Legal Studies Core Part II: Rights and Responsibilities

The Doctor had an end in mind, or a point to prove.

Much has been said about his tactics, about the lengths to which he was prepared to go and the risks he was prepared to take. Did he present me with versions of himself that were most likely to cut through? Probably. We all do that. Did he cultivate the sense we were on the same ride, that this was as hard for him as it was for me? It is possible; maybe he was that good—so convincingly imperfect, so perfectly fallible. But at the time, let me say, it never crossed my mind. I guess you had to be there.

What the transcripts told me was at age twenty-three, as a graduating medical student, the Doctor was presented with awards for both academic achievement and community service. An outdated online bio revealed that over the course of three years he had volunteered in the medical corps, as a summer camp counsellor, at a mental health clinic, and at a homeless youth shelter. I found a photograph of him at that time wearing a baseball cap backwards and a blue T-shirt and surrounded by a group of black and Latino kids. Nine years later, he joined a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company and successfully launched the first outpatient clinical trials for a drug that was subsequently listicled as One of 10 Innovations that Will Change Your Tomorrow.

Like I said: versions, plural. Time gives us versions of ourselves. As we get older they can pile up a bit. By the time I met the Doctor he had plenty more. Every time I came to his door I was in the dark about which one would be waiting on the other side.

Our third session.

Even before the mandarin, he seemed to have a bitter taste in his mouth. As I went to knock on his door I heard him shouting: ‘This was not part of the agreement!’ The other voice was very quiet and I couldn’t make out the words. The door then opened and Greg came out.

He saw me and smiled. ‘I’d give it a sec.’

I waited five minutes before knocking. When I entered he was smoothing his hair and taking long breaths. He did a lap of the office and sat down in his usual seat. ‘Are you hungry?’ He was wearing the suit and tie again.

We both peeled a mandarin; he recoiled after biting into the first segment. ‘It isn’t good. Yours?’

It was a little dry, tasteless. ‘Not great. It’s okay.’

He insisted we bin them, dropping his from shoulder height to punish it for being bad fruit. When he sat down again he was distracted. He tilted his head from side to side as though to release a crimp in his neck, then straightened his spine and sat unnaturally tall in the chair. ‘Would you like to try another?’

I said I wouldn’t.

‘Fair enough.’ There were three left in the bowl. ‘You don’t want to take your chances.’

What I didn’t want to do was talk about the mandarins anymore. I had been quietly looking forward to the session and was feeling let down—the way a small child feels when a parent spends their play-time cleaning the floor.

‘I have an idea for the contract,’ I said.

That seemed to bring him at least part-way back. ‘Excellent,’ he said. No real enthusiasm, but the sentiment was in the ballpark.

I explained that I wanted a way to open the kitchen, or I needed to keep food in my room. ‘When I get hungry, this thing with the kitchen closing…’

‘Ah yes, I heard that you had an issue with that. I heard it as it happened, as a matter of fact—I think our neighbours on the farm would have heard it too. Tell me then, your appetite. You’re getting hungrier than you usually do?’

I said yes, glad someone had asked.

‘I thought that must be the case. Let’s take up your second suggestion: additional food to be provided in the student’s room.’ He made a note. ‘Our intention isn’t to starve anyone, that is what I said to them.’ He smiled then, the first for the morning; an equilibrium returned, a focus.

Version two: he leaned forward in his chair in a now I am all yours kind of way. ‘Could we change the subject?’

‘Sure.’

‘Fergus,’ he said. ‘How are you getting on with Fergus?’

I shrugged. ‘Minimal contact.’

In all honesty, I didn’t know where he was heading; he had to direct me to the day of the field trip in the bush: ‘Tell me about your conversation with him.’

‘It was short,’ I said. ‘He’s got a thing about his dreams.’

‘Okay, and did that upset you somehow?’

‘No, I just didn’t want to listen to it.’ I wasn’t being evasive; I didn’t have the sense I had anything to hide.

‘And so you threatened him?’

I shook my head, a bit dumbfounded. I didn’t remember it that way. It wasn’t until he spelled it out that I remembered my threat to break his fingers, and even then my sense was still that it was a non-event. I remembered the phlegm and the war story. ‘It would have just been a turn of phrase, you know, like an expression.’

‘And what did you actually mean?’

‘I meant: I’ve got an idea—let’s not talk anymore.’

He smiled at that. ‘I think he interpreted it differently.’

Through all this the Doctor didn’t seem at all angry, and because of that I felt relaxed. ‘How about this, Daniel,’ he said. ‘I’d like to get it into the contract that you don’t do that again. Use whatever phrases you want with me, but not them. I don’t want to make a big deal of it. I’ll work on the food supply, if you agree to that.’

