The Panopticon

by Jenni Fagan

  They’ll find her. They will. Do not think about it. Don’t, or you’ll start to panic.

  It’s weird driving through the city after being surrounded by farmland for weeks on end. I cannae believe I’ve been in the Panopticon for over two months now. It almost feels like home, cos of, like, Shortie, and Isla, even Angus, and the roof. It’s a long time since I’ve wanted to stay anywhere. Helen is breathing, just in, and out. Her nostrils flare. Her fingers are long and bony.

  ‘So you’re leaving – tae, retire?’ I say.

  ‘I’m taking a gap year.’

  ‘But, you’re what: fifty?’

  ‘I am thirty-seven, Anais.’

  ‘Same difference.’

  Helen grits her teeth.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to take a gap year, Anais? Go and help people less fortunate than yourself, or work in a sanctuary to save elephants?’

  ‘No, I fucking wouldnae.’

  ‘Some day you won’t feel so smart about things. One day you’ll realise it’s up to you, and you alone, to make something of your life.’

  ‘Fuck off, Helen.’

  ‘Be rude if you want, it’s not my problem any more. So, today, I want to go through this with you. Focus. Anais, are you stoned?’ she asks.

  ‘Just a wee bit.’

  ‘Right. You were born in Warrender Institute, as you already know, and I have finally managed tae find your adoption certificate – well, a copy of it. It was taken in with the rest of Teresa’s documents when they were investigating her murder.’

  I flinch at the word. And now all I can see is Teresa’s kimono on the floor in our bathroom. I could slap Helen sideways.

  ‘Mr Jamieson is really looking forward to meeting you. He was there when you were born, and he remembers it well.’

  ‘What? He saw me, and my biological mother?’

  ‘That’s what he said, yes. He’s actually been at Warrender longer than any other resident.’

  ‘That’s promising, the longest crazy they’ve got!’

  ‘Don’t say crazy, it’s not a positive term.’

  ‘What would you say, like?’

  ‘I would say, people like your mother are obviously fragile to the pressures of life and, sadly, those pressures can make them ill. That’s maybe what made your mum run away from the hospital.’

  ‘If it makes you feel better.’

  ‘You are fragile, Anais.’

  ‘Am I fuck!’

  I go quiet and think about the iguana in that guy’s flat a few years ago. What was his name again? Chief. He was a right weirdo.

  ‘Angus said you thought the blood on your skirt was animal blood, and you had them checking it out at the lab?’ Helen breaks the silence.

  ‘Aye, I picked up a squirrel, I didnae know it had blood on it. Why, have they got the results yet?’

  ‘The tests came back saying it was definitely human blood, Anais. The police think you’re just – trying to halt the investigation with this squirrel story.’

  ‘Do they now?’

  Clever experiment. They are smart and relentless and wholly fucking brutal, and in my heart I’m raw, and scared, and nothing. I feel cold, shivery. I want tae get in a bath and put my head under the water.

  Click, click, click. Tash turning around – looking at the guy, him saying something to her. What does he say?

  Some day, aye, you will walk into a room, or a car, or an aeroplane, or a toilet, and you won’t know it right then – but you will never get back out again. Exit only. Fact. You might go home and put your shopping down and turn on the telly, and all the time you dinnae realise that the next time you go back through your front door it will be in an ambulance, or a body bag.

  ‘You must remember something about that day?’ Helen asks.

  Shrinking. Shrinking, shrinking, shrinking.

  It was a squirrel – it wasn’t PC Craig’s blood, I know it in my bones, and so do they, but they don’t care. They dinnae. The experiment want me to know that they’ll have me in a secure unit for life – for something I dinnae do. How else can they break me?

  Helen’s serene. The city is ugly. People. Cars. Buses. Trees. Buildings. Then the motorway again, and silence. A turn-off. We drive by a car broken down by the side of the road, then a wee bit later a man walking along with a can of petrol. We whizz past a garage and down a track in the woods, through wide-open gates: Warrender Institute. It’s a big building – like the Panopticon, but less imposing. Huge windows, like the ones in my dream.

  The nurse greets us and we all turn to wait for an old barefoot man who’s walking down the corridor. This place stinks.

