“The fact that Victoria was underage and virginal or whatever wasn’t exciting because he could exercise more power over her,”
Julia says. “It was exciting because he stood to lose so much more if anyone found out.” Julia has a way of cocking her head
to emphasize the shock value. “He wouldn’t just lose her,” she says. “He would lose everything.”
There is a small pause and then another rustling swoop as all the girls turn back to look at the counselor. He looks up, tugs
again at his tuft of hair, and sighs.
“I think we’ve deviated from the point,” he says. “What we’re concerned with here is the power imbalance. We’re concerned
with the fact that, as a teacher, Mr. Saladin abused his position of power by seeking out a relationship with a student.”
“We’ve only deviated from
your
point to
my
point,” Julia snaps. “And anyway, isn’t every relationship a power imbalance in some way?”
The counselor quickly turns back to the group before Julia can open her mouth to say more. “What do you guys think?” he asks,
trying to make eye contact only with the least combative and least articulate girls in the room. “Any thoughts? Agree? Disagree?”
A few girls raise their hands and begin to speak, and Julia loses interest immediately. She scowls at the counselor, and then
fishes a biro out of her pocket and begins to doodle on the back of her hand as if she doesn’t care. After a while she looks
up, and to her sudden thudding surprise Isolde is looking at her. Her expression is no longer childish and candied. Her head
is turned slightly so she is looking half over her shoulder like a cold and careless queen with her neck all standing out
in ropes.
Julia flushes under her collar and censors herself too late. Her heart is beating very fast. All of a sudden she feels too
big for her own body, clumsy and stupid and lumpish, and the feeling washes over her all at once in a horrible thrill.
They hold each other’s gaze for a moment, and then Isolde looks away.
Isolde and Victoria are watching television. Isolde is curled in the cat-furred hollow of the armchair with her legs hugged
to her chest and her head upon the arm. Victoria is lying on the sofa with one leg cocked and the remote control held lightly
between her finger and her thumb. Their father has just come through the room and crumpled Isolde’s toes in his big hand and
said, Goodnight, slugs. Their mother has just called out from the stairway, Bed by eleven please. Their counterpointed footsteps,
light and heavy, have just dwindled away up the stairs, and they have just shut their bedroom door with a faint and knuckled
click.
Victoria says, “What about that group of boys you used to hang out with? Are they still pissing about with you guys?”
She speaks with the unrequited prerogative of an older sister’s demand for the whole truth. As the elder, Victoria’s perspective
on her little sister’s life is always that of a recent veteran, knowing and qualified and unshockable. It is as if, at each
new stage, Isolde merely picks up another hand-me-down costume that Victoria has grown out of and cast behind her, and as
she struggles with the arm-holes Victoria is entitled to enter the dressing room and watch. When Isolde gets her first period,
fits her first bra, plants her first kiss, chooses a dress for her first ball—at all these milestones Victoria is, or will
be, present. If not, the elder sister is then always entitled to ask, Why didn’t you
tell
me, Issie, why?
By contrast, little Isolde would never dare ask Victoria what really
happened
behind the tiny pasted window of the rehearsal-room door. She would never dare ask for details—the life under his clothes,
his breath, the touch of him. She would never ask, Was he nervous, Toria? or Who reached out first? or Did you talk together
first, for weeks and weeks—about yourselves,
about what you wanted and what you didn’t have? All these are questions Isolde
is not allowed to ask. She could not ask, Why didn’t you
tell
me? when Victoria snared her first lover, began her first affair, broke her first promise, or shed, for the first time, tiny
blossom-drops of virgin blood, for all of these slender landmarks are part of a terrain in which the younger sister does not
yet belong.
Later, when Isolde is Victoria’s age, and Victoria is still two steps ahead, at university maybe, and living elsewhere, smoking
her first papered twist of weed, walking home from her first one-night stand with her sandals slung over her wrist, for the
first time deciding what, in truth, she is going to
be
—then, perhaps, Victoria might tell her what really happened. Not every detail, because by then Victoria will be airy and
deliberately removed, waving her hand and saying, “I just think Mum and Dad were cunts about that whole thing,” or “God, that
was ages ago.” She might say, “We were going to run off together, but in the end he went back to his old girlfriend. I ran
into him on the street a few months ago. He’s fatter than he was.”
