The Subjects

by Sarah Hopkins

  Geography: Biophysical Interactions

  When I sat in that first class with Helen K, I’d assumed that there were more students in other classrooms. I was wrong. Our cohort was twelve in total. Soon I would learn there were others, other children in other places, but it was only when I sat down at a computer last week to find my name that I got a true sense of the scope.

  There it was, my very own dashboard: metrics reduced into graphs and grids—performance measures and targets, a timeline of key events over my forty-seven years of life. Until that moment, the scientist in me had felt that human existence was in one sense wasted because it went unobserved. Wrong again. It turned out someone was paying attention.

  The first field trip came at the end of the week.

  After four days at the School I had accepted that students were confined to the building and the courtyard. Around us were grey-green paddocks glimpsed through long and narrow windows in each of the classrooms, with no way to access them; all interior doors faced inward, to the courtyard. Apart from Dr J’s waiting room, the emergency fire doors were the only way to exit. It was just something I noted—having made my plan to wait and see, I wasn’t much bothered with what was outside.

  When I came into the kitchen on the Saturday, Tod hurried me through my bowl of chia porridge and then out into the corridor where the rest of the students had assembled outside the furthest emergency door. After a minute or so of waiting, it clicked open. On the other side of the door was Helen K in a wide-brimmed hat, standing behind a table piled with small backpacks and handing them out to the students.

  The doors, the trips, the backpacks—none of this was ever explained to me; I never got a list of house rules. If you didn’t manage to get to the kitchen for breakfast by 11 am, it closed, door locked. It opened again between 1 and 3 pm, and then again between 7 and 9 pm. The hot water got turned off between 11 pm and 5 am, the same hours there was no access to the games room. If you asked a question, they’d give you an answer, but it was never laid out. You felt your way. What I couldn’t work out, and what perplexed me more than the rules themselves, was why this group of supposed delinquents was so compliant. The ensuite bathrooms and the video games and the fridge stocked full, sure—I could see there was no reason to riot—but there had to be more to it. The field trip was the next piece of the puzzle.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked, the last to get a backpack.

  Helen smiled. ‘Wherever you want to go,’ she said, like she was bestowing some great gift. ‘Be back by dark.’

  In front of me was a gate to a yard. The others had left it open and hadn’t waited. They were all walking now in separate paths across a massive field. At the end of the field was a tract of bushland that went all the way to the mountains. Apart from the car trip, this was my first real chance to scope my natural surrounds, standing on a patch of earth that spanned beyond the mountains to a line that blurred into cloud, and between me and the line, closeup and distant patches of colour and shade, less real, but still it was all somehow beneath my feet.

  So where to?

  Wherever you want to go.

  The boys from the back row had stopped on a flat bit of paddock to toss a ball around; Alex and Tod had taken off towards the bush, boys with a purpose. Behind them was Rachel—without a pack and also without shoes, and last, the sisters. My decision to follow came not from an instinct to explore, but an instinct not to get left behind.

  I trailed by fifty metres, maintaining my distance, until Rachel stopped in her tracks just as she reached the bush and turned to face the sisters. It was sudden, confrontational. I couldn’t hear what she said but by the time the sisters caught up with her, I was within earshot.

  ‘Knock, knock, who’s there?’ It was the taller one, Grace (she was slightly younger; there was less than a year between them).

  Then Imogen: ‘Crazy fucking psycho bitch.’

  Grace: ‘Crazy fucking psycho bitch who?’

  When they saw me coming they put the punchline on hold and disappeared into the bush.

  Rachel looked at me for a moment like I was a curious new species. Furrowed, her eyebrows almost joined up.

  ‘You think they just want to be friends?’ I said.

  She almost laughed. ‘I think they are serial killers.’ Then she shrugged and something harder came into her eyes, something untouchable. In spite of the sisters’ efforts to infiltrate, she could shut them out. The sisters, all of it. In the lessons and around the school…Rachel was the first out of class. She slept a lot. She stared into space. A couple of times I’d caught her smiling at some thought inside her head. And now, as the words left her mouth, she had spun around into the bush and disappeared. The girl was hardwired to deflect, I thought as I peered after her through the trees: a rogue cell cluster up against the toxic pathogens.

