COUNSEL: Ah, yes. Rebirth.
When he asked if she could explain that, she replied that just as a newborn opens his eyes to the world and screams with all the power his tiny lungs can muster, so the adolescent howls at the assault of adulthood.
As I read this piece of transcript my feeling was that she knew what she was walking into. But her pact with herself, with the world, with all of this, was to be who she was and to tell it like it is—the world through the eyes of Helen K.
For a page or so she explained that adolescence is a time of subconscious connection to the very essence of the universe—dark matter—leading into this final part of the explanation and the end of this particular exchange.
HELEN K: It is this realisation, at a subconscious level, that confronts the adolescent. They want to kick out, or shut down—or just not get out of bed. You know how teenagers are.
COUNSEL: Others might posit that it is hormones, as opposed to some sort of cosmic interconnection.
HELEN K: They might. And I would say hormones are a function of our brain, and the brain is the operational arm of our being—our soul, if you like—and the adolescent soul, these young people, in those key moments they see more, they feel more and they understand more. Listen to them. Listen, nurture, and let them be. It is the time we define ourselves, our instinctive responses: what will make us recoil and cringe and shudder, how we look into our own eyes…Look into your own eyes and in them, I dare say, you will see your adolescent self. You should try it some time.
COUNSEL: Thank you; I appreciate the tip.
The day I read this part of the transcript I did go home and look in the mirror and into my own eyes. Mine are a spotted hazel brown with a darker rim around the iris. Tiny red threads drift into the white. It took me immediately back to my second-year visual system classes, shifting restlessly in my seat and staring up at the diagram of the cortical pathways. And then the task at hand: what of myself did I see in them? I couldn’t look at both eyes at once without the reflection becoming blurred. When I looked at the single eye, my focus was drawn to the imperfections, the irregularities, not just in the eye itself, but now around it, the space between the eyebrows, and then just the awkwardness of the components. There was a moment where that was uncomfortable, and there followed a sudden lack of recognition. What I was looking at was a strange animal. And finally, a funny thing happened. I remembered that first field trip. I remembered waking and looking into the eyes of the goat, and for a moment those eyes, the doey-brown eyes, were mine. I was looking out at myself, not at the man in the mirror, but at the boy beside the creek transfixed on the curious and gentle creature that did not run away.
I’m not sure that is what Helen K had in mind in her evidence, but there it was. A calm washed over me.
Legal Studies Core Part II: Rights and Responsibilities
The Doctor had an end in mind, or a point to prove.
Much has been said about his tactics, about the lengths to which he was prepared to go and the risks he was prepared to take. Did he present me with versions of himself that were most likely to cut through? Probably. We all do that. Did he cultivate the sense we were on the same ride, that this was as hard for him as it was for me? It is possible; maybe he was that good—so convincingly imperfect, so perfectly fallible. But at the time, let me say, it never crossed my mind. I guess you had to be there.
What the transcripts told me was at age twenty-three, as a graduating medical student, the Doctor was presented with awards for both academic achievement and community service. An outdated online bio revealed that over the course of three years he had volunteered in the medical corps, as a summer camp counsellor, at a mental health clinic, and at a homeless youth shelter. I found a photograph of him at that time wearing a baseball cap backwards and a blue T-shirt and surrounded by a group of black and Latino kids. Nine years later, he joined a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company and successfully launched the first outpatient clinical trials for a drug that was subsequently listicled as One of 10 Innovations that Will Change Your Tomorrow.
Like I said: versions, plural. Time gives us versions of ourselves. As we get older they can pile up a bit. By the time I met the Doctor he had plenty more. Every time I came to his door I was in the dark about which one would be waiting on the other side.
Our third session.
Even before the mandarin, he seemed to have a bitter taste in his mouth. As I went to knock on his door I heard him shouting: ‘This was not part of the agreement!’ The other voice was very quiet and I couldn’t make out the words. The door then opened and Greg came out.
He saw me and smiled. ‘I’d give it a sec.’
