it's fortunate that's not the point!
WHAT IT IS
1.
If there was one worse place to be on your birthday than your counsellor’s office, Jess thought, it was at home. It wasn’t as though they really expected her to smile – or talk – but she could still smell the disappointment among the candle smoke, the wreathes of it that had swirled up to meet her dark auburn hair from the moment she blew her candles out. It tasted quite nice, she thought slightly bitterly, once you got used to it.
Banners and discarded wrapping paper ringed the awkward silence. She fiddled aimlessly with a CD case, watched her mother distractedly setting up cards on the mantelpiece, watched her father watch the two of them sadly, and hated them both. Hated herself for hating them. For a moment, all she could see was a bloody, angry red, and then it faded tiredly; she looked down, and saw she had cracked the CD case. A jagged edge marched across the picture’s pale blue sky, cutting off half an aeroplane on the way.
“Time to go, I think.” Her father was standing slightly behind her, holding her coat and scarf in a steady hand. “We seem to have had enough unfettered joy for one birthday.”
“James,” her mother said painfully, but he cut across her with a weary grimace and turned Jess out the door, one hand on her shoulder, the other twisting in some sort of farewell. She felt perversely grateful for the bitterness in his face: she could shout and scream and swear at him all she wanted, and he would never even bat an eye – just look at her as if she were something poisonous. Being hated she could deal with; at least with mutual loathing you were on the same level. Love, though, love: love always forced you to love it back, she thought, whether you wanted it or not.
She pulled on her gloves and wound a scarf around her neck, staring blankly into the hallway mirror while her parents argued in low tones by the living room door. His wife’s restraining arm seemed to be the only thing holding her father there; impatience was clearly audible in his voice, even though the words didn’t carry. They seemed like casual strangers to her, almost as strange as the girl staring back out of the mirror. The high, pale cheekbones were hers, and the straight nose; even the watchful eyes, pale hazel and deep set, but the expression was someone else’s. There was a tightly coiled peace in every line: a dangerous animal asleep, one she didn’t remember. She wished she were mad enough to talk to her reflection.
Her father came to stand beside her, pulling his arms into a long grey trenchcoat, and handed her her CD player silently. She half-turned to see where her mother was, then decided perhaps she wouldn’t, today. Something new to try; one more distraction to set aside. There were things to be done.
Father and daughter drove through the streets of Edinburgh in grey silence, neither one trying to think very much. Jess’ eyes slid slowly out of focus, watching car headlights weave their way through the late November sleet. Trucks, streetlight, houses: they all blurred slowly together, until she realised there were tears dripping onto her gloves. Without taking his eyes off the road, her father put an arm around her shoulder; she swore in a muffled kind of way, but he didn’t let go. It didn’t help, but then, it didn’t really hurt either.
Finally, the grey streets gave way to a grey parking lot surrounding a low, rambling clapboard building. The sign above the door proudly proclaimed the ‘National Fuckwit Centre,’ though the faded blue NHS logo was just about visible underneath the graffiti. Jess figured she’d rather be a fuckwit any day: shorter waiting lists, and a better chance of recovery. She wondered slightly about the people who wrote it; fuckwits themselves perhaps, or just used to laughing at them.
The queue inched forward, pulling tired legs slowly toward the surly receptionist. A few lethargic bluebottles buzzed unchallenged near the lights, refugees from the season, contemptuously avoiding the electric bug trap. It was curiously cheering to think that even the bugs got a break now and then; she hoped they’d use their hard won freedom well. It was almost worth laughing at, she thought.
Forms finally filled, they were sitting in one of the long rows of plastic seats, watching lines of fellow fuckwits shuffle past into this room or that. There were no men in white coats, or shiny machines with straps and needles, just tired looking doctors in cheap pullovers, checking their fixed smiles every now and then. As if an escaping smile would have anywhere to go, here; the bluebottles had more chance.
Jess’ dad turned to look her square in the face, which was rare, especially here.
“You don’t have to do this today, you know, if you don’t want to,” he said quietly, barely audible over the howling coming from a nearby room. “It is your birthday, whatever that means to you; we could do something, just the two of us, no need to let your mother know.”
Jess looked straight back at him, which was even rarer. Especially here.
