The Rehearsal

by Eleanor Catton

  Julia laughs and shreds her grass even smaller.

  “But you were brilliant,” Isolde says. “Standing up to him like that. Like you did.”

  “He’s scared of me now.”

  “So is everyone, after what you said,” Isolde says, meaning it as a joke, but Julia frowns and shakes her head.

  “I was paraphrasing, anyway,” she says. “It’s not like I made it up. Dumb shits. Not you.”

  “Oh, no,” Isolde says quickly. Her nervousness has given way to a kind of giddiness, a reckless charged feeling that is keeping her heartbeat in her throat and her vision sharpened in awareness of Julia’s total proximity, the fall of her hair around her face and the every movement of her hands as they pick away at the yellow balding patch of lawn. Julia’s hands are thin and reddish, with nibbled patches of dark nail polish in the center of each flat-nibbed nail. She has a few loops of dirty string knotted around her bony wrist, and on the back of her hand a few notes to herself in blue ink, several days old now so the ink has furred out into the web of tiny creases on her skin. Even looking at Julia’s hands seems unbearably sensual to Isolde, and she quickly draws her gaze away, out across the quad where a group of girls are clapping a rhythm as they rehearse a set for the school dance challenge.

  “We’re the ones with the power,” Julia is saying. “That’s the real lesson from this whole Mr. Saladin thing. The lesson they don’t want us to learn.”

  “Oh,” Isolde says, looking again at Julia’s hands.

  “It’s because of where we are in the power chain. We can be damaged, but we can’t damage others. Well, I suppose we can damage each other, but we can’t damage our teachers or our parents or whatever. They can only damage us. And that means we get to call the shots.”

  “What does calling the shots mean?” Isolde says.

  Julia tosses her head in a brooding way. “Everyone worships the victim,” she says. “That’s all I’ve learned from this place, victim-worship. In fourth form I rowed for the coxed quad in the Nationals, right? We turned up and we were clearly the worst team in the tournament. We just didn’t have good enough gear, the quad was really old and heavy, we hadn’t been training for long enough. But because we were the underdogs we really believed we were going to win. Because that’s what happens. In the last ten seconds, the underdogs pull through and win by a canvas, and good triumphs over evil and money doesn’t matter in the end. I remember sitting there in the boat before the race with my oars ready and waiting for the buzzer and thinking, We’re really going to show them when we win.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Course not,” Julia says. “Some rich school with a flash fiberglass boat won by about a mile. We were the last team over the finish by at least forty-five seconds. But I’m just pointing out the victim thing. If you’re the victim, you really do believe you’re going to come out on top. It’s what we learn here. Worship the victim. The loser will win.”

  Isolde looks puzzled. She’s a little in awe of the way Julia spits out her opinions, little rehearsed pieces that she delivers with her eyes flashing and her head cocked. Her opinion is more like a challenge than a point of view.

  “You know,” Julia says. “Back in the day, schools would have special desks for the brainiest kid in the class. But the brainiest kid isn’t set apart anymore. Instead we have the remedial block, and the special needs block, and the careers and counseling building. They’re the ones who are set apart from the rest.”

  Isolde says, “You think people worship my sister.”

  “Yeah, I do,” Julia says.

  Isolde looks sideways at the older girl, and finds that she has nothing to say. She tugs a pale shard of ham out of her roll with her fingers, and nibbles it carefully.

  “So what was it like,” Julia says, “with Victoria?” She has unwrapped a cereal bar but is eating it slowly, pinching off the sweaty grains between her thumb and forefinger, and rolling them to a greasy ball, one by one. The girls often eat in this mincing way when they are in nervous company.

  “What do you mean?” Isolde asks.

  “I just meant—she’s your sister. Did she talk to you about it afterward and stuff? Did you guess, while it was happening? Is she going to be okay?”

