The Subjects Read online

  It will do for now.

  It is better to stay away.

  Biology

  The next morning I followed Tod into my first lesson with Helen K.

  There she was, sitting on the desk with her feet on the back of a chair, her eyes cast out the window with the look of someone much further away. Cowboy boots, worn pale suede like a shorn cat, and the cheesecloth shirt that hugged her A-grade rack. She had pale skin and frizzy hair and wasn’t really my idea of pretty, but before she even opened her mouth I knew she’d be playing a lead role at shower time.

  With Tod and me, there were twelve of us, and on each desk there was a tablet—one of the newest hybrid models, an eight-inch variant, thin as air—and a very schmick headset. I managed to slide into my seat without anyone paying me much attention, picked up the headset and looked it over. When I say schmick, I mean I’d never seen anything like it before—a double-banded headpiece made of rubber and a super lightweight metal.

  ‘Go on, try it.’ She had come off her desk, was standing next to mine. Waiting for me to put it on (it fit like a glove), she reached out her hand and introduced herself. ‘Hi there. I’m Helen.’

  Her voice was warm and gravelly. Again it gave me pause: the teacher and the technology, the glass walls and the pots in the courtyard, the bathroom in the bedroom. Not so very far away there was a bunk with my name on it in a juvenile prison.

  Helen raced through the new-boy intro to the rest of the class. Next along from me was a boy called Fergus with a forehead of Himalayan acne and in front of him, Alex from the kitchen. In the row behind sat the three girls—Rachel and the sisters, and behind them, a back row of boys. There were five of them. I caught the names of a tall guy who shaved his head, Glen, and two Bens. The shorter Ben held up his tablet so I could read the screen. The letters were fluoro green and big enough: FUCK OFF PEDOPHILE. This spurred on Glen and the other Ben, who came up with:

  Ur Asexual

  Where’s my penis >

  Standard stuff. What followed was less standard.

  ‘Okay,’ Helen said, ‘we’re good to go. Headsets.’

  With no further coaxing everyone went quiet and put them on, back-row boys included. Everyone doing what the teacher said to do.

  I was curious enough to play along. Through the headset now came lots of nice noises increasing in volume: birds and waves, chimes, a wind instrument, a few strings.

  Tod saw my quizzical look and motioned for me to lift out my earpiece.

  ‘Noise-blocking, surround sound,’ he whispered. ‘Good, isn’t it?’

  Helen scanned our faces, gave the thumbs-up, and motioned for me to scroll. I did, and the nice noises ceased. An image appeared on the screen, some kind of mythological figure that reminded me of my ancient history textbook. I checked around and everyone was looking at it like it was something interesting, so I did my best. For lack of relevance, I had not hitherto been a fan of ancient history. Draw a circle around what you need to know, that was my school motto. Modern history scraped in. I could see it was something I should try to get my head around—how fucked-up people managed to fuck up everything for everyone else: the Holocaust, the A-bomb, the Khmer Rouge, Tiananmen, Rwanda. Boko Haram wasn’t even on the syllabus but occasionally I’d do a quick net trawl to see what they’d been up to. Anyhow, the ancient figure now on the screen had three heads. One was a lion, then a guy with a face like God and last a dragon with wings and snakes for fingers. If such a creature had ever existed I would have been interested in taking a closer look; as it was, I scrolled on.

  There was still no audio. I took out an earpiece. ‘I can’t hear anything.’

  Helen said that was okay; when I was meant to have sound, I would have sound.

  The next image was more my thing: a boy with a neck thicker than his head and a bulbous growth the size of my fist protruding from his left cheek. I tried briefly to imagine what that would feel like then scrolled on. Number three was a ring, and inside the ring a bullseye pattern of concentric circles, graduating from pale grey in the middle to a minty outer orbit. It looked like a pretty pattern, but I clocked it from the start as an agar plate. There were a few more, other creatures and patterns and bad heads and then, at the end, a blank screen and the nice noises again.

