Thought Crimes

by Tim Richards

  ‘Sure. I thought you knew that. He’s doing well. Never seen him happier.’

  After terminating the call, Sophie calmly filled the electric kettle. She told Karen she was looking at things the wrong way.

  ‘None of this IC stuff is simple. These kids feel as if every dream they’ve ever had will be denied to them … Sure, I could tell Mossy that his obsession with sucking himself off is perverse, but what’s he going to do? He’ll off himself, just like his brother. Since we’ve had the ICs, we’ve had no suicides. It’s like Dr Best says. Sometimes you have to cut kids some slack.’

  Karen said there was a big difference between helping kids who’d experienced bad family environments or tragedies and countenancing perverse interventions on healthy teenagers.

  ‘Mossy never saw himself as healthy. He felt depleted. His ribs were preventing him from being whole, from expressing himself. Whatever you or I think about it, that wasn’t what Mossy was thinking.’

  Karen asked if Dr Best knew the purpose of Mossy’s operation before the boy went into surgery.

  ‘Sure. She encouraged Mrs Behrens to let him have the operation. The school has a special fund.’

  ‘The school paid for Mossy’s ribs to be taken out?'

  ’ ‘The school pays for all operations. That’s what the Integration Classes are about. Letting these kids find a true sense of wholeness.’

  The young teacher couldn’t describe her experiences to Paul.Her partner was a struggling subeditor, and there was no doubt what he’d do with the information. An exclusive like that would make Paul an internationally published journalist. Famous at the expense of her school.

  Her thoughts shifted from memories of obviously happy faces to imagined operations where hacksaws cut through healthy bone to separate healthy feet and knees from healthy thighs.

  How could anything, even a patient’s stated determination to commit suicide, rationalise the blatantly irrational?

  Unable to eat or relax, and knowing that Eva Ng lived nearby, Karen went to Eva’s house, not sure that she wanted to know more than Sophie had already told her. Though Eva was at a singing lesson, her mother Mai was thrilled to invite the teacher into the family’s modest cottage.

  Eva was doing exceptionally well, A’s in everything. She never used to speak in class, but now she spoke confidently and displayed a ready wit. She’d managed to persuade one of her younger brothers to give up heroin and apply his talent for painting. Integration had saved two lives. Mai was sure of it.

  As the two women sipped tea, Karen told Mai that Eva was an unusually pretty girl. She couldn’t imagine a mother allowing a surgeon to saw off a perfectly functional arm.

  ‘Eva never wanted that arm. She said two arms, always having to put up with the second arm, it made her feel like bad girl, you know … a slut. She never wanted that arm. It make her ashame.’

  At that moment, Eva came through the back door, and was so obviously thrilled to see her favourite teacher, Karen forgot her qualms long enough to return the girl’s broad smile.

  ‘I was just telling Miss Park why you have your arm cut off. How you not want to feel like a slut no more.’

  Eva beamed as she flexed her raw stump. Having an arm removed was self-evidently the best thing a girl could do.

  ‘I never could have loved anyone who said they loved me while I was like that,’ Eva declared.

  Trying to be as delicate as possible, Karen asked whether Eva found other people with missing limbs attractive, or whether she wanted to be attractive to people who obsess about amputees.

  Though it had never occurred to her to think about such things, Eva spoke of the missing arm as if it had sharp teeth. She had to get rid of it before it devoured her. Sex had nothing to do with it.

  ‘Most people have no idea what it’s like to go through life knowing that a body part is the true enemy of your happiness.’

  As Karen struggled to absorb this, Eva reiterated that sex was never the issue for her. She was much more like Amber, Wendy and Con than Mary, Caroline or Pol.

  ‘How is that?’ Karen asked.

  ‘Rowdy had her tongue cut out, and Mary got her eye removed, so they could enjoy sex better.’ The teacher’s jaw had already dropped as far as it could.

  ‘For them, getting a clit-piercing wasn’t enough. They’re so happy now. Caroline wants to get her teeth pulled.’

  ‘And Pol?’

