Fascinated by Dr Best’s reputation as a miracle worker, Karen was anxious to meet her, but on the eve of this meeting the principal was badly injured in a collision. Two passengers in the other car were killed, and Dr Best’s head wound required sixty-five stitches. Friends who’d visited her in hospital late that night said that Dr Best would be off work for a month.
Typically, the principal was in her office to greet the new art teacher just two days later. Nothing kept her from the first day of the school year.
After apologising for the failed air-conditioning, the stench from the neighbouring blood and bone factory and the unsightliness of her scar, the principal escorted Karen to a seat underneath a framed Goya print.
‘You’ll find that teaching art in the west is a challenge,’ Dr Best warned.
Karen said that she’d been offered a better-paid job at Firbank, but challenge was what she wanted.
‘Beginnings are important,’ the principal told her. ‘Be bold. The first day sets the tone. Let them know you’re a presence to be reckoned with.’
The principal was certainly that. Karen feared the Form Ones would pass out at the sight of a massive, flame-haired woman with bloody muck oozing from a well-stitched gash.
Though the newcomer tried to stay calm, the pressure gathering in her colon told her that a trip to the toilet would soon be required.
Recognising this unease, the older woman told Karen that she couldn’t have chosen a better time to come to Prospect. Asbestos had been cleaned out of the ceilings, and the art rooms had been spruced up with new seats and tables. Morale in the school had never been higher.
‘When I first came here, there was an epidemic of drugs and violence. We had to ban mobiles and pagers to keep kids out of the reach of dealers. Teachers were being bashed. And this school had the worst suicide rate in the state. We’d lost twenty students in the last three years of the old regime.’
Karen swallowed hard.
‘We’ve turned things around,’ Dr Best told her. ‘In the last two years, we haven’t had a single suicide attempt. We took some new ideas on board, and fought to maintain absolute consistency of approach. And the kids appreciated the fact that we cared enough to know when to cut some slack.’
Karen wanted to ask about that. She’d heard the same phrase used by senior staff, but didn’t understand what was meant by this slack-cutting. The school might have been trialling a new drugs policy.
Just then, Dr Best clutched her head as if she’d been stabbed.
‘Should I call someone?’ Karen asked.
‘No, no. I’ll be fine,’ the principal said, wincing for a moment till the crisis passed and she could look the bewildered newcomer in the eye. ‘I wouldn’t miss first day for anything. First day sets the tone.’
Around eight-fifteen, students began streaming into the school grounds; the boys in their short sleeves and shorts, the girls in summer frocks designed to combat the intense heat that always accompanied the arrival of first term.
As Karen expected, their faces reflected the ethnic diversity of the western suburbs: many Asians and Africans to go with students of Mediterranean and Balkan origin. And the uniform smiles told her that these kids were happy to be back.
The initial Form Assembly with 3B passed without a hitch, attentive students apparently content that their form teacher would also be taking them for art. When Boris Feltov and Maggie Nguyen failed to answer her call, Karen was told that they were present, but had been transferred to 3IC. The teacher noted this without comment, 3IC being another of her art classes.
General Assembly gathered some nine hundred students and seventy staff. After welcoming the school community, the vice-principal spoke of the school’s outstanding academic performance in the previous year. For the first time ever, the Year Twelve pass-rate exceeded eighty-five per cent, and more than fifty per cent of candidates were accepted into the tertiary course of their first choice. When Dr Best was introduced, the entire assembly rose in a moving display of affection.
Most of what Dr Best said was standard low-key inspirational stuff about mutual respect and community. Nothing in her speech marked her as an exceptional educator in the way her seeping head-wound did. Towards the end of her message, the principal told the gathering that the school’s phenomenal success with academic programs, and also with its anti-drugs and anti-suicide programs, had encouraged the Education Department to treble its funding for integration students. The whole school had a right to be proud that Prospect was leading a revolution in educational methods.