  For the first ten minutes or so the class sat in silence, scrolling. Maybe this was what I was signing up for—to react, to be watched. Maybe they were monitoring our responses to the images like the old psych flashcards: what is the first thing that comes into your mind? Maybe, I thought; maybe not. And maybe I don’t care. I didn’t have anything to hide anymore; I didn’t have to stay under any radar (never excel, never fail). I started to feel some relief about that, because it had taken its toll, the oscillating between personas. Turning up the dial on ‘weird explosive kid’ when the standover boy senses your weakness. Edging closer to a group when a teacher tags you as the outsider. Not too clever, not strikingly dumb. Always in fear of being noticed, caught out…It was all starting to fall away. It didn’t matter anymore.

  My attention had turned back to the teacher when there was laughter from the back row. The bigger Ben was using the stylus to scribble over one of the images.

  ‘You want to share?’ Helen asked.

  When he held it up there was a group guffaw. It was the boy with the bulbous growth, only now it had multiplied so the face was a montage of mutations and towering pustules, a giant penis sprouting out of his ear. It was pretty good. The guy could draw.

  Helen was gracious, the blue cheesecloth shirt with the sleeves pushed up to make room for her clunky bangles, her hair pulled into a tangled nest on the top of her head: cupping her chin in her hands as she considered her reply. When it came it was just one word:

  ‘Virulence.’

  We all sat blank-faced as Alex chimed in. ‘I saw a guy on You Tube once,’ he said, his voice soft, melodic, ‘who had a similar thing encrusting his forehead. It looked like bark on a tree.’ He went silent. We waited. Finally he added, with the solemnity of a TV newsman: ‘They cut it off and it grew back faster.’

  Helen clapped. ‘The question is why does it grow back? How does it conquer the immune system? The answer is?’

  Silence.

  ‘Virulence. The power of mutation. Nothing can hold it still. Think about what we can take from that. Thanks, Alex. Someone else?’

  No one.

  Helen motioned for us to remove the headsets. When she spoke again, she seemed to be projecting her voice to a more distant audience. ‘From the start,’ she said.

  I scrolled back to the first image: the three-headed guy.

  ‘Proteus. The sea-god who could see everything—past, present and future. Men travelled from far and wide with questions. When he refused to answer they became desperate, violent…’

  She scanned each of our faces and, ignoring the WTF expression on mine and the fact the sisters were hand-signing between themselves, she nodded and continued.

  A hand shot up from the back row. ‘Can we just start now?’

  She smiled. ‘Give me three minutes.’ I wasn’t sure what they were going to start but the timeframe seemed to be accepted.

  Helen continued. There was a lot to watch when she told a story. Her hands shaped imagined landscapes and her eyes darted all over the place. It was a performance, the tone all wrong for a class of twelve delinquents, and yet it wasn’t. I slid down into my seat, more scared for her than anything: how could this type of earnestness survive?

  ‘But Proteus could elude them. Proteus had the power to transform.’ This she imparted with a meaning-of-life zeal, making me wonder whether this was history or religious education and I was right about the cult thing, whether Helen hadn’t escaped from somewhere, whether this light-filled building was not an outback temple to an ancient sea-god. (The God of Mansions, the God of Dirt—‘There’s as many gods as you want,’ Mary said, ‘whatever you care to believe.’)

  ‘One day, King Menelaus became shipwrecked on
the same shore. Proteus was asleep with the seals. When he refused to tell Menelaus how to get home the king took hold of him and didn’t let go. Proteus turned into a snake, into water, into fire, but Menelaus held on.’ (I don’t know how you hold onto fire or water either.) ‘And when the cycle was complete and he returned to the form of man, all that was left was to speak the truth.’

  And Menelaus found his way home, end of story.

  ‘Hallelujah.’ It was Rachel. Her tablet was turned face down, and after she spoke she dropped her head into her folded arms and didn’t surface for the rest of the lesson. (It was more of the same in class the next day and the one after that. Inside of class the whole first week it was the only word I heard come out of her mouth. Hallelujah. That seemed fine with Helen K, and it was no surprise to me—Rachel and the antisocial stuff. Same with the other Aboriginal kids at my old school and the blackfellas in the flats who you crossed the street to avoid. The old ladies who sat out front never did much harm but they got lumped in with the rest. Nina said they got given too many handouts. I am pretty sure Nina was on the pension too, but she held fast on her reasons to begrudge them theirs.)