  Julia’s heart is beating fast. Her instinct is to act tougher than she feels, to make no concessions, to woo Isolde by a kind of reckless baldness, a brash and unapologetic ownership of hard opinion that will make the younger girl look up at her in awe. At the same time Julia is burying a thudding feeling of lonely vulnerability, a simple childlike yearning to be touched, to be gathered up in the other girl’s arms and kissed and crooned at. Even as she speaks aggressively, as she delivers her opinions and shrugs and scowls as if she doesn’t care, a part of her is trying to show the other girl that she could be tender, underneath; that she could be sweet and delicate and thirsty, that the animal precepts of her feminine nature are not quite lost. It’s a strange thing to keep the two in balance: the appearance of hard with the appearance of soft. Julia feels ravaged by the effort, as if she might easily burst into tears at this very moment, sitting here on the grass.

  Isolde pinches a half-moon of cucumber with her fingers and licks its dewy edge as she thinks about the question. She is about to reply when a shadow falls across the two of them, and they look up.

  It’s the beautiful girls, and they are all smiling, thin little curved smiles that press their lips tight together into a cruel reversal of their usual slack-mouthed pout.

  “Got yourself a girlfriend at last, Julia?” the most beautiful girl says. “Going to take her home to show your mum?”

  Julia looks up at her and says nothing. Isolde is looking from face to face and trying to decide whether she should smile, even a bit.

  “She going to brush away some cobwebs?” the beautiful girl says again. “Clean you out a bit? Is that the idea?”

  They snicker. Isolde’s almost-smile fades a little.

  “Did you dial her in? Slip her some cash for the privilege?”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, are you like twelve?” Julia snaps. She reaches for her headphones and her paperback, and begins packing her bag to leave.

  “No,” says the beautiful girl’s sidekick, stepping forward in a moment of rare glory, “but she is, isn’t she?”

  She points at Isolde, and Isolde feels herself turn scarlet. She wonders whether she should point out she’s actually fifteen, or whether that would simply give them ammunition for another joke. All the beautiful girls laugh. Julia looks thoroughly irritated at her own mistake, and continues shoving the remains of her lunch into her bag.

  “I guess you couldn’t find anyone your own age who was keen,” says the sidekick.

  Julia says, “Just fuck off, Tiffany. Whatever you’re trying to do, you’re not doing it. Fuck off.”

  “So if she’s the tough one,” the beautiful girl says, turning now to Isolde, “what does that make you? The feminine one? Isn’t that the way it works—there always has to be a man and a woman anyway? Like a big old game of pretend?”

  Isolde, nervous and caught between public denial and public defense of something she doesn’t yet understand, simply tries to smile, a nervous tight-lipped smile that the beautiful girls evidently take as a confirmation of the taunt. The leader casts around for something further to say, but ends up just saying “Faggots!” as a way of punctuating the scene, and flounces off with her servants in her wake. The group of them spear across the quad like a tiny blue comet, its head bright and beautiful and its ragged tail getting duller and more ordinary as it trails away.

  “Cunts,” says Julia under her breath, and she tugs savagely at the zipper of her schoolbag.

  “Sorry,” says Isolde.

  “Sorry,” says Julia.

  The first bell rings but Julia and Isolde make no move to rise. They sit on the grassy verge side by side and shred grass.

  “I heard she had a nose job anyway,” Isolde says. “The main girl. Last year.”
>
  “Can I have a bit of your doughnut?” Julia says, because underneath it all, the ordinary rules of thieving still apply.

  Tuesday

  The role of Mrs. Bly requires a fat suit, and special latex pouches that slip into either cheek to fatten the jaw. The fat suit is impeccable. It is made mostly of silicone, sculpted especially for the woman’s frame, and it is heavy enough to make her stagger when she walks. She is wearing a tubular denim skirt that buttons up the front, and a gold link necklace with a slender golden charm, and she has rouged her fattened cheeks and sprayed her hair with scented mist. She waddles gracefully into the room and descends upon one of the armchairs, sighing and reaching down to rub her artificially fattened calf. You can’t even tell it’s a fat suit. The saxophone teacher almost forgets to speak, she’s so busy admiring the effect.

  “You were recommended to me by one of the Tupperware mothers,” Mrs. Bly says. “She said her daughter swapped over to you after that whole scandal at the school, and she’s been very pleased.”

  “I’m glad,” the saxophone teacher says. “Yes, I’ve had a considerable influx of students this year from Abbey Grange.”

  “Wasn’t the whole business just terrible,” Mrs. Bly says, and she puckers her lips and squints her eyes and gives a merry chuckle.

