Take Three Girls, Page 2

  The old pool is down the back of the grounds. Past the tennis courts, it’s hidden by a huge box hedge that’s perfect for cover. The gate is always open – there’s no point locking it. One day they’ll build something else here, but until then it’s the best place to play. Empty of water, it’s perfect for echoes.

  I climb down the stairs into the shallow end, where I’ve left an old school chair. Joseph, the groundsman, gave it to me. He doesn’t seem to question why a girl would get up before light to play her cello in a pool full of leaves. He’s worked here a long time, I guess, and seen all types come and go.

  My breaths are sharp wisps in the dark. This is the moment I love. When I’m alone, warm in my jacket, angling my face at the moon. I put on headphones and start my practice session the same way I always do – listening to Frances Carter and waiting for sunrise.

  It’s as if I was one person before Frances Carter walked into the auditorium in my third week at St Hilda’s, and then another person when she walked out.

  She’s lean, wiry, about thirty. Wearing black that looked even blacker against red hair. Her face wasn’t unsmiling or unfriendly. She had the same look I’d seen on my own face in photographs, when someone took a shot of me working on a maths or science question, or a computer problem.

  She set up – cello in her arms, laptop on the floor, which she used as an instrument controlled by a foot pedal. A pickup mic attached to her cello caught and threw sound. When she was ready, she looked at us with this quiet certainty.

  Then there was a second before she started. A second before I knew you could combine my two loves – computer and cello. Before I knew I could use a computer to loop and layer and build sounds. Before I started listening to everything electronic and experimental I could get my hands on.

  Before.

  When a solid career in medicine seemed like the best thing in the world. When I didn’t know that a cello had a throat and a heart. When my life was ordinary and I didn’t mind because I didn’t know.

  Frances started her first song and Iris shifted like she was bored. I wondered how a person could ever be bored by the mixing of something ancient and new – human and machine – engineered to make honey.

  Only a few of us were still in the auditorium when Frances left. The others, Iris included, moved out as soon as Mrs Davies said they could. But I stayed, matching the pace of my packing to hers. Every movement was graceful and deliberate. I wondered how she came to be so full of choice.

  ‘There’s an audition,’ she said to those still waiting. ‘I’ve given the flyers to Mrs Davies.’

  Then she was gone, and I was reading the flyer, reading about the Harpa International Music Academy in Iceland, imagining an unknown landscape, where classes would be held over summer, our winter, in June next year. Frances Carter was offering a scholarship to the Harpa Summer School because someone had given her a scholarship when she was in Year 10. I want to sponsor someone in my area, she’d written on the flyer, so auditions are for young musicians using technology.

  A life changed in thirty minutes.

  At the sign of first light, I take off my headphones and set up.

  Frances Carter uses Ableton Live and Super-Looper on a MacBook Pro with a MOTU Ultralite audio interface, so I’ve bought the same. Add in the price of some pickup mics, and the whole set-up cost me a little over two thousand dollars – half my funds.

  When I told Iris about my dwindling savings and where most of it had gone, she cut me off mid-sentence. ‘Your parents have spent everything to send you here. Are you effing crazy?’

  Probably. I’m definitely obsessed, of that, there’s no doubt.

  Curved corners catch and bounce sound. I bow long strokes, cello humming through my arms, my chest, my thighs. I lay down separate tracks this morning, experimenting with tone. There are sweet spots: places where I play and the sound bounces back at me. Echo spots. Later, I will take these lines of cello and mix them. Heighten, twist, shape and colour.

  I’m getting better, but I’m not great. There’s only so much I can learn alone. What I really need is to meet people playing this kind of music, people I can talk with, experiment with. Those people are at clubs like Orion, which is why I need to escape. The problem is I need back up. But Iris is pretty much my only friend in the city, and there’s no way she’ll sneak out with me.

  It’s something I have to do alone, but I can’t quite find the courage.

  I force myself to pack up at seven-thirty. Orchestra is at eight in the new arts centre, across the other side of the school. Plush and warm in winter, the acoustics are brilliant. And, best of all, it’s near the new canteen, which sells real coffee.

