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.
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.”
“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.”
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.”