  ‘This is Mr Jamieson, Anais. He was living here when you were born,’ the nurse says.

  The old monk stops about a metre away; he nods his head a lot – and looks totally pleased to see me. His eyes have a right agitated sheen, and the left one is milky and bloodshot. I think he must be totally blind on that side. The other one is a watery pale-blue colour, and it doesnae look much better.

  ‘Hiya.’

  I dinnae know what else to say. My hands feel really far away, and my arms and my legs dinnae feel like mine.

  We walk along to the day-room. The monk sits in his chair and I take a seat across from him. He isnae saying much. The nurse gives me weak orange juice in a plastic cup. I put it down on the table and check the place out. There’s a woman in the corner dozing; her T-shirt has Happy Place written on it. Her handprints are in green paint underneath and there’s spittle around her mouth.

  It smells like saliva in here. Like when you go to the dentist, or to get your eyes checked, and the man comes right up into your face and you can smell the saliva in his mouth – it’s gross. There must be a café or something through that door as well. I can smell bad school dinners and bleach.

  The monk smiles and smiles, and nods his head. He’s kind of cute, tiny and wizened and I dinnae have a clue what to say, so I just sit. After a while he begins to look sad.

  My face flushes, and I feel embarrassed. Helen is out in the nurses’ office chatting – she’s probably telling them all about elephants in India.

  Someone should wipe the spittle from that old pill-head’s mouth; every time she exhales a strand of it expands out.

  ‘So you saw my mum?’ I ask finally.

  ‘Aye.’ He grins.

  ‘But you cannae really see?’

  ‘I could see quite a lot then,’ he falters.

  ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘Nice thatch.’

  I dinnae think he’s taking the piss but I cannae be sure.

  ‘And a winged cat, lovely it was, great big wings.’

  He spreads his arms wide to demonstrate. Shivers up my back. A winged cat and a woman that jumps from a big arch-shaped window and never stops falling.

  I’m not looking at the walls, cos I dinnae want to see faces. I cannae imagine a woman in this room giving birth to a baby, but that doesnae mean she wasnae here. He said she had a flying cat and he even drew it for me. My arms are prickling.

  ‘She flew in on it. It followed her around, and it padded right down this ward. They didnae see it, of course. Oh, it had lovely black glossy wings.’

  A cat that flies – Malcolm. There’s a coldness in me. The hairs on my arms are really up and I look around the room as hard as I can, as if this cat will materialise for me to see it, but it doesnae. The faces are there briefly. Just like a tracer.

  ‘My mother flew?’

  ‘Uh-huh, flew in – flew away. They didnae see anything.’

  The monk leans across to me.

  ‘They dinnae see much, though – do they?’ he says.

  Glance towards the office. Helen and the nurse are drinking tea.

  ‘So. You’re saying you saw my mother.’

  ‘Aye,’ he nods.

  ‘And she flew in here on a winged cat?’

  ‘Oh, aye. He was braw, he had a thick coat. His wings were huge! Your mother flew in from that side of the buildin
g – the orderlies thought she was walking, but they didn’t look down, her legs were not touching the ground! She glided right down that corridor on him, then through this door. He waited for her, while she gave birth tae you – and that took quite a while! Then she smashed that big arched window right there, then she jumped. Well, the cat picked her up, down by the woods, about five minutes later. I saw them flying east.’

  ‘Right.’

  He’s so schizo it’s hopeless. Weird thing is, I totally believe he’s never told a lie in his life.

  ‘Your mother was massive with you in her tummy.’

  ‘What colour was her hair?’

  ‘Black, like yours.’

  Helen’s still chatting in the nurses’ room; they’re all laughing about something.

  ‘What did she smell like?’

  ‘Eggs, and death.’

  ‘I hate eggs. So – let me get this straight: she flew in on a big black winged cat, and she gave birth in here?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘In this room?’ I ask him.

  ‘Right there.’

  He points to the window. I look, but all that’s there is a fake rubber yucca tree.

  ‘And she smoked cigarillos,’ he adds.

  ‘She smoked wee cigars?’

