The Subjects

by Sarah Hopkins

  I shook my head.

  ‘Is that because you know what it is?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘How do you think she is feeling now?’

  ‘She is alone,’ I said, ‘so it’s better.’

  ‘Tell me, if she doesn’t leave the flat, how does she get by?’

  ‘There’s a neighbour, Nina. And some days she can get out.’

  He nodded, refilled his glass. I hadn’t taken a sip from mine. ‘Very well, Daniel, I’ll pass the message on to you as I undertook to do. You are under no obligation to read it.’ He folded a piece of paper and I put it in my pocket. ‘Let’s move on, then. At our last meeting we left off talking about school and your business operation. I would like today to talk about what was happening at home.’

  I’d assumed it was coming. ‘Is that part of this whole thing?’ I asked. ‘Do I have to answer your questions?’

  He shook his head. ‘That is more specific than the condition we included. The requirement of you is to keep an open mind, to work with me.’ He reached over and picked up the contract. It had its place there at the edge of the small table through all of our meetings: a third presence, an arbiter. He found the section and pointed me to it. ‘The word we used was “cooperate”. That is vague, deliberately so. If the condition was that you answer all my questions I dare say we’d just end up with a sack full of lies. There isn’t much point in that. I thought we might come at it another way.’

  He returned the contract to the table.

  ‘Would you hear my idea?’

  ‘Sure.’ I’d heard plenty of ideas before; I wasn’t worried about one more.

  ‘There are a number of people involved in your story, none of whom I know anything about. To start, if we could just make a list.’ He waited for my assent, content with my lack of objection. ‘Number one is your mother, Mary, and then her various partners. There were three? After your father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And their names? Just for my list.’ He was of course making no list.

  ‘Josh, Gary, Brian.’

  ‘In that order?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So we have Mary, and then Josh, Gary and, finally, Brian. And then there is the boy at various ages, that is you. Five characters. You mentioned a neighbour, Nina; should we include her?’

  I didn’t think so.

  ‘Anyone else?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Then let’s proceed. Have you ever seen a play, Daniel?’

  ‘At school.’

  ‘And there were actors playing characters on the stage?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘All right then. If you could go along with me for a minute: first, whatever was on the set of the stage at your school, take that away, so it is empty. You’ve got that?’ He waited for my nod. ‘And now, instead, use props to make it a replica of the living room of your flat. The windows and furniture, paint colours, the doors to different rooms.’

  In spite of the fact that I had no intention of complying, the images flashed into my brain. I couldn’t stop them.

  ‘Second, I want you to do this: I want you to place your characters on the stage. The three men, yes? And Mary. Lastly, the boy.’

  At this point he pulled some chess pieces out of his drawer and put them in the centre of the desk. When I looked closer at the carved wooden pieces, I saw there were no pawns or rooks but instead farm animal faces. Sheep, cow, rooster; you get the idea.

  ‘If it helps, you can allocate a person to the pieces and move them around.’

  This one I could stop. Fiddling with his rooster, I managed to keep my stage empty.

  ‘Are you with me?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I had spent the better part of my childhood mastering ways not to get sucked into other kids’ games. Kids use all sorts of tricks to lure you in. Adults too. It wasn’t like adults before him hadn’t tried—a whole gamut of tactics. I had a script in reply, depending on the angle they came at it, and dot points of details I’d share. I could list off the physical injuries, easy—hers and mine, from the start, all the way up to the burns. Key milestones for Josh and Gary, down pat with pauses in the right places. For Brian I just said most of it took place on the other side of a door; I only heard it, and what I heard, I blocked. They backed away then, slowly-slowly. To questions on any of the more recent stuff I shot back with: ‘I can’t talk about it, not yet.’ (I saw a note the last guy made on his page before court: Persistent avoidance—explosive/ aggressive in response. Dosage?)

