March
“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.”
April
“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.
“Before we begin fighting I want to start with a few exercises that will get us comfortable with touching each other,” the Head of Movement said. “This exercise is called The Raft of the Medusa. The aim of the exercise is to be the last person standing inside this rectangle. When I say you may begin, you must all start pushing each other. If any part of your body touches the floor outside the rectangle, you must leave the raft immediately. The last person to remain inside wins. Does everybody understand?”
There was a flurry of nodding from inside the cramped rectangle.
“Pushing only,” the Head of Movement said. “No punching. No kicking. Not yet.”
Everybody tensed their elbows and braced their legs, ready to fight. The students on the outer edge realized too late their disadvantage, and all at once they tried to angle themselves better to worm their way into the center.
“All right,” the Head of Movement said. “Go.”
The rectangular crowd immediately began to boil. A few of the students were shoved out of the rectangle within seconds; they skipped backward and retreated with a kind of rueful disappointment to watch. Stanley found himself surrounded by girls, and at first he shoved at them gingerly, careful with his hands lest he touch their breasts by accident, using mostly his shoulders and his hips. The girls were less polite. Little palms were shoving at the small of his back all of a sudden, pushing and pushing, and he found his feet slipping on the floor. He grabbed a fistful of somebody’s sweater in an effort to resist. The whole crowd lurched suddenly sideways; everybody’s bare feet arched and skidding over the floorboards, and half the class tumbled over the western chalked perimeter and off the raft. The disqualified students hopped neatly out of the way and left the rest of the group to fight.
With a large part of the class gone, the winning students could move more freely. The game became more tactical and more deliberately hostile. Stanley had one of the smaller girls in a clumsy underarm headlock and was trying to force her over the line when another student fell sideways on to him and sent all three of them staggering off the raft. The Head of Movement was standing calmly to the side. He checked his watch.
When the raft had been emptied of most of the students, the remainder formed a ring around the final fighters and began to chant and cheer. The winning three were locked in a sweaty embrace in the chalky center of the raft, skidding sideways and occasionally dropping painfully on to a knee or a hip and tugging the others down as they fell. Their legs were braced and bowed as they grappled with each other, two boys and a girl—a wiry muscular girl with the shapely and decided figure of a dancer.
Somebody on the perimeter set up a stamping rhythm, and soon all the students were stamping and stamping, their bare feet sending up tiny clouds of white dust, the steady beat filling the massive space, rising up to the lofty stippled ceiling where the hooded bulbs hung from their bluish rack unlit. The Head of Movement did not join in the stamping, but his long fingers tapped in time against his forearm and his eyes moved carefully from the ring of cheering watchers to the fighting three, and back again. Every time one of the winning fighters was shoved hard or forced closer to the chalk perimeter there was a whoop of appreciation from the crowd and an explosion of clapping and laughter. The beat got faster and faster. The Head of Movement nodded his head and sometimes smiled a tiny smile.