Thought Crimes (4 page)

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 measures.

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.

I guess other people never see themselves that way, as going through their lives as a name Bob Dylan doesn't know, and they'd prefer to see their names listed in the big volume,
People Whose
Names Bob Dylan Ought to Know
.

For Grace, it might be different, but for me, it's glass half-full, glass half-empty. We know who we are and who we know, but we'll probably never know if the people we know want to know us, or if they give a shit about the spelling of our names. So what if Dylan doesn't know my name? Should a friend choose to take that as an insult, or treat it as a sign that he and I communicate in a very particular way? I'm not like Grace. I'm not frightened to find my name listed among the names of the people in the fat directory. Those people wouldn't know my name either, but I'm happy to be one of them. I'm with them in spirit.

V2

We have a thin man who runs, and you can set your clock by him. He passes at 6.52 in the morning, and 9.17 at night. Most people would call that crazy, but Dane and I understand. We are the same in that respect. We hate carelessness with time. Though the solicitor had promised to meet us at one-thirty, it was now two, and Dane was edgy about whether to ask his assistant to collect Jess from school. Neither of us wanted to tell Jess that her uncle had smashed his neighbour's skull with a hammer.