The Rehearsal

FIVE

“Thanks all for coming in, people,” the counselor is saying as Isolde walks in. He raises his palms like he is a politician or a priest. “I’d really like to build on some of the issues that we raised in our last session. I thought that today we could talk about taking control.”

The room is almost full. Isolde looks around for a seat, nodding tersely at a few of her sister’s friends who look at her with sad round eyes as if they are imagining themselves in her shoes and feeling very sorry for themselves indeed. Isolde scowls. She slips into a chair and tries to scrunch down as low as possible. The counselor smiles at her, a horrible rubbery proud smile that makes Isolde’s skin creep, and she quickly looks away, down at her fingernails and the worn tatty cuffs of her school jersey. She suffers being questioned and patted and caressed by the girl sitting behind her, a stout motherly figure who was Victoria’s tennis partner in intermediate school and once shared a paper bag of sweets with Isolde under the trees at the end of the lawn.

The girl settles back into her chair like a fat tufted hen, and Isolde can hear her say to the girl sitting next to her, “They’re keeping her in the dark I reckon. Makes sense.”

“Who can tell me what the issue is here?” the counselor is saying, spreading his arms to include them all. “It starts with B,” he adds, silencing the girls who are about to volunteer possible answers that do not start with B. The girls lean back and think of all the B words they have heard the counselor use.

“Boundaries,” the counselor croons at last, and there is a collective exhalation. “Boundaries, people.”

Isolde sits very still and gives nothing away, folding into herself and glassing over as if she is pushing her face into a mask. Vultures, she thinks to herself, using her mother’s word. Her mother had said it when she saw the contented headlines in the morning paper. Vultures, she said, and then swooped down and ripped off the front page, but ineffectually so the column headline was vertically halved and the piece that remained read Teacher Sex. Vultures, Isolde thinks now, as the whispers eddy around her and the counselor smiles his plump greasy smile.

The counselor is saying, “Maybe you might let this sort of thing happen because you just don’t know how else to respond.”

Isolde sighs and wishes she were dead.

“Why do I have to go?” she asked her mother last night, slapping the pink form down next to the chopped onions and the flour. “It’s seventh formers and music students and then me. I’ll be the only fifth former there and everyone will know and it’s humiliating. They all pity me and I hate it.”

Isolde’s mother chewed at her lip in the way she did when she knew she was out of her depth.

“I suppose you could refuse to go, honey,” she said distractedly, “but it might end up seeming like you were taking a stand. You might draw attention to yourself, and that might not be what you want. It might be better for you to just go along and put your head down. I’m not sure. You decide.” She smiled in a vague but encouraging way. “Poor lamb,” was the last thing she said before turning back to the onions, her disinterest settling over her daughter like a damp chemical mist over a household fire.

Isolde snatched back the pink form and stalked out of the room. “I have to go to counseling because of you,” she snapped as she passed Victoria in the hall.

“Why?” Victoria asked, stopping and looking thoroughly surprised.

“Because they want to quarantine,” Isolde shouted. “They want to keep us all in one place so the sickness won’t spread and they can figure out a vaccine. They want to put us in a concrete yard and take our clothes off and hose us down and scrub us with sandpaper and turpentine and rags made from old Y-fronts that have turned gray. It’s like you’ve left big inky handprints on all of us, everyone you’ve ever met, but especially me, I’m the most inky, I’m like dripping ink, it’s running down my legs and arms and off my fingertips and pooling wider and wider on the floor.”

Victoria stood there in the hall with the last of the sunlight slanting across her face and didn’t say anything for a while. Isolde breathed raggedly and glared at her, and stood just inside her bedroom door, her hand on the door edge and ready to slam it on cue. Then Victoria said, “Sorry.”

“You bloody aren’t,” Isolde said. She slammed the door.

“Does anybody want to say anything before we kick off?” the counselor is saying now, and one of the girls in the back row calls out, “I do.”

Isolde is still broody and wrapped up in herself and doesn’t turn around when the girl begins to speak. She hears her say, “I don’t agree that Mr. Saladin wanted to gain control,” but it takes a moment before she registers what the girl is actually saying.