  ‘That Pol … Pol is sick,’ Mai chipped in, displaying uncharacteristic venom. ‘Pol very sick boy.’

  Eva corrected her mother. Pol used to be a boy. Her gender had been reassigned. When Pol was Paul in Form Two, she threatened to slash herself to bits if someone wouldn’t help cut off her dick.

  Though Karen never considered the possibility Pol might be transsexual, she had noticed that she and Eva weren’t close. Eva now said that nothing, not even a whole series of operations, could make Pol happy. She wasn’t like the rest of the class. She was sick in the head.

  ‘That buzzing noise that Pol makes,’ Eva confided. ‘She wears dildo pants. If you ask me, that’s not right. It’s sick.’

  Karen resolved to hand in her resignation before she told Paul. She wanted to be out of that madhouse before the media descended.

  Now, statements and allusions that had rocketed over her head came back to haunt her; the kids who’d been spoken of as being IC before the end of the year. What the school saw as integration, or defending personal integrity, was the ultimate in disintegration, a new benchmark in depravity.

  Karen used exactly that phrase in her letter to Dr Best. She’d believed in the miracle that was Prospect Secondary College, and she’d trusted her principal as a great and selfless educator. But so far as Karen was concerned, this scandal was a police matter, and she intended to take these concerns as far as she could.

  Dr Best read Karen’s letter without comment, then looked the art teacher in the eye.

  ‘You’re a fine teacher. These kids respond to you, the IC kids especially. But if you can’t abide what we’re trying to achieve here, the school will respect your decision.’

  Karen couldn’t imagine any sane person abiding what the school was doing. She’d instantly lost all respect for her colleagues.

  Reading her mind, Dr Best pounced.

  ‘You’re not the only one who has had misgivings. I wouldn’t trust my staff if they didn’t have serious qualms. These are the most radical interventions imaginable. But you’d be doing your colleagues an injustice if you left, or raised a scandal, without letting them explain why they chose to support our great adventure.’Karen had hoped to resign and get away from that place as fast as she could. Talking it over with erstwhile friends and senior teachers never figured in her game plan.

  ‘There’s a general staff meeting in ten minutes,’ Dr Best told her.

  The sixty-seven staff of Prospect Secondary College gathered in the small common room. Those who couldn’t find seats stood, or leaned against a wall, the more relaxed among them drinking coffee and tea. Several defied the absent principal’s smoking ban.

  Having chosen not to attend, Dr Best invited Ralph Horsberg to chair the meeting, and he made his thoughts immediately clear. It was one thing to feel disquiet about the school’s methods, quite another to threaten the school’s future. If Prospect Secondary College went under, a lot of these kids would be left for dead.

  When Karen tried to address the group, Gavin McGibbon spoke over her. Gavin felt personally betrayed. Karen could have come to him and discussed this at any time. Now she was impugning his integrity, along with that of all the staff at the school, and the brave parents who’d been forward-thinking enough to permit these integrations.

  Gavin had qualms at first – everyone had qualms about using surgery to solve behavioural problems – but he’d never once thought about ratting on his mates. In the final analysis, the figures spoke for themselves. The hopefulness of the integrated kids spread to students who had no reason to consider such radical meas
ures.

  Ordinarily, Gavin was much disliked, but his enemies rode with him on this one. And that made Karen still more determined to let them know just how much they’d disappointed her.

  ‘This is a sickness. You should be trying to cure these kids and set them straight, not encouraging them. What could be more fucked-up than finding a handsome limb or organ so loathsome that you’d beg for its removal?’

  Helga Goonesarrawa was a mouse at meetings, but now she rose to inform Karen that she was reducing kids to some kind of metaphor for the national malaise. Sure, you had to do more for troubled students than keep them alive till the tertiary education sector or social welfare took over, but keeping them alive was still the most important thing. The school had succeeded in eradicating suicide. Prospect’s efforts deserved international recognition.

  Furious that the group could cheer this self-serving nonsense, Karen leapt to her feet, determined to speak the great taboo: maybe all the kids who’d committed suicide hadn’t been wasters, or insane, maybe they were political martyrs whose deaths spoke the truth in a way that couldn’t be contradicted.

