A boy began to describe the worst fight his parents had ever had. He was one of the comedians of the group, cheerfully self-deprecating
and witty and successful with the girls, and as he spoke the class visibly relaxed and brightened, and sat up with a new generosity
and willingness to laugh. The Head of Acting turned to a fresh sheet and looked up at the boy over his glasses, his head tilted
and his finger-pads splayed on the desk in front of him.
“And that was the point,” the boy was saying, “where Dad goes, You are a neurotic, compulsive woman and one of these days
you are going to need to accept that. He really screamed it, and it was a bit frightening just for a moment because my dad’s
a really quiet, patient sort of a person. After that something just broke. Mum ran off, she really ran away from him, right
down the corridor into her study, and slammed the door. We thought the fight must be over, but ten minutes later or so she
opened the door again with her head so high and proud, like this—” he demonstrated, holding his arms out like a ballerina
“—with her arms full of paper, and she’d typed it out, the whole phrase, in thirty-six point, and she’d got fifty copies printed.
She put it up everywhere. She hid copies in his briefcase and in all his pockets. She pinned it to the noticeboard in the
kitchen. Everywhere in our house there were these signs that said, You are a neurotic, compulsive woman and one of these days
you are going to need to accept that.”
Everybody laughed. The boy gave them a quick thumbs-up and then made as if to return to his seat on the floor.
“Stay there a second, Oliver,” the Head of Acting said. He wasn’t smiling. “Why did you choose this as your most intimate
memory?”
The boy shrugged and shoved his hands into his pockets. “I guess because it was the day I learned about revenge,” he said,
and everyone laughed again.
“Really?” the Head of Acting said. “Or was it because the easiest thing in the world for you is to make everybody laugh? And
you chose the easy option, took the easy way out, instead of choosing to actually share yourself in a sincere and honest way?”
The room had gone quiet. Everyone picked at the floorboards with their fingernails and avoided looking at the comedian Oliver,
who was still standing with his hands in his pockets and scuffing the soles of his shoes upon the stage. Stanley watched the
defensive smile flicker like a flame at the corners of the boy’s mouth.
“Everyone else here has really shared something,” the Head of Acting said. “They have willingly shown themselves at their
most vulnerable. They have relived the most painful and most sacred moments of their lives, and laid them out for us to see.
That’s a brave thing to do. There’s been a lot of trust in this room this morning. I don’t see a lot of trust in you, Oliver.
Playing to your strengths isn’t brave. You knew everyone was going to laugh, big deal.”
Oliver was nodding now, chagrined and visibly straining to get down off the stage and melt back into the seated crowd so he
could ponder his disgrace in private. He had known this was coming. All the first-years endured a breaking-in of this sort,
a forcible public fracture of their ego-mold in the interest of rebuilding a more versatile self. About half the first-years
had been targeted so far, and the rest sat glumly and waited for their own turn.
“Do you have a girlfriend, Oliver?” the Head of Acting asked.
“Yes.” She was part of the first-year batch and his eyes sought her out briefly in the crowd.
“Is there any aspect of your relationship with your girlfriend which you would not want the rest of the group to see?”
The boy turned back to the Head of Acting. He paused and looked at the tutor suspiciously for a brief moment. “Yes,” he said
again, but Stanley thought to himself that he could not very well say no. The girl looked faintly stricken, as if anticipating
some forced revelation that would cheapen or destroy her, but all the same the boy’s admission gave her a rush of pleasure
and she almost smiled, looking quickly around at her classmates to see if they were jealous.
“That is what intimacy means,” the Head of Acting said. “Intimacy is all the moments that you would be unwilling to share.”
The Head of Acting looked at the boy Oliver and tapped his fountain pen against his desktop in a disapproving way.
“You can get down,” he said at last. “But I haven’t finished with you.”
The Head of Acting was sitting behind the students, arranged sideways behind a small writing-desk, with his long legs folded
and one palm absentmindedly stroking his calf as he wrote. He watched the shamed Oliver return to his seat next to his girlfriend
on the floor, and then capped his pen crisply.
“Stanley,” he said. “Up you get.”
Julia’s cue cards are swollen at the edges from the damp of her hands.
