The harm caused by drugs. As far as that bit of courtroom piety went, I got it. No argument. Mary was stoned most of the time and the users in the building were all scabby ghosts scavenging for their next hit. But their drugs were not my kind of drugs, and my trade was different. I was supplying a niche market. Ordinary kids just getting some help with their study or their ailments or having a bit of fun, and no damage done. Living their healthy lives unscathed. That was my personal stance and I was comfortable with it.
Dr J wanted to know how it began, so here’s how: I told my GP the drugs were helping and she kept prescribing them and soon I had a Ritalin stash piling up at the back of a closet. Then came the light-bulb moment when a Year 12 boy got suspended for standing over the mentals for their pills; ADHD or not, they were a big brain booster, a steep improve in concentration. I got him on his own and said I’d make it easier for him. There were a bunch of kids pepping up around exam time, so I rationed out my stash, cheap at first. Then they hooked me into private school kids, more pressure to achieve, a more buoyant market. My supply ran out; I dived into the dark web, and there I found it all, a world of information and opportunity. Suddenly I knew what kids were taking in schools from Brussels to Boston. I made arrangements (free pills) with key people to keep me up on who wanted what and what they should want; I worked out ways to message and manage fluctuations in supply and demand. I was never late for a drop; I never accepted deferred payment or gave credit. Over five schools I serviced fifty-seven students.
Dr J listened. ‘So I am assuming that what ended up before the court wasn’t even the half of it.’
I shrugged. ‘About half.’
‘How much did you make?’
Seven envelopes stored in separate hidey-holes plus a bucket of gold coins (sometimes it was all they had, especially the younger ones). ‘Twenty-three K.’
By the way he had been listening, I now expected a high-five at the final figure, and was perplexed when he reacted the way he did, which was to start laughing, not a pat-on-the-back sort of laugh, but more like a carnival clown, with a mouth stretched wide, his hands gripping the side of his shaking head. I didn’t comprehend it, nor did I comprehend the words he spoke as he rose from his seat:
‘And the animals escape from the zoo.’
Finally I said, ‘Are we done?’
‘There is another thing.’ He poured me a lemon drink from the jug, the way we would usually have begun our session. Leaned forward so that if he chose he could have touched my knee. ‘Your mother called.’
I don’t know why I was surprised at the mention of Mary but I felt something shift, like an intruder had come into the room, and I was trying to work out if there was any way to eject her and everything that came with her. What had she told him?
‘I can leave and let you call her if you like,’ he said, but he didn’t push it. He nodded through the silence, gesturing his agreement that it was a complex decision. ‘She sounded quite well. And she was very pleased to hear about what is happening here.’
What had he said? How had he explained it? I wondered about that, but really what was at the front of my mind was the growing certainty that I could not speak to Mary.
Observing my reaction (I could the feel blotchy heat rising into my face), he held his hand in the air. A directive to the blood to stop in its tracks. ‘Let’s take that off the table. You will not telephone your mother.’
I’m not sure what he was seeing but he asked me if I’d heard that, and then told me to say it in my mind, repeat it if I needed to. ‘I made no undertaking that you would call.’ And more firmly this time: ‘You will not telephone your mother.’
Feeling calmer, I nodded. He watched me, waited. When he asked me to clarify whether I was still concerned about her safety, I told him no.
‘But you are concerned about her more generally?’
I spoke because I feared otherwise we would spend the remainder of the session on this, on her, on us. ‘My mother doesn’t leave the house. She is too scared. She is scared of lots of things, things that are not real.’
‘And some that are,’ he said.
I nodded.
‘Are you scared too, Daniel?’
I didn’t answer, but this time he got it, my need for it to stop. He told me I’d done well and went over to his desk, returned with the contract. He made an addition, and then passed it to me.
Here in my hands was my contract. There were the conditions as discussed in two parts: The Student Agrees to…The School Agrees to…I was surprised to find myself studying it carefully, considering the consequences of each of its terms. The requirement on me in terms of my sessions with Dr J was headed Authentic Engagement and went on: ‘The student will to the best of his ability comply throughout the sessions with any reasonable request of the Director in regard to his education and treatment.’ (My italics.)
What they call involuntary treatment. I shrugged it off. I can sign it or I can leave, I told myself. These were my negotiations. I am choosing this.
‘So this bit about reasonable requests—like me not using my left hand…’
‘Precisely.’ And to my question who decides what’s reasonable: ‘You and I. The onus is on us to agree about that.’
‘And if we can’t?’
He was confident we’d manage it but offered to include a mediation clause; an independent third party could meet with us…I stopped him. No third party. I didn’t want anyone else involved. ‘We’ll keep it between us, then.’
I flicked through the next conditions—weekly times of meetings, a handwritten proviso for food drops to my room—until I got to this one:
‘There will be no intimate physical contact between the student and any other student at the School.’