  Left alone, I questioned whether to go on.

  A bushwalk. That was something people did, I told myself. They got special boots and broad-brimmed hats and went on weekends or whatever. Sometimes they got lost and rescued and had to thank the emergency services. One died once, a Korean woman who went off on her own, and I remember thinking what sort of fucking idiot takes off on a solo trek. Until this day I couldn’t say I’d been on any kind of walk in anything that would qualify as bush. At the end of the park I used to hide in there was a bunch of trees; when you rubbed the leaves in your hands it smelled like toilet cleaner. They were decent trees, well-spaced, and they stood straight like trees are meant to.

  From a distance, as I walked towards the bush on the day of my first field trip, I had expectations of something similar. From a distance, from the outside, the bushland presented as an entity within a landscape, a shapely mound of green positioned as a breaker between paler pastureland and a greyish rocky mountain, promising, in my mind, shade, life, protection. But from the first step under the canopy I saw it for what it really was, what was hidden from view: its bones and its spindly innards, a dishevelled mess of gum trunks sloping all over the place in a grab for a place in the sun, matted bracken and burnt-out logs, a battleground of ragged survivors.

  There was no clear space to walk, no path, no order. I tried to tie it into a narrative: boy on mission, boy in obstacle course—lightfooted, stepping up and over, never stumbling. The others gathered and waiting on the other side in a golden place…Then I hit a landmine—a hole covered over in twigs—tripped over and landed on my arm, a deep scratch sprouting bubbles of blood. I wasn’t on the ground ten seconds before I felt the bite on my ankle—a pair of ants on my sock line big enough to eat. I jumped up. There, not a few inches from me, what I’d thought was a boulder I now saw was a clay tower infested with the fat little fuckers. That thing I said when Mary tried to tell me something was good: this is the opposite of good. I repeated it now as I picked up a rock and threw it, ducked when it hit a tree, rebounded and almost took me out. The tide of bad adrenaline peaked with the realisation that no track meant no track back. It got blurry and I went in circles for a while before stumbling into a clearing of sorts where I paused, stood my ground, waited.

  I heard a twig crack, footsteps. A figure coming through the trees…I hoped it was Rachel but it wasn’t. This one wore boots. It was the boy with the acne. Fergus.

  ‘You look fully freaked,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, I’m okay. Which way is out?’

  That was all I wanted to know from Fergus, but he sat down, took out a bag of sandwiches from his backpack and started eating. With a mouth half full of ham and tomato he started shaking his head. ‘I had the weirdest friggin’ dream last night.’

  I did what I do in the face of unsolicited sharing; I said nothing.

  The message wasn’t received.

  ‘I’ve had it before. I keep getting the same one. I’m in like a trench in a battle and right in front of my face is this wall of mud and it’s like full of cut-off arms and legs with no bodies. The Doctor reckons I’m like tapping into the dreams of my grandad. He’s dead. He w
as in a war, like a hero…’

  It went on. There was a gurgle of phlegm in his voice. I stood up and he stood up too and when I started walking he followed and kept talking. I stopped him mid-sentence.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said. Habit. I picked my people; with an operation like mine it was the only way it worked.

  He either didn’t hear or pretended he didn’t and kept walking along beside me. I got way too close to his pus-filled face when I said it again. Louder this time; also something about breaking his fingers. Then I walked alone towards the light.

  When the trees cleared I was back in the white glare. In front of me was a creek, a bit ganky. Not far down it ran dry, and up a way too, after which there was a rise, a rock face which was as far as I could see. I found a patch of grass next to a boulder blanketed in pale lichen (no ants) and sat down again, took off my shoes and my shirt and ate my sandwiches. Without registering that I was tired, I leaned against the rock, closed my eyes and almost instantly fell asleep.

  I was blasted out of it some unknown time later by a desperate cry, like someone groaning in distress or in physical pain.