  “Catalytic,” the saxophone teacher says in pretended agreement, guessing that Mrs. Bly won’t pause for long enough to think about the word. She doesn’t.

  “It was just terrible,” she says again. “The girl is ruined. She’s damaged goods now. And all the girls are keeping their distance of course.”

  “As they should be,” the saxophone teacher says.

  “Because it spreads like a virus, that’s what I said to my girls,” Mrs. Bly says, drawing the vast spread of denim over her knee and puckering her lips to form a little thatched smile that draws all the wrinkles around her lips into a single central nub. “That kind of stain doesn’t come out in the wash.”

  The saxophone teacher suddenly feels weary. She sits down. “Mrs. Bly,” she says, “remember that these years of your daughter’s life are only the rehearsal for everything that comes after. Remember that it’s in her best interests for everything to go wrong. It’s in her best interests to slip up now, while she’s still safe in the Green Room with the shrouded furniture and the rows of faceless polystyrene heads and the cracked and dusty mirrors and the old papers scudding across the floor. Don’t wait until she’s out in the savage white light of the floods, where everyone can see. Let her practice everything in a safe environment, with a helmet and kneepads and packed lunches, and you at the end of the hall with the door cracked open a dark half-inch in case anyone cries out in the long hours of the night.”

  The spiderweb lasso of creases around fat Mrs. Bly’s mouth loosens slightly.

  “The good news,” the saxophone teacher says briskly, turning now to her diary, “is that I have an opening on Wednesday afternoon, if that suits your daughter’s schedule. One of my students was hit by a car.”

  “Oh, isn’t it dangerous,” Mrs. Bly says. “I don’t let Rebecca cycle. I flat out refuse to let her cycle anywhere at all. Wednesday afternoon is perfect.”

  “At four.”

  “At four.” Mrs. Bly chuckles again. “She’ll be so pleased,” she says. “She’s practiced so hard to get her clarinet up to scratch, and she’s wanted this so badly. It’s as if for the first time in her life something has just begun to blossom.”

  Friday

  “I suppose you didn’t know Bridget,” the saxophone teacher says to Isolde one afternoon.

  “The girl who died? She was the year above, in sixth form.”

  “She was one of my students.”

  “Oh,” Isolde says. “No, I didn’t know her.” She stalls a moment, looking clumsy and rocking back and forth on her heels. “Are you okay?” she asks finally, wincing to show a kind of concern.

  “Wasn’t it a great shock,” the saxophone teacher says.

  “Yeah,” Isolde says.

  “Everyone must be terribly upset. At your school and so forth.”

  “Oh,” Isolde says. “Yeah, they had an assembly.”

  “Just an assembly?”

  “And they flew the flag at half-mast.”

  “I suppose everyone is still terribly upset,” the saxophone teacher says, “skipping class, weeping, remembering everything that was irreplaceable about Bridget.”

  “I suppose so. She was in the year above. I don’t know anyone that knew her.” Isolde is wearing the half-stricken expression of someone who is required, but ill equipped, to offer condolence or advice about death. She shuffles uncomfortably and looks at the floor.

  “Bridget,” the saxophone teacher says abruptly, changing tack, “was my least favorite student. Bridget had a way of bucking and rearing her pelvis when she played that I privately found a little distasteful. Bridget would lean back with her knees bent and her eyes closed, tensing up and preparing to catapault her weight forward on to the balls of her feet, the saxophone rearing up like a golden spume about to break and fall. The muscles in her jaw were tight. I bent over Bridget’s notebook to avoid looking at her, scribbling curt bullet-points in the margin for her to remember in her practice. Tone, I wrote, and then underneath, Brightness.”

  Shyly, almost respectfully, Isolde slips out of herself and becomes Bridget—not the real Bridget, just a placeholder, a site for the saxophone teacher to aim at, a figure to address. She stands hangdog in the middle of the room with her sax tucked against her hip and her hair across her face. She doesn’t speak.

  “This was the last time I saw Bridget,” the saxophone teacher says. “She came to the end of ‘The Old Castle’ and removed the sax from her mouth, shoving her lower jaw forward and back several times as if repositioning a set of dentures. She’d practiced. She always practiced. That was one of the things I didn’t like about Bridget so much. I asked her, What did you learn in counseling today? And Bridget said, This week we’re talking about guilt. About how guilt can be illuminating. We’re doing role-plays based on ideas about guilt.

