The Subjects Read online

  With eyes in the back of my head, I peeled off into the waiting room, wondering if it would be my first and last day, if soon I wouldn’t be running down a long straight road trying to find some train tracks. I liked the trees, I liked Tod and Alex, and I fucking loved the pump pack, but not enough to sell my soul.

  And then I had my first session with the Doctor.

  Personal Health and Development 1.1

  Standing at the wood-panelled door, I heard voices inside and so I waited.

  When eventually I knocked and entered, the Doctor was there alone, sitting at his computer. We had no set appointment, but still he looked at his watch and nodded, as though to confirm I was expected and on time. He ushered me away from the desk to the wingback chairs near the window and before I sat down he reached out to shake my hand. It was awkward in itself; more so as he kept hold of my hand and stared at me, like he was searching for something and dissatisfied with what he was finding.

  On the table to his side was the jug of lemon water. The contract was next to it, in the same place we’d left it.

  ‘Shall we start with that?’

  I half-laughed. ‘I don’t know. I don’t really get it.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand it yet.’

  Sometimes it was hard to tell if he was correcting you or agreeing with you, or just translating out loud. But my point in being there was not to work that out. All I wanted to know was that this whole business of the contract wasn’t going to lead me down some weird, secret corridor.

  ‘Why don’t I begin?’ he said. ‘This is our contract. Let’s start with an easy one. We ask that you participate each week in at least two hours of video games. That is not a limit, but a minimum.’

  I took it for a sweetener and asked him what was next.

  ‘The second condition I’d like to include is your in-principle consent to co-operate with me.’ He looked at me again like he was trying to burn a passage into my brain and I did the thing I do when people try that on: turn my focus to their hairline so I’m not looking at their eyes. He kept talking.

  ‘I don’t mean turning up to class on time, or doing anything in particular that anyone else here asks of you. What I mean is that if I ask you to try something different you listen, and consider it, and if it’s within the realm of possibility, you’ll give it a go—you won’t close yourself off. I can’t ask for a mental shift, but just in practical terms, if you know what I mean. To the extent that is possible…’

  I had expected something a little more silver-tongued. As it was, I had almost no idea what he was talking about, and he seemed frustrated at his own inability to articulate it. Whether intended or not, it put me on a more level playing field than I’d anticipated.

  ‘Maybe you could give me an example,’ I suggested.

  ‘Yes, good idea. I have one I’d like to start with. You are right-handed?’

  I nodded.

  ‘For the next, say, seven days, would you—to the extent that it’s possible,’ (it was a phrase he repeated a lot) ‘use only your left hand.’

  I played along. ‘For everything?’

  There was no trace of a smile. He was serious. ‘I have some tape I can stretch across the fingers of your right hand so it is harder to use. Of course we won’t include that level of detail in the contract—simply your in-principle consent…’

  ‘…to give it a go.’

  ‘Precisely—to keep an open mind, I like to think of it that way.’

  The condition was noted and he smiled, genuinely pleased, as if it was a game and he’d won the first hand. ‘Your turn.’

  ‘You mean I get one?’

  ‘You get as many as we agree to.’

  I had to think for a while. ‘Is whatever I say to you our secret? Are you that kind of doctor?’

  ‘Yes. I’m a psychiatrist. With that, there is a doctor–patient confidentiality, of course.’ He was waving it away, a more significant question of his own forming. ‘You asked about leaving yesterday. Tell me, why do you want to leave?’

  I shrugged. ‘To get out of here.’

  He cocked his head as though that made no sense at all. And then: ‘The primary reason you have for leaving is so that you can go home to be with your mother, is that right?’

  I shrugged again.

  ‘That is because you want to be at home to protect her.’ There was no tip-toeing around the subject as others had done. And when I didn’t respond: ‘You don’t have to worry about that. Greg made inquiries, about your stepfather…’

  ‘I don’t have a stepfather.’