  I order a long black and take it over to a spot coated in winter sun. It’s one of my favourite times of the day, spoiled only by one thing.

  ‘Hello, Kate.’

  It’s a combined orchestra. We play with Basildon, the boys’ school. We do most things with them – orchestra, plays, the school formal – since they’re close by. There are seven other cellists in the orchestra. Iris is one of them. I sit next to her. There are five other people I wouldn’t mind on the other side of me.

  ‘Coffee’s bad for your health.’

  But I get Oliver Bennet.

  ‘So, some studies say, is a lack of quiet time,’ I tell him.

  I’m a friendly person. At my old school back in Shallow Bay, I was considered pretty much the friendliest person in the school. But I have the urge to cut Oliver Bennet’s cello strings one by one, and watch him watch me doing it, and this is why:

  1. He thinks he plays better than me.

  2. He does, sometimes, play better than me.

  3. Oliver is obsessed with perfection. I heard him laughing when Frances Carter played.

  4. He loves nothing more than to give me a lecture on the importance of technique.

  5. Oliver, in short, is a boring, anally retentive, fuckwit.

  Iris told me that Oliver’s mum is a cellist in the Australian Chamber Orchestra. A child prodigy, she was playing Bach at six. Oliver’s never mentioned it to me directly, but for the last six months, he’s acted as though he knows everything and I know nothing.

  Iris arrives as I finish my coffee and we all walk inside. Oliver goes through his set-up routine – shifting his chair till it’s in exactly the right spot, setting out his music so it’s exactly in front of him, asking me to move a little to the right, and then asking if I’d like him to show me how to play double stops.

  ‘No thanks,’ I tell him, but he goes ahead with the instruction anyway.

  ‘The double stops,’ he informs me, ‘are the most misunderstood device ever.’

  ‘That’s fascinating,’ I say, and concentrate on fading his voice to background noise. Because this is my favourite part of orchestra – what happens while we’re tuning. The steel shift of chairs. The whispers before notes. The third viola staring at the first violin while she thinks about sex. I can hear it in her eyes. It’s a slow, slow slide. Blinking heat and the sweetness of C.

  ‘You nearly have it,’ Oliver says, whispering some last instructions.

  ‘Thanks,’ I tell him, as I think: Go. Away. Fuck. Off.

  He keeps banging on about it though, in that stiff, repressed way of his, so I turn to him, and hold my hand up to stop him talking. ‘I can play the double stops, Oliver. I choose to play the wrong notes.’

  He looks genuinely perplexed. ‘Who chooses to play the wrong notes?’

  ‘Me, I do.’

  Mrs Davies taps her baton, points her finger at me, and Oliver sees the tap and the point and looks satisfied.

  ‘Experiment in your own time,’ he says, before we start to play.

  I leave orchestra feeling stupid because Oliver has a small, small point. Orchestra is not the place to experiment. But when is the place to experiment? At the pool, sure. But experimenting alone only gets me so far.

  Iris goes back to the boarding house to make sure she has her things, so I
spend the time before class calling Ben, my best friend from back home.

  He answers the phone with his foggy morning voice, and I hear a series of shuffles as he pushes himself up, fumbles for his glasses, and reaches for the cold cup of coffee on his bedside table. Ben can’t get up before caffeine, and since he doesn’t mind cold coffee, he makes himself a cup before he goes to sleep.

  ‘Okay, I’m awake.’

  He’s not. He never is till he’s had a good couple of mouthfuls.

  ‘Okay,’ he says after a few minutes. ‘Really awake now.’

  ‘I need to get out. I need to go to Orion. I need to hear music. I need to meet people like me, who are equally obsessed, or Iceland will never happen.’

  ‘Still too freaked out to use the portal without back up?’

  ‘Still too freaked out to use the portal without back up.’

  ‘Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.’

  ‘Orwell?’

  ‘Camus,’ he says.

  I never pick Ben’s references. He reads too widely. If I’m a mixture of computer and music, Ben is a mixture of book and plant.