  What she wanted to question was why all these kids had been topping themselves in the first place. They were doing it because they saw this society for what it is. Even thick kids knew enough to see that the world where conspicuous consumption defines success would be denied to them. And the smart, sensitive kids recognised that product bingeing is utterly vacuous. They were mutilating and killing themselves to express contempt for the way this society had distorted human experience. However, emotion saw Karen’s words emerge in an incoherent blurt.

  ‘But this isn’t mutilation,’ Sophie interjected. ‘It’s correction. They’re making themselves comfortable with the person they are.’

  Several teachers then said how much they preferred amputations to tattoos or piercings. Amputations were more honest. Sure, kids liked to claim that they were getting a tongue or eye removed to improve their sex-lives, but in truth they didn’t know what that meant. These kids were just doing whatever they had to do to defeat the peril of insignificance.

  Karen tried one last time to explain that an educator’s duty was to promote the creation of a better society, not to generate eloquent statements of desperation.

  ‘This is barbaric,’ she said, searching the room for just one face that agreed with her. ‘If we don’t fight against what consumption culture’s been doing to these kids, we’re standing by while humanity disintegrates.’

  ‘So what would you have us do?’ Ralph asked Karen. ‘Tell Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch, “Wrong Way, Go Back!” ? … Most schools can’t produce a functional timetable, and you want us to reverse the tide of history. By cutting a little slack, we’re saving these kids’ lives.’

  ‘What for? What are you saving them for?’

  ‘Don’t be so cynical … Life’s life. It’s a fair starting point for everything that follows.’

  Disregarding advice that she take time to reconsider, Karen ran out of the school to find a park where she could gather her thoughts before speaking to Paul.

  The teacher felt the pale-blue sky reaching down to fix her head in an Indian Deathlock. Not one of her friends supported her stand. Many said that they’d started out thinking just as she had, but had been forced to alter their views when they’d seen the change in the school. They asked what she’d prefer: drugs and suicide, or happy, purposeful students working hard to realise their potential?

  Detlef Fir told the assembly that he’d just that morning made an appointment to have his ears amputated. He wanted to show his IC kids how much they’d inspired him. Ears had always given him the shits. He could pleasure his wife much better without ear flaps getting in the way.

  When Noni Poussis said that her husband was giving her massive breast implants for her thirtieth birthday, Karen could stand no more.

  Maybe it was her. Maybe she was out of sync with reality. If she could just accept that any behaviour that short-circuits the self-destructive impulse was reasonable, she could release the sky’s vice-like hold on her forehead.

  While listening to Karen’s story, Paul scribbled meticulous notes.

  His few questions concerned verification of detail; when something happened, or whether someone spoke exactly the words she reported. He showed no powerful emotions, but answered ‘Yes’ when Karen asked if he believed her. It took four hours for Paul to take down everything Karen felt needed to be said for the story to be told accurately.

  After a long silence, Paul looked up from more than thirty pages of handwritten notes. They were both exhausted.

  ‘This is really something,’ he told Karen. ‘Schools weren’t like this when we were there.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You do realise the paper won’t print this story?’

  Karen’s eyes fought against their sockets. She’d just given an intimate account of her school’s complicity with madness. She asked again whether Paul believed her tale of Prospect Secondary’s attempts to redefine integration.

  He did. Every word. No one could doubt that Karen was taking a principled stand. The thing was, his newspaper never published stories about teen suicide, or anything that might be seen to romanticise suicidal behaviours. There was no way his editor would run a critique of a school that had won out over suicide.

  So, this was the brick wall. You’d never be permitted to attack the underlying socio-economic causes of youthful discontent. You were only allowed to fudge the truth by blaming dodgy song-lyrics and zealous drug dealers.

  ‘Have you ever felt that having a full set of limbs made you inadequate?’ Karen asked.

  ‘I don’t like my nose, but I’ve never thought of having it amputated.’

  ’We’ve got to stop this,’ she insisted.

