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.
“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.
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.”
Isolde aims a kick at a flattened Coca-Cola can and it advances a few meters toward the school. She resolves to kick it all
the way to homeroom. The first bell rings. Isolde aims another kick at the can, shifting to her other armpit her English project,
a hand-drawn poster rolled stiffly into a tube and secured with rubber bands.
For this particular assignment Isolde has drawn a king dead in his bed with a sword through his heart, and the spreading bloodstain
on the blanket forms the shape of Scotland. Underneath is the quoted line “Bleed, bleed, poor country.” Isolde is good at
drawing, portraiture especially, and she is proud of this particular effort, drawn in colored pencil and charcoal, and sprayed
with an aerosol lacquer to prevent it from smudging in the tube.
“You know whenever the word ‘country’ is used in Shakespeare it usually means something to do with ‘cunt,’ ” Victoria said
when she saw the poster, leaning her elbows on the back of one of the dining-room chairs and looking down at the drawing with
a critical eye. “Everyone was way more smutty back then.”
Isolde put down her pencil and pulled the text of the play
toward her. She scoured the quoted passage uncertainly, and then
said, “I don’t think it means that here. There’s nothing in the notes.”
“Well, it’s a school edition, isn’t it?” Victoria said. “They’re not allowed to put the filthy stuff in. Trust me, country
always means cunt. Country matters—that’s
Hamlet
. And same with the word ‘cunning.’ O cunning love. Means cunt.”
They spend a moment looking at the picture. Then Victoria adds, “You learn it in seventh form. After English stops being compulsory
they let you in on all the good stuff.”
“Do you think I should start again?” Isolde said, pinching a pencil shaving between finger and thumb and looking down at the
static image with new eyes.
“No, I reckon it’s even cleverer now,” Victoria said generously, putting her head to one side to see the picture better. “The
bleeding and everything. I bet you get top marks.”
Mr. Horne is standing by the entrance to the car park as Isolde trudges quietly past with her poster under her arm. He is
shaking his fist intermittently at the scarved and mittened flood of girls pouring into the school, shouting “Get off and
walk!” at the cyclists who stand up on their pedals and weave around their classmates and trail their helmets from their handlebars
by a single strap.
“Morning, Isolde,” Mr. Horne calls across to her, touching his first two fingers to his forehead in a kind of salute. Isolde
smiles and waves and mounts the steps to the music block where she has homeroom.
As she enters, one of her classmates swoops down and says, “Hey, Issie. You all right?” She makes a mock-sad face at Isolde,
pulling down the corners of her mouth like she is begging, and in her mind’s eye picturing herself as motherly and caring
and kind.
Isolde scowls. “Today is not a good day,” she says, because it’s easier to pretend that it isn’t.
“A man can be powerful and still be loved,” Patsy reads aloud, “but it’s rare to see a woman loved for her power—women must
be powerless. So as women gain power in our society, they also find love more difficult to attain.” She closes the book and
looks at the saxophone teacher questioningly. “Do you agree?”