“Good,” said the Head of Acting abruptly. “Tell us why you want to be an actor.”
“I want to be seen,” said Stanley. “I don’t really have a bigger answer than that. I just want to be seen.”
“Why?” said the Head of Acting, his fountain pen hovering above the page.
Stanley said, “Because if somebody’s watching, you know you’re worth something.”
FIVE
Monday
“Thanks all for coming in, people,” the counselor is saying as Isolde walks in. He raises 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.”
The room is almost full. Isolde looks around for a seat, nodding tersely at a few of her sister’s friends who look at her with sad round eyes as if they are imagining themselves in her shoes and feeling very sorry for themselves indeed. Isolde scowls. She slips into a chair and tries to scrunch down as low as possible. The counselor smiles at her, a horrible rubbery proud smile that makes Isolde’s skin creep, and she quickly looks away, down at her fingernails and the worn tatty cuffs of her school jersey. She suffers being questioned and patted and caressed by the girl sitting behind her, a stout motherly figure who was Victoria’s tennis partner in intermediate school and once shared a paper bag of sweets with Isolde under the trees at the end of the lawn.
The girl settles back into her chair like a fat tufted hen, and Isolde can hear her say to the girl sitting next to her, “They’re keeping her in the dark I reckon. Makes sense.”
“Who can tell me what the issue is here?” the counselor is saying, spreading his arms to include them all. “It starts with B,” he adds, silencing the girls who are about to volunteer possible answers that do not start with B. The girls lean back and think of all the B words they have heard the counselor use.
“Boundaries,” the counselor croons at last, and there is a collective exhalation. “Boundaries, people.”
Isolde sits very still and gives nothing away, folding into herself and glassing over as if she is pushing her face into a mask. Vultures, she thinks to herself, using her mother’s word. Her mother had said it when she saw the contented headlines in the morning paper. Vultures, she said, and then swooped down and ripped off the front page, but ineffectually so the column headline was vertically halved and the piece that remained read Teacher Sex. Vultures, Isolde thinks now, as the whispers eddy around her and the counselor smiles his plump greasy smile.
The counselor is saying, “Maybe you might let this sort of thing happen because you just don’t know how else to respond.”
Isolde sighs and wishes she were dead.
“Why do I have to go?” she asked her mother last night, slapping the pink form down next to the chopped onions and the flour. “It’s seventh formers and music students and then me. I’ll be the only fifth former there and everyone will know and it’s humiliating. They all pity me and I hate it.”
Isolde’s mother chewed at her lip in the way she did when she knew she was out of her depth.
“I suppose you could refuse to go, honey,” she said distractedly, “but it might end up seeming like you were taking a stand. You might draw attention to yourself, and that might not be what you want. It might be better for you to just go along and put your head down. I’m not sure. You decide.” She smiled in a vague but encouraging way. “Poor lamb,” was the last thing she said before turning back to the onions, her disinterest settling over her daughter like a damp chemical mist over a household fire.
Isolde snatched back the pink form and stalked out of the room. “I have to go to counseling because of you,” she snapped as she passed Victoria in the hall.
“Why?” Victoria asked, stopping and looking thoroughly surprised.
“Because they want to quarantine,” Isolde shouted. “They want to keep us all in one place so the sickness won’t spread and they can figure out a vaccine. They want to put us in a concrete yard and take our clothes off and hose us down and scrub us with sandpaper and turpentine and rags made from old Y-fronts that have turned gray. It’s like you’ve left big inky handprints on all of us, everyone you’ve ever met, but especially me, I’m the most inky, I’m like dripping ink, it’s running down my legs and arms and off my fingertips and pooling wider and wider on the floor.”
Victoria stood there in the hall with the last of the sunlight slanting across her face and didn’t say anything for a while. Isolde breathed raggedly and glared at her, and stood just inside her bedroom door, her hand on the door edge and ready to slam it on cue. Then Victoria said, “Sorry.”
“You bloody aren’t,” Isolde said. She slammed the door.
