Alex was from a small coastal town. ‘A little piece of paradise,’ he said. It sounded more sad than sarcastic.
‘You grow up there?’ I asked.
‘Nah. Me and my dad moved there after Mum went AWOL.’
Rachel asked if he missed it and the lightness leached out of his eyes in a single word. ‘No.’
There was more chat about postcodes. Tod was in no hurry to get back to his. I told them I had a view from my kitchen window out across the city.
We went quiet for a while, then I cut to it: ‘So why are we all here?’
I had assumed that this had been discussed among them at some other time—in the kitchen, on a field trip. But from the silence they retreated into, it was safe to say I was wrong. It was like the line between us had been cut, and I found myself working hard to build it up again. I went back a step, talked through what happened in the courtroom, and in my first meeting with Dr J.
Finally Tod made a small offering. ‘It’s our second chance,’ he said, rolling over. An intricate web of stretchmarks spanned his gut.
Over the course of the next hour as we went back into the water and came out again, the three of them divulged a similar course of events: they too had been about to be delivered into custody and given a reprieve. Dr J had been in the courtroom every time. And they had all been offered a contract. Rachel’s was three pages long, mine yet to be signed.
‘So what is it?’ I asked. ‘What is this place even called?’
You couldn’t google it, Rachel had tried; it wasn’t in any directory of youth services or rehab programs.
‘They say it’s a school,’ Alex said.
‘That is such crap,’ Rachel retorted, shaking her head. ‘You call Helen a teacher? You think they’ve even heard of curriculum? It’s not education, it’s some kind of wacko therapy…You know what this place is? It’s a home for mental kids,’ she announced. ‘What they call involuntary treatment.’
The mentals. I thought about it, working out if there was truth in it. I said we could leave whenever we wanted, and Tod backed me up. ‘Right now. If we wanted.’
Rachel: ‘Sure, we could walk out the front gate, and then where would we go?’ She was standing at the edge of the water, her feet sinking in the mud. Her legs were skinny but looked strong, like the rest of her.
Alex chimed in: ‘How long was your drive here? For the last two hours of it, did you see a single car on the road?’
‘I saw train tracks.’
‘But did you see a train?’
Tod said he didn’t want to leave anyway. ‘Why would you?’ And so forth, around and around. Could we leave? Did we want to leave? How would we get out if we did? But all of us sidestepping Rachel’s assessment of what this place was, and why we were here.
Walking back after that first field trip, as the school came into sight through the trees, Tod led us into a joint roasting of Dr J, ‘our great guru’, and I remember the creeping feeling that this was a piece of a story with a traditional narrative and proper characters. I think for a moment I even dared think it was solid, real. If we could just reach the school, eat a meal, sleep and turn up to our class with Helen K in the morning…If we took small steps, the ground wouldn’t begin to crack under our feet. If I was careful, this could be my plan.
A diptych: on the left it is a picture-book scene, a fine oil landscape—four teenagers in various stages of undress wading in a waterhole against a backdrop of bushland and white sky. Somewhere at a distance, but in the frame, is a goat.
The panel on the right side is a darker image of the twenty-four hours that followed. We are back at the school. Rachel’s words keep replaying, resonating, as each abnormal hour passes, as each abnormal episode unfurls.
Back in the confines of the building, we are not students but patients, and this is what they call involuntary treatment. We cannot navigate our way because we cannot see. The right-hand panel is a paper mache monster with eyes in the back of its head.
We didn’t get back until after dark. Tod offered to make omelettes but it didn’t go to plan. When he dropped an egg on the floor, he went back to the carton and picked up another and crushed it in his hand. He nodded as though it had been an experiment and the albumen leaking out of his closed fist was the outcome he had predicted, which he seemed satisfied with until he shook his head and dropped it in the sink, picked up another egg and did it again. (At this point I exited the kitchen.)
