Monday 11 July

I wake with my hands in the air, curved as if holding my cello. I can’t remember what I dreamed about when I lived in the country. The city, no doubt, but I don’t have a clear recollection. I remember daydreams from then – staring at white dry fields, wishing they were streets.

The Marlins move along the boarding house corridor, up before dawn for swim practice. Jinx and Clem slide past almost silently in socks, floorboard surfing the downward tilt outside the room I share with Iris. If you get up some speed, a smooth pair of socks will take you all the way to the Year 10 bathroom.

We’re on the third floor, so we have the dodgy showers with the pressure of mist. The Year 11 and 12 boarders are above us on the fourth floor, and the Year 8 and 9s are below us on the second. The mess, kitchen, boarder study rooms, lounge and Year 7s are on the ground floor. It’s as if the water’s being sucked and heated in every direction except ours.

I’ve heard the basement has an excellent shower, if you don’t mind the cobwebs. Every morning when I’m freezing in the Year 10 bathrooms I decide it’d be worth pushing my way through all the forgotten things they keep down there – old suitcases and chairs and blackboards and costumes – to shower under a blast of water as hot as we had back at the farm. I’d happily get naked with the spiders for that.

Thoughts about the basement lead to thoughts about the portal – the door down there that’s too swollen to shut, forgotten by everyone except the boarders; forgotten even by Old Joy, who spends her life in constant fear that one of us will break her rules and have sex.

I don’t want to go through the portal for sex. Sex would be nice. I wouldn’t mind a date for the formal, followed by sex, but that’s not my most pressing need at the moment. It’s not why I’m obsessed with the door in the basement.

Instead, I imagine myself walking silently across the cold grass of a shadowy world, towards the main gates. I climb over them at the low point and land on the street. From the street to a tram, from the tram to the city, and from there to Orion, this small club above a record store where Frances Carter plays; where Emilie Autumn, Zoë Keating, Anna Meredith, Amiina and Wendy Sutter have all played. I need the portal because it could get me freedom at night without a pass, and the night is when the clubs are open, and the clubs are where the music is happening. And music, these days, is pretty much all I think about.

I try to be quiet in the morning but it doesn’t matter all that much. Iris sleeps through anything. She sleeps through me feeling around in the dark for toiletries, through me tripping over her laptop cord, stubbing my toe on her desk (fuck!), through me shining my phone around, looking for the door handle.

She dreams while I shower, while I come back and get dressed, while I take my cello, my laptop, everything I need for practice. She’s still dreaming as the stale heat of the boarding house gives way to crisp air, as I head into a morning so early it’s dark; so dark the stars are out, and I can imagine, for a second, that I’ve escaped into night.

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.