“All right,” Felix said graciously, drawing with a fat felt-tipped pen a spiky cloud around the word SEXUALITY. The others
watched. At the beginning of the year Felix had labored to snare the role of the group’s organizing mind, to the irritation
of most of the students, who looked at the tiny protrusion of his tongue as he wrote and felt they could do better.
“Then what about that story that Grace brought in?” Felix
said when he had completed the bubble. “The teacher–student thing
at Scabby Abbey.”
He used the nickname to show them that although he was organizing the group, they were not allowed to resent him or regard
him as a teacher-figure.
“My sister’s at Abbey Grange,” one of the boys said. “In sixth form. She reckons they don’t know the half of it yet. What
she heard was that after all the girl’s friends found out, the teacher kept them quiet for a few months by paying them out.
Mostly buying them booze, on behalf.”
“But wasn’t the girl a seventh former? So most of her friends would have been eighteen anyway.”
“It’s what I heard,” the boy said, shrugging.
“How did they get caught in the end?” somebody asked.
“I heard it was another teacher,” the boy said. “The guy had been dating someone else on staff, and then they broke up and
she was the one who found him with the girl. That’s what Polly said.”
“I thought it was her friends,” one of the girls said. “They caught on and went to the principal and dobbed her in.”
“I heard that it wasn’t just the one girl who was abused,” somebody said, “it was a whole bunch of them—he was playing them
all at the same time. She was just the one who got caught.”
“Do we know whether anything actually happened?” one of the girls put in. “What if nothing actually happened between her and
the teacher at all?”
“They had evidence. Like there were some of her clothes at his house. And there was a toothbrush.”
“A toothbrush doesn’t mean
rape
,” the girl said, with a sharp little laugh. “A toothbrush means the opposite of rape. It doesn’t even mean a one-night stand.
A toothbrush means you’ve got foresight. It’s like if they found
pajamas
at his house, little girly flannel pajamas, pastel pink with a pattern of clouds. It can’t be
evidence
. It’s an investment. A toothbrush is an investment.”
There was a silence as they all digested this new concept.
Then one of the boys said, “Wasn’t he like sixty?”
“He wasn’t that old. There was a photo in the paper last week. He’s got brown hair.”
“So we don’t really know very much at all,” Felix said crossly, swiping his fringe away from his face. He was feeling the
helpless boiling irritation of an officious person struggling to control a group too large and original for him. He uncapped
his pen and wrote ISSUES at the top of his butcher’s sheet.
“We need to make really awesome use of the card itself,” one of the girls said. “Playing cards need to be an integral part
of the performance, not just some little byproduct scene that’s tacked on.”
“I think that’s a given,” Felix said. “Well, let’s talk about the card then, and the different ways we could use it.” He underlined
the word ISSUES, recapped his pen with a careful snap and looked expectantly at them all.
“Just the one card, or the whole pack?”
“I reckon the whole pack,” somebody said. “It’s a really great aesthetic for costuming and we can use it to shape the play
kind of, like if we have four acts, each with a suit name, or thirteen scenes that each have a card name in a particular suit.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“Yeah! We can dress up like the court cards, with their weapons and stuff. Don’t they all have weapons?”
“What if we made up a
game
? A card game that we could use as the focus of the play. If you draw a red card you will be attracted to women. If you draw
a black card you will be attracted to men.”
“Yeah, and every individual card could stand for some sort of particular—I don’t know. Some sort of particular habit or trait
or something. Something to do with sexuality or whatever.”
“If you draw His Nobs, you leave before the morning?” one of the boys said, and everyone laughed.
“What’s His Nobs?”
“One of the jacks in cribbage.”
“Hang on,” said Felix, scribbling. “We’re going too fast.”
“We’re going fine,” one of the boys said. “You’re just writing too slow.”
Felix felt his authority begin to ebb. He scowled and wished he had appointed a scribe.
“What if we make the whole play a kind of fantasy, like set in a fantasy world or whatever, where as soon as you turn a certain
age you have to draw a card?”
“You get sent to a fortune-teller or something—”
“Like a tarot reader.”
