink glitter sleeve. The older they get, the richer they get. You had way more stuff to play with than I ever did.”

  “Yeah, but that’s just it. I’m always compared to you. You aren’t compared to anybody, because you always do things first.”

  “That’s balls,” Victoria says. “When’s the last time they compared you to me?”

  The conversation is a comfort, because underneath it all they know that at
least they occupy a place, the older and the younger, a place they each fill as closely and completely as Isolde’s body fills the ancient cat-worn dip in the old armchair by the wall. Underneath it all they know that it is more a thing of necessary equilibrium than any sort of failed facsimile. Each sister claims not a mirror copy but a rough-edged ill-formed twisted half of their parents’ attention and command.

  “What about that group of boys you used to hang out with?” is Victoria’s question now, and Isolde says, “Nah, I don’t know. All the St. Sylvester boys are dicks, I reckon.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Victoria says. “When I was your age.”

  Wednesday

  There is a strange mood in the rehearsal room as the jazz band assemble their instruments and unfold their music stands. It’s the first time they’ve met for practice in three weeks, and privately everyone feels betrayed—not by Mr. Saladin, who was always jovial and tousled and called them Princess or Madam, but by Victoria, who fooled them all by pretending to be one of them.

  The girls are silent as they collectively suffer the gross humiliation of being the last to know. They feel a dawning indignation that all along Victoria must have watched them founder and said nothing, that all along she sat among them in silent smug possession of her secret. Now they are compelled to remember with embarrassment their own harmless shy flirtations with Mr. Saladin, every remembered happy-flutter feeling poisoned now by the knowledge that he was already hers and already stolen. They remember their woodwind tutorial when he punched the air and said, That’s what I’m talking about and grinned his boyish grin, in the quad at lunchtime when he briefly joined their game of hacky-sack and then ran off with the hacky when he started to lose, before jazz practice when he strolled over and started talking about the Shakespeare Festival and the chamber music contest and the changes to the summer uniform—