The Rehearsal

Julia comes straight to her lesson from afternoon detention. She is almost late, and when the saxophone teacher opens the door Julia is still red faced and sweating a little, her cycle helmet trailing from her wrist.

“My teacher is an arsehole,” she says in summary, once they are inside. “Mrs. Paul is an arsehole. They have to write a reason on the detention slip, and I said, Why don’t you write, ‘Saying out loud what everyone was thinking anyway.’ So she made it double. I fucking hate high school. I hate everything about it.”

“Why did you get detention in the first place?” the saxophone teacher says admiringly, but Julia just shakes her head and scowls. She takes a moment to unwrap and to fish for her music, and the saxophone teacher stirs her tea and tilts her head as she waits.

“When you leave, and all of this is over,” the sax teacher says, “you will always have one schoolteacher you will remember for the rest of your life, one teacher who changed your life.”

“I won’t,” Julia says. “I’ve never had a teacher like that.”

“You will have,” the saxophone teacher says. “Once you’ve got a few years’ distance and you can look back cleanly. There will be some Miss—Miss Hammond, Miss Gillespie—there will be some teacher you remember above all the others, one teacher who rises a head above them all.”

Julia is still looking skeptical. The saxophone teacher waves her arm and continues.

“But how many teachers are lucky enough to have had one student who changed their lives?” she asks. “One student who really changed them. Let me tell you something: it doesn’t happen. The inspiration goes one way. It only ever goes one way. We expect our teachers to teach for the love of it, to inspire and awaken and ignite without any expectation of being inspired and awakened in return; we expect that their greatest and only hoped-for joy would be, perhaps, a student returning after ten or twenty years, dropping by one morning to tell them just how much of an influence they were, and then disappearing back to the private success of their own lives. That’s all. We expect our teachers every year to start anew, to sever a year’s worth of progress and forged connection, to unravel everything they’ve built and move back to begin work on another child. Every year our teachers sow and tend another thankless crop that will never, ever come to harvest.”

“I’m not a child,” Julia says.

“Young adult,” the saxophone teacher says. “Whatever you like.”

“I’ve never been inspired or ignited,” Julia says.

“But you see my point,” the sax teacher says.

“No I don’t,” Julia says sourly. “You get paid. It’s just like any other job.”

The sax teacher leans forward and crosses her legs at the knee.

“Your mother,” she says, “wants a progress report. She wants me to describe how I have inspired you, how I have awoken you, how I have coaxed you on to a glorious path toward excellence and industry and worth. Secretly she also wants me to tell her just how much you have inspired me—not directly, but in a roundabout, subtle way, as if I’m a little abashed, made a little vulnerable, as if we’re talking about something dreadfully taboo. She wants me to lie, a little.”

“So lie.”

“She wants,” the saxophone teacher continues, “what all the mothers want. She wants me to tell her that you and I have a special rapport, that you tell me things you wouldn’t tell anybody else. She wants me to tell her that I see something in you, Julia, that I haven’t seen in years. She wants me to say that our relationship functions for both of us as a shared or double birth—not the mere instruction of a pupil, but the utter opening of one person to another.”

“So give her what she wants,” Julia says. She is stubborn and difficult today, still wearing the injustice of her double detention like a surly veil around her face. She stands ready with her saxophone fitted around her neck.

“All right, let’s get started,” the saxophone teacher says, not without irritation. “Play me something loud.”

Thursday

“I think two of my students are having a love affair,” is what the saxophone teacher would say to Patsy if Patsy were here. It would be brunch, as it always is with Patsy, and it would be a Thursday, and the sun would be shining slantwise through the tall windows and filling the apartment with lazy dusty light.

“With each other, you mean?” Patsy would say, leaning forward and putting both elbows on the table and her chin upon her hands.

“Yes,” the saxophone teacher says. “I introduced them at the concert. They’re schoolmates—well, one girl is two years older, but they attend the same school.”

“Oh, yes,” says Patsy, “there always has to be an age difference at the beginning. With same-sex relationships. It’s an initiation rite. You need an inequality of experience or you never get anywhere.”

“Really?” says the saxophone teacher.

“Definitely,” says Patsy. “If you don’t have gender roles to fall back on, you need the power to be organized somehow. You need a structure. Teacher and pupil. Predator and prey. Something like that.” She throws her head back and laughs suddenly, a clear, delighted laugh that peals out in the tiny flat like a bell.

“I knew you would laugh,” the saxophone teacher says. She’s petulant today, and cross with how Patsy has been tossing her hair over her shoulder and sucking the smear of butter off her index finger and behaving for the most part like a person who thoroughly enjoys being desired.

“Have they said anything to you?” Patsy says.

“Not directly, but—well, you know.”

“Showing all the symptoms.”

“Yes, exactly.”

Patsy ponders this for a moment in a contented sort of way and then asks, “Is it the girl who had the sister in the newspaper?”

“Yes—the younger girl, Isolde. Her older sister was abused.”

“That makes it even more likely, then,” Patsy says.

“Does it?”

“Definitely. For all sorts of reasons.”

The two of them sit for a moment in silence. The newspaper is spread over the breakfast things, peaking over the jam jar and the syrup bottle, creased and grease-spotted with marmalade and oil. There is a single strawberry left in the bottom of the thin plastic punnet, flat edged like the snout of a cold chisel and frosted white with unripeness.

“I just want to get to the truth behind it. That’s all. The kernel of truth behind everything,” the saxophone teacher says suddenly, into nothing.

Friday

“Dad’s trying to connect,” Isolde says, with the special weariness that she reserves for parental efforts to connect. “It’s part of his rebuilding thing. He wants to know more about us. Both of us.”

“Is that good?” the saxophone teacher says.

“Last night he comes in while I’m watching TV and goes, Hey, Isolde. Do you have a boyfriend?” Isolde snickers unkindly. “I only laughed because he said Hey. So jolly and casual, like he’d practiced it in the mirror or something. I said, Yes, and he clapped his hands and said, Well great, let’s have the man around for dinner.”

“You said Yes?” the saxophone teacher says. She has stiffened and is looking at Isolde with her head cocked and one hand hanging limp from the wrist, like a caricature of a startled pet.

“Yeah,” Isolde says suspiciously, tucking her hair behind her ear. “It’s only been a few weeks, but yeah.”

The saxophone teacher makes a little twitching motion with her hand, gesturing Isolde onward. Isolde rolls her tongue out over her bottom lip and regards the saxophone teacher a moment longer before continuing.

“Everything’s about eating together now,” she says. “Eating together as a family solves everything. We do it like a ritual—nobody’s allowed to touch their food until everyone’s sat down, and then we all thank Mum and pass the sauce and whatever. Dad says eating together is the answer. If we had eaten together from the beginning, then Victoria would never have bumped accidentally-on-purpose into Mr. Saladin in the hall and let her breasts rub against his chest for the briefest half-second before stepping back and saying, Oh sorry, I’m such a klutz. If we’d eaten together from the beginning then Mr. Saladin would never have bitten his lip and ducked his head whenever