“The girls are like wax models in a living tableau: it’s always the same scene and they’re always in the same configuration,”
she is saying. “Whoever is the most sexed-up functions as the snare. The snare is always in the middle. She can’t be too near
the edge or she’d be an easy target.”
A crisp spotlight nails Julia flatly to the wall.
“The snare is not necessarily the most beautiful,” she says, “but she is always the most provocative. Sometimes the snare
will do things that will shame or embarrass the other figures, mostly by adopting a crass or deliberately scandalous manner.
That’s a normal part of her role.
“The most beautiful girl sits to one side of the snare, and she is known as the prize. The prize is characterized by her untouchability.
She is often the only figure in the tableau to be in
a stable long-term relationship. The objective of this relationship is
always to emphasize her untouchability. Typically the prize is clean and successful and unknowable.
“Standing behind the snare and the prize is the manager. The manager orchestrates all movements within the tableau. The manager
is often hard to spot: methods of management naturally differ from group to group. Some common methods of covert management
include the use of wit or cruelty, or sometimes the adoption of a motherly persona.
“All other figures in the tableau are the aspiring servants of this central trio. They are used as foils, scapegoats or canned
laughter.”
Julia has a peculiar flat way of delivering her lines sometimes, as if somebody has forced her to read them and she wants
to make clear her private feelings of contempt.
“The depressing fixity of this tableau,” she says in conclusion, “makes it clear to us why girls value reincarnation and reinvention
above all things.”
There are no counseling sessions about Bridget’s death. A flag is retrieved from the sports cupboard, ironed, and hauled to
half-mast where it spends a glum week slapping against the rusted flagpole. The girls move around the campus in a vast ghostly
drift. They are ashamed that they feel nothing and so respectfully they affect to feel very much. They self-consciously contemplate
their own mortality as they watch the raindrops travel down the glass. They sigh and take too long in the toilet cubicle,
and say to each other, “I think I need to be alone for a while.”
“It’s the little things,” Julia hears a girl say to her friend while they wait in the line for the tuck shop. “It’s the little
things that you remember.”
In assembly the counselor says, “Bridget was a very special person.” He says
special
in the same way he says
important
, cupping his lips around the word as if he is trying to suck an acorn and unwittingly conferring its opposite meaning. In
the auditorium, girls who never knew Bridget nod their tremulous assent and pluck at the sleeves of their neighbors for support.
In the staffroom the teachers discuss a memorial for Bridget. Somebody suggests a mural. Somebody suggests a commemorative
plaque in the music corridor, to honor her commitment to the jazz band. The weeks go by.
In the meantime Isolde’s sister, Victoria, returns to school.
“You and Julia seem to get on very well,” the saxophone teacher says after Isolde has trundled in and unwrapped her scarf
and pulled off her mittens.
“Yeah,” Isolde says. She flaps her arms about. “God, it’s cold!”
“Do you see her much around school?”
“I guess,” Isolde says. “The seventh formers have their own commonroom and their own study lounge and stuff. We’re not allowed
in. Hey, I tracked down some of the recordings of that guy we saw—they’ve got a whole bunch at the library.”
“Good,” the saxophone teacher says. “And?”
“Awesome,” Isolde says. “Made me want to start playing with other people, like properly.”
“You could join Julia’s underground band.”
“She’d be way better than me,” Isolde says. “Hasn’t she been learning for ages?”
“She’s sitting her letters this year,” the saxophone teacher says. “I must say I was so pleased you two got on so well. Is
she a friend of your sister’s at school?”
“God no,” Isolde says with a snort. “Victoria’s friends are… I was going to say brain-dead. No. They’re just… much more girly.”
“Julia’s not girly?”
“No way.”
“What’s the opposite of girly?” the saxophone teacher asks, thinking to herself that only matters of social hierarchy or branding
ever produce this sort of conviction in her students.
Isolde reflects for a moment, twirling her necklace around her finger. “Hard-core,” she says at last, pronouncing the word
definitively, as if to deny all other options.
“So Julia is hard-core,” the saxophone teacher says.
