“So lie.”

“She wants,” the saxophone teacher continues, “what all the mothers want. She wants me to tell her that you and I have a special rapport, that you tell me things you wouldn’t tell anybody else. She wants me to tell her that I see something in you, Julia, that I haven’t seen in years. She wants me to say that our relationship functions for both of us as a shared or double birth—not the mere instruction of a pupil, but the utter opening of one person to another.”

“So give her what she wants,” Julia says. She is stubborn and difficult today, still wearing the injustice of her double detention like a surly veil around her face. She stands ready with her saxophone fitted around her neck.

“All right, let’s get started,” the saxophone teacher says, not without irritation. “Play me something loud.”

Thursday

“I think two of my students are having a love affair,” is what the saxophone teacher would say to Patsy if Patsy were here. It would be brunch, as it always is with Patsy, and it would be a Thursday, and the sun would be shining slantwise through the tall windows and filling the apartment with lazy dusty light.

“With each other, you mean?” Patsy would say, leaning forward and putting both elbows on the table and her chin upon her hands.

“Yes,” the saxophone teacher says. “I introduced them at the concert. They’re schoolmates—well, one girl is two years older, but they attend the same school.”

“Oh, yes,” says Patsy, “there always has to be an age difference at the beginning. With same-sex relationships. It’s an initiation rite. You need an inequality of experience or you never get anywhere.”

“Really?” says the saxophone teacher.

“Definitely,” says Patsy. “If you don’t have gender roles to fall back on, you need the power to be organized somehow. You need a structure. Teacher and pupil. Predator and prey. Something like that.” She throws her head back and laughs suddenly, a clear, delighted laugh that peals out in the tiny flat like a bell.

“I knew you would laugh,” the saxophone teacher says. She’s petulant today, and cross with how Patsy has been tossing her hair over her shoulder and sucking the smear of butter off her index finger and behaving for the most part like a person who thoroughly enjoys being desired.

“Have they said anything to you?” Patsy says.

“Not directly, but—well, you know.”

“Showing all the symptoms.”

“Yes, exactly.”

Patsy ponders this for a moment in a contented sort of way and then asks, “Is it the girl who had the sister in the newspaper?”

“Yes—the younger girl, Isolde. Her older sister was abused.”

“That makes it even more likely, then,” Patsy says.

“Does it?”

“Definitely. For all sorts of reasons.”

The two of them sit for a moment in silence. The newspaper is spread over the breakfast things, peaking over the jam jar and the syrup bottle, creased and grease-spotted with marmalade and oil. There is a single strawberry left in the bottom of the thin plastic punnet, flat edged like the snout of a cold chisel and frosted white with unripeness.

“I just want to get to the truth behind it. That’s all. The kernel of truth behind everything,” the saxophone teacher says suddenly, into nothing.

Friday

“Dad’s trying to connect,” Isolde says, with the special weariness that she reserves for parental efforts to connect. “It’s part of his rebuilding thing. He wants to know more about us. Both of us.”

“Is that good?” the saxophone teacher says.

“Last night he comes in while I’m watching TV and goes, Hey, Isolde. Do you have a boyfriend?” Isolde snickers unkindly. “I only laughed because he said Hey. So jolly and casual, like he’d practiced it in the mirror or something. I said, Yes, and he clapped his hands and said, Well great, let’s have the man around for dinner.”

“You said Yes?” the saxophone teacher says. She has stiffened and is looking at Isolde with her head cocked and one hand hanging limp from the wrist, like a caricature of a startled pet.

“Yeah,” Isolde says suspiciously, tucking her hair behind her ear. “It’s only been a few weeks, but yeah.”

The saxophone teacher makes a little twitching motion with her hand, gesturing Isolde onward. Isolde rolls her tongue out over her bottom lip and regards the saxophone teacher a moment longer before continuing.

“Everything’s about eating together now,” she says. “Eating together as a family solves everything. We do it like a ritual—nobody’s allowed to touch their food until everyone’s sat down, and then we all thank Mum and pass the sauce and whatever. Dad says eating together is the answer. If we had eaten together from the beginning, then Victoria would never have bumped accidentally-on-purpose into Mr. Saladin in the hall and let her breasts rub against his chest for the briefest half-second before stepping back and saying, Oh sorry, I’m such a klutz. If we’d eaten together from the beginning then Mr. Saladin would never have bitten his lip and ducked his head whenever Victoria looked at him—that shy-schoolboy flirt effect that he’d been using since the eighties but it still worked a charm. If we’d eaten together, Victoria would never have sucked on his fingertips and pushed her tongue down into the V between his first two fingers and made him gasp. None of it would have happened.”

“I didn’t know you had a boyfriend,” the sax teacher says.

“And none of us ever have anything to talk about at the table,” Isolde says. “Not even Dad. He just ends up spieling about his work and everyone switches off and tries to eat as fast as possible.”

“How did you meet him?” the sax teacher says.

“By accident,” Isolde says. “Just around.”

“He should come to the recital next month,” the saxophone teacher says, still peering at Isolde with a new hard look on her face. “Come and watch you play.”

“Yeah,” Isolde says, bending the word like a sucked harmonica note so she manages to sound indifferent and aloof.

“Is he in your year at school?” the sax teacher says.

“Oh no,” Isolde says smugly, “he’s left school. He’s an actor. At the Drama Institute,” and she waves an airy hand out the curtained window to the buildings on the far side of the courtyard.

The lights change suddenly and the saxophone teacher can see it, playing out like someone else’s home video in front of her, furry and striped with grainy black.

“He’s an actor,” Isolde’s father is saying.

“That’s what I said,” Isolde says.

“He’s at the Drama Institute.”

“That’s what I said.”

“How old is he?”

“Only first-year, Dad,” Isolde says, trying to look charming.

“I certainly hope he doesn’t expect you to have sex with him.”

“Dad.”

“Because you’re only fifteen,” Isolde’s father says, speaking loudly and clearly as if Isolde is partly deaf. “If you were to sleep with him, that would be a crime.”

“Dad!”

“I’m going to ask you now,” Isolde’s father says, his eyes wide, “I’m going to ask you now, and I want you to give me a straight answer. Have you slept with him?”

“Dad, stop it, it’s gross.” Isolde is inspired by a rare shaft of genius, and says, “It’s like you want to even everything out, play it fair, do by me as you’ve done by Victoria. Crime for crime. Stop it.”

“Why are you sidestepping my question?”

“Why are you talking to me like that? Can’t I talk to Mum?”

“You’ve slept with him.”

“Great. You’ve decided. Now you’ll never believe me whatever I say anyway.”

“You’re only fifteen.”

“Can I talk to Mum?”

“Isolde,” says Isolde’s father sadly, “I never had sisters. Throw me a bone.”

The lights return to normal, restoring a yellowish afternoon light to the studio, and the saxophone teacher blinks as if awakening.