“Does anybody want to say anything before we kick off?” the counselor is saying now, and one of the girls in the back row calls out, “I do.”
Isolde is still broody and wrapped up in herself and doesn’t turn around when the girl begins to speak. She hears her say, “I don’t agree that Mr. Saladin wanted to gain control,” but it takes a moment before she registers what the girl is actually saying.
The girl says, “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.”
Isolde turns around to look at her.
The speaker is a seventh former, a hard-edged ink-spotted girl who smokes lonely cigarettes by the goalposts of the soccer field and sits in after-school detention with a satisfied smirk on her face to show that everything is going precisely as she has planned. She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost and pursued by frightened vicious rumors that she is possibly probably gay.
The fact that the rumors about Julia are unsupported by witness or report means that Julia’s sexuality remains an elusive property, threatening but not entirely quantifiable, predatory in an unpredictable, unpreventable way. Julia herself, surly and caustic and isolated by her headphones and her paperbacks and the curtain of hair across her face, never chooses to actively dispel the whispers that shadow her. If she is provoked she might scowl and give the finger, but provocation isn’t in fashion right now, so mostly she is simply left alone.
Now, while the girls watch Julia as if she is a carnival act and the counselor tugs nervously at the tuft of hair at the nape of his neck, Isolde becomes aware that the atmosphere in the room is changing. A cold dawning fear is rising from the girls like a scent. The belated threat posed by the now absent Mr. Saladin is plainly diminished in the face of this more insidious and unnameable threat posed by Julia. It is not simply the voicing of the opinion that frightens them. Julia is an infiltrator, a dangerous and volatile mole who might without their knowledge have a crush on any one of them, who might at any moment be imagining any one of them—there are no counseling sessions to prepare the girls against the advances of one of their own.
“The fact that Victoria was underage and virginal or whatever wasn’t exciting because he could exercise more power over her,” Julia is saying. “It was exciting because he stood to lose so much more if anyone found out.” She cocks her head to emphasize the shock value. “He wouldn’t just lose her. He would lose everything.”
Isolde looks her up and down in fascination. As she contemplates what Julia is saying, she begins for the first time to feel an interest in Mr. Saladin: Mr. Saladin, who saw in her sister something worth pursuing, who whispered things that nobody had ever said before, who risked and lost everything he had.
Why did Mr. Saladin choose Victoria? Isolde finds herself considering the question properly for the first time. She pictures her sister’s round cherry pout and round wide eyes, and the flash of red satin whenever she leans over and exposes the artful low waistband of her school kilt. She pictures Victoria in jazz
band, leaning forward to turn the page with her sax slung slantwise across her body, the weight of the instrument pulling the neckstrap downward and tight against her sternum so that the upper end of the instrument lies brightly golden between the blue woollen swell of her breasts. And then Isolde thinks, Why did Victoria choose Mr. Saladin?
In the beginning, watching her parents quarrel over Victoria and clinging to her shoulders like the conscience angels of a morality play, all Isolde could feel was a preemptive stab of injustice as she wondered whether her parents would ever find cause to attend so closely to her. She applied herself gravely to her parents’ distress and watched Victoria from a careful distance, but she did not think to ponder or picture Mr. Saladin as he paced his camel-cream apartment and handed in his hangdog resignation and in shame telephoned his family to confess.
Even now Isolde has only a dim and tangential perception of Mr. Saladin. She remembers him suited and conducting the orchestra at the end-of-year showcase concert, and once she saw him jogging from the music department to the staff car park with his necktie whipped over his shoulder and a sheaf of papers in his fist. She vaguely remembers him slouching on stage at the first assembly, running a hand through his hair and furtively checking his watch as the third formers were welcomed at length into the school. She recalls that he used to call his students Princess, in a teasing despairing sort of way, as if to say that there was nothing to be done.