“It’s a good idea, Dad,” she said, a little too loudly, “if you want to make the headlines tomorrow. ‘Birthday Girl Cuts More Than Cake,’ perhaps, or ‘Surprise! You’re Dead.’”
She realised she was staring at her hands again, and forced herself to look at him. His faces hadn’t changed, but there was something dark struggling behind his eyes, and his hands were clenched around the insides of his pockets.
“Well, if you need to unwind, it’s probably just as well,” was all he said. Without looking at her, he turned slowly and made his way to the door, his back as stiff as a fence post. She could almost feel the effort it took him not to turn back to check her, to see if she was alright. For the briefest of moments, she wanted him to, so badly; but then it was gone, and a dumpy nurse in an ill-fitting uniform was guiding her to Dr. Merton’s office, and things were back to the way they shouldn’t be. She followed.
2.
Dr. Merton, MD, BPsych, as his door proudly proclaimed, was sitting behind his desk, looking neither proud nor particularly proclamatory. He was the sort of man who looked like he could do with a good dusting, and perhaps a few less good meals; recent years has seen a steady increase in pullover size. He was not, however, prone to forcing a fake smile onto his ample cheeks, and Jess had learned to take the small things when they came.
“Hello Jessica,” he said mildly, peering at her over a pair of reading glasses. “I do believe I haven’t seen you since early October – terrible lapse, that – and I haven’t reviewed your prescriptions, either.” He paused, shuffling papers around his desk in a vague sort of way. The mess shifted from a pile on one side to a thin layer over the whole tabletop. Merton gave up.
“How has school been? You haven’t got into anymore fights, I hope? Haven’t been letting your temper run away with you?”
His tone was so patronising that she could have punched him then and there, if he’d been anyone else, but she’d learned from experience: he was faster than he looked. And stronger. She had a slight, grudging respect for this fat, sedentary academic who had pinned her to the table so fast she’d chipped a tooth on the way down. That had been the first time; after the third, she’d learned to control herself around him. At least physically.
“No, I’ve been a good little psycho.” The reply was wrung out bitterly. “No-one in their right mind comes near me anymore, anyway. You’re cool if you pretend to be crazy, I guess, just not when you actually are.”
She flicked a mint humbug across the room, where it lost itself in a pile of old books, and wondered idly whether their were rats in the walls. Merton was jotting down notes slowly, and glancing up every now and again. She wished he’d say something.
“And are you still working?” he asked finally, prodding distractedly at a hole in his chair. “Do you go to your classes?”
“Of course I fucking work,” Jess said tonelessly, “what else do I have to do? Can’t fight, can’t skip lessons or you’ll ship me off to the special school to practice my letters with every retard and inbred in the city. Half the fucking time you’ve got me so drugged up I can’t see the words in my books; if I tried to cross the road by myself I’d probably end up like a fucking hedgehog. What I wouldn’t give for that, sometimes.”
Her low monotone trailed off. Merton was winding some of the stuffing from his seat around his fingers, but his eyes had never left hers. There was no pity there, no empathy, but he still knew how to make her speak, how to force every thought to see the light of day. He would cure her because it was his job, and they both knew it, but Jess wasn’t sure how much of her would be left when he was done. And neither do I know nor care, his face said, watching her flick mints and the bookshelves again. He almost smiled.
“Who is your favourite teacher at school these days?” He changed tack abruptly, leaning back in his chair and stabbing blindly at her silent walls. “Is it your favourite lesson, too, or are they different?”
She knew, she knew that he was trying to mess with her mind somehow, but there was no point in playing mute with the Stalag commander, she thought, or you’d just be up against the firing wall as soon as if you’d confessed.
“Mr. Silvers, my classics teacher,” she said shortly, her mint missing a shelf ornament by a good foot, shocking. “I don’t have him anymore, obviously.”
She stopped, unwilling to say more than she had to, and wanting to say so, so much more than she could.
“And why is that, Jessica?” Merton asked, settling back into this chair with a comfortable sigh. “Why do you no longer do classics?”