I waited five minutes before knocking. When I entered he was smoothing his hair and taking long breaths. He did a lap of the office and sat down in his usual seat. ‘Are you hungry?’ He was wearing the suit and tie again.
We both peeled a mandarin; he recoiled after biting into the first segment. ‘It isn’t good. Yours?’
It was a little dry, tasteless. ‘Not great. It’s okay.’
He insisted we bin them, dropping his from shoulder height to punish it for being bad fruit. When he sat down again he was distracted. He tilted his head from side to side as though to release a crimp in his neck, then straightened his spine and sat unnaturally tall in the chair. ‘Would you like to try another?’
I said I wouldn’t.
‘Fair enough.’ There were three left in the bowl. ‘You don’t want to take your chances.’
What I didn’t want to do was talk about the mandarins anymore. I had been quietly looking forward to the session and was feeling let down—the way a small child feels when a parent spends their play-time cleaning the floor.
‘I have an idea for the contract,’ I said.
That seemed to bring him at least part-way back. ‘Excellent,’ he said. No real enthusiasm, but the sentiment was in the ballpark.
I explained that I wanted a way to open the kitchen, or I needed to keep food in my room. ‘When I get hungry, this thing with the kitchen closing…’
‘Ah yes, I heard that you had an issue with that. I heard it as it happened, as a matter of fact—I think our neighbours on the farm would have heard it too. Tell me then, your appetite. You’re getting hungrier than you usually do?’
I said yes, glad someone had asked.
‘I thought that must be the case. Let’s take up your second suggestion: additional food to be provided in the student’s room.’ He made a note. ‘Our intention isn’t to starve anyone, that is what I said to them.’ He smiled then, the first for the morning; an equilibrium returned, a focus.
Version two: he leaned forward in his chair in a now I am all yours kind of way. ‘Could we change the subject?’
‘Sure.’
‘Fergus,’ he said. ‘How are you getting on with Fergus?’
I shrugged. ‘Minimal contact.’
In all honesty, I didn’t know where he was heading; he had to direct me to the day of the field trip in the bush: ‘Tell me about your conversation with him.’
‘It was short,’ I said. ‘He’s got a thing about his dreams.’
‘Okay, and did that upset you somehow?’
‘No, I just didn’t want to listen to it.’ I wasn’t being evasive; I didn’t have the sense I had anything to hide.
‘And so you threatened him?’
I shook my head, a bit dumbfounded. I didn’t remember it that way. It wasn’t until he spelled it out that I remembered my threat to break his fingers, and even then my sense was still that it was a non-event. I remembered the phlegm and the war story. ‘It would have just been a turn of phrase, you know, like an expression.’
‘And what did you actually mean?’
‘I meant: I’ve got an idea—let’s not talk anymore.’
He smiled at that. ‘I think he interpreted it differently.’
Through all this the Doctor didn’t seem at all angry, and because of that I felt relaxed. ‘How abou
t this, Daniel,’ he said. ‘I’d like to get it into the contract that you don’t do that again. Use whatever phrases you want with me, but not them. I don’t want to make a big deal of it. I’ll work on the food supply, if you agree to that.’
I agreed, but not with any confidence. It must have showed.
‘I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think you could do it. I know you can.’ He left that hanging there. I didn’t bite. ‘Do you know why I know?’
I didn’t. He couldn’t know; no one could know.
‘I know that you can do it,’ he continued, ‘because since our last meeting I’ve requested information about your school disciplinary record over the last two years. You know of course what the result of that enquiry would be…’
I shrugged. Get to the point.
‘You would know that there isn’t one. Over the last two years you never once came to notice. Zero incidents, zero threats, zero fights.’
I nodded. ‘So?’
‘So, that tells me you can do it. And it makes me wonder—the fact that you come here and within weeks have threatened a student and howled the place down—what is different now?’ He didn’t wait for an answer but instead suggested we go through my history at school, from kindergarten until the present. He talked about the importance of timelines ‘so that we can view the whole and break it down into pieces, make sense of it. Because looking at yours’, he said, ‘it makes no sense at all. If we drill into it, you and I, we can find some, I’m sure’.