  ‘Apologies. Your mother’s partner. He is in prison interstate, for a minimum twelve months. You will be home by then; we won’t keep you that long.’

  I spent a moment piecing it together: what he knew, what he thought he knew. Satisfied, I moved on, content to take up the direct approach. ‘If you’re serious that I get to ask for something, how about this: you agree to tell the truth—about me, I mean, once you’ve worked it out, what’s wrong with me, you know, whatever condition it is I have.’

  He responded immediately. ‘I can tell you that now: you don’t have any condition.’

  I laughed. ‘That’s not what they say.’

  ‘Tell me, what do they say?’

  ‘I dunno. You name it.’

  He smiled. ‘That’s precisely what I’d like to avoid doing. But let’s try it: give me an example.’

  I was eleven when I was first told there was something wrong with the way I responded to things, and fourteen when I was told to start taking pills to fix it. There was a lot to go on. ‘All right. There was one called oppositional disorder. I definitely had that.’

  He nodded, small rapid movements like he was processing something. ‘You’ll have to listen carefully. Oppositional defiant disorder…You ready?’

  I nodded.

  From here he spoke slowly, as though he was dictating and giving me time to write it down. ‘Tick as we go: over a period of at least six months, at least once a week, you display a minimum of four of a series of symptoms. That series includes anger or irritable moods, or being argumentative or defiant or vindictive (that just means ‘mean’)…Careful here, not two or three of these symptoms, but four. If you have three you don’t have it; only if you have four. And if you have four of them but only for five months then you’re out too. That pretty much sums it up, I think. It’s a very popular one at the moment.’

  I had a thing for numbers. Sometimes when people were talking to me the only thing that would make sense was when a number came into it, like a clear voice on a crackly phone line. But these numbers weren’t speaking to me at all.

  ‘What do you think?’ he finally said. ‘Do you fit the bill?’

  By the time he got to this last question he seemed to have such contempt for what he was saying that he couldn’t even hold eye contact with me anymore. Instead, he was looking at a tiny bird on the window ledge.

  ‘A finch?’ I knew birds. Mary liked them. She put bowls of birdseed outside the windows.

  ‘Yes, agreed,’ Dr J replied. ‘It is a finch.’ At which the bird hopped across the ledge and flew away.

  ‘So all this, you think it’s bullshit, a joke?’ I said.

  He took a while, then nodded, just once. ‘I do. But not the funny kind.’

  I had been playing dumb, of course. I remembered everything every doctor had ever said I had:

  • oppositional defiant disorder (as above. I’d googled it; he wasn’t telling me a lot I didn’t know)

  • disruptive mood dysregulation disorder (the child psych after I was suspended: she showed me sets of facial expressions ‘from neutral to full intensity,’ and said I was slow to recognise fear. The treatment would be about ‘relabelling my perceptions’; antipsychotics were an option. That was it for Mary: we were out of there)

  • PTSD (a police youth liaison officer when I wouldn’t tell them what I’d seen)

  • ADHD (well, doesn’t everyone?)

&nb
sp; And now, Dr J: you don’t have anything. It was appealing to me, what he was saying. It always felt like the others were talking about someone else. Now we went around in circles: ‘So can you tell me what is wrong?’

  ‘Nothing is wrong.’

  ‘But when it is bad…’

  He leaned in. ‘Think of when you are “bad”—what it feels like, the level of control you have.’ He gave me a minute. ‘If I were to say to you there is no illness affecting you, but rather, and bear with me, you are possessed by a demon. You’ve seen movies like that?’

  I nodded. Plenty. The old classic: the devil-girl’s 360 headspin and your mother sucks cocks in hell.

  ‘Okay, so the demon has infiltrated your body, and when you are bad, as you say, what you are thinking and feeling has nothing to do with you; it is the demon. If for a moment you could accept those things…?’ He paused. I shrugged. Why not? ‘Then I want you to close your eyes and think about this thing, this demon. Don’t tell me, but just think about what it looks like, how big it is, where in your body it sits. What sort of creature is it? Imagine its head, its body…’

  He gave me another minute. I was thinking shiny and dark, hard-shelled, slow-moving.