The girl says, “Sleeping with a minor isn’t exciting because you get to boss them around. It’s exciting because you’re risking so much. And taking a risk is exciting because of the possibility that you might lose, not the possibility that you might win.”

Isolde turns around to look at her.

The speaker is a seventh former, a hard-edged ink-spotted girl who smokes lonely cigarettes by the goalposts of the soccer field and sits in after-school detention with a satisfied smirk on her face to show that everything is going precisely as she has planned. She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost and pursued by frightened vicious rumors that she is possibly probably gay.

The fact that the rumors about Julia are unsupported by witness or report means that Julia’s sexuality remains an elusive property, threatening but not entirely quantifiable, predatory in an unpredictable, unpreventable way. Julia herself, surly and caustic and isolated by her headphones and her paperbacks and the curtain of hair across her face, never chooses to actively dispel the whispers that shadow her. If she is provoked she might scowl and give the finger, but provocation isn’t in fashion right now, so mostly she is simply left alone.

Now, while the girls watch Julia as if she is a carnival act and the counselor tugs nervously at the tuft of hair at the nape of his neck, Isolde becomes aware that the atmosphere in the room is changing. A cold dawning fear is rising from the girls like a scent. The belated threat posed by the now absent Mr. Saladin is plainly diminished in the face of this more insidious and unnameable threat posed by Julia. It is not simply the voicing of the opinion that frightens them. Julia is an infiltrator, a dangerous and volatile mole who might without their knowledge have a crush on any one of them, who might at any moment be imagining any one of them—there are no counseling sessions to prepare the girls against the advances of one of their own.

“The fact that Victoria was underage and virginal or whatever wasn’t exciting because he could exercise more power over her,” Julia is saying. “It was exciting because he stood to lose so much more if anyone found out.” She cocks her head to emphasize the shock value. “He wouldn’t just lose her. He would lose everything.”

Isolde looks her up and down in fascination. As she contemplates what Julia is saying, she begins for the first time to feel an interest in Mr. Saladin: Mr. Saladin, who saw in her sister something worth pursuing, who whispered things that nobody had ever said before, who risked and lost everything he had.

Why did Mr. Saladin choose Victoria? Isolde finds herself considering the question properly for the first time. She pictures her sister’s round cherry pout and round wide eyes, and the flash of red satin whenever she leans over and exposes the artful low waistband of her school kilt. She pictures Victoria in jazz band, leaning forward to turn the page with her sax slung slantwise across her body, the weight of the instrument pulling the neckstrap downward and tight against her sternum so that the upper end of the instrument lies brightly golden between the blue woollen swell of her breasts. And then Isolde thinks, Why did Victoria choose Mr. Saladin?

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?”

This is a scene from a long time ago. The saxophone teacher looks younger. Her skin is tighter underneath her eyes and the droopy muzzle lines around her mouth have not yet started to show. Patsy is surrounded by books and papers and ballpoint pens. Outside it is raining.

The saxophone teacher leans back in her chair and ponders the question doubtfully. “I knew a couple with a baby,” she says at last, “a baby boy, maybe fourteen months. The father worked all day, came home every night, and the baby would smile and simper and reach out his little arms and perform for his daddy. But if the mother left for a while, maybe left him with a relation or a neighbor if she popped out on her own, when she came back the baby would be furious. He would scowl at her and turn away from her and refuse to be held by her, and howl if she came too close. In the baby’s mind, she had no right to go away and leave him. The father’s love was conditional and it had to be fought for. The baby had to win his father over, and he did. But he saw his mother’s love as rightfully unconditional, and when she took it away he felt nothing but injustice and contempt.

“At first,” the saxophone teacher says, “I felt sorry for the mother. I thought the baby was being terribly unfair. But then I think I changed my mind.”

“You changed your mind?”

“Yes,” the saxophone teacher says. “She had a kind of power too. She had a kind of influence. That’s what I saw, in the end.”