  ‘So, are you justified in breaking the school rules?’ He takes another swig of coffee.

  ‘I’ll get back to you on that. What’s news in your world?’

  He talks about school and I hear my old life in his voice. I’m taken back to the farm, to the river, to the fruit trees. To my parents working crazy long days, buying in water and feed and worrying about money, but telling me not to, telling me they have plenty to send me to St Hilda’s this year, and once I get the scholarship for Years 11 and 12, it won’t be a worry.

  ‘I’m concerned,’ Ben says, and I realise I’ve drifted off. ‘Could it be possible –’ Ben has a way of talking, a steady way, so that you can hear the dashes in his sentences. ‘What I mean to ask is – could it be possible – that the only thing people like about me – is you?’

  He tries to say it like it’s a clinical, scientific observation.

  ‘That is not possible. It’s absolutely a hundred percent not possible.’

  ‘I’ve been collecting quite a bit of evidence to the contrary,’ he says. ‘No one really talks to me. I eat lunch alone.’

  I can see him in the part of the school we call The Back, staring over the fence into the dry grass of the out-of-bounds section. He’s eating a cheese sandwich, and missing me.

  ‘Twenty-seven percent of the universe is dark matter, and sixty-eight percent of the universe is dark energy.’

  ‘The point?’ he asks.

  ‘Dark matter is essential. But it took some time to be known. Talk to people. You’re funny. They’ll talk back. Trust me. I’m smart. I know things.’

  A silent dash hangs in the air. ‘I’m a bit lonely without you,’ he says eventually.

  ‘I’m a bit lonely without you,’ I say.

  I want to talk more, but I have to go. The class is filing in for Wellness, a new program designed to cure us of the urge to trash each other on social media. I love the internet, code, computers. I love that if I miss Ben, I can summon him into my room and talk to him over Skype. It’s the most mind-bending invention in the last century and how do humans use it? They access porn and talk smack about each other.

  I walk inside, and while I wait for Dr Malik I put on my headphones and turn up Imogen Heap. There’s a moment when her voice reaches a point so thick and high that it gets into my skin. It makes me feel like rebellion is possible. I’m cutting out at night, confident, walking into a club, cool-skinned in the face of possible expulsion.

  But then class starts, and I put my music away. I go back to the old Kate. Reserved. Responsible. Am I justified in rebelling? Maybe. And if that’s the answer, then probably not.

  Monday 11 July

  ‘Okay if I go shopping with Tash this week? We need to start looking for formal dresses.’

  My mother, cutting up fruit, points to her earbuds, and shakes her head. She is talking to her friend, Viv. ‘The reason you don’t know her name is because she’s the next big thing. She did Simon and Lucy’s – you know, massive budget – it’s stunning and Vogue Living’s doing a feature on it. You’re welcome.’ My mother, the resident style know-it-all.

  Breakfast at my house: we’re a group of islands.

  My father is on another call, standing at the middle set of French doors looking out over the garden, my mother glancing towards him about every two seconds.

  Charlie is head-deep in Brian Jacques, one elbow on the table, making his way through three Weet-Bix in a puddle of milk.

  Clare is stirring porridge – Monday breakfast – and scrolling through world news headlines on Twitter.

  I try to connect the islands. ‘Anyone have any ideas about the formal? I’m on the organising committee.’

  ‘Here’s an idea, tell the Brains Trust to keep their tongues inside their mouths for photographs, they look like a possie of B-grade porn stars on Facebook.’ The Brains Trust is my friends. Clare’s life is full of timesaving abbreviations. She slices a banana on her porridge, tops it with maple syrup, sits down and opens the newspaper to the op-ed page. Year 12 means keeping up with the state of the world every day so no issues-based question in an English exam will ever catch you uninformed.

  I’m eating toasted sourdough with peanut butter, and making a bagel for my lunch. Skills. ‘Is that better or worse than looking like A-grade porn stars?’

  ‘You decide,’ says Clare.

  ‘Don’t say porn in front of a child,’ says Charlie, not looking up from his book. He’s ten, and he plays the kid card like a champ.