  I didn’t move.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw something beige and fur-covered with overgrown toenails. A hoof. Two. I remained motionless and so did the hooves. Terror, that was my first reaction. I would be trampled or kicked to death; maybe eaten.

  Slowly, I trawled the courage to turn my head and look up from the hooves to the legs; the body. When I reached the woolly coat, it was with some relief that I realised I was looking at a goat. The neck was long and slender, supporting a strangely small head with a face like a camel. The creature was standing alert, a metre and a bit high, pointed ears pricked forward, fluffy tail raised. Big doey brown eyes partly covered by an outcrop of longer, flopping fleece on top of the tiny head, staring right at me.

  My fear ebbed away. It was not humanly possible to be afraid of this pair of eyes. I stared back, and we stayed like that, me and the little goat, for what seemed like minutes. A peaceful standoff. Its ears fell flat and it made a clicking sound inside its mouth. I mimicked it the best I could. I didn’t want to move now because I didn’t want it to run away. A feeling of calm washed over me, an endorphin rush, like a nice diazepam. For a second I even wondered if I was still asleep; it was that smooth. I didn’t have any other thoughts, just this channel flowing between me and my goat. You couldn’t pay money for that.

  But all good things. The sound of steps approaching, heavy through the trees: the goat let out a squeal like a girl screaming and sped away at an awkward and endearing gallop, while out of the trees, puffing and pink-faced, stepped Tod.

  Looking me over, he told me to be careful. ‘You’ll get burnt.’ And when he saw my indifference: ‘Even when it’s cloudy, as long as you can still make a shadow.’

  He looked like he was intending to walk on, but reconsidered and, like Fergus before him, plonked next to me and took out his food pack. No sandwiches, just boiled eggs and carrot sticks. He was ‘off wheat’. He’d lost another kilo over the last eight days.

  ‘Dr J wants to take away my scales. He thinks I’m starting to fixate.’

  Like Fergus, but unlike Fergus…

  ‘Are you?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ve got no idea how fucked it is being fat.’ He was sick of the gym room. He needed to get out here more, into the wide open sky. ‘I need to change my contract…You signed yours yet?’

  ‘We’re still working on it.’

  He squinted a little when I said that. ‘Get it right. Once it’s signed, that’s it; he won’t let you change it.’ The last bit he mumbled, more to himself than to me. This wasn’t the Tod from the kitchen, but I didn’t expect it to be. This was a different set of conditions, I understood that.

  I changed the subject. ‘I saw a goat,’ I said.

  ‘Just by himself?’

  I nodded.

  ‘That’s the good goat. They reckon it’s got some kind of brain damage. Goats don’t normally come near you.’ He finished his egg, got up and started walking away, up the creek. I called out: ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Swimming,’ he shouted back.

  I followed. Unexpectedly agile, Tod kept up a cracking pace. Scrambling up the rocks behind, I guessed this was his survival mode, or a workout, one of the two. He was a way ahead of me so he disappeared when he reached the top. As I neared it, I heard voices. And it came into view: the creek widened into a waterhole, framed on one side by a jutting rock platform and on the other by a willow tree, the tips of its branches dipping in the water. The water itself was muddy brown at the edges, clearer as it deepened, and in the centre, a dark and velvety green.

  And there, floating in the bed of velvet, was Rachel.

  What happened next was unexpected. I stepped closer to the edge…Girl floating in creek. Star-shaped limbs, a halo of waving hair, eyes closed. Just beneath the surface, the outline of her body and rising above it, through black singlet fabric and with a buoyancy all of their own, her breasts, in the flickering wet light like they were communicating with me somehow. It was the most perfectly intimate thing I had ever seen and my physical reaction shocked me. It was not mild. You would better say extreme to off-the-charts, like the peak of synthesised MDMA, stomach churning, scaling through light-headedness and nausea to a release of cranial and muscular pressure, and finally, euphoria—which is by its nature short-lived.

  Tod, struggling to pull his shirt over his chest, started to emit a series of grunts, and Rachel’s body turned at the sound and slid beneath the surface. When she resurfaced, she looked at me. I almost jumped when she spoke.