“You haven’t really answered the question,” Patsy says. “I asked, do you think that as women gain more power in the world they find love more difficult to attain?”

“No,” the saxophone teacher says. “I object to the wording of the question. I object to the assumption that power and love are necessarily two discrete things.”

“You always object to the question,” says Patsy in mock-irritation. “We never arrive at any answers because you are always objecting to the question.”

“It’s what you learn at university,” the saxophone teacher says. “At high school they expect answers, but at university all you’re supposed to do is dispute the wording of the question. It’s what they want. Ask anyone.”

Patsy sighs and brushes a crumb off the dust jacket with the flat of her hand. “Ridiculous,” she says, but she sounds defeated.

“I had a friend in first-year,” the saxophone teacher says, “who would begin every essay the same way. Suppose she was set an essay on Images of Violence in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. She would begin the essay, ‘The problem of violence in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is twofold.’ It was always the same. No matter what she wrote on. ‘The problem of nationalism in prewar Britain was twofold.’ Always the same.”

“What if it wasn’t twofold?” Patsy says, scowling afresh at the textbook on the table.

“It always is,” the saxophone teacher says. “That’s the secret.”

“There’s this girl at school,” Bridget says, “who tells these weird lies. The reason I think they’re weird is that I don’t think she even knows she’s lying when she does it.”

“Which girl?” the saxophone teacher says.

“Willa,” says Bridget vaguely. “But you wouldn’t be able to tell. She’s good.”

Bridget fiddles with her reed for a second and then looks up.

“Like, I always made this mistake,” she says, “whenever I read the word misled I didn’t realize it was mislead, to lead somebody astray. I thought that there was a word mizle which meant to diddle somebody, and if you were mizled then it meant you’d been diddled. So I always said mizled, not miss-led.”

The saxophone teacher’s fingertips are on her saxophone hanging from her neck, and when she moves her hand she leaves gray ovals of damp that pucker and vanish in seconds.

“This girl, Willa,” Bridget says, “she was in my remedial English last year and heard me say mizled out loud and the teacher told me the right way to say it and we all laughed about it, because it was such a stupid mistake. And then last week we were sitting at lunch, a whole group of us, and Willa starts telling us about how she always thought mizle was actually a word, and she says mizled instead of miss-led. She repeats the whole story back to us as if it’s her own.

“I watched her really carefully,” Bridget says, “and she was looking at me when she said it, all casual and laughing at herself, and I truly don’t think she knew that she was telling my story. She would have looked guilty or avoided me or something. I think she’d just heard me make the mistake and she liked the sound of it and after a while she made herself believe that the story was hers.”

“Did you shame her?” the saxophone teacher says. “In front of everybody?”

“No,” Bridget says. “Everyone would have thought I was lame.”

“So nobody knew she was lying.”

“No.”

“And the next time you say mizled by accident, everyone is going to think you only want to be like Willa.”

“Yeah,” says Bridget. “If I make the mistake again.”

“And you know that Willa definitely does not read mizled in her head whenever she sees the word misled.”

“No,” Bridget says stoutly. “It’s my thing. And anyway she laughed at me in remedial English.”

“Well,” the saxophone teacher says. “It’s certainly not the most heroic story to poach from another person and call your own. I’m sure I can think of better.” She moves her hand again and the gray finger-spots of damp turn to vapor and melt away.

Bridget is flushed, unable to voice coherently the indignation and even rage she feels toward this liar Willa, the plunderer, the unashamed thief. Bridget is never rich in tales about herself, however unheroic, yet she is now a fraction poorer, her life shaved a fraction thinner, her mind a fraction less unique, because of this girl’s theft.

“But now she’s got this memory,” Bridget says, struggling on. “A real memory of it, of every time she’s ever read that word. And she laughs at herself and says, What an idiot, like she can’t believe how silly she is. And she isn’t. Silly. She knew the right way to say it the whole time.”

“Maybe she’s just a liar,” the saxophone teacher says.

“But if she doesn’t know that she’s lying,” Bridget says, almost desperately now, “and nobody else knows that she’s lying, and she’s got this real memory in her head—”

Bridget breaks off, working her mouth like a caught fish.