While the audience applauded, Karen sidled up to the head of the art department, mainly to note surprise at the absence of integration students.
‘Oh, you’ve misunderstood,’ Darren Price told her. ‘It’s a different kind of integration. It’s not about bringing challenged people into the broader school community. This is about personal integrity … I never thought it could work, but the results are incredible. It’s given kids something to aim for.’
Her first Form Five and Form Three groups were as quiet and diligent as any art classes Karen had taught. If anything, she would have liked more vivacity. She felt as if she was being set up, that the kids were hatching a sophisticated plan to pull a rug out from under her.
When she confessed to a fellow art teacher that she didn’t feel confident about teaching kids with special needs, Sophie told her that the integration kids didn’t consider themselves impaired in any way, and she shouldn’t either. They were expressive, and very resourceful. Integration classes were the way of the future.
Integration classes were taught in a new building to the west of the college campus. Compared to other schools Karen had seen in the west, this block was almost ridiculously well-appointed. Lifts and ramps. Air-conditioning. The latter made it the preferred location to teach art in the summer, with the blood and bone factory a poor neighbour when winds blew hot and dusty.
Though numbering just nine, the students in 5IC would drop the jaw of any teacher in her first week on the job.
Con Soutannis had lost his right arm at the shoulder blade, and Mary Pavlidis had a mauve-coloured glass eye. Wendy Koh had no fingers on her left hand, while Caroline McQuillan’s absent tongue prevented her from speaking clearly. Mossy Behrens was a skinny kid in a wheelchair, very likely paraplegic. While EvaNg’s right forearm was a bloody stump, neither Nellie Wang nor Amber McKenzie had legs below the left knee, the first preferring a wheelchair, while the latter used crutches to augment her prosthesis. Only the African girl who went by a single name, Pol, had no obvious physical impairment, though the teacher noticed a buzz in her vicinity, and for all Karen knew, the girl was being kept alive by some sort of defibrillator.
Yet despite all this, 5IC was a magical group. Whenever Karen apologised for suggesting techniques that might be physically impossible for some of them, the class immediately came up with an ingenious solution. The students expected to be able to paint, screenprint, draw and sculpt, and asked for no concessions to be made. Karen would soon feel ashamed of all the times she’d complained about trivial hardships. These kids, who had endured so much in their short lives, were uncomplaining. If it wasn’t such a cliché, she would have described them as inspirational.
5IC so caught Karen’s imagination that she spoke of nothing else while Paul rubbed massage oil into her shoulders, back and buttocks. Her boyfriend had only just begun to trace the outline of her sex with his thumbs when Karen recalled some students Sophie had mentioned. What had she meant when she said that those two would be IC before the year was out? But this question soon vanished as the young teacher opened to accommodate a skilled masseur whose interests were extra-curricular.
Weeks flew by. Karen expended phenomenal amounts of energy in the classroom, and the weight peeled off her. She committed her students’ names to memory, and commended behaviours and contributions she wished to encourage.
The kids were remarkably enthusiastic, and Karen thrilled to the challenge of getting the best out of her art classes, 5IC in particular.
When Mossy Behrens, whose drawings displayed astonishing sensitivity and detail, was absent for three successive classes, the art teacher grew concerned. Nellie Wang told her that Mossy was in hospital having another two ribs removed. He expected to be back at school within a fortnight.
However ill or disadvantaged, you couldn’t keep these kids away from school.
Later, a fellow art teacher, Gavin McGibbon, found Karen admiring one of Mossy’s lithographs in the staffroom. The illustration featured two boys playing with a bull terrier.
‘I reckon that’d be Mossy and his brother Sam,’ Gavin said. ‘I taught Sammy a few years back. Broody kid. Barely said boo. Mum was OK, but their old man was a useless shit. Dealt smack through the pokie clubs. Sammy ended up cutting his wrists in the bathtub. Back then, I would’ve put money on Mossy going the same way. Depressive kid. Even in Form One.’
