Jenni Fagan - The Panopticon

‘Sound.’

‘We could chat today, if you like?’

‘Are you doing a dissertation, Eric?’

He doesnae answer but he’s pissed off, he disappears into the office and shuts the door. Back out the fire exit, close the gate and run up the steps.

When I get to the top floor I take the screwdriver out of my sock, jam it into the door frame, hard — harder. Fuck, I wriggle it around, then I manage tae wedge it right in. Take my sneaker off and belt it; the sound echoes off the stone walls. Fuck it, if they hear it, they hear it. Boot the door and it ricochets open.

Fuck! It’s black in here. Feel my way across the floor, pushing my sneakers out in front of me, so my feet will hit anything before I do. I bump around things, they feel like big boards of MDF or something. I reach the big old windows and it’s hard to undo the first shutter, but I get the clasp and pull it back. A shaft of sunlight floods in. Particles of dust rise up, all golden in the sun.

There are white sheets draped everywhere — it’s a snow scene in a derelict theatre. A faceless, dusty sheet is a polar bear, arching up a paw. Beside him there’s a snow sleigh. A snow wolf thrusts his nose out, sniffing for blood.

Sneeze. Shit! Sneeze again.

This room is amazing. I pull a white sheet off the sleigh shape and underneath there’s a leather bench. Thick ankle-straps dangle off it, and wrist ones and another for across the forehead, which has teeth marks on it. Run my fingers across the stained leather. That’s how they used to hold patients down, so they could fry the voices out. If they fried my mother’s voices out, did she still know who she was afterwards? They found her naked outside a supermarket supposedly. In labour. Psychotic. They never did say what supermarket.

This bench must be from when this place was a nuthouse. It’s not my first time near this kind of stuff, not if you believe the social workers, ay. They reckon bio-mum squeezed me out on the nut-ward, then jumped. Like from the window. They said the staff couldnae find her on the grounds, and they never saw her again. Like ever. She didnae leave a thing — no forwarding address, no hand-knitted booties, no wee gold bangle. Not even a name.

I touch the leather softly. They would fry patients’ memories as well as their voices, and sometimes they’d even fry out their names. Fry it all out, boys, every last drop.

‘What did you get fried out, Anais?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Oh, come on, it must have been something — a birthday? Bar mitzvah? Your first time?’

‘Nobody fried anything out, so fuck off!’

What if they fry out the wrong voices? I bet they do as well. They just fry everything, they dinnae just pick the bad things to fry out and leave the good things. They urnay that clever, they just fry it all, willy-fucking-nilly. Then they say you’re better.

My old social worker was the one who went to the nuthouse after Teresa was gone. She decided it would help me with my identity problem — you know, like if I trace my roots. That’s how she found the monk; he talked at her for half an hour about flying cats, and apple crumble. She said it was the flying cats he was really passionate about, though, and she said he’d seen my biological mum and did I want tae meet him? Aye. I do. I wonder if I should take him an apple crumble?

The snow wolf and the snow polar bear are silent. There are bars on the windows. I open another shutter and look down: the car park’s half-empty and trees framing the lawn bend softly. The light is neither this nor that.

You can see for miles. Past the driveway there’s fields and a thick patch of forest; a couple of farmhouses are tiny specks up towards the hills. Down to the left there’s the village, then a wee loch. A boat’s going out on the water, someone fishing maybe, and behind the trees there’s a wee house. Smoke curls out its chimney. I didnae see that on the way in.

Step away from the windows, in case any of the staff come out and see me. I lean across the bench in a perfect spanking pose. ’S just like my old postcards of Victorian girls in stockings, with wooden paddles. They’re hot, hot, hot. I need touch. I need tae fuck and kiss and dance, and get out of my head — like now. That’s the best thing about shagging, when your mind leaves your body. If it wasnae for that, it wouldnae be as good.

Swing my legs and let my head hang upside down. There’s a rusty base holding the bench up, it must have been here for ages. Years ago they’d cut people’s memories out and keep them in a jar, just hunks of grey tissue preserved in formaldehyde. Sometimes they pickled them, but more often it was formaldehyde.

If you look at a brain in formaldehyde you wouldnae see preserved memories. You wouldnae see Christmases or first presents or snowy days or a red bicycle. Memories must still be somewhere, though — like just because the tissue is dead, the things that created the memories still happened! So where are they?

Maybe if there’s nobody else that remembers them, then it’s like they didnae happen. They’re just gone then. If they fried out my memories it’d be like I never existed, cos there isnae a sister, or aunty, or da who’s gonnae say: Oh, remember when Anais broke her ankle? Remember when she cried on her birthday? Remember when she ate a whole cake and was sick at the back of the bus!

I saw brains in jars on a school trip to the College of Surgeons. There was even a pickled two-headed baby. I’d love a two-headed baby in a jar. If I ever grow up I want tae be a vampire with a two-headed baby. As if. I’ll never grow up.

Imagine all the people getting their memories fried out cos they were too sad to live, or their voices were too loud or too mean or too many? In the old days they’d do it just because you had a baby but not a husband. That was enough back then. They’d fry your memories out so you couldnae remember the baby or the no husband. I want Jay. I want touch. I lie back on the bench and unbutton my jeans.

Run my fingers over the leather strap, then use it to tickle my tummy. It feels good. I always do it just before my period. Well, most days really; actually — it’s every day. If I think about it, it’s everyday. My name is Anais Hendricks, and I’m a wanker.

Some days it’s just once, but sometimes it’s two or three times. Sometimes if I cannae get to sleep I’ll just do it again and again — it gets harder to make it happen after a while; the most in a row’s fourteen or fifteen. The first time I did it ten times. Nobody said how to do it, it’s just something you do. I had a Sunday job in the paper shop for five weeks once. I kept shutting the door so I could wank in the loo with porn. Magazines are fuck-all like the stuff online, they’re less hardcore.

I point my toes and everything recedes: sound, colour, temperature, words. Then there are flashes — Hayley’s perfect tits, sucking her nipples. Jay watching, telling me to lie down. The physics teacher and tongues, up and up, and up until there is nothing, no thoughts, no time or space.

My legs go slack and my feet fall out to either side. Sunlight’s warming the room. I button my jeans up.

They cannae have my memories, not even the bad ones. They dinnae belong to them. They cannae get me up here when the locks go on those doors, cos they’ll never let me back out. Fact. I’ll spend eternity drooling down my chin while Erics do their theses, then fuck off to have lives with houses and kids and gardens and holidays and cars and dreams.

Someone should take photos of all this shit before they clear this room out. The white polar bear and the white wolf. The bars. The straps. The teeth marks. I wantae photograph them all and hide the photos in a box — then even if they do fry me, someone will open the box one day and find them. Then they will have the memory. The snow wolf and the snow bear will live on.