it tastes horrible on his tongue.
‘Tutsis, stand up!’
There is that word again. Tutsi. I cannot believe it – we were only talking about it this morning on our way here. Tutsi – that is what they say my mum is. So I must be too. Nine or ten children in front of me start to rise from their seats, and some behind me too (I could feel them, hear them, I am not sure which because it all happened quickly in real life, only slowly when I remember it). I am not sure whether I even turn to look. But I feel myself untangle my hand from Jeanette’s, because she is not getting up with me, although I thought she would. She is my mum’s shadow. She thinks Mum is the most beautiful too. And if to be Tutsi is to be like Mum, then I must be Tutsi as well as Hutu. I look down at Jeanette as I stand as straight and as tall as I can. She looks confused and scared.
The teacher starts to take the names of all the Tutsis standing up – there are a lot less of us than the Hutus – but he stops suddenly. The sudden silence makes me look up from Jeanette and into the angry eyes of the teacher again.
‘Clementine –’ he is checking his list – ‘Habimana, what do you think you are doing?’
The children in front all turn to stare at me too and I know how the Twa boys felt now. What do I think I am doing? What…
‘Well?’ His wide head looks like it is swelling up, getting wider, perhaps going to explode. ‘You are either a Hutu or a Tutsi! Now, which is it?’
Which is it? You mean I can only be one or the other – not both? I am not sure what to do. It feels like an age before I decide. Most of the class are Hutu – it felt powerful to be the same as everyone else. Jeanette is Hutu. And we must be the same. But perhaps she does not realize if she is Tutsi too. So she cannot know how nice it is to feel special, not the same as everyone else, one of the beautiful ones. But it does not feel that good right now. I feel Jeanette’s hand on the back of my knee – she only touches me lightly, but I tell myself that she has almost beaten her fist there so I have no choice but to sit down, otherwise I might have been standing there all day! I want to tell the teacher that I think my mother is Tutsi and my father a Hutu, but he does not seem in the mood for any more words from me. He just stares through the standing Tutsis at me – I feel like an antelope hiding in the forest and he is the hunter peering through the tall trees trying to find me. He keeps looking, even as he starts checking the next name on his list. Then his eyes finally leave me and I start to breathe again – it is only when I start that I realize I had stopped!
‘Tell me a story. And remember to breathe!’
‘What do you mean?’
I pressed ‘stop’ on the tape deck before the song kicked in again. Sometimes when I’m teaching I feel a right fraud, I tell you. I mean, when there’s someone in front of me with a great voice already, I just want to say, ‘Go away, save your twenty quid: there’s nothing I can teach you!’ But then I think about my own bank balance and I ask myself, why are they here? If they’re such good singers, if they think they’re such good singers, what are they doing coming to a teacher? So I start to look for faults, scribbling frantically in my important-teacher-looking file (99p WH Smith) as they sing Mariah better than Mariah again. That ‘all’ was a bit shorter than Mariah’s = she has a problem with her breathing. Hits every bloody high note without fail = needs lower range developing. Looks a bit nervous standing in a scummy room in the middle of the scariest council estate in London singing to a stranger with a receding hairline = has a confidence problem.
Bingo!
That’s why the singers who can sing come looking for a teacher – they lack confidence. It’s like paying twenty quid to go and see a therapist, I suppose, and I’m happy to play Dr Bolt for an hour – everyone’s a winner! Except…then I feel even more of a fraud. Me, teaching confidence. Hey, student, this is how I deal with my stresses: grab a knife, any knife, but it must be sharp, really sharp, then pull up a sleeve and find a bit of skin that isn’t already cut or scarred (obviously this gets more difficult the more you do it, but for a novice like you the world is your oyster), sink in that knife as if you were slicing bread, not too fast and not too deep (we don’t want to damage tendons if possible), just deep enough so that the pain blots out the stresses and the nerves. Some rock stars take copious amounts of cocaine to boost their confidence – OK if you can afford it, I suppose – but all you need is an everyday kitchen knife and you can manufacture your own drugs, your own anaesthetic, free of charge whenever you want.
That’s not what I tell the eighteen-year-old Mariah-wannabe fiddling with the edge of her lyric sheet, by the way! Because when it comes to teaching confidence in singing, really I’m selling myself short if I say I’m a fraud. If there’s one time in my life when I’m truly confident, when I don’t think for a second about cutting myself, or even so much as a little burn, then it’s when I’m on stage singing. One minute before I go on, maybe, as I pace the dressing room. Two seconds after I get off, probably, as I remember the tiny mistake I made that no one else noticed. But while I’m on stage…I’m in heaven, I tell you…If only the gig could go on for ever…And if only I could get a bloody gig these days.
So yeah, sometimes when I’m teaching I feel a right fraud. But when it came to Lola, I earned every penny.
‘What do you mean?’ She sat down again behind my flimsy metal music stand, which had seen better days since I bought it when I was learning the violin at school, and she rubbed her enormous calves, tired from the heels, I suppose, pursing her lips so hard that I thought the collagen would start oozing out any second from between the glossy too-brown-to-be-red-and-too-red-to-be-brown lipstick and the dark brown lip liner.
I called her ‘she’ because…well, she would kill me if I called her ‘he’, and because, although she was clearly a bloke dressed up like a woman, she did it with such conviction that you started to believe it yourself, I tell you. Lola needed no lessons in confidence. But she really needed them in singing.
‘I mean you’ll never make it to the ends of these lines with power unless you take a breath before each one, as I showed you.’
‘I was.’
‘Lola, if I can see your shoulders going up and down like they’re on strings then you’re not breathing from the diaphragm, you’re just taking shallow breaths.’
She started looking at her nails, looking out the window – you could just see her twenty years ago in the back row of a French class refusing to join in. Perhaps she would’ve paid more attention if she’d known she was going to be singing Edith Piaf songs and ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir’ for a living by the age of thirty. She didn’t take well to criticism; I was going to have to tread carefully here.
‘The lamé dress you told me about for this number sounds…’
Grotesque.
‘…grrrreat; but it’s hardly going to show off your figure if it keeps riding up with your shoulders as you gulp for air, don’t you reckon?’
She looked back at me, down her long nose, fiddling with the crucifix around her neck. I was getting through.
‘It’s just a matter of practice, until it becomes second nature. And it will, I promise you.’
She uncrossed her legs and stood up, smoothing down her pink skirt.
Result!