‘What happened to him?’ Karen asked.
‘They started the Integration Program here,’ Gavin said, missing her point. ‘Best thing that could have happened to Mossy. Saved his life.’
Karen’s special favourite was Caroline McQuillan. Losing a tongue hadn’t stopped Rowdy from being a joker. She skipped through the classroom, singing in her own strange fashion, a cross between Björk and a lovestruck magpie.
Rowdy was an extraordinarily pretty girl, keenly sought-after by senior boys, but shy in the face of their advances. As an artist, collage was her thing. She took after Kurt Schwitters. Even her weird rhythmic mutterings seemed like homage to Schwitters’ sound poems.
That said, Rowdy’s parents, Jack and Paris, were the most defeated human beings Karen had met. Praise of their daughter’s talent or personality left them unmoved.
When the teacher commended a brilliant piece of collage, the mother turned her back and said something inaudible. Karen made the mistake of asking her to repeat the remark.
‘I said I’d rather she was dead than stuck here with this lot.’
Mossy Behrens returned to class sickly thin, with lost strength forcing him to exchange his manual wheelchair for an automatic steed. Still, he declared that he’d never felt better. The operations had been a complete success. By the end of the year, he’d have no need for a wheelchair of any kind.
‘I brought this for you,’ Mossy said, giving Karen an immaculate pen and ink drawing of herself perched on a desk in front of the class.
Kissing the proud artist, the teacher let the tears race down her cheeks.
‘Hey, I nearly forgot, there was a story about that school of yours on the wire services.’
Paul and Karen were dressing for a dinner to celebrate his mother’s fiftieth birthday. Ordinarily, Paul said little about Karen’s work, except to complain when it drained her sexual energies.
‘Some bloke from Switzerland claiming that what Prospect does violates the treaty safeguarding children’s rights.’
Karen felt certain that Paul had read the piece arse-about, missing the point that Swiss educators probably wanted to use Prospect as a model.
Paul conceded that he’d only skimmed the report, and the unusual conjunction – his partner’s suburban school and a major international organisation – only struck him later. They’d be sure to hear more if there was any substance to what the Swiss were suggesting.
Just before Easter, Sally Young, the brightest girl in 3A, was expelled. A small quantity of marijuana was found in her locker, and Sally’s parents were called to the school. Having spoken to Karen on several occasions, the mother enlisted the art teacher’s support.
Karen told her that she’d talk to Dr Best, but couldn’t promise to have any influence in the matter. In her experience, the principal never reversed decisions.
Just lately, the scar on Dr Best’s forehead had turned a frightening shade of crimson, and Karen wasn’t alone in thinking that the wound might be infected. Yet The Empress was formidable as ever. Any meeting with a young staff member was more like an audience than a chat.
‘You’re right. Sally Young is a good girl, and one of our most brilliant students. But she knew the rules. This school has zero tolerance of drugs.’
Karen tried to argue that it was a small amount of grass. There was no suggestion that Sally had invited anyone to smoke with her. A reprimand might be more appropriate.
‘Zero means zero. Drugs were a scourge here, and we had to take radical measures to show kids that life has more to offer than narcotic oblivion … We’ve freed up their imaginative expression. Prospect tolerates more behaviours than most schools, but not drug-taking. Drugs insult the human imagination.’
If Karen ever wanted to make a case for drugged-up artistry, this wasn’t the time. Dr Best reminded her how the school had eliminated bullying, smoking and alcoholic excess. Acts of violence were now extremely rare. Eating disorders and mental health problems had declined markedly. Accepting this, Karen saw that no case could be made for retaining Sally. The girl knew the rules, and had failed to appreciate just what this school was about.
Though Mossy’s quip to Eva was intended innocently enough, when the teacher overheard, she thought the boy should be set straight. He’d said that chicks were more trouble than they’re worth.