It hadn’t stuck out in the first session. Now I had no wish to give him any idea of my embryonic feelings for Rachel by objecting to it. I read it again, a couple of times over, thinking about the odds of her letting me come anywhere near her, and I moved on. My minimum hours in the sessions and on the video games, then next was the Fergus B clause: no threats of physical violence (or use of words that could be construed to amount to a threat of physical violence) in the presence of any student of the school. I’d agreed to that: no going back. There wasn’t much more to it. On the School’s side, the Director agreed to provide his assessments upon request from the student along with copies of any and all written records and reports prepared by the Director during the Student’s participation period.
‘So I can get any notes or anything you’ve done so far?’
‘Yes, but I haven’t made any notes. I don’t tend to. But if I do, you’ll be the first to get a copy.’
‘So how will I know what you think, then?’
‘You’ll ask. Oral assessments—let’s change it to that. So now: “…the Director agrees to provide his open and frank oral assessments…” That better?’
There was a bit more fine-tuning along these lines. I thought I was pushing it, but I asked for and was granted a small fridge. I remember looking up at the clock and seeing the session had already gone two hours. The truth was that there was something very satisfying about the process: clarifying my entitlements and constraints, the extent of each of our commitments—the parameters of our relationship. With each new understanding, I felt on firmer ground, less at sea. I felt exactly the way he wanted me to feel—like I was part-owner of the process, a collaborator. It was Governance 101, of course. This was a contractual community and in our minds we were masters of our own destiny.
‘And what happens if one of us doesn’t comply?’
‘In the event of breach,’ he said, ‘you are released from the contract.’
‘And that means?’
‘It means you are no longer a student here.’
‘But what if you breach?’
‘Same same, both ways. If you breach, if I breach, either way there will be no further requirement for you to stay. We will arrange transport for you to get h
ome, of course.’
‘And will I go back to court?’
‘No. Your time here, however long it is, will conclude your legal matter. Consider yourself a free man.’
It was a bold move, I thought. At the first sign of bad times we could breach and be gone. Strangely, though, what was occupying my mind as we sat in our final negotiations was not the freedom to leave, but the threat of exclusion—the fact that a single breach could mean expulsion. I thought this through.
‘This breach thing,’ I said. ‘Can we put in something in there about a second chance, like on both sides, so it isn’t just one strike you’re out?’
He hesitated. ‘You mean like three strikes you’re out?’
I nodded. ‘Or just two…’
‘Let’s insert a warning clause. That’ll give us both a bit of wriggle room.’ He made the necessary change and looked back at me. ‘Are we done?’
There was just one final thing, since I was on a roll: ‘At night time, if we can’t sleep, we need to be able to get down to the courtyard.’
His response to this was not immediate. When it came it was a shake of the head. ‘That is a systems change.’
He could see the perplexed look on my face.
‘No one can sleep,’ I said. ‘If we could go to the courtyard… Someone just needs to unlock the screen doors.’
Talking to himself again: ‘This is precisely why I can’t be constrained…’
‘Sorry?
‘It is a centralised, automated system.’ He smiled. ‘It is not my friend.’ He seemed to think hard on that, eventually discarding the smile. ‘It helps you, does it? You fall asleep when you’re outside?’
‘Most times I do. Or I just lie awake, but I don’t mind then. There’s stuff to look at; you’re not inside your head.’
He looked at me for a while, his chin cupped in his hand. ‘I can see the sense in it. Why not; let’s put it in.’ He read it out as he wrote: ‘The Student will be able to access the courtyard twenty-four hours a day.’ He gave me his warmest smile yet. ‘To hell with them.’
As for Fergus B, I did manage to either avoid (preferable) or tolerate him. In classes he shifted into a seat with the boys in the back row, which I guess he felt was a safer bet, and within three weeks of that session with Dr J his six-month phase was complete. A second phase wasn’t required; that’s what he told us, sitting in the sun-filled courtyard with his bag all packed and waiting for his ride. We had a lot of questions for him in terms of how Dr J wrapped it up, but he had nothing remarkable to report, his answers atypically succinct.
The other reason I didn’t find it so hard with Fergus (and this is one I’ve drawn on since) was something Dr J had hit on the head: when I needed to keep a lid on things at the old school, I did. I could. When framed as a matter of necessity, non-confrontation was easier. So that was where I placed Fergus. When he got me one-on-one and started on a new dream analysis (he moved on from his grandfather to a young woman working in a hospital in an unknown African country—and yes, her pus-filled dreams), I imagined him as a kid at school, a customer, and our interaction as one with an end-goal, a sale. I sat and thought about what I could give him that would mess with the dream-memory chemicals in his brain.
Fergus left us without further incident.
Sitting at the computers last week, I checked what happened to him. The first column, headed Criminal History, told me that Fergus’s initial offence (none of us had asked him) was a botched armed robbery in which one of his co-offenders stabbed a pharmacist in the shoulder with a bottle opener. There were two further entries on his record after leaving us at the School, spanning a twelve-year period: both minor and non-violent. In the Education column, he received a short suspension from school (for reasons non-violent) prior to leaving altogether just before he was due to sit his final exams, after which he completed two out of the three years of a computer programming course. Apart from the words ‘not a completer’, that was it for Education. More broadly, he’d married, had two sons and started an extraordinarily successful online business that sold paranormal products around the globe. There was no notation under Personal regarding marital separation, so I felt I could assume that in Mrs B, Fergus had finally found someone prepared to listen to his dreams.