  End of story for the boys in the back row meant they could put their headsets back on and start playing video games. Two of them left to go to the ‘games room’, apparently with Helen’s blessing. The sisters slid out right after.

  That left Tod, Alex and me for the last slide. I was right about the agar. The image was swarming bacteria. Helen hit the whiteboard and started drawing dots in a tunnel:

  ‘The opportunistic pathogens in the human intestine. How do they survive? How do they thrive? We were talking about this yesterday…’ I wondered if that meant she had explained some of the concepts then too, but suspected this was how she rolled, jumping around any which way. I started to settle into the idea that she was a bit mad. Good mad, not spooky mad and mercifully, no God involved. She kept drawing, turning the dots into a diamond weave (six a side, no variation).

  ‘If there’s nothing to fight them, if the host is weak, they link together and form a raft, a swarmer cell.’ One big diamond made up of twenty-eight small diamonds and no room for any more dots or diamonds, at which point she stopped and smiled, that awe-struck look again, more like a child than a teacher, and from the back of her throat pronounced the secret weapon: ‘Virulence!’

  The point being, I was starting to work out, that the slides were all linked by a common thread—Proteus and the growth sprouting out of the kid’s face, the bacteria—and in finding the link, we were linked too (at least those of us left listening) in a subliminal and pointless joint enterprise.

  What we were meant to be learning day to day was anyone’s guess. Reading the transcripts years later, I was interested to learn that part of Helen’s brief was to teach us English. That was not made clear to us. During her classes we did not, for instance, open a single book. No mention was ever made of good grammar. This was put to her by the counsel assisting the inquiry, to which she responded that they had only a brief window to work with the students, and that inverted commas were not high on our action list.

  As I read on I imagined her cupping her chin in her hands like she did in class, then letting her fingers creep over her eyes the way she used to when we were missing the point.

  COUNSEL: And instead, Ms K, lesson after lesson of random, unrelated stories and experiments…

  HELEN K: I think if you did your research, you’d find they were neither random nor unrelated.

  Nor of course were her stories just stories.

  More a chemistry boy myself, during the next part of her biological exposition on the colonial structure of the bacteria I zoned out with Rachel and took a closer look at the uber-tech headset. The rubber was still warm in my hands, and on the inside of one of the headbands I saw my initials on a white sticker. Further down, a stamp: Made in Pakistan. When I zoned back in, Tod was telling a story about his own gut flora: how at age fourteen his meds started messing with his blood sugars and he began to gorge himself into a state of gargantuanism. (He wasn’t sure what the meds were for, only that he’d stopped sleeping and started acting up.)

  ‘Within a year I went from chubby boy to school fat kid.’

  But he wasn’t a head-butting insomniac anymore so they kept him on the pills. Eventually his fatty acids secreted into a place they weren’t meant to go, with the result that he started smelling like bad milk.

  ‘Bad milk, a very bad smell, everywhere I went, and I couldn’t wash it off, no matter what I did.’

  This was more my area: the pills. Risperidone, Zyprexa, Seroquel—they were all in my inventory, a strong trade with the Year 12 high achievers who started flipping out at exam time because they couldn’t sleep, couldn’t concentrate. I made a mental note to get Tod’s contact details before I left; he’d be a perfect source and the doctors would be gagging to get him back on the meds when he got out of here. As long as he was happy to trade them on…

  I was starting to think about the logistics of that when Helen K clapped her hands, this time nice and loud:

  ‘Agar,’ she said, rolling the r and half-laughing, a private joke between her and the man in her mind. ‘Let’s get some agar of our own!’