  ‘Good point, darling.’ My mother sits down next to Charlie and drops a kiss on the side of his head. They look so . . . Instagramable, his hair streaky blond, hers sleek and dark. Genes divide up hardcore in this family: Clare is like our mother, blue eyes, dark brown hair; Charlie and I have our dad’s blond hair and grey eyes.

  My father is winding up his call, sounding very peppy. ‘No, great – totally. Absolutely. Soon, for sure. Cheers, buddy.’

  ‘Yes?’ my mother asks him.

  ‘No.’ My father walks out of the room.

  My mother compresses her lips.

  Clare gives me a knowing look, but I’m not quite sure what it is she knows.

  ‘Mother, the formal dress – I need to start looking and thinking.’

  ‘Looking and thinking only. The credit cards need a rest.’

  Okay. This is new, and I don’t like the sound of it. ‘Is there a particular reason why?’

  My mother doesn’t answer. She’s hardly eaten any of her fruit and yoghurt, but she stands up and follows my father out of the kitchen. I pick up the pace on lunch prep, keen to be out of the house before they start arguing, and try to remember exactly when he last worked.

  Walking the three blocks from River Place, where I live, to St Hilda’s, where I learn, I’m chewing over last night’s PSST post and worrying about Bec – a member of the Brains Trust – whose name was on their shitty list. Way to start the week. PSST is like a slime monster that feeds on lies and nastiness. Every time it lifts its arm to drag another victim down it gets stronger.

  I get to school just after Bec has arrived. She is tragically holding up a ‘Disorderly Friendship Foundation’ brochure that someone has slipped into her locker. Three Year 11s are staring at her from the other side of the corridor, whispering. I give them the death stare and they slink off.

  ‘I don’t even have one . . .’ she starts, a tear brimming in each eye.

  ‘I know. You’re just a skinny Minnie, Becs. It’s not a crime.’ I give her a hug.

  Lola arrives and throws her bag down. ‘Hey, at least you were top of the list.’

  That’s enough to get the tears flowing. Trouble is, in our group Bec is the peacemaker, the diplomat, the smoother; she’s the one who knows exactly what to say at times like this.

  Tash emerges from the door of our homer
oom, right next to the lockers. It’s out of character for her to have arrived at school before the rest of us. ‘Ady! Have you opened your locker?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Tash has a huge smile as I unlock it. We four have each other’s combinations, naturally. I spy a square box, tied with Délicieux patisserie’s signature satin ribbon. Inside is one perfect coffee éclair – my favourite – and a note, To sweet Ady, love Rupe X

  ‘Thank you, Tashie – you sneaky cupid.’ Tash and Rupert both come in on the Brighton train. Rupe goes to Basildon.

  ‘He adores you, Ady,’ says Tash. ‘God knows why.’

  We share the perfect éclair in four luscious bites, with me getting the dark chocolate coffee bean, then cluster around Bec to give her some more love before the first bell.

  How horrible for the girls on that list who do have eating disorders, to have PSST make a joke about your sickness. Jessie Ong was in fricken hospital last term.

  Not. Funny.

  The gravel path crunches underfoot as Bec, Lola, Tash and I head for Wellness; early bulbs are green spiking from the cold earth and the air is scented with daphne. How can PSST even exist in our shiny shiny world? It’s not like nastiness is a new invention. It’s just floated closer to the surface lately. Scum will do that. Mean stuff spreads so fast. One click. Post. Send. Share. Online bullying = sometimes-suicides, so all the private schools have strategies for dealing with it. At St Hilda’s, it’s Wellness classes. We greeted the idea with genuine enthusiasm. Why not? Everyone loves the chance to slack off.

  The classes are being held in the Oak Parlour in the ‘old building’, as we call it. Framed sepia photos show actual cows grazing on the riverbank, with the old building – then, a freshly built Victorian tower mansion – in the distance. These days, a handful of architect-designed hubs populate the sprawling, beautifully landscaped campus. And there are a few blocks of luxe suburbia between school and the river, including my street.