  Then came the Doctor’s gambit—the ‘work with me’ proposal. What he asked me to do was to pick one of the characters to play—any one of them ‘except the boy. You are not playing him. You have no control over what he does; things are just happening to him, around him’.

  People had tried before, but no one had come up with something as stupid as this. It crossed my mind in a hypothetical way that he might be messing with me, like the left hand thing. But that wasn’t the feeling I was getting. He was talking like someone giving directions on the street. I could feel pockets of cold fluid bulge behind my eyes.

  ‘Open your eyes, Daniel.’

  I think he had to repeat that, but eventually I did open them.

  ‘What do you think of this idea?’

  I am a truth-teller at heart. ‘I think it is fucking retarded.’

  He nodded. ‘Thanks for your honesty.’ And when I smirked: ‘I mean it: thank you.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What’s next?’

  ‘I want to stick with it, in spite of your reservations. I know what you think—you have been clear on that—so there’s no misunderstanding. Let’s just give it a go.’

  ‘Why?’

  I look back on this part of the conversation now and wonder why I didn’t do a better job of shutting it down. As it was, the question opened the board right up.

  ‘Why should you give it a go?’ he said. ‘My reason is that you received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder at the age of ten. We need to explore that. I think I’m right in saying that you haven’t done that yet in any kind of meaningful way with the other people you’ve talked to.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t buy into the diagnosis stuff.’

  ‘An open mind, remember?’

  As he reached again for the contract, I stood up, walked to the door. Because I didn’t know what would happen if I walked out, I went back again, and I sat down, spent a few minutes mentally rearranging books on the nearest shelf into reverse order by whatever numbers I could find on the spines. Long enough to make a plan.

  ‘Okay, I’ll tell you what happened,’ I said, and I launched in (that was my plan): the first time, it was in the kitchen, he cut her with the scissors…

  The doctor put up his hand, shaking his head. ‘What we need, Daniel,’ he explained, ‘is some other perspectives in the room.’

  I looked at him; he looked at me, and with a strange half-smile, he waved the contract, and repeated it, like a jingle, like a dare. Give it a go…‘We can just try it.’

  My arms were folded, my fists clenched, and my fingernails were digging painfully into my palms. As I made no further effort to stop him, he continued. ‘Let’s say we start with the one who cut her arm. Is that Josh?’

  I nodded. I could play along, until I couldn’t.

  ‘I’ll ask him questions—’

  ‘How many?’ I said. ‘How many questions?’

  He smiled. ‘Fair enough—no more than five.’

  ‘Three, let’s make it three.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘The answers can be as short as I want.’

  He nodded. ‘Let’s begin then.’ And when I didn’t stop him: ‘Okay, Josh—what are your favourite things?’

  I laughed. What sort of an idiot question…? ‘I dunno. The beach, he liked the beach.’

  ‘You are him: I like the beach.’

  And you are a mental case. ‘I like the beach.’ Josh, the flat…I put my mind bac
k there to extract the next ones: ‘I like TV, The Simpsons, and bacon and pineapple pizza. That’s all I can remember.’

  ‘Okay, thank you, that is good.’

  ‘That’s one.’

  For the second question he wanted to know how I/Josh felt about Mary. I wanted to make this quick, but I needed the question clarified. ‘When?’

  ‘You’ve just moved into the flat.’

  What I reported starts getting a bit foggy here, pieces of memory caught in the orbit of a non-fathomable nucleus. I don’t have a toothbrush. Mary laughed and said she had a spare. She’s such a fucking nanna. That’s what he said when he saw the little china swans on the window ledge. ‘I got her a rooster for Christmas and she put it in the middle of the swans.’

  ‘And what about later, Josh, before you leave, how do you feel about Mary now?’

  The words were the same but different. ‘She is such a fucking nanna.’

  His questions were up. Now it was Gary. He didn’t ask about his favourite things. He asked how he felt about the boy.

  ‘When?’ I said.

  ‘You have just moved into the flat.’

