Anger Management

Content Warning:

Strong language, upsetting references

Transcript

Anger Management

Justin, a secondary-school biology teacher, was on his way to Anger Management in Ipswich, his fourth session. He was required to attend the sessions after he’d struck a pupil. Blue-black darkness hid the world from him, as the train hurtled past marsh and woods. No moonlight showed on the running streams, on the greasy river. On the rain-splashed windows, his reflection gazed eerily back at him, vivid and morose against the night. He’d recently failed his driving test and he didn’t want anyone at the meeting to ask him how it went. He wished he hadn’t mentioned it last time. 

            At Colchester, a roofer (and tiler and slater and pointer) called Kurt clambered onto the train and spotted Justin. Kurt was also on his way to Anger Management, to the same session as Justin. Kurt was a non-mandatory but disciplined and regular attendee. Justin didn’t especially care for Kurt. He resented him for his virtuous, voulantry attendance and found him common, deficient in certain graces. Kurt didn’t much like Justin. He found him spiky, snobbish, untrustworthy, and glib- despite his attempts to conceal his prejudices. Yet, whenever Justin and Kurt encountered one another, as they had done twice before on this same train service- running hourly from Chelmsford to Norwich- they were concertedly cordial. 

            Justin wished that Kurt would walk on, sit by himself in a different part of the aisle, in a different carriage preferably. But Kurt, with his usual deliberate affability, invited himself into the four-seat section where Justin was seated.

            They dispensed quickly with the niceties. The train set off, quickly achieving its desired tempo. The cars rocked and wobbled, the wheels rumbled on the track beneath. A trolley-attendant began making her way down the aisle. The trolley rattled with each of the train’s mighty, sporadic shudders and one of the wheels squeaked. It made an uncannily vocal sound, like a small girl crying out some frightened, persuasive monosyllable.        

            “I watched that true-crime doc about Lucy Letby, last night,” Justin said. His conversational gambits were all an effort to stop Kurt from talking about rooves or telling occupational anecdotes.  

            “Oh yeah?” Kurt answered.

            “Yeah. It’s new on Netflix. They’re gearing up for retrial; a panel including David Davis made evidence public that they believe might help overturn her conviction.” There was a pregnant pause. He pictured her face. “She makes me sad, if I’m honest.”

            “Sad?”

            “Yes.”

            “Fuck her,” Kurt said. “She’s a baby killer, do you know what I mean?”

            “I know. But she still makes me sad. She strikes me as sort of…” He tried to think of a different adjective. But his mind was magnetised to only one and would permit no other. “Sad. She seems sad. She makes me feel sad. She’s sort of plain and pale-looking. Maybe she got tired of caring for other peoples’ babies, wanted one of her own, couldn’t have one for whatever reason. There was a story from one of her colleagues- by the way, you know they digitally anonymise interviewees-”

            “They what?”

            “They digitally anonymise…”

            “Amononise”

            “No, AnOnOmise-”

            “Anomynise-”

            With loathing, Justin watched Kurt’s lips work at the troublesome word, attempting to produce it.

            “They record the voice of the actual person, but they use AI to create a fake person for the voice to come out of. They used to just film a silhouette. It’s freaky. It gives women an eerie sexiness.”

            “Yeah?”

            “Anyway. One of her friends- who was digitally anony- digitially anom-” he found, all of a sudden, that he couldn’t say the word. This was surely Kurt’s fault, Justin thought. It had sailed forth flawlessly the first time. It was as though Kurt had minutely crippled him and engendered a withholding doubt in his lips. Justin pressed on, skipping over the tricky participle: “She said that when Letby was a student nurse, the other nurses at the Countess-”

            “At the what?”

            “Countess of Chester. The hospital.”

            “Oh.”

            “Yeah, she said that-”

            The trolley arrived.

            “Any refreshments,” the lady said.

            Kurt came eagerly to life.

            “Cup of coffee, please love.”

            Justin waited quietly for the attendant to make the coffee and charge Kurt for it. It took an age. The trolley began to move off, the attendant pushing it from behind.

            “Nice arse,” Kurt said, taking a sip.

            Justin was feeling angry. His entire being hummed and trembled, aglow with anger. The feeling filled him and rayed out from him. It was the same as sex for a sex-addict or drink for an alcoholic: all consuming, empowering, and destructive.

            “Why do you need coffee? It’s after six in the fucking evening.”

            “Thirsty,” Kurt curtly answered.

            “Have an orange juice. Have a 7up. Have some water…”

            “I’m tired. It’ll wake me up for the meeting. Please, go on with what you were saying…”

            Justin struggled, for a few moments, to remember what that was. 

            “Yes…erm…a friend of Letby’s said that when she was placed on the neonatal ward as a trainee nurse, she would try to talk to the senior nurses at break time- in the staff room or whatever- and they were really unfriendly.”

            Kurt looked at Justin blankly, the coffee cup at his lips. 

            “And so she became the woman who went on to murder seventeen infants.”

            “She only attempted to murder seventeen infants. She killed twelve…I think…” The sadness he felt was overwhelming. He was ashamed to admit that he didn’t really care about the children. The quiet murderess, the pale nurse; the sterile blue of her nurse’s uniform emanated a powerful melancholy.  

            Justin studied Kurt’s hands. They were roughed and chapped and covered in cuts. The hands held the half-full paper cup with steely intention.

            Inexplicably, Justin had become afraid of the man sitting opposite him.