The timeline idea was familiar to me, courtesy of my Grade 6 teacher Mrs Pyke. This particular timeline, according to Dr J, kicked off the day I picked up Kevin Barnes and shoved him into a wheelie bin, the start of a spate of schoolyard infringements that had me siphoned into aggression replacement therapy midway through term four. Mary called it ‘going berserko’.
‘Could you tell me the reason behind that?’
Kevin Barnes. Little shit. ‘He was small enough to pick up.’
Dr J nodded like he could see the sense in the reasoning. ‘How old were you?’
‘Ten, maybe.’
‘And what do you think caused it to escalate from there?’
I started to ask myself why I had been looking forward to the session. But whatever the answer, I had committed to play ball, so that is what I did.
‘Different things, stuff in my head.’
What I was trying to explain was that my behaviour was in part reactive to various external factors, but in larger part to the messed-up workings of my mind. Luckily for me, for us, he was an adept interpreter and had no need to prod where others would have done. He rewarded effort with restraint; he never picked at sores. That in turn kept me on the field.
‘If it’s a timeline,’ I offered, ‘the library was before Kevin.’
‘Ah yes, apologies, the library. Do you want to tell me what happened there?’
I wasn’t being difficult when I said, ‘That’s hard.’
Grade 5: the social sciences aisle of the school library. I knew where it ended up (books on floor, not on shelves) but I wasn’t so clear about how it got there. There wasn’t one single trigger. I went to the library because the playground was hot and loud and full of dickheads. I liked the library because I liked the world history section and the Dewey decimal system and the smell of the librarian, and on hot days it was cool, except for this day; the air conditioning was bung and the librarian wasn’t there and there was a bunch of kids spitting at each other in world history so I ended up in social sciences. Not my usual section. I was surrounded by strange titles. One of the boys followed me and asked me, fairly insistently, what I was reading. He started dribbling and I was pretty sure he was about to spit at me. My reaction was to tear the books off the shelves (social sciences and world history). It probably wasn’t the best call. Some of the kids laughed; one of the girls cried. A teacher came. They called Mary and there were some hushed conversations. Apart from a library ban, not much else came out of it. The same kids laughed; the crying girl and her friends steered clear. The year went on as usual until Kevin Barnes.
For Kevin and for those that followed, there was a simple and universal explanation for my going berserko: it felt good. I was made to delve into this more in post-Kevin therapy. My predisposition to aggression, it was explained to Mary and me, was due to a depletion in my serotonin level. They didn’t measure it or anything; it was just a given. That meant my command-and-control centre wasn’t sending the correct messages—less communication, less control. Communication is everything. Mary and I thought it was bullshit but we didn’t argue because it seemed to be another way of saying it was not my fault. There was a culprit, and it was called intermittent explosive disorder and my triggers weren’t triggers at all, they were ‘cues of provocation’. What was happening outside of the crisis points—strange imaginings, a bad gut, stunted growth—those things didn’t seem to factor in. The shrink had her boxes ticked. Mary and I nodded. Sure, miraculously it all now made sense.
Over the course of the following year, the cues kept coming and incorrect messages kept getting sent, culminating in a number of intermittent explosions with varying levels of fallout. The class thug: I was that kid. The word bully got thrown about. I didn’t wear it like a badge of honour, but nor did I accept the stereotype. In the movies, you know him before he even opens his mouth: thick-set and plain, zero charisma, the character that never develops, the child actors who never make it as adults. The plot points require us to save our empathy for the rest of the cast. But pause on the thug. That’s all I’m asking: drill down a bit. There are children who need to be contained—Kevin deserved a stint in the bin—and therein lies the role of the thug. I am not saying it is ideal; and, sure, it is a slippery slope: might is right, schoolyard cop, self-appointed disciplinarian, global warrior, the United States of America…
‘There was this one kid,’ I told Dr J.
