The Rehearsal

keep. You will carry it around with you always like a dirty secret.”
    With a flourish the boy fans the cards in an arc on the felt table in front of him. Her eyes are focusing now, and Isolde becomes aware of others on the stage, clothed in red and black and foaming around this central boy like lepers. The boy is tall and proud and glittering, harshly lit as if he is a figure in an overexposed photograph, bright and misted and glassy-eyed against the glare.
    “If you pick a card of a black suit you will be attracted to men. If you pick a card of a red suit you will be attracted to women. The number value on any spot card indicates your sexual prowess. Ten means you’re good; ace means you only think you’re good.”
    The boy is whipping the cards out of the pack as he speaks, holding them up between his fingers and his thumb, then puckering his hand swiftly so the card pops out and flutters into the air above him. He catches the fluttering card with his free hand, his other hand already reaching to pick up the next. The effect is rather like he is juggling, the cards tossed up in an explosive little arc and snatched away before they fall.
    “If you pick a court card, your sexual life might get a little more complicated. In general, a queen of any suit forces you to cross-dress, a king will give you a sadistic tendency and a jack will give you a masochistic tendency. But there are exceptions.”
    The kettle-drum roll is building and building. As the drum roll gets slowly louder, the boy becomes gradually more urgent. His movements get faster and his throat gets tighter and his voice gets more insistent. The black-clothed figures on the stage have begun to writhe.
    “The King of Diamonds is the only king to carry an axe instead of a sword. For this reason he is known as the Man with the Axe. If you draw the Man with the Axe, your sexual appetite may well develop into a perversion.
    “All the court cards are shown in full face except for three: two of the jacks and one of the kings are always in profile. If you draw one of these one-eyed cards, you will be prone to self-deception and dishonesty.
    “But the most important of all the court cards is the Queen of Spades.”
    Someone collides heavily with Isolde from behind. She staggers painfully and whips around. A boy has fallen back against the wing-cloth, swearing and clutching a handful of fabric to steady himself, his feet slipping on the worn chalky floorboards and his free arm sawing back and forth as he tries to regain his balance. He fumbles to keep hold of the scepter he is holding, but it falls with a clatter and rolls away under a fold of cloth.
    He peers at her sharply and frowns. “What are you doing here?” he hisses, already ducking down to retrieve his scepter.
    “I was just watching,” Isolde says, taking a hasty step back as the boy scrabbles around in the half-dark. “Sorry.”
    “Stanley!” hisses one of the lepers on stage. “Stanley, that’s you!”
    There is no time for Isolde to say more. The boy grabs his scepter, jumps to his feet and hurries onstage, righting his crown and flipping his scepter up in the brief half-second before he is illuminated. Isolde’s last glimpse of him before he dissolves into the harsh stage light is of a face in transformation, caught between a natural expression and a caricature, changing from the inside in the way the bathwater skin begins to pucker and depress when the plug is pulled from underneath.
    Isolde’s heart is still thumping from the collision and she suddenly feels ashamed that she is watching without invitation. She turns and slips away, retreating down the white-nosed steps she entered by, padding softly down the narrow corridor and finally bursting out into the ginkgo-smelling bright of the day.

SIX
    April
    “Masks or faces? That’s what I keep asking myself. Masks or faces.”
    The Head of Movement was leaning against the radiator in the staffroom, his thin hands wrapped around his mug, frowning in a glassy sort of way at a faint stain on the linoleum floor. “The tall girl,” he said. “Today. Doing that… that piece from… The piece she did today—oh, start me off?”
    The Head of Acting dipped his newspaper and looked at him over the top of his glasses. “Come, you spirits…”
    “ Come, you spirits, that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full of direst cruelty. Yes.” The Head of Movement stood quivering for a