Isolde tries to imagine Mr. Saladin in a sexual context, and falters. She casts about and tries to place him among his peers. Mr. Horne with the cellulite smear of acne scarring on both cheeks and the chalky fingerprints around his pocket rim. Mr. Kebble who teaches maths and musty French, his underarm sweat-stains blooming like secret bruises. Mr. MacAuley from the bursar’s office who is pert and brisk and shines like an apple from behind the sliding glass. She imagines unbuttoning them and tugging their shirttails from their trousers and pushing them hard against the music-cupboard door. She imagines smiling at them in lessons and making their hearts race. She imagines saying, How about lunchtime? and, I like the shirt with the stripes better. She imagines saying, I don’t believe you that it doesn’t fit. I saw Miss Clark put one over her whole shoe.
Isolde is lost in this contemplation when Julia looks up and meets her gaze. It takes a moment for Isolde’s trance-glazed eyes to focus, and then she suffers a swoop in her gut, panicking for an instant in case the subject of her thoughts was in some way visible. Her heart begins to pound. Again Isolde thinks about the rumors that shadow Julia everywhere she goes, and suddenly she feels a little frightened, as if she has just made herself terribly vulnerable in a way she can’t quite understand. She panics and turns away. The counselor is talking again, and all around her the girls are nodding, full of contentment and pity and a deep satisfied peace.
Isolde’s heartbeat returns to normal. Julia’s words return to her in a late echo, washing over her with sudden volume like the unexpected slapping rush of a spring tide. I don’t agree, she said, that Mr. Saladin wanted to gain control. Isolde slithers down her seat in confusion and shame, and when the bell rings she slips out of the room without looking back.
Wednesday
“Bridget,” the saxophone teacher says, “I told you that if you didn’t play that bar perfectly first time I was going to scream.”
“I know,” says Bridget unhappily.
“Did you want me to scream? Did you imagine the sharp edge of each wrong note stuck like a little barb into the side of my face? Is that what you wanted?”
“No,” says Bridget.
The saxophone teacher draws out the silence between them for three minim rests, the metronome on the piano keeping dogged time. “Are you under pressure at home?” she asks. “Or at school?”
Bridget’s eyes fill with tears. “Did my mum call you?” she asks, dreading the inevitable. “She said she wouldn’t. She always says she won’t and then she does.”
The saxophone teacher looks her up and down, and then she asks, “Does your mother lie to you, Bridget?”
Bridget falls into miserable silence as she ponders the question.
Whenever she is bullied or short-changed or mistreated in any way, Bridget’s first panicked thought is always that she must make sure her mother doesn’t find out. Bridget’s mother marches into the school administration block almost fortnightly, complaining or querying or demanding on behalf of Bridget, always on behalf of Bridget, who trails in her mother’s righteous wake and once heard the secretary whisper, “That girl has got her mother wrapped around her little finger. Wrapped around.”
“Please don’t come in to school,” Bridget said in dread alarm last week, when her mother discovered she’d paid twice the cost of her sax rental for the month by mistake. “I’ll sort it out at jazz band. Please don’t come.”
“All right,” her mother said at last, peering at Bridget in a distrustful, grudging sort of way. “But make sure you get a receipt.” Later she doubled back on her way home from the supermarket and went in to the music department after all, before Bridget had a chance.
“I said I’d sort it out at jazz band,” Bridget said.
“Gave me a chance to ask what measures have been put in place,” Bridget’s mother said. She eased a puffy foot from her shoe and massaged it slowly. “After this whole Mr. Saladin ordeal, I said, I just want to know what measures have been put in place.” She peered at Bridget, brandishing her shoe in her fist. She said, “Nothing, that’s what. Nothing is what’s been done.”
“I asked you not to go,” said Bridget quietly. “They think you’re wrapped around my finger.”
“Bridget,” said Bridget’s mother, “it’s my money you’re spending on that saxophone. I can manage my money as I please. Plus. It gave me a chance to stir them up a bit. Nothing is what’s been done.”
The saxophone teacher is waiting quietly for Bridget’s recollection to end.
“I suppose it is lying,” Bridget says at last. “I suppose she does lie to me.” The betrayal twists sourly in her stomach.
“It’s undermining,” the saxophone teacher says.
“I suppose so,” Bridget says. The metronome arm is still swinging back and forth, measuring the space between them.