  It took a while to extract this one. Mary told him what my teacher said; she shouldn’t have told him. He’s a little smarty pants. Then Mary, what he thinks of Mary, when he moved in (number two), and just before he left (three). I’m going to get us into a house and buy a fridge with an ice-maker and get my kombi back and take us to Coffs. And all the rest of it, like it was real, like she could make it real.

  ‘And later?’

  I shrugged. A slut like the rest of them. As short as I wanted.

  I was hovering around all this like I was making it up, in and out of their heads, there but not there. It was easier than I thought. I found my focus falling on the doctor’s hairline, in this light (a sliver of late-afternoon sun across his chair) it looked like it was painted on, like I could see all the carefully directed strokes. Even the markings on his face, the pigmentation and the scars, it all suddenly looked like part of a grand design.

  Then it took a turn. He moved on to Brian. I tried my usual:

  I was on the other side of a door; what I heard I blocked.

  I’m not really ready to talk about this yet.

  Dr J wanted me to try. An easy one. When he first moved in. ‘How do you feel about Daniel?’

  There wasn’t an easy one for Brian, and no part of me wanted to even pretend to step inside his head. All I wanted was for the guy with the genius complex and the shiny hair to back off. When I got up again I knocked the table and the chess pieces fell onto the floor. Neither of us picked them up. I ended up over at the window watching the sky turn dark, the very same dark in a different form funnelling down my throat, the alien pressing against my ribs. My hand reached out to the shelf in a white-knuckled grip.

  I got my balance. What I saw then was not the stage and the bullshit players, but a photograph on the shelf. My vision was blurred but I forced myself to focus: it was the Doctor in a suit shaking hands with a silver-haired woman, a gold plaque in her other hand, and in his, the framed black-and-white photograph that was now on the wall, with the cliffs and the lake and the forest. In the photograph the Doctor looked to be mid-sentence and there was a row of people behind him, listening, leaning forward in their chairs. In these photos, there is less of him, less flesh, but more light.

  I turned around and saw now sitting in the chair a man burdened by time, by events. Have a break from yourself, Mary used to say when I was little and she got sick of me complaining. Focus on other people’s problems for a while. She had other tips too. It isn’t what happens, it’s how you react—that old chestnut. In times past they hadn’t much resonated, but what was forming now was a morphing of messages, a different way of reacting. Looking back to the man in the frame, I found my own questions, my own game.

  I pointed to the silver-haired woman. ‘Who is she?’

  For a moment he seemed to be considering whether to answer, his eyes dropping to the floor before rising again to meet mine. ‘The director of a government department.’

  I kept at it, a different focus, deflection: What department? When? His answers were vague. He was in the United States. It was a long time ago.

  ‘Proud moment,’ I said. Our eyes stayed fixed. ‘And there is your photograph.’ I pointed at the one on the wall. ‘It was a prize?’

  It took a while, but he responded. ‘It was.’

  ‘Did you make some kind of discovery or something?’

  ‘You might say that.’

  I did what he did, scoured his face for signs. ‘So what happened?’

  His mouth curved into a kind of smile, and I sensed there was something behind it, an answer to all this. Not that I expected to get it. Adults avoid, deflect, lie: I’d always known that. All I was trying to do was to blow up the session. I needed out. It made me nervous to see his mind starting to tick into the answer, and then: ‘Come, sit.’

  When I returned to my chair, he leaned in towards me and picked up the animals from the floor. ‘What happened is that I was wrong. Why I am here…is because I was wrong.’ There was such pain in his eyes as he repeated the words that I had to look away. I actually thought there was a chance he was going to cry. Then he caught himself. ‘Enough,’ he said gently. ‘We are straying.’ He picked up the contract. ‘Let’s be more careful.’

  He was good with his words. It was a warning: we were stepping outside the agreed parameters, in breach, at risk, and a reminder—let’s be more careful—that we both had skin in the game.

