“Oh, but why can’t the two girls just perform a duologue about themselves?” the saxophone teacher says, enjoying herself.
“A play written for two girls.”
“There aren’t any,” Julia says. “There aren’t any plays about two girls. There aren’t any roles like that. That’s why you
have to pretend.”
“Surely you’re mistaken, Julia,” the saxophone teacher says. “Surely that isn’t right.”
Julia shrugs and looks away into the sheen of the piano and her own blurry image reflected back. She says, “There is one thing
going for me, despite all this. Danger. There’s a seduction in that. That’s the card I’ll have to play, I suppose. I’ll have
to amplify how forbidden it is, how unscripted and unprecedented, the danger of it.
“The element of danger is what will turn any happy-flutter in her chest into a powerful and thudding fear. That’s what I
have
going for me: the force of her feeling, the massive release of her trepidation, when at last she surrenders and responds.
If she surrenders. Whatever she ends up feeling, at least it won’t be ambivalent. It will be either the terror-struck forbidden
heave of her desire, massive and explosive like the breaking of a dam, or it will be the massive repelling force of her revulsion,
her opposition, her denying me. Either way, I’ve made her feel something. She’ll have to feel something. Whatever happens
next.”
The girls at Abbey Grange are forever defining each other, tenderly and savagely and sometimes out of spite. It is a skill
that will be sharpened to a blade by the finish of their fifth and final year. It is the darkest and deadliest of their arts,
that each girl might construct or destroy the image of any of the rest.
They say, Who do you think is most likely to marry first? and Who do you think will get with the most boys? and Who is most
likely to cheat? and Who will be best in bed? and then, inevitably, Who is most likely to be a lesbian, out of all the girls
in our form?
The last question is always met with shrieks and slaps and a swift intake of merry breath. In their minds they weigh up the
girls with the least conquests, the girls currently not in their favor, the girls that are marginally less attractive than
the rest. Unpopularity, silence, bookish introversion, any disinclination to follow in the footsteps of the flock—all these
are symptoms, the girls agree, as they huddle round to diagnose. They shout out names and laugh and laugh like a coven of
giddy witches casting a terrible fate.
If Julia’s name is mentioned, however, the girls will frown and flap their hands and say, “Yes, but apart from Julia.” Julia
is no fun to diagnose. She somehow does not exist in this breathy,
shrieking realm of social and sexual investiture where
girls are named without their knowledge, convicted, and condemned. The girls cannot alter Julia’s fate by saying, I reckon
Julia’s most likely to be gay. Their power has no meaning for her. She is like a loaded gun cast into their toy-box and half-buried
among the plastic rifles, the plastic revolvers, the toy cannons, the caps. They fear the glint of her.
A few of them have kissed each other for the satisfaction of the St. Sylvester boys, perhaps to earn a ride around the block
in a low-seated car, or in exchange for a stolen bottle or a crate of beer. A few of them have kissed each other at parties
in their mates’ front rooms while their friends are outside being sick into flowerpots. Not passionately—that is their defense—but
casually, and experimentally, and with no eye for affection or the promise of a sequel or a trend. These are not romances,
but selfish tallies that they will later use as a mark of their own liberalism, their own worldly free-spiritedness: the kiss
is an insurance, a proof for the later remark, Yeah course, I’ve kissed a girl.
By not speaking of Julia, the girls have the subtle advantage: they reduce the threat to almost nothing. When they pass her
in the hall, they turn their heads and simply walk on by.
There is a message waiting on the saxophone teacher’s answer machine after Julia’s lesson. The speaker swiftly and gracefully
identifies herself as one of the uninspired mothers, one of the cloying snatching mothers who would rather smother their daughters
in the fold of their bosom, clasp their daughters’ faces tight to their chests and let them be stifled and choked than lengthen
the ribbon of their leash and see them walk away.
The saxophone teacher pauses the machine with the edge of her fingernail, and stands a moment with her finger on the dial.