‘I was only talking about women and me, Miss, not the value of women in general.’
Karen knew enough about adolescent complexities to recognise that not all remarks should be taken seriously, but she adored Mossy and didn’t want to see him becoming a resentful man who blamed women for his frustrations.
‘I’d be very surprised if you don’t find time for girls when you’re well again.’
As the class roared with laughter, Karen began to wonder if she’d missed some obvious sign that Mossy was gay.
‘If Mossy was interested in chasing girls, he wouldn’t have had his ribs knocked out,’ Pol observed.
When Karen queried this, Rowdy McQuillan mumbled something that she couldn’t understand. Finally, Nellie Wang took pity on her art teacher.
‘It’s about auto-fellatio, Miss.’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘Mossy had his bottom ribs knocked out so that he’ll never have to worry about girls. He can suck himself off whenever he wants.’
Instantly dizzy, Karen found a desk to lean on.
‘Are you saying that Mossy didn’t need to have any of these operations?’
‘Of course he did … How else was he going to reach his knob? … Two vertebrae, and six ribs.’
Karen told them she liked black humour, but this was too sick.
Moses had been through a lot. He deserved the same respect they’d expect from him.
‘It’s no shit, Miss,’ Mossy said, coming to his friends’ defence. 'I never felt real. I always felt my life would be right if I could do it like I do in my dreams. Seeing contortionists killed me, I’d be thinking, if I could do that, I’d be at myself all day. I’d be like a dog … And then, middle of last year, I read about that Italian painter guy. How he had his ribs knocked out so he could slick the snorkel whenever he wanted.’
‘Modigliani?’
‘Yeah, Mogyani. Him.’
‘But, Mossy … 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 said I could be the man in my dreams … Yeah, Mogyani, that’s the dude.’
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 staffroom 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 5IC kids the previous year.
‘Did you know that Moses 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, 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 ICs, we’ve had no suicides. It’s like Dr Best says. Sometimes you have to cut kids some slack.’
Karen said 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 felt depleted. His ribs were preventing him from being whole, from expressing himself. Whatever you or I think about it, that wasn’t what Mossy was thinking.’
Karen asked if Dr Best knew 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 couldn’t describe her experiences to Paul.Her partner was a struggling subeditor, and there was no doubt what he’d do with the information. An exclusive like that would make Paul an internationally published journalist. Famous at the expense of her school.
Her thoughts shifted from memories of obviously happy faces to imagined operations where hacksaws cut through healthy bone to separate healthy feet 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 teacher into the family’s modest 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 allowing a surgeon to 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, Eva came through the back door, and was so obviously thrilled to see her favourite teacher, Karen forgot her qualms long enough to return the girl’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 girl could do.
‘I never could have loved anyone who said they loved 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 people who obsess about amputees.
Though it had never occurred to her to think about such things, Eva spoke of the missing arm as if it had sharp teeth. She had to get rid of it before it devoured her. Sex had nothing to do with it.
‘Most people have no idea what it’s like to go through life knowing that a body part 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.
‘For them, getting a clit-piercing wasn’t 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 reassigned. When Pol was Paul in Form Two, she threatened to slash herself to bits if someone wouldn’t help cut off her dick.
Though Karen 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 Pol makes,’ 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, statements and allusions that had rocketed over her head came back to haunt her; the 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 in 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 scandal was a police matter, and she intended to take these concerns as far as she could.
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 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 has had misgivings. I wouldn’t trust my staff if they didn’t have serious qualms. These are the most radical interventions imaginable. But you’d be doing your colleagues an injustice if you left, or raised a scandal, without letting them explain why they chose to support our great adventure.’Karen had hoped to resign and get away from that place as fast as she could. Talking it over with erstwhile friends and senior teachers 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 defied the absent principal’s smoking ban.
Having chosen not to attend, Dr Best invited Ralph Horsberg to chair the meeting, and he made his thoughts immediately clear. 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 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.