But speaking of it now would be impossible. Isolde thinks that it would be like flipping a chapter ahead in a book that she
was reading, to press Victoria for a detail, or an answer, or a map. Victoria’s life will always be two paces ahead, now and
forever, and if Isolde saw the road before she had to walk upon it herself she would simply be a cheat.
“Yeah, but it means you’ll never make the same mistakes as me,” Victoria says, unwilling to let Isolde feel she has the poorer
lot.
“No,” Isolde says, “I
will
make the same mistakes, but by the time I do they won’t seem interesting because you’ll already have done it, and I’ll only
be a copy.”
“Yeah… no,” says Victoria. “You’ve got it better. Mum and Dad are way stricter with me than they are with you. They waste
all their energy on me and by the time you come along
their standards have dropped and they can’t be bothered any more.”
“Yeah… no,” says Isolde. “I have to pretend to be the baby, and that sucks.”
“Yeah, but when I was six I was getting crayons and chalk for Christmas, and when you were six you got a pink tennis racket
in a pink glitter sleeve. The older they get, the richer they get. You had way more stuff to play with than I ever did.”
“Yeah, but that’s just it. I’m always compared to you. You aren’t compared to anybody, because you always do things first.”
“That’s balls,” Victoria says. “When’s the last time they compared you to me?”
The conversation is a comfort, because underneath it all they know that at least they occupy a place, the older and the younger,
a place they each fill as closely and completely as Isolde’s body fills the ancient cat-worn dip in the old armchair by the
wall. Underneath it all they know that it is more a thing of necessary equilibrium than any sort of failed facsimile. Each
sister claims not a mirror copy but a rough-edged ill-formed twisted half of their parents’ attention and command.
“What about that group of boys you used to hang out with?” is Victoria’s question now, and Isolde says, “Nah, I don’t know.
All the St. Sylvester boys are dicks, I reckon.”
“That’s what I thought,” Victoria says. “When I was your age.”
There is a strange mood in the rehearsal room as the jazz band assemble their instruments and unfold their music stands. It’s
the first time they’ve met for practice in three weeks, and privately everyone feels betrayed—not by Mr. Saladin, who was
always jovial and tousled and called them Princess or Madam,
but by Victoria, who fooled them all by pretending to be one
of them.
The girls are silent as they collectively suffer the gross humiliation of being the last to know. They feel a dawning indignation
that all along Victoria must have watched them founder and said nothing, that all along she sat among them in silent smug
possession of her secret. Now they are compelled to remember with embarrassment their own harmless shy flirtations with Mr.
Saladin, every remembered happy-flutter feeling poisoned now by the knowledge that he was already hers and already stolen.
They remember their woodwind tutorial when he punched the air and said,
That’s
what I’m talking about and grinned his boyish grin, in the quad at lunchtime when he briefly joined their game of hacky-sack
and then ran off with the hacky when he started to lose, before jazz practice when he strolled over and started talking about
the Shakespeare Festival and the chamber music contest and the changes to the summer uniform—
“He said she looked good in her summer uniform, way back in the first term,” says first trombone as she empties her spit valve
on to the carpet. “I was standing right there, as well.”
It is a mark of the depth of their wounding that they are pretending they suspected it all along. Everything that they have
seen and been told about love so far has been an inside perspective, and they are not prepared for the crashing weight of
this exclusion. It dawns on them now how much they never saw and how little they were wanted, and with this dawning comes
a painful reimagining of the self as peripheral, uninvited, and utterly minor.
“He had this thing he did,” the percussionist is saying, “if they were lying in the dark together, if he was talking into
the dark and he wasn’t sure whether she was smiling. He would make his forefingers into little calipers and he would keep
reaching over to check the corners of her mouth. Sometimes he would lie on his side and he would keep his fingers there, just
lightly, as they
talked on and on into the dark. They used to laugh about it. It was a thing he did.”