“The mothers always imagine that my allegiance lies with them,” she says aloud, “that our mutual adulthood functions to bind
us together against the daughter, the child. They imagine that the daughter is simply the pursuit that draws us together,
the activity we both enjoy, the monthly book club, the tennis game. The daughter is simply a medium for our friendship, an
opportunity for our togetherness, a shared interest that allows us to explore and reflect upon our adult selves.
“The mothers imagine that I am their ally against the daughter, and that they are mine: they imagine that I have to work as
hard as they do in order to forge a connection with the girl, and they roll their eyes at me and shake their heads and laugh
like the daughter is impossible, and the both of us know it. They invite me to be tender toward the girl, frustrated with
her, even despairing of her, but above all to treat her as an object, as the mere occasion for this reciprocal connection,
adult with adult, like with like.”
She comes to a halt now and then stabs the machine again, bringing the voice back to life, bringing the woman back into the
room.
“So I look forward to hearing from you,” the recorded woman continues. “Stella’s fourteen, been studying the clarinet for
almost three years now, and before that nearly six years piano. She’s really very interested in moving on to the sax. There’s
just something so dowdy and unfashionable about the clarinet, as you know, and I think she’s looking to make the move on to
something a bit sexier. Something with a bit more bite, that gives her a bit more appeal. It’s a welcome move, in actual fact.
We were worried for a time that she wasn’t interested enough in that sort of thing, just didn’t care enough. About boys and
nice clothes and all the rest of it. We were worried for a time, I don’t mind telling you that. Not that she had trouble making
friends—it was almost the opposite, really, that the friendships were just so close. You couldn’t prize them apart. Whoever
it was, the
current favorite. Always one after another, there was always a favorite, right the way through. I’d ferry them
around, to and from the cinema and all that, and they’d always sit together in the back seat with an old rug thrown right
over their heads so they could talk quietly and I couldn’t see. I’d watch in the rear-view, this shrouded tartan thing with
their two heads together and both of them whispering away. Looked like they were kissing, even. It unnerved me. I don’t mind
telling you that.
“If you could call me back on this number,” the woman says in closing, and then there is a little pip to show that the message
has come to an end.
It is thirty-five minutes before Bridget is going to die, and she is sitting on her high upholstered stool in the video store,
the till already cashed up and waiting under the counter in its dirty canvas slip. The car park outside is empty and slick,
and she can see the line of yellow streetlights peeling away from her into the black.
Bridget is remembering two girls at her primary school who had for a time become obsessed with gathering facts about sex.
They always referred to the act as
It
, and sat together for hours in grave dutiful conference as they revised and expanded their combined wisdom on the subject,
from time to time closing their eyes in long-suffering horror and saying something like “Two-on-one It. That is
so
gross.” They were secretive and guarded and unwilling to share their wisdom, like proud and weary sphinxes guarding the door
to a world that the others could not hope to understand.
Bridget recalls one athletics lesson from this period, the two girls standing together with their arms casually linked, and
watching the PE teacher with the expression of forbearing
solemnity that was appropriate to their studies of It. The PE teacher
called out, “Today we’re practicing sprints from a crouch start,” and the smaller girl immediately whispered, “Crouch start
for It.” They exchanged a grave nauseated look as if the conjured image had pained them both. Bridget felt a little jealous
as she watched these two girls share their mutual feeling of pious disgust. The smaller girl’s deliberate revulsion fascinated
her. “Crouch start for It,” she said. The subject was just too painful to say more. The taller girl looked down in sympathy
and shook her head as if to acknowledge how sickening and inescapable the whole business was. It was all around them.