  ‘Do you have it?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Okay that’s fine. Now I have another question, the only question I want you to answer.’ He tilted forward. ‘Do you want to be rid of it, Daniel, or do you want it to stay?’

  I remember thinking in that moment that this one was smarter than the others. I remember looking at a black and white photograph on the wall, trying to think of ways to deflect the question. The photograph was a landscape: soaring granite cliffs and a soft patina of light over a forest at the edge of a lake, and behind it all a blackening sky. The cliffs were reflected in the water, a mirror image, like a photograph within a photograph. I noticed then at the edge of the lake closer to the forest there was an object rising out of the water, a clump of shadowy bracken. It marred the beauty and I wanted to move closer to make it out, because now that I noticed it, it was all I could see.

  ‘Daniel?’

  I turned back to him. I held his gaze and he mine. The answers to his questions, the shape, size, where it sits…In my mind I held up my closed fist: so big. My other hand I placed flat against the centre of my chest: here, and then over my gut and the back of my skull: and here and here…There is no face, no head. My fist-sized demon—hard-shelled and slow-moving—had its own faceless functions: toxifying the lungs, secreting bile through the guts. It had its own defence system. A simple answer to a question was no threat to it, but at least it was being asked a question. No one had ever spoken to it before. Still, I shook my head at him. ‘Why do I do what I do? You tell me that.’

  He nodded then, like it was too easy. ‘I don’t know what you do yet, but when I do, yes I can tell you that.’

  ‘I want it in the contract,’ I said.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘I want you to tell the truth about me. And then I want it to stay between us.’ There it was, the second condition. And the third: ‘I want to be able to leave whenever I decide to leave.’

  He wrote them all down.

  ‘And for mine,’ he continued. ‘If you agree to meet here at this time every week for a minimum of an hour. Are you happy with that?’

  Sure, but let’s be clear (the cult thing was still at the back of my mind): ‘To talk, just like this.’

  ‘Just like this?’

  The Children of God, the Family of Love. It didn’t matter how good the shower pressure was. ‘No weird stuff.’ And when he looked up, blank-faced: ‘No touchy-feely.’

  He took it in his stride. ‘No, no touchy-feely. In fact, no touchy anything, with anyone here. Let’s add that?’

  I acceded. Never having achieved a real-life enactment of my shower scenes, it didn’t seem much of an ask. (I couldn’t see Rachel showing any interest, and I had a hunch the sisters were lesbians.)

  ‘Anything else?’ he asked.

  ‘I go to classes and watch videos. I eat. I see you. That it? What about medication?’

  He shook his head. ‘No need for that. It’s been at least three months since the last prescription.’

  This was a final piece of information I was happy to share: my raised middle finger to the quacks. I didn’t realise it at the time, of course, that in disclosing it, I was putting us on the same side, us versus ‘them’.

  I shook my head. ‘I never took it in the first place.’

  There were only a couple of times across all of our sessions when I saw him genuinely taken aback. He looked at me for a while to digest what I had said. ‘If you could explain that to me… That was not what I was told. You didn’t take the medication?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  With this information he jumped from his chair and walked behind his desk and then back again, now smiling conspiratorially. ‘What did you do with it?’

  He was forgetting why I was there. ‘I kept the pills, and I sold them.’ It was my first act of supply, before diving into the dark web.

  ‘And you just told the doctors that you were taking them?’

  I nodded.

  ‘That’s lovely that is…For how long?’

  ‘A year and a half. A bit more…I said they made me calmer, more able to manage.’ I kept it real: I went up and down. They messed with the dosage.

  ‘So you never took it?’

  ‘Well, later. I tested stuff I sourced from the web, a pill here and there—just so I knew what I was selling.’