  ‘Aye. She was a cigarillo-smoking Outcast Queen.’

  He is taking the cunt.

  ‘They’re lovely, they are – sensational girls, the Outcast Queens. D’ye not know of them?’

  I rub my head, and undo my ponytail and shake my hair out. My scalp feels too tight, and this is the single weirdest conversation ever – it tops ketamine. Maybe the experiment have already got me, maybe I’m in a cage somewhere right now, drooling down my chin.

  ‘Oh. Well. There were only ever three,’ he says.

  He seems disappointed in me.

  ‘What’s an Outcast Queen?’

  The monk smiles queerly and my tummy flips over – he is freaking me right out.

  ‘You dinnae seem mental,’ I tell him.

  ‘I was in the army before this, Anais. I went to boarding school first from the age of four, all the way until I was a young man – then straight in the army. Both are quite extreme institutions in their own right. They got me early. It’s hard when they get you so young.’

  I’m sweating. I need to get out of this room.

  ‘I couldnae be in the army,’ I say.

  ‘Me neither – in the end, it was too late, by the time I came here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I ask him.

  He just stares at me. His white eye’s moving with the other one. I want to believe him, I want to believe that I was born here – not in a test-tube. I dinnae want to have started life as a fucking experiment.

  ‘What colour were her eyes?’

  My heart’s pounding and the shrinking’s coming in. He can fucking sense it.

  ‘They were just like yours,’ he says.

  My mother had eyes and they were the same colour as mine. A nurse comes in with a medication tray for the drooler – she holds her hand out and swallows some tablets down. I want to take them off her. I’d pop anything I could get my hands on right now. The drooler waves at the monk and goes back to sleep.

  The monk takes out a worn domino, its numbers four and four – he gestures at me to take it.

  ‘It’s my lucky one.’

  ‘We better leave now, Anais.’ Helen appears.

  The monk quickly hides the domino; he doesnae like Helen, and she can tell.

  ‘Thanks for speaking tae me,’ I say.

  I walk away and my legs are like fucking jelly.

  ‘You’ll come back and play me at dominoes?’ he calls after me.

  ‘Aye. Okay.’

  ‘D’ye promise?’

  ‘Aye.’

  It’s snowing outside, just lightly, and Helen’s spraffing shite, but I dinnae hear it.

  As we reverse out the car park, the monk comes stumbling out the doors. He’s not fast. His bare feet slap off the stones and his pyjamas flap around his skinny body.

  ‘Stop the fucking car.’

  ‘Anais, we should just go, our appointment time is over.’

  She slows down and I wind down my window, feeling protective of the monk although I dinnae know why.

  ‘It was snowing, Miss Anais!’

  He pants as he reaches the car and grabs at my window.

  ‘It was the prettiest snow I have ever seen – it began tae fall just as you were born. It was the biggest snowstorm for fifty years that winter. The snow was so thick, it covered everything and it sparkled and the moon was full, Miss Anais – a great big one. I remember, cos hardly anyone was asleep. We all heard your first cry, you sounded so fierce!’

  I let him see my tears, it’s important – I dinnae know why, but it is.

  ‘I looked out the window, not long after she jumped. That big one right over there, see. I looked out the window tae see where she went, but she was gone, and her footprints were filling up with snow, they disappeared by the light of the moon. It was such a big moon,’ he whispers.

  ‘And she was gone?’

  ‘Aye.’

  The monk grasps my hand. He’s frail. He’ll not be here much longer, he’s on his way out. I’ll look it up when I get back: snow and a full moon, the coldest snow in years is bound to be on record. Maybe there’s even a photo. The monk slips the domino into my hand.

  ‘For luck,’ he says.

  ‘Good to meet you then, Mr Jamieson. We need to go!’ Helen says.

  I turn and glare at her. If she starts on him I’m gonnae fucking slap her.

  ‘They dinnae own you,’ he whispers.

  ‘Bye then,’ Helen calls loudly.

  I turn the domino over in my hand, and slip it in my pocket before Helen can see. The car begins to reverse and I stick my head out of the window. The monk steps back and stamps his feet together hard.

  ‘Good luck, daughter of an Outcast Queen,’ he salutes me.