Bridget is in the corner, lifting her sax out of its gray furred cavity and fitting the mouthpiece together absently. Last
week she bought a number of different reeds from different manufacturers to test, numbering each one with a tiny red numeral
to remind her which is which. She removes one from its plastic sheath and checks the tiny inked number before screwing it
tight. The reed is harder than she has been used to, and probably her tongue will bleed.
“My gypsy girl,” says second trumpet. “That’s what he called her. My gypsy girl.”
The bell rings. There is a vague flurry of chair-scraping and shuffling and they all aim their half-eaten sandwiches at the
wastepaper bin and then settle into their concentric half-circle, ready for the conductor to arrive.
“They got her to admit that it had been going on since last year,” says tenor sax. “She had to give a statement to the police
and everything.”
And then they are silent for a while, dwelling separately on the unhappy realization that they, above all others, are the
ones who have been deceived.
“If you imagined yourself in French plaits and a pressed school kilt, playing ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ on tenor sax at the seventh-form
prize-giving and standing coyly in a pool of yellow light, then I’m afraid you made the wrong choice.” The saxophone teacher’s
fingernails are blood-red today, and gently tapping. “The saxophone does not speak that language. The saxophone speaks the
language of the underground, the jaded melancholy language of the half-light—grimy and sexy and sweaty and hard. It is the
language of orphans and bastards and whores.”
Bridget stands with her sax limp in her hands like a wilted flower.
“The saxophone is the cocaine of the woodwind family,” the sax teacher continues. “Saxophonists are admired because they are
dangerous, because they have explored a darker, more sinister side of themselves. In your performance, Bridget, I see nothing
grimy or sexy or sweaty or hard. Everything I see is scrubbed shiny pink and white, sedated and sanitized like a poodle at
a fair.”
“Okay,” Bridget says unhappily.
Tap-tap goes the bloody fingernail on the side of the mug.
“What do you think makes a good teacher, Bridget?”
Bridget draws her lips in between her teeth as she thinks. “I guess talent,” she says lamely. “Being good at what you’re teaching.”
“What else?”
“I guess being patient.”
“Shall I tell you what makes a good teacher?”
“Okay.”
“A good teacher,” the saxophone teacher says, “is somebody who awakes in you something that did not exist before. A good teacher
changes you in a way that means you cannot go back even if you might want to. Now you can practice and learn the pattern of
the notes and have good control over your instrument and you will be able to play that piece very competently, but until you
and I can work together to challenge and awaken and
change
some part of you, competent is all that piece will ever be.”
“I was just trying it out how Mrs. Critchley said,” Bridget blurts out. “She’s Mr. Saladin’s replacement. We had jazz band
today.”
The sax teacher narrows her eyes briefly, but all she says is, “Is that Jean Critchley?”
“She’s Mr. Saladin’s replacement,” Bridget says again.
“I’ve seen her play live. She plays trumpet.” The saxophone teacher is suddenly withdrawn, her voice cold and calm and careful,
looking Bridget up and down as if she is seeking visible signs of treachery.
“Why didn’t
you
apply?” says Bridget, her eyes widening with the thought.
“I don’t like high schools,” says the saxophone teacher.
“She doesn’t look like a Mrs. Jean Critchley. She has red glasses and she wears baggy tee-shirts with leggings and sneakers.
First thing she said,” Bridget says, brightening now, “first thing she said was, All right, shut up so I can talk about myself.
I’m the teacher who comes after the teacher who had the affair. Let’s blow it all out of the water now so we can get on and
make some music and have some fun. And you can all relax right away. They made me promise not to have an affair with any of
you.”
Bridget blinks innocently at the saxophone teacher. She is good at voices.
“Did anyone laugh?” the saxophone teacher says.
“Oh, yeah,” says Bridget. “Yeah, everyone likes her a lot.”