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.
Saturday
“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.”
Wednesday
“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 wa
s 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.
Monday
“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.”
Thursday
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.”
Friday
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 g
round. 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.