The Best Australian Stories (59 page)

‘Modigliani?'

‘Yeah, Mogyani. Him.'

‘But, Mossy … That story … That story about Modigliani getting ribs taken out … It's apocryphal.'

‘Don't care what sort of story it is. It's a great story. It told me I could be the man in my dreams … Yeah, Mogyani, he's the dude. Amazing.'

Karen couldn't remember much after that. She remembered the bell going. Some of the kids must have helped tidy materials away. But she did remember the laughter as her students charged down the corridor.

*

The art department staff-room was empty but for Sophie, who was talking on a mobile phone. Karen felt compelled to interrupt. She knew Sophie had taught Mossy and most of the 11IC kids the previous year.

‘Did you know that Mossy Behrens had a doctor remove his ribs so he can suck himself off?'

‘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, you or 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 IC classes, we've had no suicides. It's like Dr Best says. Sometimes you have to cut kids some slack.'

Karen tried to point out that 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 could only see himself as depleted. His ribs were preventing him from being whole, from expressing himself. Whatever you or I might think about it, that wasn't what Mossy was thinking.'

Karen asked if Dr Best knew about 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 could not describe her experiences to Paul. He was a struggling sub-editor, and there was no doubt what he would do with the information. An exclusive like that would make him an internationally published journalist. Famous at the expense of her school.

Her thoughts shifted from memories of obviously happy faces to imagined operations where hacksaw blades cut through healthy bone to separate healthy feet, calves 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 art teacher into the family's modest weatherboard 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 actually letting a surgeon 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, the girl in question came through the back door, and was so obviously delighted to see her favourite teacher that Karen forgot her qualms long enough to return Eva'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 young woman could do. ‘I never could have loved anyone who claimed to love 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 the kind of people who obsess about amputees. Though it had never occurred to Eva to think about such things, she spoke of the missing arm as if it had sharp teeth. She had to get rid of that arm before it devoured her. Sex had nothing to do with it.

‘Most people don't have any idea what it feels like to go through life knowing that one part of your body 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 drop.

‘I don't know what it's like to feel that way,' Eva said. ‘For them, just getting a clit-piercing was never 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 realigned. When Pol was Paul in Year 8, she'd threatened to slash herself to bits if someone wouldn't help her get rid of her dick.

Though Karen had 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 comes from Pol,' 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, all the statements and allusions that went rocketing over her head came back to haunt her. 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 for moral 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 was a scandal, a police matter, and she intended to take these concerns as far as they could be taken.

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 really 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's ever had misgivings. I wouldn't trust my staff if they didn't have serious qualms. These are the most radical interventions imaginable. But you wouldn't be doing your colleagues justice if you left, or tried to raise a scandal, without letting them explain why they chose to support our great adventure.'

Karen had hoped to hand in her resignation and get away from that place as soon as she could. Talking it over with erstwhile friends and senior teachers had 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 chose this moment to challenge the absent principal's smoking ban.

Having chosen not to attend, Dr Best asked Ralph Horsberg to chair the meeting, and he made it immediately clear what he felt about Karen's resignation. 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 amputation to solve behavioural problems – but he'd never once thought about going to the authorities, or 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 measures. Ordinarily, Gavin was much disliked, but even declared 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. Tell me, what could be more fucked up than finding a handsome limb or organ so loathsome that you'd beg for it to be removed?'

Helga Goonesarrawa was a mouse at meetings, but now she rose to inform her young colleague 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 could take over, but keeping them alive was still the most important thing. The school had succeeded in stopping kids from trying to kill themselves. Prospect's efforts deserved to be recognised internationally.

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.

But emotion saw Karen's words emerge in an incoherent blurt. 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.

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

Several teachers were then moved to say 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 stave off the peril of insignificance.

Karen tried one last time to explain that an educator's true duty was to promote the creation of a better society, not to facilitate more articulate statements of desperation. ‘This is barbaric,' she said, searching the room for just one face that might show agreement. ‘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 direct ly, ‘Tell Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch “Wrong Way, Go Back”? … Most schools can't even produce a functional timetable, and you want us to reverse the tide of history. By cutting a little slack, we're actually 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 schoolgrounds 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 death lock. Not one of her colleagues supported her stand. Many said that they'd started out thinking just as she had, but had been forced to alter their thinking 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 had told the assembly that he'd just that morning made an appointment to have his ears amputated. He wanted to show the kids in his IC classes how much they'd inspired him. Ears had always given him the shits. He'd be able to 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'd got out of sync with reality. If she could just accept that any behaviour that short-circuits the self-destructive impulse was reasonable, she'd be able to 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 she was certain 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, he looked up from more than thirty pages of handwritten notes. They were both exhausted.