A spark flared in her eyes, and he didn’t miss it, but she stayed silent. Something black was clawing it’s way gleefully up her throat, and she was ready to kill Merton, burn him and his office and everyone in it to the ground, if only it would stop him looking. Keep his flat, steel eyes from seeing the muscle twitching in her cheek, from seeing the way her jaw clenched, from seeing slowly whitening around the arm of the chair. He shouldn’t be able to see so much, she thought tiredly, I don’t want to be a book anymore.
“Because you said I shouldn’t.” She found she was whispering through tears for the second time that night. “Because I’ll never want to change if I’m too happy, because you know I can’t be myself if I can’t think for myself. Classics, English, politics, philosophy.” She wiped her face on her sleeve. “Psychology. Oh, don’t think I don’t see things, Merton, don’t think I don’t know how this works.” She was screaming at him now, her control was slipping away silently in the face of his perfect cruelty. “Because if I have to be half a person to be fucking normal, that’s fine with you, if you have to strap me to a chair and run a thousand fucking volts through me until I’m scared of my own fucking shadow, you’ll do it, won’t you, you’ll break every fucking thing that ever made me a fucking human being, I know you will, I know you will.”
She trailed off, sobbing inarticulately, a small, pitiful thing. To know your fate for certain was probably the worst thing, Merton thought to himself, even worse than whatever was in store. She was right in some ways: he didn’t actually care very much. A job was a job, and men with empathy rarely kept it for long. They didn’t stay in the job long, either.
Jess had got control of herself, and was watching him with a very strange expression, a kind of horrified admiration. She wasn’t twitching anymore, but her face was still tear-stained and blotchy, and there were fresh fingernail marks on the arm of his chair; she seemed coiled tight on herself with pain.
“You can do it, too, can’t you?” she asked finally, in a quiet, almost timid voice. “It’s just routine, just principles applied to a subject, isn’t it. You know how to make me snap, just like that.”
He’d always known she was intelligent: people like her were one of the joys of the job, some days, and one of its greatest challenges. It was the exceptional ones that had made him become a psychologist, the exceptions to every rule. He met her eye to eye, no shame involved.
“No, Jess, I won’t; I don’t have to. You’ll break yourself just fine.”
There was a pause, like a river just before it breaks the dam; like a frozen electric current between the two of them. Merton smiled, and he thought, for a moment, that she did as well.
Jess hurled the glass mint bowl at him, and threw herself after it. Everything was blood red again, and she just wanted the joy of hearing something connect, anything, anything to wipe his smile and his eyes and his damn intelligence out of her head. She could have sworn he winked, just once.
He caught the glass missile with heartbreaking ease, and even had time to set it carefully on the table before she got to him. It couldn’t even have been called a fight, something so one-sided: he grabbed one of her arms around the wrist, the other near the elbow, and in a trice had her twisted around herself so she could hardly breathe. Choking and snarling, she kicked backwards into his shins and was rewarded with a curse, before he twisted her arm savagely out of it’s socket. The red glaze over her eyes bled slowly into black, and she followed it, screaming, down into unconsciousness.
The dull, throbbing pain in her shoulder pulled her slowly back up to the grey walls and dirty lights. She recognised the overnight hospital wing from too many previous visits and knew, with a kind of weary distaste, that she’d be stuck there for at least a day. Bad food, precious little privacy, and nothing to do but torture cockroaches and listen to the echoes of patients and parents arguing with the doctors. The second time she had landed herself in the Auschwitz ward, as the scrawled-on wall announced, her father hadn’t even said a word. Just nodded like he expected it, Merton had told her without even the decency to sound pleased, and walked back to his car with a back like a fence-post. She didn’t know what had hurt more: that he had accepted what Merton had said, or that he had believed it. They had tried to keep her in the house, after that, but she had decided she might as well take the role she was offered. There wasn’t a speck of surprise when she had walked into the kitchen, got a knife out of the cupboard and told them she’d use it if she didn’t get her keys and bus pass back. For some reason, they still let her back into the house; she hadn’t yet figured out the why.
The wing was nearly empty, and the lights were already turned down for the night. The blurred shapes of moths swirled around the nightlamps, whispering mockingly with their wings, and a young girl in one corner cried very softly into her pillow. The place felt like velvet, the air smelling of thunderstorm, ready to break. The calm before the storm.
