Eleanor Catton - The Rehearsal

“If you could call me back on this number,” the woman says in closing, and then there is a little pip to show that the message has come to an end.

It is thirty-five minutes before Bridget is going to die, and she is sitting on her high upholstered stool in the video store, the till already cashed up and waiting under the counter in its dirty canvas slip. The car park outside is empty and slick, and she can see the line of yellow streetlights peeling away from her into the black.

Bridget is remembering two girls at her primary school who had for a time become obsessed with gathering facts about sex. They always referred to the act as It , and sat together for hours in grave dutiful conference as they revised and expanded their combined wisdom on the subject, from time to time closing their eyes in long-suffering horror and saying something like “Two-on-one It. That is so gross.” They were secretive and guarded and unwilling to share their wisdom, like proud and weary sphinxes guarding the door to a world that the others could not hope to understand.

Bridget recalls one athletics lesson from this period, the two girls standing together with their arms casually linked, and watching the PE teacher with the expression of forbearing solemnity that was appropriate to their studies of It. The PE teacher called out, “Today we’re practicing sprints from a crouch start,” and the smaller girl immediately whispered, “Crouch start for It.” They exchanged a grave nauseated look as if the conjured image had pained them both. Bridget felt a little jealous as she watched these two girls share their mutual feeling of pious disgust. The smaller girl’s deliberate revulsion fascinated her. “Crouch start for It,” she said. The subject was just too painful to say more. The taller girl looked down in sympathy and shook her head as if to acknowledge how sickening and inescapable the whole business was. It was all around them.

The eight-year-old Bridget had been unable to comprehend the terrible relation that this particular athletics lesson bore to the act of It, and now as she reflects upon the scene she realizes that she still has no idea how to recognize or execute a crouch start for It. Is there even such a thing? she asks herself doubtfully, but then she recalls once more the poise and perfect confidence of this ten-year-old girl, who is eighteen by now and probably thoroughly schooled in arts beyond the reach of Bridget’s imagining. Bridget reflects on how little she knows. The raindrops reach the sill and quiver there. She feels ashamed.

The saxophone teacher smoothes the newspaper and looks again at the article. The paper is old now, and there have been others, subsidiary stories that recap this first account, stories about holding inquiries and questioning witnesses and deciding who to blame, but this paper remains, folded into eighths, limp and graying with the hangdog look of old news. The headline reads Girl’s Death “Terrible Waste ,” and the article is short. Bridget is unnamed, which is fitting, the saxophone teacher thinks, given just how forgettable Bridget was. The unnamed girl was cycling home from work, the saxophone teacher reads over and over, and she was hit by a red sedan as she made a right turn out of the video store car park. The car drove on.

The saxophone teacher thinks, She would have been at the concert with the three of us that night, if only I’d liked her enough to invite her. The thought nibbles at her for a moment, just as a possibility, like a new shirt that she may or may not try on. Finally she shrugs and snuffs it out. Outside in the courtyard she can dimly hear a group of students from the drama school, chanting and stamping their feet. She pushes the newspaper away and moves to the window to look.

Near the trunk of the ginkgo tree, six students have formed a human pyramid on a thin square of foam matting, while in front of them a larger group pace back and forth. They are like a seething flock of dark crows in the uniform black of the Institute, their feet bare and bloodless against the paving. From where the saxophone teacher is standing, the pyramid looks a little like a card castle, wobbling slightly but standing firm, growing outward and upward as more and more actors withdraw from the foreground drama and add their bodies to the tier.

The saxophone teacher watches the black flurry in the foreground for a long while. Looking back to the solid pyramid of bodies at the base of the ginkgo tree, she is startled to see that she is being watched. One of the boys in the front row, kneeling on the asphalt with his arms extended stiffly to either side, is looking up at her. His head is flung back, and the open collar of his shirt shows the length of his white throat. The saxophone teacher’s first impulse is to step away from the window, but she stays, and she thinks she sees the boy smile up at her. She looks away.

The rehearsal is coming to a close. One of the girls at the front rears up suddenly and calls out, in a rich clear voice that fills the courtyard, “ I imagine things when I watch people.”

And as she says it, as the marvelous peal of her voice breaks off and the stamping and drumming comes to a swift and terrible halt and the courtyard fills with silence like a sudden rush of water, as she says it, the card castle behind her begins to fall. It tumbles down in a stately and choreographed cascade, a slow-motion melt. The figures of the actors tumble off to land on light heels and knees on the foam matting, scuttling off and leaping away until the pyramid has disappeared utterly, thawed out to a nothing-puddle of black stillness, all of the actors unmoving and silent where they have come to rest.

The girl at the front is the only figure standing now. She spreads her arms and says, “I imagine—”

There is the tiniest of pauses, the girl outstretched and full of curtailed breath that swells her ribs to bursting. Then it is as if a spell is broken, as if an invisible curtain has come down and an invisible blackout has blanked the stage, and all the fallen figures begin to move. They jump to their feet and dust themselves down and break into conversation, and the saxophone teacher hears “That fall was heaps better that time, you came in right on the beat” and “We can still get that tighter, guys” and “From the top.”

“So we agree that sexuality is an issue that we’re all interested in, at least,” the boy Felix said loudly, the first time the first-years met to discuss the devised theater project and the King of Diamonds playing card. Felix was bossy and pert and did not understand the humor of what he had just said, scowling at a pair of boys on the far lip of the circle who faintly snickered.

“I liked the idea of using found stories,” one of the girls said. “From the media and our communities and all that, taking them and using them and making them theatrical. I liked that idea.”

“All right,” Felix said graciously, drawing with a fat felt-tipped pen a spiky cloud around the word SEXUALITY. The others watched. At the beginning of the year Felix had labored to snare the role of the group’s organizing mind, to the irritation of most of the students, who looked at the tiny protrusion of his tongue as he wrote and felt they could do better.

“Then what about that story that Grace brought in?” Felix said when he had completed the bubble. “The teacher–student thing at Scabby Abbey.”

He used the nickname to show them that although he was organizing the group, they were not allowed to resent him or regard him as a teacher-figure.

“My sister’s at Abbey Grange,” one of the boys said. “In sixth form. She reckons they don’t know the half of it yet. What she heard was that after all the girl’s friends found out, the teacher kept them quiet for a few months by paying them out. Mostly buying them booze, on behalf.”