I agreed, but not with any confidence. It must have showed.

‘I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think you could do it. I know you can.’ He left that hanging there. I didn’t bite. ‘Do you know why I know?’

I didn’t. He couldn’t know; no one could know.

‘I know that you can do it,’ he continued, ‘because since our last meeting I’ve requested information about your school disciplinary record over the last two years. You know of course what the result of that enquiry would be…’

I shrugged. Get to the point.

‘You would know that there isn’t one. Over the last two years you never once came to notice. Zero incidents, zero threats, zero fights.’

I nodded. ‘So?’

‘So, that tells me you can do it. And it makes me wonder—the fact that you come here and within weeks have threatened a student and howled the place down—what is different now?’ He didn’t wait for an answer but instead suggested we go through my history at school, from kindergarten until the present. He talked about the importance of timelines ‘so that we can view the whole and break it down into pieces, make sense of it. Because looking at yours’, he said, ‘it makes no sense at all. If we drill into it, you and I, we can find some, I’m sure’.

The timeline idea was familiar to me, courtesy of my Grade 6 teacher Mrs Pyke. This particular timeline, according to Dr J, kicked off the day I picked up Kevin Barnes and shoved him into a wheelie bin, the start of a spate of schoolyard infringements that had me siphoned into aggression replacement therapy midway through term four. Mary called it ‘going berserko’.

‘Could you tell me the reason behind that?’

Kevin Barnes. Little shit. ‘He was small enough to pick up.’

Dr J nodded like he could see the sense in the reasoning. ‘How old were you?’

‘Ten, maybe.’

‘And what do you think caused it to escalate from there?’

I started to ask myself why I had been looking forward to the session. But whatever the answer, I had committed to play ball, so that is what I did.

‘Different things, stuff in my head.’

What I was trying to explain was that my behaviour was in part reactive to various external factors, but in larger part to the messed-up workings of my mind. Luckily for me, for us, he was an adept interpreter and had no need to prod where others would have done. He rewarded effort with restraint; he never picked at sores. That in turn kept me on the field.

‘If it’s a timeline,’ I offered, ‘the library was before Kevin.’

‘Ah yes, apologies, the library. Do you want to tell me what happened there?’

I wasn’t being difficult when I said, ‘That’s hard.’

Grade 5: the social sciences aisle of the school library. I knew where it ended up (books on floor, not on shelves) but I wasn’t so clear about how it got there. There wasn’t one single trigger. I went to the library because the playground was hot and loud and full of dickheads. I liked the library because I liked the world history section and the Dewey decimal system and the smell of the librarian, and on hot days it was cool, except for this day; the air conditioning was bung and the librarian wasn’t there and there was a bunch of kids spitting at each other in world history so I ended up in social sciences. Not my usual section. I was surrounded by strange titles. One of the boys followed me and asked me, fairly insistently, what I was reading. He started dribbling and I was pretty sure he was about to spit at me. My reaction was to tear the books off the shelves (social sciences and world history). It probably wasn’t the best call. Some of the kids laughed; one of the girls cried. A teacher came. They called Mary and there were some hushed conversations. Apart from a library ban, not much else came out of it. The same kids laughed; the crying girl and her friends steered clear. The year went on as usual until Kevin Barnes.

For Kevin and for those that followed, there was a simple and universal explanation for my going berserko: it felt good. I was made to delve into this more in post-Kevin therapy. My predisposition to aggression, it was explained to Mary and me, was due to a depletion in my serotonin level. They didn’t measure it or anything; it was just a given. That meant my command-and-control centre wasn’t sending the correct messages—less communication, less control. Communication is everything. Mary and I thought it was bullshit but we didn’t argue because it seemed to be another way of saying it was not my fault. There was a culprit, and it was called intermittent explosive disorder and my triggers weren’t triggers at all, they were ‘cues of provocation’. What was happening outside of the crisis points—strange imaginings, a bad gut, stunted growth—those things didn’t seem to factor in. The shrink had her boxes ticked. Mary and I nodded. Sure, miraculously it all now made sense.

