“Always the arriviste,” the Head of Acting said in the staff-room, with a kind of paternal amusement. “We get them too late. That’s the problem. We should have a school for sixteen-year-olds. They’d get their degree at nineteen. They’d have to drop out of high school to audition. It’d do them good.”
“They’re already formed by the time they enroll,” said the Head of Voice. “Psychically formed. Morally formed. Everything happens so early now.”
“And they love themselves so dearly,” the Head of Improvisation said. She tugged sharply at her wool and sent the ball rolling away under the table. “That’s the hardest thing to break.”
In the students’ cafeteria on the floor below, the first-years were clumped together in a similar debate. Stanley picked thoughtfully at his gray slip of pork as he listened.
“You have to admire people that come here,” one of them was saying, “people that choose to put themselves on display, people that choose to play with the very aspects of themselves that make them the most vulnerable. These people are the bravest people in the world.”
April
A fine mist of slanting rain was falling, darkening the slate and beading the swollen moss with a thin film like a silver dew. Stanley was sprawled on one of the vinyl couches that lined the corridors of the technical wing, lying on his back with his legs wrapped around the radiator pipe and reading, his thumb spread over the top edge of the spine to hold it open.
“Are you doing your reading for Early Modern?” said one of the first-year girls, coming up beside him and flopping down on to the floor.
“Yeah,” Stanley said, shifting his thumb slightly to hold his place on the page. “I’ve got The Revenger’s Tragedy. What have you got?”
“The Alchemist,” the girl said, pulling her bag open and taking out a dog-eared copy of the play. “I haven’t started. What’s yours about?”
Stanley thought for a second, and then said, “It’s about a man who puts on a disguise in order to avenge the death of someone he loves, but after his revenge is complete he finds out that he can’t take the disguise off. He’s become this person he’s pretended to be for so long.” He flipped the book around to take another look at the cover, which showed a cloaked man attempting to ravish a skeleton. The skull was brightly painted in peach and scarlet, the cheekbones rouged and the eye sockets ringed in glossy black.
“Cool,” the girl said, thoroughly unmoved. She sighed and stretched out her legs, reaching down to grip her toes with both hands. “Dance class yesterday actually annihilated me,” she said. “I hobbled all the way home. Like actually hobbled.”
“Yeah,” Stanley said. He stalled a second, trying to think of something to say next. He almost began to say how much the dance class had made him sweat, but stopped himself with the words already in his throat. He almost began to chatter in a self-deprecating way about his fitness, but stalled again and instead cast around for something to say about the dance tutor or the class itself, but he took too long to come up with something and at all once he froze in the compounded panic of realizing he had paused for too long. The girl shifted and began to stretch her other leg. The rough-edged copy of The Alchemist fell sideways off her lap and on to the floor.
“All the dance tutors at this place are sadists,” she said. “Look at that bruise.”
Stanley looked. Slender fingers of gray and purple carved across her hip and melted into a reddish cloud above the bone. She stroked the bruise impressively with one finger, her other hand peeling back the waistband of her tracksuit to expose the skin.
“Wow,” Stanley said.
“But I do bruise really easily,” the girl said. She tucked the bruise back under her waistband and resumed stretching her leg.
“Hey, this play is actually really good,” Stanley said, loosening his tongue and trying for a second time. He flapped his copy of The Revenger’s Tragedy half-heartedly against his leg. “It’s so grisly and sick.”
The girl glanced at the cover briefly. “Is that the one where the guy nails the other guy’s tongue to the floor with his dagger?”
“Yeah!” Stanley said. “And while he’s dying he’s forced to watch his wife having sex with his bastard son.”
“Yeah, I know that scene,” the girl said.
Her indifference seemed to close the conversation completely, slamming it shut with a slap that left no echo. She sighed. Stanley tapped his fingers and wondered briefly if he should reopen his book and keep reading. He compromised by turning the book over and rereading the blurb on the back.
“Did you bruise after yesterday?” the girl said after a moment, looking at Stanley with a narrow-eyed interest and flicking her eyes over him, up and down.
“I just sweated a lot,” Stanley said, feeling as he said it a wash of resignation, as if he had known he would say it all along. “Dance class makes me sweat.”
“Gross,” the girl said, and touched her bruise again through the fabric of her waistband, cupping her fingers carefully around her hip.
March
“Let’s see some chemistry,” said the Head of Acting, and nodded at them both to begin.
This time Stanley was sitting on a park bench with his feet tucked underneath him, drawing his shoulders up to his ears against the cold. The air was crisp and ginkgo-smelling.
“I’ve seen you here before,” Stanley said, “on your way to your music lesson, stepping around the leaves.”
The girl halted a little way off. She slung her music case down from her shoulder and placed it on its end in front of her, resting her wrists upon it like a teller at a tollbooth. Stanley spoke again.
“I thought,” he said, “that maybe I could make you feel like you were worth something. If you were interested. Maybe this weekend. I’d kiss you only once you were very sure that you could trust me. I’d look out for you. I promise.”
“Why?” the girl said.
“I think you’re interesting,” Stanley said. “I want to know you better.”