  Everyone seemed to know that meant moving to the courtyard with the pear trees, for those who wanted to, and ongoing games or sleep for those who didn’t. As Tod had a session booked with Magnolia, it just left Alex and me outside with Helen. For the rest of the afternoon we stood at a trestle table covered in swirling agar plates, taking swabs from various parts of our bodies and incubating our own bacterial colonies, both of us focused and quiet like kids making a fort out of pop sticks.

  The next day we came back to check them. While mine remained a sad little dot, Alex’s plate was covered in pale, pox-like fuzzy circles—a bona fide biohazard.

  ‘What orifice did you swab to come up with that?’ I said.

  It was the first time I saw him crack a smile, our first one-on-one conversation and the beginning of the second most important friendship of my life.

  ‘Superior virulence,’ he said.

  We stared at it for a while, the virulence. I found a face in the microbial blobs, an open mouth leeching in horror (when there are no numbers I find faces), and he started telling me about a protein that can mutate and destroy a part of your brain, how once it does you can’t sleep anymore, and it gets worse and worse until you get double vision and become delirious and start hallucinating.

  ‘There was this guy once, it was so bad they tried to induce a coma but his brain still refused to shut down.’ Alex had the slightest of lisps—a dragging of the s that sometimes disappeared altogether, adding to my sense of an underlying fragility. He looked at me tentatively now, like he was waiting for a contribution to the discussion. When I didn’t have one he jump-started another:

  ‘You like Helen’s story yesterday? The one on the beach?’

  I shrugged. ‘What kind of bullshit is that?’

  ‘Yeah, made no sense. What even happened to that guy?’

  ‘He got home, didn’t he?’

  ‘No, I don’t mean the king. The one in the picture, the shape-changing man.’ He was waiting for me again. Any last trace of a smile disappeared. ‘I mean, once he tells the truth, does he die?’

  Proteus. He’d read the story as I had read it: the shipwrecked man as an assailant; his actions—pinning the sea-god to the sand—as a violation. I was unused to peers connecting on any level other than the comical or commercial, and this one had a way of holding eye contact longer than the moment deserved. A directness in his gaze that put you under the microscope.

  ‘Let me rephrase,’ he eventually said when I had no answer for him. ‘Should he die?’

  Again, I hesitated.

  ‘Go on, just yes or no. Don’t give me a reason.’

  ‘No.’

  Sometimes he’d flinch as you spoke. It was barely perceptible, but I could see it, as I did now. Like a pinprick. L
ike he was hearing or seeing something no one else did.

  I made a go of changing the subject and asked him what landed him here.

  He smiled again. ‘Good question.’

  I waited.

  ‘I sprayed stuff on buildings.’

  I shrugged it off. ‘Street art…’

  He shook his head. ‘Not sure you’d call it art. I can’t draw for shit.’

  ‘Yeah, but they sent you here for that?’

  He nodded. ‘As I understand it, yes.’

  Making no effort to extrapolate, he picked up the small plate from the bench and peered at the fuzzy growth. ‘Nom nom nom,’ he said, like the cookie monster, and before I realised what he was doing, he sucked the full plate of bacterial contents into his mouth.

  I never said it was a long conversation. But it was noteworthy.

  After he left, I sat down on the bench and stared at my reflection in the glass: me and the pretty trees and pots. Wherever you sat, surrounded by glass, you could see yourself reflected. Putting Tod’s story together with my own, each of us was there because of a wrongdoing, saved only by the presence of Dr J in the courtroom. I had sold drugs to fellow students, Tod had almost blinded his teacher, but Alex—what had Alex really done? I never pressed it with him. It was only later, reading the transcript, that I came to learn the extent of his crimes. He was telling me the truth: he spray-painted birds on the walls of bank buildings. He was caught and cautioned and then caught again, this time for drawing guns on the door of the police boys club. He was ordered to serve the community by cleaning it all off. He didn’t. He painted penises on a Catholic primary school and didn’t clean them off either, and more, and again, until he left them without any options. His crime was that they didn’t know what to do with him; they didn’t know how else to make him stop.

  I’ve since wondered if it was a warning, that first conversation, that first question. Should he die? I have wished many times I had been less equivocal in my response; that I had screamed him down.