Applied Mathematics: an Introduction
By the time I’d been there a couple of weeks I had a better sense of how the place worked.
Apart from Helen K, the only other group lesson we had was Numbers with a baby-faced teacher who introduced himself as Mr PW. He didn’t want us to use his first name, and he didn’t like to call it maths. He said numbers ‘had meaning beyond the mathematical’ and my heart warmed to him. When he started on algebraic equations, he plunged into content usually reserved for extension classes. The two Bens rocketed through it so they could play their games. Grace sometimes lagged but got there in the end.
The only one to really struggle was Tod. ‘You guys are freaks,’ he said, third lesson in. ‘I can’t do this for shit.’
When Glen from the back row chimed in with ‘Keep up, fat boy,’ Rachel waved a small-dick pinky in his face and he threatened to crack her ‘ugly dog head’ open. The usual banter. I didn’t normally partake but as I watched Rachel for a reaction—there wasn’t one, she didn’t flinch—I found myself willing her to turn my way.
‘Or you could suck cum out of your own midget cock,’ I said: my small gift to her.
She didn’t turn, but she pressed her lips together to contain what I think would have turned into a smile.
Throughout all this, PW looked silently on. In an odd sleight of hand, nature had given him a face that invited people in—plump cheeks, a little ski-jump nose and perfect rosy lips—although he was not a warm person. Nor, I should say, was he cold, or even indifferent: he had a singular focus, as though the rest of his brain had been shut down. Like an attention overload disorder. He didn’t laugh if someone made a joke but he didn’t care either, making it impossible to offend him. After our usual attempt at crafting a name out of the teacher’s initials—Piss Weak, Proper Wanker; none of them stuck—Rachel referred to him as Lobotoman outside of class. Inside class, they got on fine. PW didn’t have to deal with her moods because in Numbers, Rachel attentively followed the screens without naps or argument.
PW still used the tablets and the headsets (we always did, whatever the class). A question appeared with an answer field and then we’d flick to the next. In some classes the program moved through the questions automatically, so you had to race the clock. We liked those because it was like a game, but whichever way, we didn’t complain. Sometimes the teaching came through audio as well. He asked us to listen and then went into further explanation, which was, without fail, succinct and adequate and was only given once. If you missed it, any part of it, you just had to find your own way out of the dark. It meant that you didn’t tend to miss it in the first place.
When Rachel first coined Lobotoman, Alex nodded his head and said it was like being taught by a machine, but I disagreed. To me there was something very human about the way he’d put the shutters up. It was honest, I guess that’s what I mean.
This is what I can do for you. This is all I can do for you. After that you are on your own.
His approach, along with our aptitude, confirmed for me what I had already suspected, and nudged my narrative forward. With Tod as the possible exception, collected here at the School was a particular cohort of students. A group of gifted delinquents, a boy and the chosen few—sent on a mystery mission to an outback facility with a chip implanted in their enormous brains. One of the chips is programmed to self-detonate at mission completion and blow the unlucky brain into a billion pieces…A variation on the buddy movie: in order for the protagonist to grieve and redeem, one of them has to die. Or something along those lines.
So that was Numbers. There was Helen K and Numbers, and then there were the ‘tutorials’. They were smaller sessions, usually one on one, and we all had different
tutors for different things. In this, they seemed to play to our perceived strengths and/or needs. So Rachel had ‘spaz English’ (Imogen and Grace caught a glimpse of a whiteboard with a list of her spelling words and coughed them out all the way through a science session in the courtyard). Tod said he needed ‘spaz Maths’ but instead had Magnolia in the kitchen and a guy called Mr T in the movement room. I’m not exactly sure what the scope of Mr T’s expertise was but it went beyond fat burning and muscle development, at least that’s what Tod said one day when Rachel referred to him as a personal trainer.
‘You learn how to breathe, you learn how to live,’ he pronounced. None of us went near it.
Unsurprisingly, Imogen and Grace stayed together, splitting their time between business studies and music. The music room was soundproof so the only way we heard anything coming out of there was if the door was left open. From what I got, it wasn’t strictly music. Bird tweets, bells, engines, whistles, thunder, all kinds of sounds, just snippets until the door closed. A couple of times there was a guitar, and once I heard singing. One of them sounded a lot better than the other. The first time I got a split response from them was when I asked, ‘Who’s got the voice?’
As for Alex, he had a tutorial with Helen K, and he had the dance man. I peeked in on a couple of sessions. In the first, Alex was sitting cross-legged on the floor as the dance man executed a slow hypnotic movement like a big black snake. The second time they were performing it in perfect unison and they looked like lovers.
The Subjects Page 8