It was the first glimpse she ever caught of him, and probably the one she’d remember best, save one. He was sitting up in his bed, two rows down, with most of his face in shadow; she could almost catch the line of his jawbone, fading into the darkness behind his eyes. It might just have been the play of the night all around his body, but looking at him, Jess got a feeling of strangeness. That perhaps, out of all of them who passed through this place, here was one who belonged. She didn’t quite get a shiver down her spine, but maybe she should have.
He had quiet eyes: green, but aggressively so; they were a dull, flat sea colour mixed with blue, and they were busy following a moth around the dusk-shrouded room. He watched it for the longest time, losing it in corners or among empty beds, but always finding it again. Finally, with a quiver, it settled on her bedpost for a second, and he caught her watching him. A conspiratorial smile crooked across his face, one inmate to another, and she was surprised to find a similar one flicker over her own. The tableau held for the briefest of moments; then broke, as the nurse’s door opened suddenly, spilling the too-bright electric light into the silent room. The two wordless rebels vanished into their covers.
3.
When Jess awoke, her midnight companion’s bed was empty, but his CD player and backpack were resting beside it; he was most likely already eating breakfast. She got up slowly and pulled the green plastic curtains around her before getting dressed. Her arm ached abominably, even with the dregs of last night’s painkillers in her system, but at least she could move it. Merton must only have wrenched it, she thought grumpily, though God knows he’d have liked to do more. Forgiveness wasn’t on the mornings ‘to do’ list; she pulled her sweater over her head with a curse for the good doctor, and went off to find something to eat.
The canteen was a large, ugly hall filled with dirty tables and worse food. Tired-eyed staff and hollow-eyed patients filed through slowly, picking up bits and pieces of whichever meal they’d missed last and leaving with trays still half-full. Occasional snatches of conversation wafted past: drugs and prescriptions; family; love lives; gossip; anything to get the mind off the office or the ward. You could pick out the new patients by the scared, huddled groups, and the new doctors by the charts and histories spread on and around the chipped blue NHS plates. She wondered how long it took them to get over their own work ethic.
She spotted her boy just as she was paying, surveying the room over the top of a coffee-cup, so she went to sit in her normal place, at a small table near the opposite side of the hall. It was nice, she decided, to have a friend, as long as she didn’t have to talk to him; almost ideal, in fact. Friendships, she had discovered with some interest, often suffered from too much communication. Or perhaps just too much truth: she wasn’t quite sure yet, not that she’d had much experience to draw on lately. Her table, however, offered an easy view of the whole area, didn’t talk back and didn’t complain about being put upon; there were few things, she reasoned with a kind of smug illogic, so relationship-friendly as a good table.
Her boy was settled back now, reading a book, so she got on with her regular practice of people watching. There were plenty of old faces she recognised, all picking up their caffeine and sugar for the trek home: Dr. Fernandez, short and squat with round glasses and a vicious temper; Dr. Stuart, a petit woman with mousy brown hair, sweet by completely immovable once her mind was made up; Drs. Barrett and Barrett, married but not living together; and Drs. Jenson and Katcha, living together but not married. It was fascinating, watching them coming and going, all wearing their hearts and allegiances on their sleeves, or so it seemed to Jess. You could almost smell the old hatreds and rivalries drifting through with the cheap decaf., nearly see the love and loss bubbling in and around the cups and saucers. She had been coming here too long, Jess realised sharply, to know these people so well. Three times a week, ever since the beginning of high school. Ever since.
I was normal once, she thought. Or at least I could get away with being crazy. It was like they thought she couldn’t get any worse, but she knew better, and so did Merton. Crazy or not, she still had a breaking point.
Ever since she had started in Nursery, the other children had learned to be nice to Jessica Bailey. It wasn’t even anything too obvious, most of the time: she was bright, cheerful, clever; she didn’t throw fits when she didn’t get her own way; even later on, she could take the jokes and insults kids always love to throw at you. But somewhere slightly deeper, there was always a person who would not be pushed – someone who kept the important things close, and lashed out when they were touched. And lash out she had.
School reports were punctuated with puzzled stories of fistfights, slapping matches, children in tears; teachers simply couldn’t understand how such a placid, intelligent girl could so often be found sitting sullenly outside the headmaster’s office, covered in bruises and scratches. And she wasn’t about to explain.