The saxophone teacher lets Bridget’s misery weigh heavy for a moment, and then she says, “Your mum did come and see me last week, actually. Just to catch up. She’d had a run-in with one of the teachers at your school.”
Panic floods Bridget’s face. “What did she say?”
The sax teacher likes playing Bridget’s mother. She shrinks into herself until she looks pale and stringy and rumpled and slightly alarmed, toying with the end of her scarf in a mincing compulsive fashion, her little eyes darting to the edges of the room as she speaks.
“Bridget hasn’t had much luck with teachers,” is what Bridget’s mother said. “Teachers just don’t seem to click with her. It’s not that she’s a bad kid—she isn’t a troublemaker at all—and she’s not stupid. But there’s something about Bridget that seems to rub teachers up the wrong way. It seems that she’s just not a likeable girl. It’s not something I understand. How do you make your child likeable? I seem to have missed that opportunity. Somehow it passed me by.”
It is an accurate performance. The saxophone teacher returns to herself with a pleased expectant expression on her face, as if she knows that she qualifies for full marks but she wants to hear it confirmed all the same.
“She always says things like that,” Bridget says unhappily. “Talking about me like that. Going to see my teachers and telling them I have ideas, or asking them why I don’t have enough ideas and what they’re going to do about it.”
“It’s because she wants the best for you,” the saxophone teacher says.
“No, it isn’t,” Bridget says. “It’s because there’s nothing else happening in her life and she has to stick her nose in or she’d be bored out of her brain.”
“Come on, Bridget,” says the saxophone
teacher in a scolding voice. “All that drama at your school—the sex scandal—it really shook her up. She’s worried about you.”
This sea change is characteristic of the saxophone teacher’s conversations with Bridget. A sudden about-face always provokes a satisfying wounded bewilderment that clouds Bridget’s face with shame and with the throbbing irreparable guilt of having said too much. The saxophone teacher watches the effect with satisfaction.
Bridget looks at her music miserably for a moment. Her pigtails are drooping and her ribbons are gray. “She said thank God you’re a woman,” she says suddenly, as if she is contemplating the words for the first time.
Thursday
The school that these girls so reluctantly attend is called Abbey Grange, colloquially known as either Scabby Grange or Abbey Grunge, depending on your mood or point of view. The boys from the high school opposite hang from their armpits along the iron fence and shout “Scabby Abbey!” through the bars, and when the girls take a shortcut through the St. Sylvester grounds they always shout out “Syphilis!” or “Saint Molester!” sometimes without an audience, but always with a judicious sense of evening the score.
Today Isolde is picking her way across the balding field toward Abbey Grange, threading a path around the wind-blown litter and the scuffed mud-holes crusted beige with last night’s ice. Steam rises from the netball courts as the sun warms the wet asphalt, and the patched netting behind the soccer goal is bright with dew. The painted divisions on the courts have faded from white to a dirty thready gray. The school is mostly weatherboard, cream and fawn, but there is a clump of newer buildings among the old, recently painted and brighter than the rest, standing out like shiny patches of skin over a new burn. All the trees are restrained with iron collars and ringed by chiseled seats that spell the name and fate of every student once imprisoned there.
Isolde walks slowly, watching the creeping tidemark of gray mud and lawn cuttings advance over the lip of her school shoes and into the damp wool of her socks. Most of the girls are pouring into the school through the main entrance, and Isolde is thankfully marooned as she makes her way toward homeroom. Thus far since Mr. Saladin left the school Isolde has enjoyed a special kind of freedom, all the students awkward and stepping around her as if she is very fragile, all the teachers brisk and absent and clearly trying to treat Isolde in the most ordinary, invisible way. The privacy is welcome but Isolde knows that soon the mileage of this reflected notoriety will run out. She has noticed with a kind of indifferent contempt that none of her teachers now draws comparisons between her sister and herself, not even the netball coach who was once so fond of repeating, “I swear, you two—there must be something in the water at your house.”
The Rehearsal: A Novel Page 9