Over the course of the following year, the cues kept coming and incorrect messages kept getting sent, culminating in a number of intermittent explosions with varying levels of fallout. The class thug: I was that kid. The word bully got thrown about. I didn’t wear it like a badge of honour, but nor did I accept the stereotype. In the movies, you know him before he even opens his mouth: thick-set and plain, zero charisma, the character that never develops, the child actors who never make it as adults. The plot points require us to save our empathy for the rest of the cast. But pause on the thug. That’s all I’m asking: drill down a bit. There are children who need to be contained—Kevin deserved a stint in the bin—and therein lies the role of the thug. I am not saying it is ideal; and, sure, it is a slippery slope: might is right, schoolyard cop, self-appointed disciplinarian, global warrior, the United States of America…

‘There was this one kid,’ I told Dr J.

Roger Bell. He fell at a bad angle and when I laid the boot in, my shoe made contact with his forearm right at the point of fracture, compounding said fracture and necessitating complex and worrying surgery. His parents wanted to call the police and Mary had to talk them out of it. I don’t know what she said, but I got suspended instead of expelled or incarcerated. The condition was that I stay in therapy. My therapist talked about things I could do to express my feelings ‘in a healthy way’. I told her I couldn’t concentrate in class and that seemed to provide her with the missing piece: it was time for the pills—‘Let’s meet the happy chemicals.’ (She drew smiley faces on a piece of paper.)

Here Dr J interjected. ‘If we can stop there, I’ll get to the pills in due course. But in terms of our timeline, I feel like this is a critical juncture. After the suspension, that was the end of it; the violent behaviour just stopped. From there the reports all talk about good behaviour, diligence in class…It wasn’t the medication, we know that, because you never took it. So what was it?’

I shrugged. ‘It just never happened.’

‘You mean nothing provoked you?’

‘I mean I just didn’t look for it. I couldn’t.’

‘You couldn’t?’

‘I couldn’t get called up for anything—you know, the pills, the sales…it’d bring attention.’

‘Yes, I see, of course.’ He was at it again, scratching his eyebrows, talking to himself more than to me, or to his imaginary sounding-board friend. ‘You hear that? He couldn’t!’ He started mumbling something about a self-imposed regulatory system. ‘I mean, there is an extraordinary degree of self-control in that.’

Bringing me back in as audience again, he leaned forward. ‘At the centre of it all is this operation—this busines—of yours. So let’s get to that.’ The smile he threw me was like a wink. ‘Let’s talk about what got you here.’

This part of the story I was eager to tell. Time gives us different versions of ourselves. To date, this had been my best one.

The whole thing had been cast in such a negative light. In the courtroom, when they talked about the level of sophistication, the number of children on my books and the quantity of pills I’d sold, I found myself preening a little. I felt like getting up and saying: Don’t you realise what hard work it all was? To ensure an adequate supply, to target the right market…Don’t I get any credit for that? I was conscientious and responsive to my customers, I lived on four hours sleep a night and worked through most of my weekends—and I built a successful business. Point me to another sixteen-year-old schoolboy who could claim that. That is what I wanted to say.

And I built it in the ashes of a non-existence: Mary and me like cockroaches. Just us—Brian had gone—neither of us sleeping, me lying out on the walkway distracting myself with the night sky and the battles in the floors below while she scratched around inside. During the day she wouldn’t even go down to the clothesline. Sometimes she’d stand on the walkway, but her world was pretty much confined to a living room, a four-metre square that fitted a stained two-seater couch and a TV, adjoining a kitchen with cracks in the swirly laminate and a sink that wouldn’t drain. An inner-city Housing Commission block that developers circled like drooling wolves and no one wanted to live in but no one could leave. Our neighbour, Nina, had been there for forty-three years; she reckoned the kitchen drain had been blocked for the last twenty. The pipes in the place were universally stuffed. As for the tenants, there were the ones like Nina who called it home and grew herbs in planters, and there were the ones who pissed in the walkway and punched the walls. There was a central courtyard like at the School, but no pear trees; most days you’d put money on finding a syringe or a used rubber or an empty stolen bag under the bench. Sometimes the Ninas of the building cleaned it up or kicked up a stink; mostly it was just the way it was. And I couldn’t see a clear way out of it. I didn’t want to leave school but I didn’t want to wait three years to make enough money to get us out of there.

That was when things started getting worse for me. The minute I stepped inside the flat my breath got short. We were rid of the tenants but I’d still come home to a red-eyed Mary sitting at the kitchen bench pretending she was straight, pretending she’d gone out, pestering me with questions about my day so she had something to fill hers. I avoided coming home in the afternoons because she’d be waiting; she sensed it, and stopped waiting in the kitchen—stayed in her bedroom to give me some space because at least that way I was home and she wasn’t alone. I didn’t want to feel this way; I didn’t choose to, but you watch your mother on the slide and just her presence is enough, the sickly stench of air freshener and stale smoke…

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 home, 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.