Friday

“I suppose you didn’t know Bridget,” the saxophone teacher says to Isolde one afternoon.

“The girl who died? She was the year above, in sixth form.”

“She was one of my students.”

“Oh,” Isolde says. “No, I didn’t know her.” She stalls a moment, looking clumsy and rocking back and forth on her heels. “Are you okay?” she asks finally, wincing to show a kind of concern.

“Wasn’t it a great shock,” the saxophone teacher says.

“Yeah,” Isolde says.

“Everyone must be terribly upset. At your school and so forth.”

“Oh,” Isolde says. “Yeah, they had an assembly.”

“Just an assembly?”

“And they flew the flag at half-mast.”

“I suppose everyone is still terribly upset,” the saxophone teacher says, “skipping class, weeping, remembering everything that was irreplaceable about Bridget.”

“I suppose so. She was in the year above. I don’t know anyone that knew her.” Isolde is wearing the half-stricken expression of someone who is required, but ill equipped, to offer condolence or advice about death. She shuffles uncomfortably and looks at the floor.

“Bridget,” the saxophone teacher says abruptly, changing tack, “was my least favorite student. Bridget had a way of bucking and rearing her pelvis when she played that I privately found a little distasteful. Bridget would lean back with her knees bent and her eyes closed, tensing up and preparing to catapault her weight forward on to the balls of her feet, the saxophone rearing up like a golden spume about to break and fall. The muscles in her jaw were tight. I bent over Bridget’s notebook to avoid looking at her, scribbling curt bullet-points in the margin for her to remember in her practice. Tone, I wrote, and then underneath, Brightness.”

Shyly, almost respectfully, Isolde slips out of herself and becomes Bridget—not the real Bridget, just a placeholder, a site for the saxophone teacher to aim at, a figure to address. She stands hangdog in the middle of the room with her sax tucked against her hip and her hair across her face. She doesn’t speak.

“This was the last time I saw Bridget,” the saxophone teacher says. “She came to the end of ‘The Old Castle’ and removed the sax from her mouth, shoving her lower jaw forward and back several times as if repositioning a set of dentures. She’d practiced. She always practiced. That was one of the things I didn’t like about Bridget so much. I asked her, What did you learn in counseling today? And Bridget said, This week we’re talking about guilt. About how guilt can be illuminating. We’re doing role-plays based on ideas about guilt.

“Guilt, I said. And Bridget said, rushing on with this rare flash of pleasure that she was owning the spotlight, that the voice she was using was for once her own, and worth hearing, she said, Guilt is really important. It’s the first step on the road to something better.”

Isolde’s toes are ever so slightly pigeoned, her knees inward turning and her hips awkwardly thrust. She rubs the bell of her sax with her finger and looks at the saxophone teacher’s shoes.

“So I said,” the sax teacher says, “Bridget, I think you are being deceived. Guilt is primarily a distraction. Guilt is a feeling that distracts us from deeper, truer feelings. Let me give you an example. You might feel guilty if you become attracted to someone who is forbidden to you. You feel attraction, and then you remember you are not allowed to be attracted to this person, and then you feel guilt. Which do you think is the more primary of these feelings, attraction or guilt?

“I guess attraction, said Bridget. Because it came first.

“And I said, Good. Guilt is secondary. Guilt is a surface feeling.”

Isolde nods a tiny nod, to show she’s listening. The saxophone teacher is glazed over now, the memory filling her vision like a glossy cataract over each staring eye.

“I said that,” she says, “because Bridget was my least favorite student. I said that because I didn’t care for Bridget much at all.”

The memory dissolves and her vision sharpens once again.

“What have you learned in counseling?” she says, rounding on Isolde with a savage, narrowed look, and the girl blinks and straightens and returns invisibly to herself.

Isolde is not sure what answer she should give. As she hesitates and paws uncomfortably at the sax around her neck she thinks about the girl, the one assembly and one half-masted flag, the never-scheduled counseling sessions about her death, and the paper cutout convenience grief that some of the older girls wielded for a week or so, just to earn a half-hour’s freedom and a pass to the nurse.

The saxophone teacher is still looking hard at Isolde, waiting for an answer.

Isolde says, quietly and full of shame, “In counseling we all mourn everything that was irreplaceable about my sister. We grieve for everything about Victoria that is now lost.”

Monday

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.”