“Yeah! It’s like a coming-of-age ritual thing. A rite of passage.”
“The card becomes like your identity card. You keep it with you always.”
“You can’t show it to anybody.”
“So queens might mean drag or something, and if you drew a queen you’d have to take up drag.”
“Queen—like drag queen!”
“That’s what I meant.”
“Is that what we really believe, though?” Stanley said. “Do we really believe it’s like that—that your identity is dealt out
to you, given to you the moment you grow up, and from then on it becomes your—your motif or something? Like a badge?”
“Yeah,” the first boy said. “Do you not believe that?”
Stanley opened his mouth but then closed it again. He wasn’t sure.
“But doesn’t that mean you’d have one card for the rest of your life?” somebody said.
“Yes,” the emphatic boy said. “Unless you gamble it away. In a high-stakes game of chance. In a deadly game of chance in an
underground bar, where you run the risk of ending up with nothing.”
“We could do that really well.”
“It would dramatize really well.”
“Really steam-punk.”
“I reckon.”
“Anyway,” one of the girls said crossly, “it doesn’t matter what we actually believe. It’s a great idea. The Head of Acting
would go nuts for it. It’s just the sort of crossover thing he loves.”
“What do you mean, crossover?”
“With the teacher–student thing. Using stories from the media. Did anyone see the production a few years back about the witch
hunt, and they had actors in disguise all through the audience pretending to be members of the public?”
“Yeah, I saw that.”
“Until you didn’t know who was acting and who wasn’t, all around you. It was really scary, actually. The season totally sold
out. They had to extend by a week.”
There was a small hush as they all imagined extending their opening season by a week. Felix had stopped writing and was looking
around with his pen limp in his hand.
“I like the Abbey Grange idea,” someone said.
“So do I.”
“What are we going off, though? Just a few articles in a local paper? That isn’t enough.”
“We’ll have to research it. We’ll have to find out more.”
“Because at the end of it everything collapses,” one of the girls said. “For the girl, the victim, the one who was abused.
It all comes down around her like a castle of cards.”
The blinds were open on the corridor side when Stanley and the girl passed, carrying their costumes down to the art department.
They heard the noise and turned their heads, and then they stopped and moved closer to the glass, to watch.
A boy was howling, squirming and bent almost double with his hands at his groin. The Head of Voice was crouched over him,
leaning right over with her feet planted sturdy and apart and her cheek against his, and her plump arms around him, clasping
him tight. She was muttering urgently and inaudibly into his ear as he howled. His howl was unpitched and irregular and ever-changing,
morphing into a guttural hum, a throaty kind of gurgle, even a bat-shriek that was too high and whispery to be heard. He appeared
to be trying to twist away from the Head of Voice but she was clamped tightly to his back and the boy could only writhe and
struggle. His eyes were closed.
“What’s happening to him?” Stanley whispered.
“Remedial Voice,” the girl whispered back. “He’s working through a lot of stuff from when he was a kid, I think. Really bad
stuff that’s all locked inside.”
The boy was slack faced and open mouthed and his expression showed no pain, but the noise he was making was raw and brutish
and full of hurt. It was frightening, this terrible noise coming out of this boy’s calm unworried throat. If it weren’t for
the leaping of his Adam’s apple, Stanley would have thought the noise recorded.
“It’s horrible,” Stanley said.
The girl shot him a disdainful look, as if he couldn’t hope to understand. “Better than releasing it any other way,” she said.
“Putting kittens in a microwave or whatever.”
“Is that what he’s doing? Releasing it?”
“Course,” the girl said, and tossed her head. “That’s her specialty. Head of Voice. People hire her out, outside the Institute—she
goes to people’s private homes and stuff. It’s like a special type of therapy. She’s really good.”
They watched the boy howl for a while, thrashing stiffly with the dead weight of the Head of Voice clamped around him. His
expression changed. He peeled his lips back so all his teeth were exposed and his nose was wrinkled in a snarl, and inside
his mouth the hump of his tongue rose up, quivering and taut. He snapped his jaw and barked a little, short gasping barks
from the back of his throat like a cough. The Head of Voice had begun crooning in his ear now, a gentle private lullaby that
welled up underneath the frenzied barking and caused the boy to wither and gasp. Stanley felt suddenly ashamed.