  ‘You swimming?’

  I said nothing. Possibly, I gaped.

  ‘You should.’

  I would have done pretty much anything she wanted. I stripped down to my shorts, suddenly conscious of my pale and weedy body. Stepping in, the rocks sharp underfoot, the water muddy and cold, I clenched my teeth and dived under. Came up hyperventilating.

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ Tod said, laughing.

  I held back on the obvious retort about blubber and swam around to warm up. I stopped when I heard clapping coming from above. I looked up: Alex, standing on a branch of the willow tree that extended part-way over the creek. He was wearing boxer shorts and, it seemed from a distance, a shirt with a pattern. As he sidestepped out over the water, I saw that it wasn’t a shirt; the images were on his skin, tattoos—half a dozen birds in upward flight forming a diagonal line from left shoulder to right thigh, the last half-covered by his shorts.

  He wasn’t holding on to anything anymore. As he raised his arms in the air, pretending to dive, I could see his ribs jutting out; he was painfully thin. Even with the branch bending under his weight he was five or so metres above us. Directly beneath him, only a small area of water looked deep enough to jump into safely, and even there I wasn’t so sure. I glanced at Tod who looked on like he’d seen the show before. Annoyed, tolerant; tense but not anxious.

  ‘Isn’t it too shallow?’ I said.

  Rachel answered. ‘It’s not my spinal cord.’ She shrugged, but the words came out too forcefully for someone who didn’t care, and I noticed she didn’t look.

  I said nothing more, just moved closer to the edge to give him room. He stood a moment, almost graceful, then launched into the air. In the millisecond of flight I caught his expression—the joy of weightlessness. He hit the spot in a massive splash and seemed to come up okay but when I saw his face I thought he was in pain. He went under again and came up smiling.

  For the next while, the four of us stayed in the water, me wading my way closer by millimetres to Rachel but trying not to look in her direction. No one spoke. It went so long like that, I wondered if there was some kind of unspoken rule about it (a term in their contract?) but either way I was beginning to find it a bit excruciating.

  ‘Has everyone seen the goat?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah.’ Tod took it up where he’d left off earlier. ‘T
he next property is a farm. There’s a lot of them there. Sometimes they let them over here to graze. But that one seems to be here for good.’

  ‘Do they eat them?’ It was the question on my mind.

  Alex said they did in India.

  ‘Not just India,’ said Tod. ‘Goat curry. It’s the most consumed meat in the world.’

  It wasn’t much but at least group conversation as a concept was no longer off the agenda. We were out of the water now, drying off, eating the rest of our rations, all except Alex, who wasn’t much of an eater. He lay spreadeagled on the muddy ground, his birds rising and falling with his breath. They were just outlines, like a child’s drawing, unfinished. He told me later he had done them himself with a home-kit. ‘Stick and poke. Wasn’t too bad.’

  I asked Rachel how she walked barefoot through the bush. She’d put a T-shirt on and had a towel around her waist but I was close enough to see the goosebumps on her skin; the faint scars on the underside of her forearms.

  ‘You got to be light-footed, that’s the only way to do it. We walked barefoot all over the place when I grew up,’ she said. ‘There were bits of glass and bone crunched up in the dirt. That’s what we walked on.’ There was no natural flow to her dialogue; a pause weighed heavily between sentences as she seemed to consider whether or not to continue. It made you wait for every word.

  Tod came in. ‘What kind of bone?’

  ‘Stray dog bones.’ She was talking to Tod, not me, but for this last bit she looked at me: ‘I don’t mean like the ones they chew. I mean dead dogs. Their bones.’

  Whether she was throwing it out there in a ‘don’t fuck with me’ way or it was an effort to connect, there was a message in it and the message was for me. And I wanted more.

  Tod took us in another direction. After a minute’s silence for the dead dogs scattered on the floor of Rachel’s childhood: ‘So where are you from, Alex?’ he asked, overly enlivened, a mocking enactment of the social ritual of conversation.