Stanley wasn’t sure what marked him out as a person. He hung back at the beginning of the year and let the other boys claim
the roles of the leader and the player and the clown, watching with a kind of uncertain awe as they worked to recruit admirers
and an audience. He guessed he wanted to be thought of as sensitive and thoughtful, but he didn’t pursue the branding actively
enough and soon those positions were taken. He found himself thoroughly eclipsed by several of the more ambitiously moody
boys, boys who were studied in the way they tossed their hair off their forehead, thin boys with paperback copies of Nietzsche
nosing out of their satchels, boys wearing self-conscious forlorn looks, permanently anxious and always slightly underfed.
Whenever these boys began to speak, the class would peel back respectfully to listen.
Stanley found himself quietly shepherded into the middling drift of the unremarkable students in the class. Like the rest
of them he nursed a small hope that one day he would come into his own and surpass them all, but the hope was half-buried,
and in his lessons Stanley rarely bloomed.
“We’ll make something of you yet,” the Head of Improvisation said to Stanley one morning, reaching over and tapping his chest
with her finger. “There’s something in there,” she said, “that one of these days is going to just
ripen
, overnight. You’ll see.”
She walked away and left Stanley with the hot echo of her touch on his sternum and a feeling of joyful arrival that stayed
with him for the days and weeks following. He applied himself more vigorously to his technique, spurred on by this germ
of
confidence that swelled his chest to bursting. He began to believe in his own ripening, waiting for it with a pious kind of
expectation like a cleric awaiting a response to prayer. He became more patient with his own failures, safe and confident
in the knowledge that one day soon he would surely succeed.
“It’s a strange thing,” the Head of Improvisation said later in the staffroom, pausing to count stitches with the pearly edge
of her fingernail and tug the woollen square out flat to check her progress. “It’s a strange thing, how we caress their egos
like we do. I see how much it affects them, lights them up, and I feel so responsible, even guilty, like I am handing a loaded
pistol to a child.”
“All actors are perverted by their profession,” the Head of Acting replied, shaking out his newspaper and folding it crisply
along the existing seam. “We inflate their egos to make up for everything about them that gets trampled and broken. You’re
not damaging them, Glenda. You’re just softening the blow.”
Most of Stanley’s friends from school had now dispersed, swallowed up by the local university and the polytechnic or packed
off overseas to pursue better chances somewhere else. Stanley buried himself at the Institute. The first-years were required
for long hours each day, and more and more often Stanley found reason to come into the buildings on the weekends, nosing around
the script library or taking a book up to the viewing gallery above the dance hall, where he could watch the weekend school
groups take classes in ballet and rope work and basic tissue. He found a flat with two other first-year actors, thin solemn
figures who, like him, had let all the other bones of their lives fall away. He became consumed by the Institute so totally
and wholeheartedly that he sometimes thought about the sour-faced boy from Wardrobe with the ancient gramophone in his arms.
He had seen the boy several times on his way to and from the art department, always hauling cans of paint and bags of fabric
scraps and half-finished puppets stuck with pins.
At home the boys talked nothing but acting, film and theater, and street performance and revolution, snug in the shell of
their own irrelevance but all of them giddy as if they were standing together and alone on the edge of a new uncharted world.
They talked long into the night and drafted plays on greasy scraps of newsprint and imagined what marvelous lies they might
one day be paid to tell.
“When they write our biographies,” his housemates said, “when they write our biographies, all this will be in the opening
chapter, the chapter before the big break, before we get famous, before everything starts happening. And this is the chapter
that everyone will find really interesting and inspiring, because it will show that we are just people like everyone else,
people who started from an ordinary beginning, people who were once poor and struggling and earning an ordinary wage. In that
way, this chapter will be the most interesting chapter of the whole book.”
Stanley began to look at himself differently, cherishing the parts of himself that he might be able to use, delicately prodding
himself for weaknesses, both fearful and hopeful that he might cause himself to bruise or break. His father, who had never
before figured very prominently in his daily life, began to surface as a source of tragedy to be mined and exploited and spent.