High school was subtly different, subtly more dangerous: by then, most children have lost their innocence and with it, their good nature – little things can become ugly over time. There is a funny naivety about children, one that say because they are small, they must be as nice as they are cute. It’s rubbish. Anyone who has worked a while with any children knows that they are just adults in miniature, tight balls of energy with all the problems and evils of an adult. They just don’t have the experience to deal with it yet.
It is one of the saddest stories of human existence, sometimes: if people could just be left alone, if people could just read the signs. But life is not for our benefit, and Jessica Bailey was not to be allowed to escape from herself, or into herself. No one saw it coming, no one saw the signs. It was his own fault, really.
The boys had met her on the way home from school, falling into step with her along some dingy residential street, trading winks and suggestions over her head. That she could deal with: she was clever enough to see the bravado for what it was, and still young enough to be amused at this power over them. But boys will be boys, and one of them thought he’d get cocky, and put his hands where they shouldn’t be. He got a slap for his troubles, but he would’ve left with just a red face if he hadn’t put an arm around her shoulders and tried to stick a hand up her shirt. Just for a laugh, they’d say later, that’s all it was. She didn’t really care what it was at the time, and she didn’t really care now.
Jess didn’t remember too much more, but when the police came, she was dead-white and shaking with anger; there were two bright red spots on her cheeks, and they couldn’t get her to talk for nearly an hour. They took the boy away, screaming with pain over the ambulance sirens; afterwards, she wasn’t frightened so much by what she’d done, as by how much she’d wanted to make him scream. Who’s in control now, you bitch, she’d snarled to herself, who’s going to get cocky now.
She couldn’t remember his name, now, if she’d ever known it. He lost an eye that day. She wasn’t especially sorry.
The parents had been up in arms at once, wanting her to be charged, but the police, for once in their lives, did the thing properly: they interviewed her, consulted the experts and the lawyers, interviewed her again and finally sent her off to see Dr. August Merton, Edinburgh’s premier NHS psychologist. It took him half an hour of school reports and ten minutes of interview to pronounce her mentally unstable, with certain psychopathic tendencies. Such cases were rare so young, he’d said gravely, his orator’s voice spilling into the shocked room gravely, but it was a blessing: with enough time, perhaps something could be done for the poor girl. For that’s what she was, a hostage to her biology: but he, Dr. August Merton, would fix her and save her.
He was clever, and he was thorough, she would give him that much. Within a few months, he had invaded every part of her life he could reach: what she eat, what she drank, what she read and watched on T.V., what sports she played. Slowly, oh so slowly, he became the final word on everything she did, the only knowledgeable authority; even her own parents were convinced that they did not really know their daughter as well as they thought. She was afraid and she was angry at his ability to control her life, but there was nothing she could do: always hanging over her head was Merton’s calm assertion that he would pack her off to a juvenile correction centre if she ever decided to stop co-operating. So she co-operated.
As it turned out, she was nearly ousted from the school anyway: parents and teachers complained so loudly about having a diagnosed psychopath in with their precious snotballs that the PTA finally voiced it at a meeting, and almost put it to the vote. There was little doubt which was it would swing, but it was averted at the last moment by the strangest of heroes. Mr. Silvers was just another teacher to her: she didn’t even have him for any lessons. But it was he who brought his tired shambles of a body to its feet, and told every single person in that hall to wisen up or get the hell out of his school. He was the longest serving teacher on faculty, the veteran, and he looked it. Chain smoking and chain drinking had taken it’s toll: there was a shade of permanent stubble purpling his chin, and his old felt suit jacket looked worn to the threads. He was a burnout, but he was a hellraiser if ever there was one, and the students loved him, and it was his voice that accused the meeting of hounding out a girl with more potential then they had between them. He took them on a guilt trip and back again, and when he finished there was an embarrassed silence. He looked around the room, gauged them up and said; I wonder what you would do to a boy who sexually assaulted one of your daughters, I just wonder what you would do. Then he sat down and lit up another cigarette, because his hands were shaking.
The matter was never raised again, though whether it was because they felt bad, or because they knew Silvers was too much trouble, Jess never knew. She met him after the meeting, with her father’s protective hand burning her shoulder, and Merton’s calculating eyes somewhere over the horizon, ever present. He smelt like tobacco and stale whiskey, but his gaze was clear and hard, and he laughed when she asked why he’d stood up for her.
