Read Online The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton - Free Book Online

from the stairway, Bed by eleven please. Their counterpointed footsteps,
     light and heavy, have just dwindled away up the stairs, and they have just shut their bedroom door with a faint and knuckled
     click.
    Victoria says, “What about that group of boys you used to hang out with? Are they still pissing about with you guys?”
    She speaks with the unrequited prerogative of an older sister’s demand for the whole truth. As the elder, Victoria’s perspective
     on her little sister’s life is always that of a recent veteran, knowing and qualified and unshockable. It is as if, at each
     new stage, Isolde merely picks up another hand-me-down costume that Victoria has grown out of and cast behind her, and as
     she struggles with the arm-holes Victoria is entitled to enter the dressing room and watch. When Isolde gets her first period,
     fits her first bra, plants her first kiss, chooses a dress for her first ball—at all these milestones Victoria is, or will
     be, present. If not, the elder sister is then always entitled to ask, Why didn’t you
tell
me, Issie, why?
    By contrast, little Isolde would never dare ask Victoria what really
happened
behind the tiny pasted window of the rehearsal-room door. She would never dare ask for details—the life under his clothes,
     his breath, the touch of him. She would never ask, Was he nervous, Toria? or Who reached out first? or Did you talk together
     first, for weeks and weeks—about yourselves,about what you wanted and what you didn’t have? All these are questions Isolde
     is not allowed to ask. She could not ask, Why didn’t you
tell
me? when Victoria snared her first lover, began her first affair, broke her first promise, or shed, for the first time, tiny
     blossom-drops of virgin blood, for all of these slender landmarks are part of a terrain in which the younger sister does not
     yet belong.
    Later, when Isolde is Victoria’s age, and Victoria is still two steps ahead, at university maybe, and living elsewhere, smoking
     her first papered twist of weed, walking home from her first one-night stand with her sandals slung over her wrist, for the
     first time deciding what, in truth, she is going to
be
—then, perhaps, Victoria might tell her what really happened. Not every detail, because by then Victoria will be airy and
     deliberately removed, waving her hand and saying, “I just think Mum and Dad were cunts about that whole thing,” or “God, that
     was ages ago.” She might say, “We were going to run off together, but in the end he went back to his old girlfriend. I ran
     into him on the street a few months ago. He’s fatter than he was.”
    But speaking of it now would be impossible. Isolde thinks that it would be like flipping a chapter ahead in a book that she
     was reading, to press Victoria for a detail, or an answer, or a map. Victoria’s life will always be two paces ahead, now and
     forever, and if Isolde saw the road before she had to walk upon it herself she would simply be a cheat.
    “Yeah, but it means you’ll never make the same mistakes as me,” Victoria says, unwilling to let Isolde feel she has the poorer
     lot.
    “No,” Isolde says, “I
will
make the same mistakes, but by the time I do they won’t seem interesting because you’ll already have done it, and I’ll only
     be a copy.”
    “Yeah… no,” says Victoria. “You’ve got it better. Mum and Dad are way stricter with me than they are with you. They waste
     all their energy on me and by the time you come alongtheir standards have dropped and they can’t be bothered any more.”
    “Yeah… no,” says Isolde. “I have to pretend to be the baby, and that sucks.”
    “Yeah, but when I was six I was getting crayons and chalk for Christmas, and when you were six you got a pink tennis racket
     in a pink glitter sleeve. The older they get, the richer they get. You had way more stuff to play with than I ever did.”
    “Yeah, but that’s just it. I’m always compared to you. You