Eleanor Catton - The Rehearsal

“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.

“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.”

“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 being 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.