The Rehearsal

others, are the ones who have been deceived.

Wednesday

“If you imagined yourself in French plaits and a pressed school kilt, playing ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ on tenor sax at the seventh-form prize-giving and standing coyly in a pool of yellow light, then I’m afraid you made the wrong choice.” The saxophone teacher’s fingernails are blood-red today, and gently tapping. “The saxophone does not speak that language. The saxophone speaks the language of the underground, the jaded melancholy language of the half-light—grimy and sexy and sweaty and hard. It is the language of orphans and bastards and whores.”

Bridget stands with her sax limp in her hands like a wilted flower.

“The saxophone is the cocaine of the woodwind family,” the sax teacher continues. “Saxophonists are admired because they are dangerous, because they have explored a darker, more sinister side of themselves. In your performance, Bridget, I see nothing grimy or sexy or sweaty or hard. Everything I see is scrubbed shiny pink and white, sedated and sanitized like a poodle at a fair.”

“Okay,” Bridget says unhappily.

Tap-tap goes the bloody fingernail on the side of the mug.

“What do you think makes a good teacher, Bridget?”

Bridget draws her lips in between her teeth as she thinks. “I guess talent,” she says lamely. “Being good at what you’re teaching.”

“What else?”

“I guess being patient.”

“Shall I tell you what makes a good teacher?”

“Okay.”

“A good teacher,” the saxophone teacher says, “is somebody who awakes in you something that did not exist before. A good teacher changes you in a way that means you cannot go back even if you might want to. Now you can practice and learn the pattern of the notes and have good control over your instrument and you will be able to play that piece very competently, but until you and I can work together to challenge and awaken and change some part of you, competent is all that piece will ever be.”

“I was just trying it out how Mrs. Critchley said,” Bridget blurts out. “She’s Mr. Saladin’s replacement. We had jazz band today.”

The sax teacher narrows her eyes briefly, but all she says is, “Is that Jean Critchley?”

“She’s Mr. Saladin’s replacement,” Bridget says again.

“I’ve seen her play live. She plays trumpet.” The saxophone teacher is suddenly withdrawn, her voice cold and calm and careful, looking Bridget up and down as if she is seeking visible signs of treachery.

“Why didn’t you apply?” says Bridget, her eyes widening with the thought.

“I don’t like high schools,” says the saxophone teacher.

“She doesn’t look like a Mrs. Jean Critchley. She has red glasses and she wears baggy tee-shirts with leggings and sneakers. First thing she said,” Bridget says, brightening now, “first thing she said was, All right, shut up so I can talk about myself. I’m the teacher who comes after the teacher who had the affair. Let’s blow it all out of the water now so we can get on and make some music and have some fun. And you can all relax right away. They made me promise not to have an affair with any of you.”

Bridget blinks innocently at the saxophone teacher. She is good at voices.

“Did anyone laugh?” the saxophone teacher says.

“Oh, yeah,” says Bridget. “Yeah, everyone likes her a lot.”

“So they laughed. They laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of it. The prospect that Mrs. Jean Critchley might seduce one of you, might draw any one of you toward her by subtle and insidious means, might push one of you against the music-cupboard door and press her cold cheek against yours so her lips are almost touching the feathered lobe of your ear. The prospect that one of you might want her, even, and pick her out as an object and a prize. That one of you might blush every time she looks at you, might stammer and stumble and take every opportunity to divert through the music block in the hope of brushing past her in the hall.”

“Yeah,” Bridget says. “She blew it all out of the water, so we could get on and make some music and have some fun.”

“So you got on and made some music and had some fun.”

“Yeah,” Bridget says again.

“And Mrs. Jean Critchley suggested that you play this piece like an ice-cream jingle.”

“She didn’t say that.” Bridget senses she’s winning, in some obscure way, and draws herself up a little higher. “She just said, Sometimes it’s not about originality. Sometimes it’s just about having fun.”

The saxophone teacher is frowning. Inside she asks: does she feel jealous? She reminds herself that Bridget is her least favorite student, the student she mocks most often, the student she would least like to be. She reminds herself that Bridget is lank and mousy, with a greasy bony face and a thin hookish nose and pale lashes that cause her to resemble a ferret or a stoat.

She is jealous. She doesn’t like the idea of Mrs. Jean Critchley, who is jovial and flat footed and forever appealing to her students to just have fun. She doesn’t like the idea of Bridget having a basis for comparison, an occasion to see her, the saxophone teacher, in a new and different light. She doesn’t like it.

“Let’s move on,” she says. “I think it’s time to try something new. Something a little harder, that will make you struggle a little more and re-establish which one of us is truly in control out of you and me. Okay?”

“Okay,” Bridget says.

“Let me find a Grade Eight piece,” the saxophone teacher says. “One that Mrs. Critchley won’t have any cause to comment on.”

Friday

Isolde falters after the first six bars.

“I haven’t practiced,” she says. “I don’t have an excuse.”

She stands there for a moment, her right hand splayed over the keys and damply clacking. The shifting tendons in her hand make her skin stretch white and purple.

The sax teacher looks at her and decides not to fight her. She moves over to the bookshelf and lifts the plastic hood off the record player. “Let me play you that recording, then,” she says. She selects a record from the pile and says, “Tell me what happened at school today.”

“They wanted to cancel Sex Ed,” Isolde says gloomily. “In light of recent events. They took Miss Clark out into the hallway, and the principal was there and we could hear the whole thing. We’re not supposed to call it Sex Ed. We’re supposed to call it Health.”

The saxophone teacher lowers the needle with a crackle and a low hiss. It’s Sonny Rollins playing “You Don’t Know What Love Is” on tenor sax. The record trembles like a leaf.

“What is it that you learn in Health?” asks the saxophone teacher as they sit back to listen.

“We learn about boys,” says Isolde in the same flat voice. “We put condoms on wooden poles. We learn how to unroll them so they won’t break. Miss Clark showed us how much they can stretch by putting a condom over her shoe.”

Isolde lapses into silence for a moment, remembering Miss Clark struggling to stretch a condom over the toe of her sensible flat-soled shoe, hopping and red-faced and puffing with the effort. “There it goes!” she said triumphantly in the end, and wiggled her foot so they could all see. She said, “Never believe a boy who says it won’t fit. You say to him, I saw Miss Clark put a condom over her whole shoe.”

The music is still playing. Isolde is only half-listening, looking out over the rooftops and the chimneys and the wires.

“We don’t really learn much about girls,” she says. “Everything we learn about boys is all hands-on 3-D models and cartoons. When we learn about girls it’s always in cross-section, and they use diagrams rather than pictures. The stuff about boys is all ejaculations, mostly. The stuff about girls is just reproduction. Just eggs.”

In truth the classes are patched and holey, hours of vague unhelpful glosses and line drawings and careful omissions which serve to cripple rather than assist. Most of the girls now lack a key definition in this new and