  ‘Suicide’s a virus,’ Paul said. ‘You should commend these people for doing something.’

  The man had missed her point entirely, and just then Karen realised that Paul had always managed to miss her point. Yet she knew that he also was sad about the state of the world. He might be thick and imperceptive, but she’d been that too.

  The subeditor then told a story that he’d never mentioned in their three years together.

  ‘My first girlfriend, Donna, committed suicide when she was eighteen. She’d drink till she was nearly paralytic, and slash-up. I know that makes her sound mad, or wild, but Donna was quiet. Smart, with a good family … Pretty. Too pretty really. She had big breasts. I never saw that as a bad thing, but she hated the way men looked at her. Always saying she wished someone would hack them off. Donna hated them. She was nothing more than her breasts. Even if she’d had them reduced, or had a leg cut off, I still could have loved her … Most girls – most girls who think like her – they stop eating, or they do something to stop being women. But Donna threw herself under the Sandringham train … A school like Prospect … A school like Prospect might have saved Donna’s life.’

  ‘It might have,’ Karen said.

  PEOPLE WHOSE NAMES BOB DYLAN

  OUGHT TO KNOW

  ‘Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and

  most important sound in any language.’ DALE CARNEGIE

  Grace says that I should stand up for myself. I’ve been playing bass for Dylan for thirty-two years, and he doesn’t even know my name. Once in a while, Bob says, ‘Man, what was that shit you played on Quinn?’, and I tell him the amp crashed, and that’s pretty much the sum of our conversations. When Grace says, ‘You’ve got kids at college … If he doesn’t know your name, how will he pay you?’ I say that you don’t bother a genius with trivia like back pay. Eventually, Bob’ll see that I get my due.

  Grace hasn’t been with me all that time. Our paths didn’t cross when she was on the catwalk, or singing ‘Walking in the Rain’ and ‘I’ve Seen That Face Before’, and I guess she never imagined then that fate would fix her up with a plodder like me. If you check out the old photos, Grace looks so dangerous, really
formidable, and you wouldn’t believe that she’s quite petite, or that she’d sing when she dries the dishes. Whenever she gets moody and tells me how lucky I am to be living with Grace Jones, I remind her that Bob Dylan doesn’t know her name either.

  It might be easier for us to live in a city full of people whose names Bob didn’t know, but geography’s tricky like that. Our local school crossing attendant is Jeff Lynne, who played with Bob in the Wilburys. His old band, ELO, sold container loads. I never heard them, but Grace says they were shit. Not that she’d say that to his face, because Jeff ’s a Wilbury, and a producer, and knowing a producer with clout makes a lot of difference when you’re begging for a recording budget.

  No question, Bob knows Jeff ’s name, and when the two of them tell their old stories about Roy, George and Tom, Bob uses Jeff ’s name maybe one sentence in a dozen. ‘Well, yeah, that’s what you say, Jeff. I don’t remember that.’ Dylan even sends him cards from different gigs, but that’s the thing, when he sends him a postcard of a fat woman by the pool at the Bucharest Hilton, it’s always ‘Mr Geoff Lynne’. Geoff with a G, not Jeff with a J.

  Jeff says that Bob’s just got the English Geoff mixed up with the more phonetically obvious American Jeff, and that’s OK. An understandable mistake. With Jeff born in Birmingham, you’d expect him to be the English Geoff with a G, not the Cold War fighter pilot Jeff with a J. Mr and Mrs Lynne got it arse-about trying to be fancy, and it’s hardly Bob’s fault that logic lets him down. But Grace says that not being able to spell someone’s name is exactly the same as not knowing it. Best not to argue that point because it’s something she gets strident about.

  Maybe it’s a Jamaican thing, but Grace has a two-directory view of the world. Most big cities have so many phone numbers that they split their directories in two, and she says that any decent authority would divide the volumes into People Worth Calling and People Not Worth Calling. According to Grace, she and I would figure in the large volume of People Whose Names Bob Dylan Doesn’t Know, and depending where you stand on the Jeff/Geoff controversy, our whole city probably squeezes into that category.