  All the way down the drive I watch him recede. Still saluting. Still barefoot, standing in his pyjamas.

  25

  WINCE AT THE light in the living area – that watchtower seems bigger than ever. The night-nurse has just come on duty. I am watching her tae see if she speaks to anyone in the watchtower again. I can imagine her up there, while we’re asleep, doors locked, playing chess with the experiment, all of them naked. Playing for our souls.

  The boys are in the pool area. John is wearing new clothes – Shortie says he’s moving out soon.

  ‘Where have you been?’ the night-nurse asks me.

  ‘Up town,’ I say.

  She grabs me by the chin and tilts my head up into the light.

  ‘I am a hundred per cent certain your pupils are dilated.’

  ‘D’ye want tae let go of my fucking chin?’

  ‘Do you know I haven’t once seen you with undilated pupils, Anais Hendricks!’

  ‘Aye? Well, maybe I’ve seen you!’

  ‘Seen me what, Miss Hendricks? What have you seen me do?’

  My mouth tastes like dog-ends. The night-nurse snorts. Tonight’s interrogation is over. She’s wearing a blue suit and her soft albino hair is neatly tied up at the back. She sashays away.

  ‘Upstairs then, boys,’ she says.

  ‘Have you seen Isla?’ John asks me.

  ‘No, I’m going tae see her now.’

  ‘I cannae believe it about Tash, ay?’ wee Dylan says. He looks scared – I give him a wee kiss on his cheek. It’s horrible for everyone knowing she’s still out there. I cannae even remember the last time I sat down and ate, or anything.

  The kitchen’s still open – someone’s forgot to lock the larder door. Sneak in, quiet as. There’s a catering-size block of chocolate in the larder, it’s the length of my arm. Shove it up under my jumper, grab a few bags of crisps and some vanilla essence.

  Imagine being the daughter of an Outcast Queen, imagine being a daughter! Imagine if flying cats were real and you
were special, not just a total fucking no-mark.

  They say the devil’s best trick was to make everyone believe he didnae exist. Maybe God’s just a scientist. This is all an experiment gone wrong, every single one of us, just wonky as fuck because of some chemical cock-up that was meant to produce something less faulty.

  Click, click, click. The car doors all close, Tash looks in the side rear-view mirror, watches Isla get further away.

  Everything’s fucked.

  How do I know I’m not an experiment? I dinnae. Fact. And the other fact is this: nobody knows, cos we’re all just wandering about with no fucking idea what the universe is, or what death is or what happens after you die. Maybe I’m just going schizo.

  But, if nobody knows anything about anything, then who’s to say there’s not an Outcast Queen who smokes cigarillos, and sends out winged cats to watch over her daughter?

  What if schizophrenia makes you believe in flying cats? Probably it does. That, and it makes you see faces where there urnay faces – next it’ll be voices, then it’ll just be me and the monk playing dominoes until the meds run out.

  Back in my room I open the top latch of my bedroom window and stick my head out – it is such a relief to see her face.

  ‘Hey, Isla.’

  ‘D’ye want first on?’ she offers.

  ‘Nope, I’ve got something better to smoke. D’ye want some?’

  ‘Aye, sound.’

  Tie a hunk of chocolate and some grass together and swing it along to Isla. Her eyes are red and puffy.

  Shortie snaps her window open and sticks her head out on the other side.

  ‘I have a delivery for you as well,’ I say, and I undo the knot on my shoelace with my teeth. Swing a parcel along to her.

  ‘You are saving my life, I thought I was gonnae end up straight for fucking ever. I’m gonnae skin up.’ Shortie’s head disappears.

  ‘What can you see?’ Isla asks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Out there, fucking look.’ She gestures across the lawn and she’s almost shouting.

  It’s the Prozac that’s making her aggressive and weird and totally non-Isla-like, and the police still haven’t found the car that took Tash.

  ‘All I can see is the dark,’ I answer.

  ‘The lawn,’ she points.

  Look down, but all I can see is dark, and fir trees silhouetted against the sky. Bare oak trees. There’s a frost out, and there’s been snow. Our lawn sparkles.