Jenni Fagan - The Panopticon

‘You have a long history of violence.’

Paris, think of Paris. New York. Florence. Think of Jay. Think of kissing Jay. Think of being held that way. The policeman begins to shrink; first it’s his head that seems the wrong size, then his nose elongates and he accelerates — further and further away.

‘Possession of marijuana.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Possession of hydroponics, one harvest in a school shed.’

Focus on the space between his eyebrows.

‘Possession of an offensive weapon. Let’s see, three times: one hammer, one baseball bat and a nineteen-millimetre easy-gauge gun.’

The second policeman begins tae shrink.

‘Possession of seventeen grams of heroin.’

‘That wasnae smack and it wasnae proven,’ I say.

‘Seventeen grams of heroin, charged fully for. The hospital speed was the other one, Anais, can you no even remember what you were charged with?’

It wasnae heroin. It wasnae my heroin. Fingers look weird. Don’t fingers look weird? They think I’m scummy as fuck, maybe I am? But I bet I know more about paintings than they do. I dinnae know much, like, but I bet it’s more than they do. They dinnae know I know about sub alterns. Old Professor True specialised in that, he was my favourite client of Teresa’s, old True, even if he was old and fat and ugly. I know what the meaning of empathy is. I know how to outline my lips in red liner.

I umnay meant to be here. I was meant to be born in Paris.

‘Over one hundred charges in the last sixteen months, Miss Hendricks. Now, the Ecstasy tablets and, let’s see,’ he runs his pen down a long list, ‘three sheets of LSD, a half-ounce of ketamine, a quarter of hash, an eighth of sinsemilla, a nine-bar in December. How have you stayed out of secure?’

Because I get grade As at school, when I go. Cos I move so much that each department forgets where I am and where I’ve been. Because the experiment find me amusing.

‘Two drunken disorderly, seven breaches of the peace — oh, and of course your weekly absconding phase, how can we forget that, Anais? Let’s see: forty-eight times you have absconded, only caught once?’

I know what the experiment would like tae see. They’d like to see me hang myself in a secure unit. One knot. One neck. Vertebrae. Snapped.

‘How were you only caught once?’

‘Luck?’

The faces are gone. Almost. They are fading all over the walls. I focus on the bit between the police officer’s eyebrows; you can sometimes get a shrinking person back if you look at that space between their eyebrows and focus. Or sometimes, like now, it just makes their head a minuscule fucking pin. Tiny Head shakes from left tae right. His tiny eyes glare. His tiny mouth squeaks.

‘You’re in a bit of a mess, aren’t you, Anais?’

There is nothing at the end of the rainbow. Not a fucking thing. Fact.

‘Battery of an eighteen-year-old.’

‘She was picking on a kid I know.’

‘Two broken bones, a broken nose, broken ribs. Stolen property. Shoplifting. Destruction of social-work property. Brandishing a hammer at an officer of the peace. Joyriding. Smashing the window of Continental Jewellers. Inciting a riot in Valleyfield children’s unit. Inciting another riot in The Braids children’s unit. And, oh, this is lovely, Anais, destruction of police property — a prolonged campaign of terror by one Anais Hendricks of 13/9 Loam Terrace, Handerly Estate, against one officer now in a coma, our own officer: PC Dawn Craig.’

Tiny Head turns a laptop round. The CCTV footage is in order of dates; he presses Play. It’s me. I’m a movie star, Mama, are you proud? Me walking through the police-station door with my arms full. I know what’s coming.

I chore the first polis light off PC Craig’s pigmobile at 6 a.m. It is February. It’s still cold and the ground is frosty. Foam the CCTV with cheap-as-shit shaving foam, climb on top of the car and unscrew the bolts holding the light down. Wear a Buddha bag on my head, with holes cut out, so I can see. They know it’s me, but they cannae prove it.

Run up to my dealer’s after and chap on his window until he wakes up. He’s the vicar’s son. Hold out the police light for him, it’s a love-token. He’s well impressed. He stashes it under his bed and says he always wanted some genuine police memorabilia for a keepsake. He fancies me, and he’s totally — hot.

Do the next car at 3 a.m. This one is double-screwed and an extra CCTV camera is on the roof. Spray the camera with fluorescent-pink paint. Dawn Craig strips me twice that week.

Strip the third car at 4 p.m. on a Sunday while the church bells ring. This one has two screws and has been glued down, so I have tae use a Stanley knife tae get the light off. Almost give up, but I get it off in the end. Strip the stickers off the side of the car. Take the hubcaps off. Remove anything I can get. Climb up on the roof of the car and surf for the cameras; my Buddha bag is squint and over the eye-holes I’m wearing star-shaped sunglasses.

Three more searches from Dawn Craig.

Wait, wait, wait. Three long weeks pass, then I do two more cars.

Five visits by the police to the children’s unit. My room gets searched. Staff quizz me. The polis look in the woods for stolen blue lights, and give me a lecture on how much money vandalism costs the average taxpayer a year. They talk to me a lot about the taxpayers. The taxpayers hate me. Why am I costing them so much money? I am selfish and personally responsible for their high taxes — they would like to see me hanging from the old oak tree.

They ask if I’m a Buddhist.

‘Are you a Buddhist, Anais?’

‘Do I look like a fucking Buddhist?’

They come again, the next morning — just before breakfast — and say there is a witness. They show me my bag with the Buddha and the holes cut out. I have no fucking idea how they found that. They’re so chuffed to have caught me, they’re almost being chatty. They are cowboys and I am the only Indian left now. They have my tomahawk and they’re gonnae burn my settlement to the ground.

‘It will be better for you if you can return the stolen police goods, Anais. Can you do that?’ the police officer asks me in the station. They are so smug in their victory of catching me that they probably didnae even spit in my tea.

‘Can you give me half an hour?’

‘Ten minutes, no more.’

He’s the only nice policeman I’ve ever met. I run all the way to my dealer’s; from outside his window I can hear his spotty bird laughing in his room. I shagged him last week. I didnae know about Spotty until after the shag, like. When I was putting my jeans back on he told me Spotty was his bird, then she turns up at the door and just knows we’ve been shagging.

Hammer on his door.

‘I need the lights back, all of them — they’ve fucking caught me, ay.’

She’s sniggering and he’s telling her to shut up, and he goes to get the lights out from under his bed. I cannae fucking believe it when he hands me them. The two of them are in hysterics, but I umnay laughing. I can still hear them roaring away to each other as I run down the road.

Me and the two policeman sit watching the footage on his laptop. Me spraying the CCTV. Me crouched on the roof of a police car with a knife. The next bit of footage is the last one they’ve got, and the policeman turns up the brightness on his laptop.

I walk into the station, up to the counter. I am holding an armful of police sirens. A wee boy and his mum are sitting in the waiting room. The wee boy stops crying when he see’s what I’m carrying. The pigs all watch from behind the reception desk, their cups of tea poised in mid-air as I line the police lights up carefully. Six of them. Official police lights. Neatly placed in a row. Each one has been spray-painted fluorescent-pink and covered in glitter.