In class he talked about his father more and more. Gradually and unconsciously Stanley began to regard himself as a tragic
figure—not a victim of the ordinary lash of adolescence, but a person more profoundly wronged, a kingly figure, an emotional
hero. At night he sighed and pounded his pillow and sometimes cried.
“Always the
arriviste
,” the Head of Acting said in the staff-room, with a kind of paternal amusement. “We get them too late. That’s the problem.
We should have a school for sixteen-year-olds. They’d get their degree at nineteen. They’d have to drop out of high school
to audition. It’d do them good.”
“They’re already formed by the time they enroll,” said the
Head of Voice. “Psychically formed. Morally formed. Everything
happens so early now.”
“And they love themselves so dearly,” the Head of Improvisation said. She tugged sharply at her wool and sent the ball rolling
away under the table. “That’s the hardest thing to break.”
In the students’ cafeteria on the floor below, the first-years were clumped together in a similar debate. Stanley picked thoughtfully
at his gray slip of pork as he listened.
“You have to admire people that come here,” one of them was saying, “people that choose to put themselves on display, people
that choose to play with the very aspects of themselves that make them the most vulnerable. These people are the bravest people
in the world.”
A fine mist of slanting rain was falling, darkening the slate and beading the swollen moss with a thin film like a silver
dew. Stanley was sprawled on one of the vinyl couches that lined the corridors of the technical wing, lying on his back with
his legs wrapped around the radiator pipe and reading, his thumb spread over the top edge of the spine to hold it open.
“Are you doing your reading for Early Modern?” said one of the first-year girls, coming up beside him and flopping down on
to the floor.
“Yeah,” Stanley said, shifting his thumb slightly to hold his place on the page. “I’ve got
The Revenger’s Tragedy
. What have you got?”
“
The Alchemist
,” the girl said, pulling her bag open and taking out a dog-eared copy of the play. “I haven’t started. What’s yours about?”
Stanley thought for a second, and then said, “It’s about a man who puts on a disguise in order to avenge the death of someone
he loves, but after his revenge is complete he finds out that he can’t take the disguise off. He’s become this person he’s
pretended to be for so long.” He flipped the book around to take another look at the cover, which showed a cloaked man attempting
to ravish a skeleton. The skull was brightly painted in peach and scarlet, the cheekbones rouged and the eye sockets ringed
in glossy black.
“Cool,” the girl said, thoroughly unmoved. She sighed and stretched out her legs, reaching down to grip her toes with both
hands. “Dance class yesterday actually
annihilated
me,” she said. “I hobbled all the way home. Like actually hobbled.”
“Yeah,” Stanley said. He stalled a second, trying to think of something to say next. He almost began to say how much the dance
class had made him sweat, but stopped himself with the words already in his throat. He almost began to chatter in a self-deprecating
way about his fitness, but stalled again and instead cast around for something to say about the dance tutor or the class itself,
but he took too long to come up with something and at all once he froze in the compounded panic of realizing he had paused
for too long. The girl shifted and began to stretch her other leg. The rough-edged copy of
The Alchemist
fell sideways off her lap and on to the floor.
“All the dance tutors at this place are sadists,” she said. “Look at that bruise.”
Stanley looked. Slender fingers of gray and purple carved across her hip and melted into a reddish cloud above the bone. She
stroked the bruise impressively with one finger, her other hand peeling back the waistband of her tracksuit to expose the
skin.
“Wow,” Stanley said.
“But I do bruise really easily,” the girl said. She tucked the bruise back under her waistband and resumed stretching her
leg.
“Hey, this play is actually really good,” Stanley said, loosening his tongue and trying for a second time. He flapped his
copy
of
The Revenger’s Tragedy
half-heartedly against his leg. “It’s so grisly and sick.”
The girl glanced at the cover briefly. “Is that the one where the guy nails the other guy’s tongue to the floor with his dagger?”