Roger Bell. He fell at a bad angle and when I laid the boot in, my shoe made contact with his forearm right at the point of fracture, compounding said fracture and necessitating complex and worrying surgery. His parents wanted to call the police and Mary had to talk them out of it. I don’t know what she said, but I got suspended instead of expelled or incarcerated. The condition was that I stay in therapy. My therapist talked about things I could do to express my feelings ‘in a healthy way’. I told her I couldn’t concentrate in class and that seemed to provide her with the missing piece: it was time for the pills—‘Let’s meet the happy chemicals.’ (She drew smiley faces on a piece of paper.)
Here Dr J interjected. ‘If we can stop there, I’ll get to the pills in due course. But in terms of our timeline, I feel like this is a critical juncture. After the suspension, that was the end of it; the violent behaviour just stopped. From there the reports all talk about good behaviour, diligence in class…It wasn’t the medication, we know that, because you never took it. So what was it?’
I shrugged. ‘It just never happened.’
‘You mean nothing provoked you?’
‘I mean I just didn’t look for it. I couldn’t.’
‘You couldn’t?’
‘I couldn’t get called up for anything—you know, the pills, the sales…it’d bring attention.’
‘Yes, I see, of course.’ He was at it again, scratching his eyebrows, talking to himself more than to me, or to his imaginary sounding-board friend. ‘You hear that? He couldn’t!’ He started mumbling something about a self-imposed regulatory system. ‘I mean, there is an extraordinary degree of self-control in that.’
Bringing me back in as audience again, he leaned forward. ‘At the centre of it all is this operation—this busines—of yours. So let’s get to that.’ The smile he threw me was like a wink. ‘Let’s talk about what got you here.’
This part of the story I was eager to tell. Time gives us different versions of ourselves. To date, this had been my best one.
The whole thing had been cast in such a negative light. In the courtroom, when
they talked about the level of sophistication, the number of children on my books and the quantity of pills I’d sold, I found myself preening a little. I felt like getting up and saying: Don’t you realise what hard work it all was? To ensure an adequate supply, to target the right market…Don’t I get any credit for that? I was conscientious and responsive to my customers, I lived on four hours sleep a night and worked through most of my weekends—and I built a successful business. Point me to another sixteen-year-old schoolboy who could claim that. That is what I wanted to say.
And I built it in the ashes of a non-existence: Mary and me like cockroaches. Just us—Brian had gone—neither of us sleeping, me lying out on the walkway distracting myself with the night sky and the battles in the floors below while she scratched around inside. During the day she wouldn’t even go down to the clothesline. Sometimes she’d stand on the walkway, but her world was pretty much confined to a living room, a four-metre square that fitted a stained two-seater couch and a TV, adjoining a kitchen with cracks in the swirly laminate and a sink that wouldn’t drain. An inner-city Housing Commission block that developers circled like drooling wolves and no one wanted to live in but no one could leave. Our neighbour, Nina, had been there for forty-three years; she reckoned the kitchen drain had been blocked for the last twenty. The pipes in the place were universally stuffed. As for the tenants, there were the ones like Nina who called it home and grew herbs in planters, and there were the ones who pissed in the walkway and punched the walls. There was a central courtyard like at the School, but no pear trees; most days you’d put money on finding a syringe or a used rubber or an empty stolen bag under the bench. Sometimes the Ninas of the building cleaned it up or kicked up a stink; mostly it was just the way it was. And I couldn’t see a clear way out of it. I didn’t want to leave school but I didn’t want to wait three years to make enough money to get us out of there.
That was when things started getting worse for me. The minute I stepped inside the flat my breath got short. We were rid of the tenants but I’d still come home to a red-eyed Mary sitting at the kitchen bench pretending she was straight, pretending she’d gone out, pestering me with questions about my day so she had something to fill hers. I avoided coming home in the afternoons because she’d be waiting; she sensed it, and stopped waiting in the kitchen—stayed in her bedroom to give me some space because at least that way I was home and she wasn’t alone. I didn’t want to feel this way; I didn’t choose to, but you watch your mother on the slide and just her presence is enough, the sickly stench of air freshener and stale smoke…
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