I was exhausted but couldn’t sleep and the thrashing around was starting to make me sweat. The air was thick, humid. I got up and tried to open the window before I remembered it couldn’t be done. I was never much of a sleeper. At home, I’d get a few hours then wake up and go outside, lie face up on the concrete walkway; I could breathe better then. The sky helps; there’s always something to look at—look at, listen to…The flats were a twenty-four-hour reality show.
I got dressed and left the room, planning to find a way outside. I didn’t make it all the way around the corridor before I came across Tod walking the opposite way and then Alex, leaning up against the glass staring into the lights at the base of the pear trees. It was 3 am.
‘Welcome,’ Alex said, not turning around.
By the time I did another round he was lying on his back. Tod was still walking at an even pace, expressionless, like someone pretending to be mad for a joke. It was the worst time, obviously: no drugs, no sleep, their rhythms all messed up. I got that, of course I did, but it still made Rachel’s words echo louder in my head…When Alex got up again they were pacing one after the other, a couple of caged monkeys, mental patients. The light in the corridor blurred into a nightmarish amber haze.
I headed for the stairs. A shuttered screen had been pulled across and locked. It was on my way back that I heard her voice. Rachel. At first a distant muffled call. I followed it and found her door.
Tod was behind me. ‘Last week too,’ he said. ‘Pretty much the same stuff.’ He shrugged. ‘Sleeptalking.’
The words were muffled, but I could make them out, sometimes a phrase repeated with different emphasis:
‘if the wax melts,
‘it’s the sun…
‘Trembling…’
I slid down to the floor and closed my eyes to pick up clues about where she was and what she meant—the wax melting under the sun, the trembling.
‘Tremble under the sun…’
I did not move. Every tiny hair on my arm stood on end. Be still my racing pulse: listen and learn.
Finally then, the sound of a hiccup. And silence.
History: the Origins of Tyranny
When I came into class the next day Rachel was sitting in a seat close to the window, staring at something outside. I looked out but saw nothing that hadn’t been there the day before.
Helen coughed. ‘Rachel, could we begin?’
The words didn’t appear to register, and Rachel showed no signs of coming back to us. Unfazed, Helen got the rest of us to put on the headsets.
The first image was an old painting of a very serious Asian guy in a red smock and a weird hat that looked a bit like a bike helmet. It was a cracker of a story: the man was Prince Sado, Korean, mid-eighteenth century. The upshot of his early years was that a mean bastard of father and a bad bout of measles sent him mad and he started acting out by beating up on his servants and raping his consorts. Over time he became increasingly deranged until he launched an all-out killing spree, most famously swinging around the severed head of one of his eunuchs. When it got really out of hand his father called time and ordered him into a rice chest. It took eight days for him to die which, even in the circumstances, I thought was harsh. As Helen K opened it up for an ethical discussion on the death penalty—‘how many heads can you swing before it makes it okay?’—it became clearer to me why she might have struggled to find employment in mainstream education.
(My take: put a bullet between his eyes, but no rice chests.)
The second image was a painting of tiny blue and
yellow dots and squares. It could have been a map of some sort, an aerial view: the blue was water and the yellow was land. Fergus thought it was about infection, and the yellow was pus, which gave him the segue he needed into gammy legs in the blood-soaked trenches, a thread which Alex used to carry us into the death toll from the most recent suicide bomb. Even after Sado, what I saw were yellow blossoms against a blue sky, and the blue sky out the window, at which Rachel continued to stare.
When Helen scrolled us into the next image, I started to suspect that for every lesson she had a gallery to choose from, depending on how we presented on any given day, and that this next image was tailored to fit catatonic girl at window.
It was a painting called The Great Transparents. In the lower left-hand corner there was a cliff edge; the rest of the painting was a grey-blue sky filled with twisted, tornadic objects drawn in white lines, camouflaged in the air.