            “Tell me another story,” Kurt said mysteriously.

            “Eh?”

            “Tell me something else on your mind…”

            Justin began to have this incredibly curious feeling: it was the feeling that Kurt was somehow in charge of the situation. He was calmer than Justin. It really was as though Justin’s anger subordinated him. Anger, he thought, was a state of precarity, a verge, a ledge. Unlike Justin, Kurt enjoyed a feeling of safety, a feeling of distance from the ledge. Justin was freshly humiliated, freshly disciplined, freshly mandated to attend Anger Management sessions.

            That morning, he had seen a car with a learner driver in it. Next to the big red L was a caveat, in blue lettering: ANXIETY SPECIALIST. Justin had been learning to drive. Five days ago, he had failed his driving test. At least two people at the meeting knew that he had taken a driving test. He imagined them asking him how it went and he suddenly realised that he had never had any intention of telling them the truth. Did Kurt know about Justin’s driving test? He didn’t think so; he hoped to God that he didn’t.

            Kurt knew what Justin had done, why his attendance at the sessions was mandatory.

            But, to Justin, Kurt was a mystery. He realised, then, how little he knew about him, realised how hollow and unconvincing his story was, his story that he was only there voluntarily, as a precautionary measure. Kurt had no anger in him, none that Justin could see and this angered Justin. 

That was why Justin felt scared of Kurt, because he couldn’t read him, he couldn’t be quite sure of his intentions. Justin no longer trusted in the purpose of their journey. What lay at the heart of their relationship? Little more than suppositions. Who was this man, this man who called himself a roofer, who called himself Kurt. He was running the show. What show?  

            Kurt was apparently unmarried. Maybe he was gay, maybe he wanted to fuck Justin. Justin looked at Kurt, studied him. Kurt was perfectly composed. There was nothing Justin could do to upset that composure.

            “My son had a friend over to play at the weekend,” Justin began. Justin didn’t have a son. “My son has special needs, he attends a special school. Over the past couple of weeks, this boy my son goes to school with, has been filling my son’s schoolbag with cut outs, little things he’s cut out from magazines. I suppose it’s his way of expressing affection. Anyway, my son told me that he wanted this boy to come over to the house for a playdate. It was arranged, my wife arranged it. The boy lives with his grandmother- she can’t drive. My wife drove to pick up this boy, to take him to the house for his play-date. While they were collecting him, while I waited for them to return- no idea who was going to come in the door- I went to my son’s room and I found the piles and piles of paper cutouts in a drawer- many handfuls of them- like snow or three autumn’s worth of fallen leaves. I started going through them. He was clearly an obsessive cutter of magazines and newspapers, and probably things he’d printed out as well, I don’t know. He’d cut out pictures of cars, animals, buildings, things that he liked the look of, I think. There were all kinds of faces- some of them famous faces, faces you or I would recognise. But, sorting through the bits, trying to understand this boy, gradually I started to find women’s breasts, and buttocks. I started finding drooling monsters and what looked like bloodied instruments, parts of scenes of bloodshed and brutality. Cartoonish, nasty characters; faceless ghouls; frightening clowns, axe-murderers with faces covered in cloth.”

            Kurt listened with stone-faced interest. The train rocked as it scampered, mile upon mile upon mile. It recommenced to rain; they could see it soundlessly beating the windows: the sounds of the train were louder than the wet lashings of the rain.

            “What happened after that?” Kurt asked.

            “He arrived,” Justin continued. “This small, quite sweet-looking, slightly chubby boy.”

            “Was he as harmless as he looked?”

            “He was…well-meaning but sort of bullying. Not quite as outwardly, as obviously disabled as my son. To be honest I didn’t like him. I found him an unsettling presence.”

            “Who was he?” Kurt questioned. (They would soon be arriving into Ipswich).

            “Pardon me?”

            “Who was he?”

            “What do you mean?”

            “The boy, who cut things out of magazines. Who was he?”

            “Do you want a name? Are you asking me what his name was?”

            “No, I’m asking you: who was he?”

            “I don’t know. I don’t understand the question. I don’t know.” 

            “You’ve told me some of the things he did, some of the ways he acted. But who was he?”

            “He was a confused boy, with autism. I think maybe his parents were abusive or severely dysfunctional in some ways. I think his grandmother is…maybe...maybe not the best person to raise him.”

            “What would you have done if he’d hurt your son?”

            “Removed him. Removed him from my house. I didn’t even want him in my house, it was my wife’s idea, she’s the one who’s always inviting people into my house.” 

            “It’s our stop…”

            The train slowed. It was raining heavily. With the train’s deceleration, the station signs should have become readable. There were four well-spaced signs, each one elevated about eight feet above the platform on white stakes. But where the name Ipswich should have been printed in black Greater Anglia-font lettering, there was only white space.

            Justin and Kurt left the train. They stepped down onto the platform and the doors closed behind them. The rain fell forcefully upon them, hard as hatred. The train departed.

            “I don’t…I don’t quite know where I am…” Justin said. He uttered it so softly, with such moaning vulnerability. “I just want to get to Anger Management. I just want to get to the session.”

            Kurt leaned in and whispered, with sensual feminine menace, in Justin’s ear:

            “I’ll take you there.”

            They walked into the rainy darkness, Kurt’s hand on Justin’s shoulder, gently urging him the way he wanted to go, nudging him, each step of the way, in the right direction.