  “Guilt, I said. And Bridget said, rushing on with this rare flash of pleasure that she was owning the spotlight, that the voice she was using was for once her own, and worth hearing, she said, Guilt is really important. It’s the first step on the road to something better.”

  Isolde’s toes are ever so slightly pigeoned, her knees inward turning and her hips awkwardly thrust. She rubs the bell of her sax with her finger and looks at the saxophone teacher’s shoes.

  “So I said,” the sax teacher says, “Bridget, I think you are being deceived. Guilt is primarily a distraction. Guilt is a feeling that distracts us from deeper, truer feelings. Let me give you an example. You might feel guilty if you become attracted to someone who is forbidden to you. You feel attraction, and then you remember you are not allowed to be attracted to this person, and then you feel guilt. Which do you think is the more primary of these feelings, attraction or guilt?

  “I guess attraction, said Bridget. Because it came first.

  “And I said, Good. Guilt is secondary. Guilt is a surface feeling.”

  Isolde nods a tiny nod, to show she’s listening. The saxophone teacher is glazed over now, the memory filling her vision like a glossy cataract over each staring eye.

  “I said that,” she says, “because Bridget was my least favorite student. I said that because I didn’t care for Bridget much at all.”

  The memory dissolves and her vision sharpens once again.

  “What have you learned in counseling?” she says, rounding on Isolde with a savage, narrowed look, and the girl blinks and straightens and returns invisibly to herself.

  Isolde is not sure what answer she should give. As she hesitates and paws uncomfortably at the sax around her neck she thinks about the girl, the one assembly and one half-masted flag, the never-scheduled counseling sessions about her death, and the paper cutout convenience grief that some of the older girls
wielded for a week or so, just to earn a half-hour’s freedom and a pass to the nurse.

  The saxophone teacher is still looking hard at Isolde, waiting for an answer.

  Isolde says, quietly and full of shame, “In counseling we all mourn everything that was irreplaceable about my sister. We grieve for everything about Victoria that is now lost.”

  Monday

  Julia comes straight to her lesson from afternoon detention. She is almost late, and when the saxophone teacher opens the door Julia is still red faced and sweating a little, her cycle helmet trailing from her wrist.

  “My teacher is an arsehole,” she says in summary, once they are inside. “Mrs. Paul is an arsehole. They have to write a reason on the detention slip, and I said, Why don’t you write, ‘Saying out loud what everyone was thinking anyway.’ So she made it double. I fucking hate high school. I hate everything about it.”

  “Why did you get detention in the first place?” the saxophone teacher says admiringly, but Julia just shakes her head and scowls. She takes a moment to unwrap and to fish for her music, and the saxophone teacher stirs her tea and tilts her head as she waits.

  “When you leave, and all of this is over,” the sax teacher says, “you will always have one schoolteacher you will remember for the rest of your life, one teacher who changed your life.”

  “I won’t,” Julia says. “I’ve never had a teacher like that.”

  “You will have,” the saxophone teacher says. “Once you’ve got a few years’ distance and you can look back cleanly. There will be some Miss—Miss Hammond, Miss Gillespie—there will be some teacher you remember above all the others, one teacher who rises a head above them all.”

  Julia is still looking skeptical. The saxophone teacher waves her arm and continues.

  “But how many teachers are lucky enough to have had one student who changed their lives?” she asks. “One student who really changed them. Let me tell you something: it doesn’t happen. The inspiration goes one way. It only ever goes one way. We expect our teachers to teach for the love of it, to inspire and awaken and ignite without any expectation of being inspired and awakened in return; we expect that their greatest and only hoped-for joy would be, perhaps, a student returning after ten or twenty years, dropping by one morning to tell them just how much of an influence they were, and then disappearing back to the private success of their own lives. That’s all. We expect our teachers every year to start anew, to sever a year’s worth of progress and forged connection, to unravel everything they’ve built and move back to begin work on another child. Every year our teachers sow and tend another thankless crop that will never, ever come to harvest.”