The wind caught the edge of the girl’s skirt and tugged at it gently. She moved her knees closer together against the draught.
“Last year,” she said, “I was standing at the bus stop after netball and one of the boys showed up on his bicycle, and I smiled at him and we talked about the people we knew and then he said, Guess what I got my girlfriend for Valentine’s Day? Pregnant. So I smiled and said, Congratulations. And then he scowled at me and he said, Jesus, we went to the doctor. She’s sixteen.”
“I don’t understand,” Stanley said.
“There’s no such thing as innocence any more,” the girl said, “there’s only ignorance. You think you are holding on to something pure, but you aren’t. You’re just ignorant. You are handicapped by everything you don’t yet know.”
“But I see something pure in you,” Stanley said quietly. “I see something in you that is different from all the others. I see a purity in you.”
“The only difference between me and any of the others,” the girl said, flatly but with a kind of relish, “is at what price and under what circumstances I am prepared to yield.”
April
“Stage fighting,” the Head of Movement said, “is also known as combat mime.”
Everyone was upright and alert today, hopping up and down on the balls of their feet and shaking out their fingertips. This was the class they had all been looking forward to, underlined on their timetables in red ink and attempted in advance in the secret of their bedrooms at home.
“Stage fighting is not a form of violence,” the Head of Movement said. “It is a form of dance, a controlled dance that is rehearsed very slowly until it is perfected, and then brought up to speed. Next year you learn basic fencing, épée and sabre and foil. This year we focus simply on how to slap, punch and kick, drawing on the arts of kickboxing, capoeira and basic acrobatics. By the end of this year you should be able to choreograph and perform a fight that simulates punching, kicking and throwing your opponent, as well as be
ing punched, kicked and thrown yourself.”
He smiled at their eagerness and added, “You’ll learn that losing a stage fight is just as difficult and demanding a task as winning one. Now. Who can give me the definition of a special effect?” He looked around, but the students were blank and distracted, hopping from foot to foot and aching to begin. “A special effect,” the Head of Movement said patiently, “is something that does not happen, it only seems to happen. Stage fighting is a special effect. The violence that you simulate does not happen on stage. Anybody who doesn’t understand this will fail this section of the course. In previous years we have had students removed from this class because they do not understand the definition of a special effect.”
He pointed at a chalked rectangle drawn on the gymnasium floor, and said, “All right. Everyone get inside the line, please.”
The students moved forward in a crush to get inside the rectangle. The area was small and they had to cluster tightly, shuffling together and clutching at each other to keep their balance and stay inside the line. The girls drew their shoulders together and became ever so slightly concave, carefully bringing their upper arms forward and together from an instinct to protect their breasts. The boys snickered and shoved each other with their shoulders and the backs of their wrists. Stanley found himself in the middle of the crush, uncomfortably pinned between a pair of girls both facing inward. The girl in front breathed into his collarbone and carefully shifted her feet so they were tucked inside his own. The rough edge of her foot touched his, and she quickly shifted her weight to twitch away.
“Before we begin fighting I want to start with a few exercises that will get us comfortable with touching each other,” the Head of Movement said. “This exercise is called The Raft of the Medusa. The aim of the exercise is to be the last person standing inside this rectangle. When I say you may begin, you must all start pushing each other. If any part of your body touches the floor outside the rectangle, you must leave the raft immediately. The last person to remain inside wins. Does everybody understand?”
There was a flurry of nodding from inside the cramped rectangle.
“Pushing only,” the Head of Movement said. “No punching. No kicking. Not yet.”
Everybody tensed their elbows and braced their legs, ready to fight. The students on the outer edge realized too late their disadvantage, and all at once they tried to angle themselves better to worm their way into the center.
“All right,” the Head of Movement said. “Go.”
The rectangular crowd immediately began to boil. A few of the students were shoved out of the rectangle within seconds; they skipped backward and retreated with a kind of rueful disappointment to watch. Stanley found himself surrounded by girls, and at first he shoved at them gingerly, careful with his hands lest he touch their breasts by accident, using mostly his shoulders and his hips. The girls were less polite. Little palms were shoving at the small of his back all of a sudden, pushing and pushing, and he found his feet slipping on the floor. He grabbed a fistful of somebody’s sweater in an effort to resist. The whole crowd lurched suddenly sideways; everybody’s bare feet arched and skidding over the floorboards, and half the class tumbled over the western chalked perimeter and off the raft. The disqualified students hopped neatly out of the way and left the rest of the group to fight.
With a large part of the class gone, the winning students could move more freely. The game became more tactical and more deliberately hostile. Stanley had one of the smaller girls in a clumsy underarm headlock and was trying to force her over the line when another student fell sideways on to him and sent all three of them staggering off the raft. The Head of Movement was standing calmly to the side. He checked his watch.
When the raft had been emptied of most of the students, the remainder formed a ring around the final fighters and began to chant and cheer. The winning three were locked in a sweaty embrace in the chalky center of the raft, skidding sideways and occasionally dropping painfully on to a knee or a hip and tugging the others down as they fell. Their legs were braced and bowed as they grappled with each other, two boys and a girl—a wiry muscular girl with the shapely and decided figure of a dancer.