“Yeah!” Stanley said. “And while he’s dying he’s forced to watch his wife having sex with his bastard son.”
“Yeah, I know that scene,” the girl said.
Her indifference seemed to close the conversation completely, slamming it shut with a slap that left no echo. She sighed.
Stanley tapped his fingers and wondered briefly if he should reopen his book and keep reading. He compromised by turning the
book over and rereading the blurb on the back.
“Did
you
bruise after yesterday?” the girl said after a moment, looking at Stanley with a narrow-eyed interest and flicking her eyes
over him, up and down.
“I just sweated a lot,” Stanley said, feeling as he said it a wash of resignation, as if he had known he would say it all
along. “Dance class makes me sweat.”
“Gross,” the girl said, and touched her bruise again through the fabric of her waistband, cupping her fingers carefully around
her hip.
“Let’s see some chemistry,” said the Head of Acting, and nodded at them both to begin.
This time Stanley was sitting on a park bench with his feet tucked underneath him, drawing his shoulders up to his ears against
the cold. The air was crisp and ginkgo-smelling.
“I’ve seen you here before,” Stanley said, “on your way to your music lesson, stepping around the leaves.”
The girl halted a little way off. She slung her music case down from her shoulder and placed it on its end in front of her,
resting her wrists upon it like a teller at a tollbooth. Stanley spoke again.
“I thought,” he said, “that maybe I could make you feel like you were worth something. If you were interested. Maybe this
weekend. I’d kiss you only once you were very sure that you could trust me. I’d look out for you. I promise.”
“Why?” the girl said.
“I think you’re interesting,” Stanley said. “I want to know you better.”
The wind caught the edge of the girl’s skirt and tugged at it gently. She moved her knees closer together against the draught.
“Last year,” she said, “I was standing at the bus stop after netball and one of the boys showed up on his bicycle, and I smiled
at him and we talked about the people we knew and then he said, Guess what I got my girlfriend for Valentine’s Day? Pregnant.
So I smiled and said, Congratulations. And then he scowled at me and he said, Jesus, we went to the doctor. She’s sixteen.”
“I don’t understand,” Stanley said.
“There’s no such thing as innocence any more,” the girl said, “there’s only ignorance. You think you are holding on to something
pure, but you aren’t. You’re just ignorant. You are handicapped by everything you don’t yet know.”
“But I see something pure in
you
,” Stanley said quietly. “I see something in you that is different from all the others. I see a purity in you.”
“The only difference between me and any of the others,” the girl said, flatly but with a kind of relish, “is at what price
and under what circumstances I am prepared to yield.”
“Stage fighting,” the Head of Movement said, “is also known as combat mime.”
Everyone was upright and alert today, hopping up and down on the balls of their feet and shaking out their fingertips. This
was the class they had all been looking forward to, underlined on their timetables in red ink and attempted in advance in
the secret of their bedrooms at home.
“Stage fighting is not a form of violence,” the Head of Movement said. “It is a form of dance, a controlled dance that is
rehearsed very slowly until it is perfected, and then brought up to speed. Next year you learn basic fencing, épée and sabre
and foil. This year we focus simply on how to slap, punch and kick, drawing on the arts of kickboxing, capoeira and basic
acrobatics. By the end of this year you should be able to choreograph and perform a fight that simulates punching, kicking
and throwing your opponent, as well as being punched, kicked and thrown yourself.”
He smiled at their eagerness and added, “You’ll learn that losing a stage fight is just as difficult and demanding a task
as winning one. Now. Who can give me the definition of a special effect?” He looked around, but the students were blank and
distracted, hopping from foot to foot and aching to begin. “A special effect,” the Head of Movement said patiently, “is something
that does not happen, it only
seems
to happen. Stage fighting is a special effect. The violence that you simulate
does not happen
on stage. Anybody who doesn’t understand this will fail this section of the course. In previous years we have had students
removed from this class because they do not understand the definition of a special effect.”