  Still, I left his office feeling utterly victorious. I had a leverage point, a way to push back, deflect. And something more. Extracting his admission had given me a taste, a desire to know him better than the others did, to create our own special link—to see if I could get closer to a man without the world exploding into blood-stained pieces.

  To characterise events now—a courtyard and the night sky, standing in a bedroom staring at a sleepwalker, the ninety-minute sessions with a doctor and a contract: if I have intimate memories, they are these. Within them, within the edging forward and back, within the questions and the answers, within the silence, our grip weakens, and in the next moment we are defined by a changed set of objectives. If I have intimate memories, if that is love…

  I left the Doctor’s room that afternoon with an answer that would inevitably raise more questions, questions that would slow burn over years to come, about how to unravel a story, the life and work of a man once lauded, now in retreat.

  What I had started to learn is that the award in the photograph and the print on the wall were not a source of pride but of shame; and that his ‘outback’ existence was a form of penance, a last-ditch and desperate effort to reverse the damage he had done. What I started to understand that day was what we had in common.

  It took me a couple of days to unfold the printed message.

  Beyond full stops, Mary wasn’t a punctuater. She always got it wrong, she said, so she just left it out.

  hi how are you doing. you know me im no good at writing but he says its better than calling. i am glad youre there. he sounds nice strange but nice. i dont expect you to write back but would be good if you did just to say youre ok. im thinking about you a lot and what must be in your head but I want you to let that go. that is what im doing. you wont believe that but its true. i love you

  I got one a week like that for the next three weeks. It wasn’t until the fourth one that I felt in the right state to reply. I kept it on point, and at the time of writing, accurate.

  I am OK.

  HSIE (Human Studies and its Environment)

  When we look up at a night sky we see different things, different patterns. I liked to stare long enough at a cluster for a face to form and then wait for it disappear. That was my thing. I saw what I saw. For Tod, on the other hand, it was important that we had a shared experience, so we could be part of a joint enterprise in tasks like, for example, ranking brightness and
taking potshots on distance. ‘Do you see that?’ It was a constant. Sharing for Tod was a process of validation; if it wasn’t shared, it didn’t happen. Tod liked to bring us in on how he was feeling in both mind and body. His diet was an example. Within the first ten minutes of every midnight session, he asked the same question: ‘Do you know what I’ve eaten today?’

  Sometimes we indulged him: a third of a cup of unstabilised oats and a hundred mils of almond milk, a slice of kamut sourdough, half an avocado. And sometimes we didn’t: ‘We don’t give a fuck what you’ve eaten today, Tod.’

  When he talked about the combination of amino acids that make eggs the perfect protein source, he was demonstrably frustrated that we showed zero interest, and again when he tried to tackle Alex on his food intake, or lack thereof. He had tracked it the previous day to a handful of grapes and a ginger snap. Alex was gracious about it, refraining from telling him to mind his own intake. In response to an inventory of all the reasons this kind of diet could lead to organ failure in the long term, Alex thanked him and said he’d take it on board.

  ‘You don’t worry about it?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Well I don’t understand that. You have to explain that to me, Alex, you really do.’

  I was taken aback at the honesty of the reply: ‘I guess it’s because I’m not expecting my organs to be around in the long term.’

  Tod threw his arms up and mumbled about bullshit talk. When Alex didn’t show in the courtyard the next night, Tod thought it was his fault and vowed to limit the food reports (to items and not quantities) and the lectures (total ban).

  ‘I am boring him.’

  I said I doubted that was the problem.

  ‘I’m not boring him?’

  ‘I didn’t say that; I just said it wasn’t the reason.’

  The second time Alex didn’t show, I went to investigate. It was a bit before midnight. I knocked on his door and entered. There was light from a large computer screen on a desk in the corner of the room. The room was the same size and configuration as mine, only there were shelves and a second desk, all stacked with books. He was sitting in his day clothes facing the screensaver; the image was a tranquil ocean beneath a setting sky.