Somebody on the perimeter set up a stamping rhythm, and soon all the students were stamping and stamping, their bare feet sending up tiny clouds of white dust, the steady beat filling the massive space, rising up to the lofty stippled ceiling where the hooded bulbs hung from their bluish rack unlit. The Head of Movement did not join in the stamping, but his long fingers tapped in time against his forearm and his eyes moved carefully from the ring of cheering watchers to the fighting three, and back again. Every time one of the winning fighters was shoved hard or forced closer to the chalk perimeter there was a whoop of appreciation from the crowd and an explosion of clapping and laughter. The beat got faster and faster. The Head of Movement nodded his head and sometimes smiled a tiny smile.
In a sudden fluent movement the dynamic of the struggling three abruptly changed, the boys turning upon the girl and moving to work in tandem for the first time. The tacit flare of cooperation made the Head of Movement inhale gravely and stroke the corners of his mouth with his finger and his thumb. The girl was finally ousted, hauled over the line by the boys shoving at her in a parallel surge. The boys then turned to face each other, skipping quickly away from the perimeter and back into the safety of the middle of the raft. The girl added her voice to the cheering and the stamping, and the boys were once again locked in a skidding headlock, a weary inching dance that finally ended when the two of them fell across the southern line in a tangled heap.
The first-years performed The Raft of the Medusa six times, repeating the exercise again and again until the students were flushed and sore and strained. As the morning wore on, their posture gradually began to change, hardening and drawing upward and becoming more aggressive and finally losing the curving self-conscious protectiveness that in the beginning had handicapped them all so plainly. The chalked line soon bled out into sticky tracks of gray and white, tearing outward like a dying star.
“Thank you,” the Head of Movement said after almost an hour, when the red-faced victor had sent his opponent lurching over the line for the sixth and final time. “Now you should all be nicely limbered up and you should have gotten used to touching each other. I want to start with the very basics of stage fighting and build upward.” He gestured for them to gather round. He said, “We’ll start with learning how to punch.”
May
The boy in the mask said, “I need a volunteer.”
The mask was cut away around his mouth like a jowl, curving over his upper lip so his chin and his lower teeth were exposed. The hard plastic curve around his mouth made him look a little like a marionette, shiny and rigid and hinged. The surface of the mask was smooth and flesh colored, with almond-shaped eye-holes, and attached to the boy’s face without elastic.
Several of the first-years in the audience raised their hands, grinning in a self-conscious, defensive way, and the masked boy pointed at one of them. “You,” he said, and beckoned. This was evidently a sound cue: the gymnasium was suddenly filled with the sound of a classic accordion, jolly and scissoring and gay.
The gymnasium door opened and the secretary darted in, trotting over to the Head of Acting and whispering urgently in his ear. The Head of Acting nodded, rose, and followed her out. The door closed behind them.
In the audience Stanley shivered with unknowing delight. He watched the volunteer make his way through the audience and mount the stairs to the stage. By now other masked figures were drifting coolly on to the stage from the wings, pacing about and looking impassively out at the audience through the fleshy almond holes in their cutaway masks.
“This is an exercise in the Theater of Cruelty,” the masked boy called out above the rising sound of the music. “This exercise is a challenge.”
He moved behind his volunteer. The boy stood and smiled uncertainly at them all, waiting for his instructio
ns, listening for sounds of the masked boy’s movement behind him, and rocking back and forth self-consciously on his heels. Then the masked boy knocked him to the ground. As he fell forward on to his knees, the boy’s head was flung painfully backward, his expression hurt and bewildered by the split-second impact but still half-smiling his nervous defensive smile. Swiftly the masked boy darted forward and hit him again, and the boy fell flat on to his stomach, jarring his chin on the floor. In an instant the masked boy was kneeling on his back, pinning him flat on the ground and twisting the boy’s wrists around behind his back so he couldn’t move.
Somebody ran forward with a water-trough, a wide, flat basin filled with slopping water, and shoved it roughly down onto the floor. The attacker grabbed a fistful of his volunteer’s hair, reared up, and plunged him headfirst into the water. He held his own breath as he struggled to keep the volunteer’s head submerged, looking at his writhing victim down the length of his stiff veined arms and pinching his lips together in concentration. The victim began to thrash out in desperation and fear, his legs kicking out on the floorboards, panicked and flopping like a bloody gutted fish dying on the edge of a pier.
From where Stanley sat cross-legged in the audience, the pinioned drowning boy looked headless. Stanley could see only his damp collar and the last white knob of his spine over the lip of the water-trough as he tried in vain to struggle free. He watched as the boy slapped the floorboards and writhed and the water slopped and thrashed and the accordion kept playing its jolly provincial tune. After almost twenty seconds the audience began to shift and mutter, and someone shouted, “Let him go!” The masked boy looked up with a jerk, as if jolted out of a reverie. He released his victim immediately, jumping up and stepping backward in a nimble little leap, and the volunteer reared his dripping head, coughing and spitting and taking great savage lungfuls of air. His eyes were streaming and pink-rimmed and his face was white. He sat for a moment in hurt bewilderment, quivering and gasping weakly in the middle of the stage.