  He waved that away as irrelevant. For the next few minutes he appeared to be engaging with a different audience. Walking around again, he wagged a finger in the air, shook his head, rubbed his chin and then squinted at various objects around the room (including my face). At one point he exhaled abruptly and started to clap. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said, and then closed his eyes and smiled, and stayed like that for long enough for me to wonder if I should just get up and leave.

  I didn’t. I was enjoying myself. I had never told anyone about any of this and to witness the impact was giving me a sense of my own significance.

  Finally he sat down again, as though returning to the room.

  ‘Tell me one thing,’ he said, now solemn. ‘I understand that you sold them later on, but that first time, when the doctor prescribed you the medication. Why didn’t you take it?’

  I hadn’t considered that question since I made the original decision, but the answer came clearly back to me—why it hadn’t crossed my mind to take the drug.

  ‘You know the kind of school I went to, loads of out-of-control kids,’ I began. He had folded his arms to listen, sitting back in his chair, as though for this he had all the time in the world. ‘There were a few of them who went to the office at lunchtime to get their pills because their parents used to forget, chaos at home, all that, so off to Mrs Jennings in the office they went. Some of them calmed down a bit, some of them got wilder. We all knew who got them. They knew we knew. They were the mentals; that’s what we called them.’

  Momentarily he looked sad—for me, for the mentals. And then he nodded. ‘You’re not what I expected,’ he said. ‘You know, Daniel, I might do something I’d never normally do, with your permission: I’d like to make some further inquiries.’ He reached over and picked up the contract. ‘And perhaps if we could hold off on signing this until then.’

  What was notable for me was that I was deflated by the fact we were not signing our contract, and that already I felt a desire not to disappoint him. I accepted his offer of a mandarin even though I didn’t want one. (It was something he did every time I sat there with him, offer me a piece of fruit from the bowl on the sideboard.)

  ‘So are you going to tape my hand?’ I held it up, but he waved it away like it was not his suggestion but mine, and a silly one at that. When I asked if we were done, he gave me a look as though it was for me to decide.

  ‘Do you have any other questions?’r />
  The tone was more procedural than inquiring, more an opening for ‘where are the toilets’ than ‘what the fuck is this place’. In light of that, I said I didn’t.

  After I left, I started heading back to my room but stopped at the door to the courtyard. It was bathed in an orange afternoon light. I went out, sat on the bench and started to think how I could put some more flesh around my plan. Yellow-bellied birds tussled above me in the branches of the pear tree as the door to one of the study rooms opened.

  Rachel appeared and stood in the corridor for a minute looking down at the floor. Then she raised her head up, like it took a particular kind of effort, and her gaze landed right on me, the boy staring at her in the courtyard. For a long second she held it, with no effort from either of us to acknowledge or communicate.

  At some point Imogen and Grace appeared out of the kitchen. As they approached Rachel, and oblivious to my presence in the courtyard, they stopped and leaned in to say something to her, one cupping her mouth to Rachel’s ear; smirking as she pulled away. I couldn’t make out what they said, or Rachel’s reply, only the ripple of anger that crossed her face before they went their separate ways, the sisters arm in arm.

  Left alone, the incident I’d just witnessed played again in my mind. The look on Rachel’s face, the sort of words I imagined were behind it…I caught myself, surprised at my level of curiosity. Pulled myself back to ponder my plan. A couple of days suddenly didn’t feel like a long time, or long enough to make a fully informed decision. I closed my eyes and opened them again to a colder light, to the voice of my mother in my ear: ‘What’s our plan, then?’

  It is a sort of plan, Mary—to hold off on making a plan.

  I undid a button on my shirt using my left hand, easy enough, but no matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t do it up again.

  Mary made this trill-like noise sometimes, in response to something I did or said. I don’t think she meant to; hers never came with words. It was a bit like the sound of Nina’s cat when it collapsed into its perfect patch of sun. I heard something like it just then. Maybe it was the birds welcoming in the night, but I took it how I wanted, and nodded back.