‘I’m going to assume you’re prepared to workshop your practice exam today?’ She smiles widely; I think it’s meant to be kind, but I can’t seem to interpret it as anything other than the smile of someone about to toss a puppy under a bus.
Damien leans back on his hands, smirking. He’s the only one who ever bothers talking to me in Drama; I have no earthly idea why. He of the pallid face and ill-fitting uniform, of the public testicle-selfies, who pronounces ‘Macbeth’ with an ‘f ’ at the end – is actually a surprisingly good actor. He may be, as Elsie says, a ‘giant bag of dicks’, but he is acing this class.
Ms Heller steps right into my space. I clock a hint of Lady Grey tea and the sweet perfume that follows her like a cloud, and I have to fight the urge to hold my breath. Someone in the orchestra pit hammers out a drum roll. It may be a coincidence – the music nerds rarely pay any attention to the drama geeks – but the sound just compounds the sensory overload. My stomach contracts.
‘So. How have we gone with the exercises we were set?’ she asks.
I swallow. ‘Exercises. Right. Well, we tried them. But I’m not sure we really understood the point.’
In fact, I spent several hours on Sunday immersed in a Sense Memory task, whereby I was instructed to sit, breathing deeply, while staring into a cup of coffee. According to the instructions Ms Heller had given me, this assignment was supposed to help develop ‘emotions as a reaction to familiar stimuli’. What I learned after contemplating Mum’s Blend 43 for half an hour is that coffee is damp and brown. I’m not sure how that’s applicable to my practice monologue from All’s Well That Ends Well. I’m writing it off as yet another unfathomable mystery of this hellish class.
Ms Heller sighs. ‘The point, Miss Reyhart, is that we need to work on unlocking some of that fire I know you have hidden away!’ She closes her eyes, her fingers fluttering near her temple, and I brace myself to be struck by a motivational quote to the face. ‘The best and most beautiful things cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.’ She taps me on the chest. ‘I know you have things to share. Don’t be shy!’
I resist the urge to remind her that I am not shy. That’s always been the conclusion most people draw about me, the simplest and least demanding diagnosis, which I rarely bother to correct. ‘Shy’ is a label everyone can get on board with. I contemplate Ms Heller, her soft eyes and earnestness. I think about her nonsense quote. Anyone claiming that beautiful things can’t be seen has never encountered a perfect Pythagorean proof.
I can’t stop my mouth from moving. ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘I’m not being difficult, Ms Heller. Not on purpose, anyway. But why is this important? Why do you think it’s something I’m missing?’
Damien snorts. I haven’t failed to notice that he’s the only person in class who seems interested in this conversation. ‘What are these human “emotions” of which you speak?’ he craws in a staccato robot voice, complete with jerky hand movements. He makes a couple of meeping sounds, then falls backwards onto the carpet, laughing.
Ms Heller glares at him. She turns back to me, brows knitting. ‘Sophia, performance is not just about learning lines and memorising facts and such.’ She glances up at the stage, which has been taken over by Joseph Cheng, who’s rehearsing his solo. ‘Accessing your emotions, being able to express them clearly – making yourself understood – it’s such a fundamental part of getting along in the world.’ She hesitates. ‘Isn’t that something you’d like to improve on?’
Huh. I wonder if anyone interrupted Richard Feynman’s quantum electrodynamics research to tell him he ought to spend time getting in touch with his feelings? Or if Turing’s invention of the computer was waylaid by a demand that he stop to evaluate his emotions? Despite all my questions about Perelman and his mental state, I seriously doubt his problem was not being demonstrative enough. And yet, the collective minds responsible for my life have apparently decided that nothing I do is meaningful unless I can smile while I am doing it.
I move past my teacher and stomp forward. If I had to name my current emotion, Ms Heller, I think I’m feeling a little pissed off.
Heavy blue drapes conceal the windows and the outside world. Beyond them, in the middle distance, lie the stark grounds and outdoor amphitheatre, with its tiers of sunken seats and its mechanised central stage, out of order for years now. I guess the idea was a ‘theatre in the round’ or whatever, but it’s never worked properly, and after an unfortunate production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in which Sanjay Khan’s pharaoh wig got caught in the stage gears, the amphitheatre was quietly decommissioned and has since disappeared under a carpet of weeds.
Dust, thick and dirty, floats before my eyes. I wonder, distantly, if there’s a way of calculating the odds I’ll slowly asphyxiate in this room while the music club practises an all-brass version of ‘Funky Town’ in the background. I can’t even tell if I’m experiencing a freak-out, since I can never breathe properly in here.
I take a seat on the stage stairs while Joseph wraps up his scene.
I drape my hands over my knees, then worry that I’m trying too hard to appear relaxed, so I cross my legs and clasp my hands lightly in my lap. Then I start to worry that my hands are in a ridiculously contrived position, but moving them again is going to make me look fidgety and agitated. I start to feel my focus tunnelling down into my hands, like every molecule of skin is lit with a glow that’s probably visible to everyone in the room –
‘Ms Reyhart!’ Ms Heller chirps. ‘You’re up.’
I force my wobbly legs to stand. Joseph gives me what I think is a sympathetic smile. I clomp across the floorboards to the place under the spotlight that he has just vacated, my heart jackhammering in my throat like it has detached itself from my pericardium and is trying to beat right through my skin.
I hunker down on my knees at the edge of the light and take a few deep, futile breaths. Then I open my mouth and let forth a torrent of words.
‘Then I confess here on my knee before high heaven and you that before you and next unto high heaven –’
‘Okay, relax your shoulders, Sophia,’ Ms Heller calls from somewhere to my left. ‘You’re supposed to be professing undying love, not taking a knee in the locker room at half-time.’
I shake out my shoulders and try to relax my hands, but my extremities seem to have lost all feeling. ‘Um … my friends were poor but honest, so’s my love, be not offended for it hurts not him –’