‘The idea is that there are invisible energies everywhere around us,’ Helen explained. ‘Our minds react to them—accept them or battle against them…’ She wanted to know what we thought of that idea, that something external can control us.
Alex said he could relate, but left it at that.
‘I suppose another way to put it,’ Helen went on, ‘is to ask not can we control them, but do we want to?’ Echoes of the Doctor. After some group shrugs she espoused a bit of theory about the need to harness the power of the energies, how if we let them they can make us brutal. She was linking us back to Sado, then Stalin, Hitler, Mao…Then ultimately all the way back to us. ‘The artist,’ she said, ‘did not see the energies as terrible, but primal.’
My sense here was that she may as well have pointed us in the direction of Rachel as exhibit marked A: Rachel, staring out to her own sky, filled with the same energies, terrible, primal, whispering into her ear and obliterating rational thought. I was trying to remember her script from the night before, imagining that was what was running through her mind now, the jumble of words. When I went back to my room later I would write them down and try to piece it all together.
At the end of the class, as everyone filed out, Helen looked over to Rachel (still motionless) and cocked her head briefly to one side, more out of curiosity, it appeared to me, than concern, before packing up her folder and following the others out of the room like it was any other day. For a few minutes I sat there and considered my options, wondering if Rachel even knew I was there. Eventually I stood up and walked over to the window and looked out again in the same direction.
‘Nice day,’ I said.
When there was no response, I turned a chair around to face her. A laser beam of sunlight streamed through the window and landed on her ripped grey jeans, illuminating patches of brown skin along her thigh. Still she stared out into a fixed space.
‘Knock, knock.’ I thought if anything would get a response from her, that might. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘bad joke. Just checking if you’re in there.’
I thought I saw a double-blink. I waited. After a few very drawn-out seconds, she turned to face me, and when I say face me, I mean she was staring at me the same way she had stared out at the sky, as though to find an answer, or to convey it—only now she was watery-eyed, like the answer was sad and terrible. And then she closed her eyes and held them closed. I sat for a few seconds following the veins in her eye-lids, knowing I had to go but not moving. From the first class to the field trip and now this: like some kind of opioid, she was penetrating the tingly place in the right side of my brain. The brooding, backwater girl with loud dreams…
When I returned an hour later she was still sitting at the window, her eyes open now, staring out. I went in search of Helen but the only teacher I could find was wearing a headset in a music class. I banged on Dr J’s door without an answer. Greg appeared behind me.
‘He isn’t here,’ he said. ‘Can I help?’
‘You can help Rachel,’ I replied. ‘She needs help. She’s been sitting like a fucking zombie for like an hour.’
He nodded. ‘In her own time.’ Then he almost smiled: ‘That is the approach here.’
It irked me. But I’d dealt with worse at my old school. I knew it wasn’t going to end well with Greg so I headed to the kitchen—not just to avert the risk, but because I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. It was closed, out of lunch hours.
Somehow Greg was behind me again.
‘Can you open it?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘If only I could.’
I suddenly realised how hungry I was. Since arriving at the School my appetite had exploded into something unpredictable and uncontrollable; eating a meal was like feeding the beast—the more I ate the more I wanted. Now the double whammy of no food and no help was starting to make for a very bad day.
I was more forceful in my second request.
Greg didn’t flinch, just explained it was an automated system: ‘We all have to live with it. It’s my kitchen too.’ (So he said. Apart from Magnolia, I never saw a staff member in the kitchen.)
‘It is a retarded rule.’
‘No argument there.’
‘So why don’t you do something about it?’
‘That is a fair question, Daniel. The answer is that I don’t have access to the decision-makers.’
‘What about the Doctor?’
He shrugged. ‘You’d have to ask him—when he’s back. I’m not sure when that will be.’
On anyone’s view, my interaction with Greg up to that time had been limited. It was safe to say he dyed his hair and had questionable people skills, and I didn’t much like the sandals. He’d showed me where to get water on my first day and brought me sandwiches. And now he was politely declining to help me out. That is the approach here. Boy with purpose. Except not here. Here, I was part of something I didn’t understand. The panic started rising. I could feel it creeping back.