“I’ve read your essays, girl,” he’d said gruffly, “and what I said was true. Ms. Mackey teaches you, aye? You’d think she couldn’t read, from the way the bloody lump sat on her arse while they were dragging you through the mud. But I know, thank God, what you can do, and I wasn’t about to let some city-centre shit-hole trainee teacher ruin you. Heh, no.” He’d nodded gravely at her father as if he hadn’t said anything out of the ordinary, and he probably wouldn’t give a damn if he had thought about it.
Life went on, as it tends to. Things didn’t go from bad to worse, but perhaps to bad to badder. Merton knew his stuff, and he didn’t make it obvious: a rule here, a limitation here, never anything too blatant or strict, but he was there all the same, and he was tightening his grip on her. Hockey; football; debating; all the things she considered part of her identity.
Classics were a breath of fresh air. Silvers had taken no prisoners on her behalf; he seemed to take a lot of pleasure in butting heads with management again and again, and he had finally had her transferred to his own class, after Ms. Mackey had almost broken down after an incident. She never let Merton know that they were the only lesson she cared about: the school only told him that she had been moved because Mr. Silvers was more capable of controlling the class. She wondered whether he was behind that as well.
In the classroom, Silvers wasn’t the demon that he could be with adults, but he knew how to keep children in line. He never shouted, barely even raised his voice, but he had a wicked tongue on him and he knew its value. Degrade a deviant kid with sarcasm and humour, and he’ll shut up for fear of ridicule, but he’ll still laugh along when it happens to someone else. He kept them divided, scorning each other as well as himself, and they never got beyond a little wild, which he could allow. He taught with a wrecking-ball mentality, ploughing through the subject at any rate he felt like, in any order: Greek, Latin, literature, history, he made sure they knew their stuff, and didn’t give a damn how or when they learned it. One-question essay tests appeared every now and then, reading homework even less, but fall behind and you were dropped to Mackey’s class. It was a harsh way to teach, elitist and brutal, but it worked. Jess knew she was good, but Silvers stretched every single one of them to the highest level of their ability. She loved it.
Then came the crunch. The worst point.
She was sixteen, barely started the school year, and she pushed a girl down a flight of stairs. Entirely intentional, and she knew what would happen, but she just could not hold herself in anyone. She had actually just meant to break the little slut’s nose, but she chose the wrong moment to do it. She had been going down to finish the job, too, when she had felt a restraining hand on her shoulder. She turned with another punch half-thrown, and Mr. Silvers just laughed at her.
“I’ve taken more than my fair share, girl, hit away. But it’d be better for you if you went to my room and stayed there, right away.”
It wasn’t words that scared her, or even the thought of disappointing him, it was the understanding in his voice. She spun around and ran, to go anywhere, but she just couldn’t get his face out of her head. Half an hour later, she turned up, breathing hard and trying not to cry, at his classroom. He wasn’t there, and she paced and paced, worrying and worrying about what Merton would do to her, and about what Silvers would think of her. She never realised ‘till later how much adrenaline she needed to burn off, and how Silvers hid her until she felt human again. Right then, she was in no state to be seen.
Merton was as bad as she expected. He nodded thoughtfully, and arranged with her school to take her out of all the lessons he thought she enjoyed even a little; not so much a punishment, he said, as an experiment to how she would react. He didn’t even have the grace to lie.
And so life had gone on, with the whole world as a little room around her soul, crushing her with it’s lack of anything, just rage and tiredness and both and nothing in between. Drugs, lessons she hated, and a man willing to violate her mind in the interests of shaping it. Sometimes, the world goes on without us. Without us caring.
Jess surfaced slowly from thought, and shook herself mentally; she’d been there for almost an hour, staring blankly at the same stretch of wall. Her boy was gone, all the staff were gone, and only a few patients remained, eating listlessly. She wondered if she’d looked stupid, staring into nothing like that, then laughed to herself; here, stupidity was ignorable unless it was very, very obvious. She picked up the remains of her breakfast, almost all of it, and dropped it in a bin on the way out the door. Seize the day, she thought vaguely, and wondered what the day would do to seize her.
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