“Hey, there was something I was going to ask you about one of the albums I got out,” Isolde says, reaching down to rummage
in her bag. “I brought it along.”
The saxophone teacher scowls. She wants a performance. She wants the lights to change, becoming the red tail-glow of Mr. Saladin’s
car, and she wants to see Isolde all lit up red for a second before Mr. Saladin kills the engine and the lights go out and
Isolde is sitting in the low half-light of the streetlamp in the darkened car, and she wants to hear Isolde say—
“It’s just the voicing on this particular track,” Isolde says now, unearthing the disc and flipping it over to find the track
title. “Do you mind if I play it?”
“Of course not, go ahead,” the saxophone teacher says, sitting down gracefully and watching Isolde stab at the stereo and
insert her disc. She masks her disappointment, reaching over for her cooling cup of tea and watching Isolde feel for the power
button, sweeping over the dials on the stereo front with light patting fingertips as if she is blind.
Isolde turns the volume knob and the music begins and, as it does, the lights change, the overhead bulb fading to black in
time with the upward swell of the saxophone. The two of them are in perfect darkness for a moment, and then the lights
come
slowly up again. They are now reddish and warm, dim and pocketed as if cast by scattered lamps in booths and tables at a backwater
bar. The music is lazy and chromatic and low. The saxophone teacher lets out a little sigh of contentment, and settles back
to watch.
“When we walked away from you,” Isolde said, “this is the tune we heard, coming out of one of those little smoky afterward
bars in the alleys by the Town Hall. There was a gig somewhere, not the kind of jostling sweaty gig where everyone’s fighting
to use their elbows, but just some three-man band jamming away the hours in a quiet bar. Julia turns to me and says, Do you
want to get a drink? and I must have nodded because the next thing we’re pushing open this foggy door and walking into a warm
late-night café—”
Isolde pushes the volume knob up a little bit and the music swells, as if a door has just been opened—
“—and they’re playing drums and double bass and keyboards, all of them barefoot and happy, and the drummer is leaning over
to talk to the man at the bar while he plays.”
The saxophone teacher nods as she pictures the bar in her mind: she knows it very well, the stained diamond pattern of the
wallpaper, the dark paneling that ends in an elegant lip at shoulder-height, the reddish brass lamps collared to the wall
and bleeding artful fingers of rust in downward rays. It’s Patsy’s favorite place to sit and drink, and the sax teacher has
spent hours in that sticky shadowed corner over the years. She can see the ornate plaster frame of the mirror behind the bar,
chipped gold and peeling, and the brass plaques on the lavatory doors, spotted gray with age.
“We walk in,” Isolde is saying, “and Julia says sit down. She’ll order drinks for the both of us, so I go and fold myself
into a corner booth, peeling off my coat and my scarf and checking my reflection in the dark glass of the window by the door.
I watch as she leans over the bar and says something to the barman, and
she picks up her change and two glasses, and he waves
his half-cut lemon at her and says, Get away from me! and they both laugh. She slips into the booth and says, Sorry, I didn’t
even ask, is red okay? And I don’t want to say that mostly what I drink is vodka or rum mixed with fruit syrup to mask the
taste, and the only time I’ve had red wine is when we stole a bottle from Nicola’s mum and decanted it into half a bottle
of Coke so you wouldn’t be able to tell.”
Isolde’s mouth is dry. She wets her lips.
“I take a sip,” she says, “and it’s foul, fouler than when we mixed it half with Coke and drank it under the bleachers on
the rugby field. I ask Julia if she’s turned eighteen yet and she looks a bit annoyed, as if she’d rather talk about something
else. She says she has, last week. It was her birthday last week. I say the wine is good. Then we start talking about you,
what we think of you, probably because you’re the only real thread of connection between us.”
The music is crooning and uncomplicated. The saxophone teacher can see it: the cheerful aging three-man band, stepping with
their bare feet over the yellow extension leads, the double-bass player nodding and smiling over the glossy wooden shoulder
of his one-legged woman-shape, the pianist leaning in and out of the light, the drummer dropping down to a one-handed beat
for a couple of bars as he reaches over to take a drink from a sweaty beaded glass of beer, golden under the tasseled fringe
of a lamp.