I don’t see red; I see yellow, and it is blinding. I stared at the blond hairline, my blood rushing and heart racing with rage because of everything Greg was and Greg wasn’t and everything he’d said and hadn’t said, because of everything he stood for and for all he had done and for all he couldn’t do. The truth, of course, is that in asking the questions, my self-diagnosis was askew. Rushing, racing, raging, yes; but (as was so often the way) the anger was secondary to fear, and the object was not poor Greg, but the terrible fact that I had no choice but to accept the answers he was giving.
I am not sure how the next bit played out.
I know I headbutted the closed kitchen door hard enough for it to hurt significantly then slumped to the floor and made noise. I don’t know how loud, or for how long. I never do. It is a process I hand myself over to. There isn’t anything else but this, and there is only one way to be rid of it.
Afterwards I could hear the others banging things in music class and out of the corner of my eye, there was Greg, standing by. I thought I saw him check his watch.
There are different versions, dependent on the trigger. This one ended with me back in my room thinking I might be able to climb down from my window when I noticed that there was a large bowl of mandarins on my bed. I stared at them for a long time before eating all nine and deciding against the window. At dinner Magnolia made her first appearance in the kitchen. She was from Columbia, as Tod had said, and had shiny lips and enormous breasts and sang quietly in Portuguese while she stirred. I asked her to cook me up a second serve of her pork and veal meatballs, which I ate alone while the others curiously watched on.
We were still sitting at the kitchen table when Rachel walked in like nothing had happened. Fergus asked if she’d had a good nap and she looked at him like he was barely sapient. I started mumbling bullshit about what she hadn’t missed then left her alone. Even the sisters looked relieved to have her back.
Alex wasn’t there. Alex didn’t much come to dinner. He said he didn’t like to eat at night. (From what I could see he didn’t like to eat full stop, and now I’d seen him in the flesh I thought there was something deliberat
e about it—the incredible disappearing man.) After dinner I went to look for him; started the lonely circle of the ground floor to see if any doors were open. There was one, the movement room, slightly ajar with just a dim light on. And this was it, a rightful end to the twenty-four-hour loop: I peered through and there he was, engrossed in the strangest cacophony of movement, his arms out to one side then, in a sudden jolt, bending at the elbow and swinging at the joint. As though separated from the upper body, the legs were moving to their own music, bowlegged then rigid, moonwalking, star-jumping , sliding—fluid then jerky—from scarecrow to ragdoll to rubber man. The finale was with his back to me, arms outstretched above his head and leaning back, swivelling at the waist and arching into a backbend. That is when he saw me, upside down, eye to eye. He smiled and sat on the floor. I joined him.
‘Some moves,’ I said.
He just kept smiling.
‘Rachel’s back.’
He nodded. ‘I wonder where she’s been.’
Vulnerable children. That was the phrase most often used when describing us in the transcripts. Not inmates, not patients, not delinquents—not any of the ways we saw ourselves.
Helen K got a particular grilling one day in the inquiry. There was a pattern with the way they questioned her. They picked out one of her images, then opened the door for her to start on her theories, and to demonstrate that we had been put under the tutelage of a woman who for all intents and purposes was bonkers.
COUNSEL: Let’s start with the second image, Ms K. It is a boy with a horrific growth out of his left cheek. It is grotesque, you’d agree with that?
HELEN K: Seeing it as grotesque is one reaction to it. That is your reaction. We had other reactions that one might categorise as more empathetic.
COUNSEL: Very well, Ms K, but you would agree these were vulnerable children…
HELEN K: Most certainly I would. And as such, you must follow their lead, explore the subjects to which they connect. This is adolescence we are talking about. It is precious and fragile, a time of rebirth.
The Subjects Page 6