“Come on. We should go,” he said, and tore his gaze away. The girl was already gone.
One Saturday afternoon in spring Stanley was huddled in a cubicle in the empty art department and trying without success to
untangle the bobbin on his sewing machine. He was near finishing his Queen of Spades costume, sewing in a large waxy piece
of cardboard behind the patterned front of the bust to give himself a more angular thrust. He had spent all morning struggling
with the wire halo that fitted around his forehead. The headpiece was spangled with wire spokes designed to lift the geometric
wimple higher off his head. After nearly five hours squinting at the seams and bruising his fingertips as he molded the rough
end of the wire, he was finally satisfied that the effect was rather good. He was wearing the wimple now as he bent over the
sewing machine, obscured to the rest of the room by a cluster of colonial furniture that had been carried to the art department
for painting and left over the weekend to dry. All around him was the sweet smell of acrylic paint, as always at the Institute
laced with detergent so the paint could be easily removed when the production closed.
Stanley bent over his costume. In his research for the production he had come to know his card very well: he knew that in
the
traditional French deck of cards the Queen of Spades was supposed to represent Joan of Arc, and in the game of Hearts
the Queen of Spades was so unlucky she was known as the Black Bitch. He knew that she was the only queen to carry a scepter
as well as a daisy flower, and for that reason she was sometimes called the Bedpost Queen. He had pored over the court cards
in his deck at home for such a long time that he found the red-and-black images appearing after he closed his eyes at night.
He disentangled the bobbin finally from the thready mess below the foot, and snipped the stray threads away. He pinched the
end of the bobbin-thread in his fingers to pull it through the notch in the bobbin-holder, and heard the spool spin cleanly.
The door opened and Stanley caught a faint swell of music from the dance hall near the foyer, where a group of schoolchildren
were taking their Saturday lessons in jazz.
“In here, then,” he heard somebody say, “Nobody should disturb us in here. It’s a bugger they’re using the staffroom. Sit
down there if you like.”
The voice belonged to the Head of Movement. Stanley was still intently returning the bobbin to its tiny hinged cavity in the
base of the sewing machine, a scrap of thread in his mouth, and he did not reveal himself at once. He wound the wheel at the
side of the sewing machine and watched the needle plunge down to retrieve the bobbin-thread, bringing it up in a little scarlet
loop that he flicked up with the tip of his scissors and tugged gently outward. He was so intent on the task that when it
was done the Head of Movement and his guest were already in mid-conversation, speaking easily and with great relief, as two
people who have longed for time alone to talk.
“They all want it,” the Head of Movement was saying. “Not just the first-years—everyone, right up until the day they leave.”
“Why doesn’t the school offer that sort of thing, then? One-on-one tutorials or whatever. If it’s what the students want.”
As slowly as he could, Stanley leaned sideways around the
edge of his cubicle and saw, through the tiny sliver of view between
an upended wing armchair and a sideboard, the central figure from the Theater of Cruelty exercise, the masked boy from second
year who had slapped and shorn and nearly drowned his victim on the stage. Stanley watched him for a second, his smooth face
unmasked now and taut with eager concentration as he listened to the Head of Movement speak.
“With you,” the Head of Movement was saying, “I think that this Institute will fall short in several respects. That’s what
I wanted to say yesterday—I recommend something postgraduate, even an internship. The mime school. You’re going to be unfinished
at the end of next year. Unfinished and hungry.”
The Head of Movement was speaking earnestly but without the clipped, rehearsed quality that usually characterized his speech.
Stanley regarded the pair of them jealously through his sliver. The boy was sitting with his leg hiked up under him and his
fingers stroking the frayed upholstery, nodding carefully as the Head of Movement spoke, and suddenly it struck Stanley what
was so odd about the situation:
they are friends
, he thought in wonder.