The Rehearsal

“I was watching TV last night,” she says, “and Dad comes in with his face all serious and his fingers sort of picking at his tie like it’s strangling him, and eventually he just takes it off and lays it to one side—”

She unhooks her saxophone from her neckstrap and places it upon a chair, miming loosening the neckstrap as if it has been very tight.

“—and says sit down, even though I’m already sitting down, and then rubs his hands together really hard.”

She rubs her hands together really hard.

“He says, your mother thinks that I shouldn’t tell you this just yet, but your sister has been abused by one of the teachers at school.” She darts a look at the saxophone teacher now, quickly, and then looks away. “And then he says ‘sexually,’ just to clarify, in case I thought the teacher had yelled at her at a traffic light or something.”

The overhead lights have dimmed and she is lit only by a pale flicking blue, a frosty sparkle like the on–off glow of a TV screen. The saxophone teacher is thrust into shadow so half her face is iron gray and the other half is pale and glinting.

“So he starts talking in this weird tight little voice about this Mr. Saladin or whatever, and how he teaches senior jazz band and orchestra and senior jazz ensemble, all on Wednesday morning one after the other. I won’t have him till sixth form, and that’s if I even want to take jazz band, because it clashes with netball so I’ll have to make a choice.

“Dad’s looking at me with this scared expression like I’m going to do something insane or really emotional and he won’t know how to deal with it. So I go, How do you know? And he goes—”

She crouches down beside the chair, speaking earnestly and spreading her hands wide—

“Honey, from what I understand of it, he started off real slow, just resting his hand really lightly on her shoulder sometimes, like that.”

Isolde reaches out and touches her fingertips to the upper end of the saxophone, which is lying on its side upon the chair. As her fingers touch the instrument a steady pulse begins, like a heartbeat. The teacher is sitting very still.

“And then sometimes when no one was watching he would lean close and breathe into her hair—”

She puts her cheek against the instrument and breathes down its length—

“—like that, really tentative and shy, because he doesn’t know if she wants it yet and he doesn’t want to get done. But she’s friendly because she kind of likes him and she thinks she has a crush on him, and soon his hand is going down, down—”

Her hand snakes down the saxophone and trails around the edge of the bell—

“—down, and she sort of starts to respond, and she smiles at him in lessons sometimes and it makes his heart race, and when they’re alone, in the music cupboard or after school or when they go places in his car, which they do sometimes, when they’re alone he calls her my gypsy girl—he says it over and over, my gypsy girl, he says—and she wishes she had something to say back, something she could whisper into his hair, something really special, something nobody’s ever said before.”

The backing music ceases. Isolde looks at her teacher and says, “She can’t think of anything.”

The lights come up again, as normal. Isolde scowls and flops down on to an armchair. “But anyway,” she says angrily, “she’s run out of time, it’s too late, because her friends have started to notice the way she is sometimes, the way she puts her chin down and to the side like she’s flirting, and that’s how it all starts to come undone, crashing down on itself like a castle of cards.”

“I see why you haven’t had time to practice,” says the saxophone teacher.

“Even this morning,” Isolde says, “I went to play some scales or whatever before school, but when I started playing she was all like, Can’t you at least be sensitive? and ran out of the room with this fake sob noise which I knew was fake because if she was really crying she wouldn’t have run off, she would have wanted me to see.” Isolde digs the heel of her kilt pin into her knee. “They’re treating her like a fucking artifact.”

“Is that so unusual?” the sax teacher asks.

Isolde shoots her a vicious look. “It’s sick,” she says. “It’s sick like when kids dress up their pets like real people, with clothes and wigs and stuff, and then make them walk on their back legs and take photos. It’s just like that, but worse because you can see how much she’s enjoying it.”

“I’m sure your sister is not enjoying it,” the saxophone teacher says.

“Dad said it would probably be years and years before Mr. Saladin gets properly convicted and goes to jail,” Isolde says. “All the papers will say child abuse, but there won’t be a child any more, she’ll be an adult by then, just like him. It’ll be like someone destroyed the scene of the crime on purpose, and built something clean and shiny in its place.”

“Isolde,” the saxophone teacher says, firmly this time, “I’m sure they are scared only because they know the sin is still there. They know it snuck up inside her and stuck fast, wedging itself into a place nobody knows about and will never find. They know that his sin was just an action, a foolish deadly fumble in the bright dusty lunchtime light, but hers—her sin is a condition, a sickness lodged somewhere deep inside for now and for always.”

“My dad doesn’t believe in sin,” Isolde says. “We’re atheists.”

“It pays to be open minded,” says the saxophone teacher.

“I’ll tell you why they’re so scared,” Isolde says. “They’re scared because now she knows everything they know. They’re scared because now they’ve got no secrets left.”

The saxophone teacher gets up suddenly and goes to the window. There is a long pause before Isolde speaks again.

“Dad just goes, I don’t know how it happened, honey. What’s important is that now we know about it, it won’t happen anymore.”

Wednesday

“So they called off jazz band this morning,” Bridget says. “They go, Mr. Saladin can’t come in this afternoon. He’s helping with an investigation.”

She sucks her reed noisily.

“You know it’s something really serious,” she says, “when they cross between not enough information and too much. Normally, see, they would have just gone, Listen up, you lot, jazz band’s canceled, you’ve got three minutes to get your shit together, get out and enjoy the sunshine for once, come on, I said move.”

This girl is good at voices. She actually wanted to be Isolde, because Isolde has a better part, but this girl is pale and stringy and rumpled and always looks slightly alarmed, which are qualities that don’t quite fit Isolde, and so she plays Bridget instead. In truth it is her longing to be an Isolde that most characterizes her as a Bridget: Bridget is always wanting to be somebody else.

“Or,” she says, “they would have gone the other way, and told us more than we needed to know, but deliberately, so we knew it was a privilege. They would have done the wide-eyed solemn holy thing that goes, Come on everyone, we need your full attention, this is really important. Mr. Saladin’s had to rush off because one of his family has fallen ill. Okay, now this could be really serious and it’s really important you guys give him the space and consideration he needs if and when he comes back to class.”

This is a theory that Bridget has been thinking about for some time, and she gleams with the pleasure of it. She screws down her reed and blows an experimental honk.

“Helping with an investigation,” she says contemptuously, returning to readjust the mouthpiece. “And they all came in together to say it, all in a pack or whatever, breathing together, quick breaths in and out, with their eyes back and forth sideways, and the principal at the front to break the wind, like the chief goose at the front of the V.”

“Geese usually rotate, I think,” the saxophone teacher says absently. “I gather it’s quite hard work breaking wind.” She is rifling through a stack of sheet music. The bookcase behind her is stuffed with old manuscripts and bleeding stray leaves on to the floor.

The saxophone teacher would never interrupt Isolde in such a dismissive fashion: that was one of Bridget’s reasons for wanting the role. Bridget remembers all over again that she is pale and stringy and rumpled and thoroughly secondary, and then flushes with a new determination to reclaim the scene.

“So they shuffle in,” she says, “in their V formation or whatever, this gray polyester army all trying really