“Then it might as well be true,” she says at last, and in her distraction flaps her hands against her sides, once, twice, and then she is still.

“I had Mr. Saladin in fifth form,” Julia says offhand in her lesson on Monday afternoon.

“Did you?” the saxophone teacher says.

“For School Cert music,” Julia says. “I always thought he was just a bit of a nerd.”

“Oh,” the saxophone teacher says in surprise, this concept of a nerdy Mr. Saladin being altogether new to her. She rolls the idea around the inside of her mouth for a moment.

“She was in my music class that year,” Julia continues, a little dreamily. “Victoria was. That must have been way before they got together—she wasn’t taking woodwind tutorials then. I remembered that the other day, and ever since I’ve been thinking and thinking, trying to recall some incident where I remember the two of them together, some incident that I can extract from the rest of the year and make it mean much more than it actually did.”

“And?”

“Once,” Julia says, “once Mr. Saladin said, Victoria, if you touch that recorder one more time in the next hour you are going to meet a swift and untimely death, and don’t you dare test me to see if I mean it.” Julia erects the flat-edged arms on her music stand that hold her music in place. “I should bring it up in counseling,” she says. She snorts inelegantly. “And then I should cry.”

“What happened in counseling today?” the saxophone teacher says.

“Criticism is constructive, comparison is abuse,” Julia says. “Like, ‘I find your attitude hurtful’—that’s criticism, that’s okay. ‘I think you are so much like your mother’—that’s comparison, that’s not okay. We learned that first, and then we did role-plays. Role-play is a useful tool for exploring a situation from a different perspective.”

The saxophone teacher says nothing, waiting for Julia to continue, and strokes the rough ceramic edge of her mug with her thumb.

“So I put up my hand,” Julia says, “and I go, But what if it’s a same-sex relationship? I go, Surely comparison plays a much bigger part in same-sex relationships. Like, I’m fatter than you, or I’m more masculine than you, or I’m the mumsy one, or I’m the sugar daddy, or whatever. I said to the counselor, If comparison is abuse, does that mean you reckon same-sex couples are more abusive than ordinary couples?”

Julia rocks back and forth on her shuffling feet, exultant in the pale afterglow of her faulty teenage logic and remembering the fearful disgusted silence of the classroom, the counselor rubbing at his forehead and the girls scowling back at her across the void.

“The counselor just goes, Julia, we are not discussing same-sex relationships right now. Mr. Saladin was a man and Victoria was a girl. Let’s not deviate. And he uses past tense like he always does, as if they’re both dead.”

Julia comes to an end now, picks up her saxophone and begins to play. She has censored the last part of the scene just before the bell rang, as the girls turned back to face front and the counselor frowned and fished for his notes. One of the beautiful girls turned around in her seat and hissed, “Why do you always have to bring up things like that? Every class you say something like that, just to watch how uncomfortable we all get. It’s like you can’t get it out of your head and you say it just for kicks. It’s disgusting.”

Sometimes, for her own amusement, the saxophone teacher tries to imagine what it would be like if the casting were to change. She imagines the girl who is playing Bridget in the coveted role of Isolde, and in her mind’s eye she converts the girl, ironing out her lanky nothing-hair into a glossy sheet that falls sheer from a center part, rosying her cheeks and transforming her expression into the careless wounded look that has become Isolde’s signature. She adds a silver watch and a delicate silver link necklace beneath the collar of her school uniform. Isolde’s character twists this necklace vaguely around her fingertip from time to time, or else lifts it into her jaw and chews it while she is thinking, the chain link biting into the smooth skin of both cheeks like a fine silver bridle.

Needless to say, Isolde’s part is not coveted because of any qualities inherent in Isolde herself: Isolde’s part is coveted because of her proximity to the scandal surrounding her sister. The resounding echo of dishonor and disgrace renders her powerful, in the same way that the beautiful girls who say “I just need to be alone for a while” are rendered powerful, thereafter attended at all times by grave concerned servants who flap about and whisper to each other, “I’m worried she might do something to hurt herself.” Even dim-witted Bridget can see that Isolde’s proximity counts for a great deal.