The eight-year-old Bridget had been unable to comprehend the terrible relation that this particular athletics lesson bore
to the act of It, and now as she reflects upon the scene she realizes that she still has no idea how to recognize or execute
a crouch start for It. Is there even such a thing? she asks herself doubtfully, but then she recalls once more the poise and
perfect confidence of this ten-year-old girl, who is eighteen by now and probably thoroughly schooled in arts beyond the reach
of Bridget’s imagining. Bridget reflects on how little she knows. The raindrops reach the sill and quiver there. She feels
ashamed.
The saxophone teacher smoothes the newspaper and looks again at the article. The paper is old now, and there have been others,
subsidiary stories that recap this first account, stories about holding inquiries and questioning witnesses and deciding who
to blame, but this paper remains, folded into eighths, limp and graying with the hangdog look of old news. The headline reads
Girl’s Death “Terrible Waste
,” and the article is short. Bridget is unnamed, which is fitting, the saxophone teacher thinks, given just how forgettable
Bridget was. The unnamed girl was cycling
home from work, the saxophone teacher reads over and over, and she was hit by a
red sedan as she made a right turn out of the video store car park. The car drove on.
The saxophone teacher thinks, She would have been at the concert with the three of us that night, if only I’d liked her enough
to invite her. The thought nibbles at her for a moment, just as a possibility, like a new shirt that she may or may not try
on. Finally she shrugs and snuffs it out. Outside in the courtyard she can dimly hear a group of students from the drama school,
chanting and stamping their feet. She pushes the newspaper away and moves to the window to look.
Near the trunk of the ginkgo tree, six students have formed a human pyramid on a thin square of foam matting, while in front
of them a larger group pace back and forth. They are like a seething flock of dark crows in the uniform black of the Institute,
their feet bare and bloodless against the paving. From where the saxophone teacher is standing, the pyramid looks a little
like a card castle, wobbling slightly but standing firm, growing outward and upward as more and more actors withdraw from
the foreground drama and add their bodies to the tier.
The saxophone teacher watches the black flurry in the foreground for a long while. Looking back to the solid pyramid of bodies
at the base of the ginkgo tree, she is startled to see that she is being watched. One of the boys in the front row, kneeling
on the asphalt with his arms extended stiffly to either side, is looking up at her. His head is flung back, and the open collar
of his shirt shows the length of his white throat. The saxophone teacher’s first impulse is to step away from the window,
but she stays, and she thinks she sees the boy smile up at her. She looks away.
The rehearsal is coming to a close. One of the girls at the front rears up suddenly and calls out, in a rich clear voice that
fills the courtyard, “
I
imagine things when I watch people.”
And as she says it, as the marvelous peal of her voice breaks
off and the stamping and drumming comes to a swift and terrible
halt and the courtyard fills with silence like a sudden rush of water, as she says it, the card castle behind her begins to
fall. It tumbles down in a stately and choreographed cascade, a slow-motion melt. The figures of the actors tumble off to
land on light heels and knees on the foam matting, scuttling off and leaping away until the pyramid has disappeared utterly,
thawed out to a nothing-puddle of black stillness, all of the actors unmoving and silent where they have come to rest.
The girl at the front is the only figure standing now. She spreads her arms and says, “I imagine—”
There is the tiniest of pauses, the girl outstretched and full of curtailed breath that swells her ribs to bursting. Then
it is as if a spell is broken, as if an invisible curtain has come down and an invisible blackout has blanked the stage, and
all the fallen figures begin to move. They jump to their feet and dust themselves down and break into conversation, and the
saxophone teacher hears “That fall was heaps better that time, you came in right on the beat” and “We can still get that tighter,
guys” and “From the top.”
“So we agree that sexuality is an issue that we’re all interested in, at least,” the boy Felix said loudly, the first time
the first-years met to discuss the devised theater project and the King of Diamonds playing card. Felix was bossy and pert
and did not understand the humor of what he had just said, scowling at a pair of boys on the far lip of the circle who faintly
snickered.
“I liked the idea of using found stories,” one of the girls said. “From the media and our communities and all that, taking
them and using them and making them theatrical. I liked that idea.”