It makes the saxophone teacher smile to imagine mousy Bridget in Isolde’s role. It makes her think fondly that maybe there is a glimmer of hope after all for this pale stringy rumpled girl who chews at the end of her hair and wears her kilt just a fraction too high and tries so desperately hard.

For the role of Bridget the saxophone teacher imagines casting the girl who is currently playing Julia, mentally redressing her in a school uniform that is musty and overlarge and ever so slightly wrinkled. She imagines the girl’s posture changing, becoming withdrawn and apologetic, withering in the way that a rind of raw bacon shrinks away from the heat of the pan. The role of Bridget would be the easiest of the three, because Bridget is a victim, and victims are easy. After playing Julia, the role of Bridget would be a cinch.

Into the role of Julia the saxophone teacher inserts the round-faced girl who is currently playing Isolde. This transformation is the hardest to picture, because it is the most subtle. The saxophone teacher reflects that the girl behind Isolde is possibly too virginal to play Julia: the perfect vanity of Julia’s self-loathing is something that this girl is not yet sullied enough to grasp.

The saxophone teacher thinks fondly of her students as she sits at the window with her chin on her fist and looks out over the rooftops and the clouds. Then there is a knock at the door and she puts her mug of black-leaf tea to one side. She smoothes her trouser leg and says, “Come in.”

The ginkgo tree rises out of a small square patch of earth in the middle of the courtyard. The concrete bulges and crumples in peaks around the base of the trunk where the tree has shifted in the ground. The fallen leaves are trodden by now into a yellow-smelling paste, choking the drains and fouling the cobbles with a dirty sallow film.

She is still early, and dimly she can hear the low honk of a tenor sax playing an ascending scale, the sound drifting over the slate tiles and down into the empty courtyard with its naked ginkgo tree. Rising above the courtyard is the old observatory tower, closed to the public now, the white-ribbed dome stained a patchy lichen green, the stippled wrought-iron staircase waxed over with bird droppings and dirt.

The saxophone teacher’s studio is in a sprawling cluster of buildings that once housed the museum and a few obscure departments of the university. Now the bricked quadrangles and cloisters and narrow unexpected gardens are privately leased, the old exhibition rooms divided into offices and studio spaces and stores.

The tenor sax moves up a semitone and repeats the exercise. Isolde checks her watch: she is almost fifteen minutes early. She swings her sax case idly and looks around the courtyard for something to do. The concrete is blackened and dulled with the recent rain, glum puddles pooling underneath the drainpipes, the birds shrugging off the drips as they hop between the wires. Isolde steers herself vaguely away from the tree and the high observatory tower, and wanders into an alley with the dim purpose of finding a bakery and buying a hot bun.

As she passes through the cloisters she begins to hear the low thump of a far-off drumbeat. Sometimes there is free theater or performance art by the hot-bread wagons that park on the far side of the cloisters, and she absentmindedly pursues the sound through a narrow arch and down a wet bricked alley until she comes to an open door.

The door is halved horizontally by a steel bar, and at chest-height there is a shiny patch where the oil from thousands of hands has worn the paint away. At present the door is wedged open with a brick, and from within Isolde can hear shouting and the clear thump of a drum.

She slips in quietly, padding down the corridor and up a small set of white-nosed stairs. She passes several dressing rooms with doors ajar and realizes that she must have entered the old auditorium by the players’ door. She hesitates and almost turns back, but the drum-thump is louder now and she can hear voices, and she resolves to go on and at least take a look before slipping back the way she has come. She emerges in the thick velvet blackness of the wings, and inches forward in the dark until she finds a gap in the cloth that will give her a view of the stage.

From the wings the stage looks chaotic, the chalk and pencil lines all visible, the painted flats slantwise and cramped together and unbeautiful, and on the far side the jumbled mess of props and costumes in the wings opposite. Isolde can see a small number of backstage watchers, separated from each other by the quivering upright cloth of the wings, some in costume and standing tense on the balls of their feet as they wait for a cue. She can see past the footlights into the foggy dark underbelly of the two-tiered auditorium, and in the foreground the silhouetted players lit around their edges like the bright thread around the rim of a solar eclipse.

In center stage there is a boy in a scarlet turban, wearing shabby coat-tails, a torn dirty ruff, and white gloves that are loose at the wrist and soiled. Vertical black diamonds are painted over each eye, spearing down his cheeks and cutting a sticky greasy track through the white powder on his face. They give him an odd haunted look, merry and melancholy at once. From where she stands Isolde can barely see his profile, just the curve of his cheek and the swell of his turban above his temple and a flash of black diamond every time he turns his head.

“This is a complete deck of cards,” the boy is saying into the dark, shuffling a deck of cards so they cascade neatly from his right hand to his left. “No joker. Aces low. The card you draw from this deck will be yours to keep. You will carry it around with you always like a dirty secret.”

With a flourish the boy fans the cards in an arc on the felt table in front of him. Her eyes are focusing now, and Isolde becomes aware of others on the stage, clothed in red and black and foaming around this central boy like lepers. The boy is tall and proud and glittering, harshly lit as if he is a figure in an overexposed photograph, bright and misted and glassy-eyed against the glare.

“If you pick a card of a black suit you will be attracted to men. If you pick a card of a red suit you will be attracted to women. The number value on any spot card indicates your sexual prowess. Ten means you’re good; ace means you only think you’re good.”

The boy is whipping the cards out of the pack as he speaks, holding them up between his fingers and his thumb, then puckering his hand swiftly so the card pops out and flutters into the air above him. He catches the fluttering card with his free hand, his other hand already reaching to pick up the next. The effect is rather like he is juggling, the cards tossed up in an explosive little arc and snatched away before they fall.

“If you pick a court card, your sexual life might get a little more complicated. In general, a queen of any suit forces you to cross-dress, a king will give you a sadistic tendency and a jack will give you a masochistic tendency. But there are exceptions.”

The kettle-drum roll is building and building. As the drum roll gets slowly louder, the boy becomes gradually more urgent. His movements get faster and his throat gets tighter and his voice gets more insistent. The black-clothed figures on the stage have begun to writhe.

“The King of Diamonds is the only king to carry an axe instead of a sword. For this reason he is known as the Man with the Axe. If you draw the Man with the Axe, your sexual appetite may well develop into a perversion.

“All the court cards are shown in full face except for three: two of the jacks and one of the kings are always in profile. If you draw one of these one-eyed cards, you will be prone to self-deception and dishonesty.

“But the most important of all the court cards is the Queen of Spades.”

Someone collides heavily with Isolde from behind. She staggers painfully and whips around. A boy has fallen back against the wing-cloth, swearing and clutching a handful of fabric to steady himself, his feet slipping on the worn chalky floorboards and his free arm sawing back and forth as he tries to regain his balance. He fumbles to keep hold of the scepter he is holding, but it falls with a clatter and rolls away under a fold of cloth.

He peers at her sharply and frowns. “What are you doing here?” he hisses, already ducking down to retrieve his scepter.

“I was just watching,” Isolde says, taking a hasty step back as the boy scrabbles around in the half-dark. “Sorry.”

“Stanley!” hisses one of the lepers on stage. “Stanley, that’s you!”

There is no time for Isolde to say more. The boy grabs his scepter, jumps to his feet and hurries onstage, righting his crown and flipping his scepter up in the brief half-second before he is illuminated. Isolde’s last glimpse of him before he dissolves into the harsh stage light is of a face in transformation, caught between a natural expression and a caricature, changing from the inside in the way the bathwater skin begins to pucker and depress when the plug is pulled from underneath.

Isolde’s heart is still thumping from the collision and she suddenly feels ashamed that she is watching without invitation. She turns and slips away, retreating down the white-nosed steps she entered by, padding softly down the narrow corridor and finally bursting out into the ginkgo-smelling bright of the day.