The Panopticon

by Jenni Fagan

When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her. —Oscar Wilde

The policeman rings the bell again. My heart’s going. I’ve moved fifty-one fucking times now, but every time I walk through a new door I feel exactly the same—two years old and ready tae bite.

We like tae keep doors open, to create a more trusting environment. There are no secrets here in the Panopticon,”

Imagine, though, ay. Imagine soft new jammies, and an open fire, and a big dog I could set on strangers if they came anywhere near my house. Imagine having your own house? Imagine having ten big dogs and a gun.

Lips have to be outlined really, if you’re not blessed with bee-stung. It’s easy tae make a Cupid’s bow look more pout than it is. It’s the same with a lack of right-angled cheekbones or supernatural baby blues or tawny owls. There are ways to make it work. Sometimes I make something so pretty, I dinnae even think it’s me.

I dinnae get people, like they all want to be watched, to be seen, like all the time. They put up their pictures online and let people they dinnae like look at them! And people they’ve never met as well, and they all pretend tae be shinier than they are—and some are even posting on like four sites; their bosses are watching them at work, the cameras watch them on the bus, and on the train, and in Boots, and even outside the chip shop. Then even at home—they’re going online to look and see who they can watch, and to check who’s watching them! Is that no weird?

some people take living out on anyone who’ll let them.

He grins wider, he’s got dimples. I smile back. I cannae help it. It’s one of they awkward ones where it seems like you like somebody that way, but actually you dinnae! You’re just smiling like that ’cause you’re a moron!

“I got taken in when I was born, moved through twenty-four placements until I was seven, got adopted, left there when I was eleven, moved another twenty-seven times in the last four years.”

right where no one can see—I’m rotten. There’s something wrong with me. It’s why nobody kept me.

They dinnae know this, though: I’d die before I’d pick on someone. I would. You dinnae bully people, ever, ’cause all bullies are cowards

People in care are always disappearing. Nobody finds out where they go.

John saw him hanging around Cherry Lane yesterday as well. Bad, bad, bad. Old people live down in they cottages, and they dinnae get it. Brian looks like he’s just walked out of one of their old school novels. He steals pity—like golden eggs—then he sucks them dry and places them back real gentle.

hate it when a guy makes you feel cheap. It’s like that in fights. It’s like that when you say no and they do it anyway. I’ve not let that happen for a long time, I learned—the worst way.

I am being deadly serious. You have tae have someone tae watch your back, and despite what the police are saying about you being a big bad lassie, I think you’ve nae bad in you at all.” I feel—shocked. I have never had a member of staff say something like that to me before, and he is just counting my outing money and places it on the table. I sit and look at the religious icons on the office wall.

“You know, you’re not the only teenager who has ever been entirely alone in the world,” he says. “How? Did you come from care, like?” “No, Anais, I came from worse than that—believe me. I’m just saying: dinnae think you’re totally alone, you’re not, alright?”

The Panopticon is creepy from up here, the top bit of the watchtower is a sharp peak in the middle of the building, and below that, inside there’s the surveillance window, and although the experiment like to hang out there, they dinnae need a watchtower ’cause they can see anywhere, that’s the truth.

The Panopticon’s a big looming hulk. It’s too big, like somewhere that a giant lives. I dinnae want to go back in there. Stop at the gates and I can tell the gargoyle’s been waiting to see how my night went.

The night nurse grabs me by the chin, tilts my head back and pulls me toward the light. She smells of eucalyptus and she turns my face this way and that. The woman sees everything. She sees what you had for breakfast and the kid you punched in primary school. She sees the first thing you ever stole.

The experiment built me a bedroom to stay in—it looks like mine but it’s not. They want me like this. My eyes glow yellow and there’s soft hair all over my body: I’m one of them. I bathe in the waters of the dead and I, too, detest the living.

“I am what you would call old-school, young lady. I would have stuck with tape cassettes if they still made them.” “Prehistoric.”

“Only soulless people dinnae like music. I love music, Angus.”

Angus seems quite decent. Normally it’s all No Smoking here, and boundary issues with clients there. He could almost be classed as a human being. Maybe.

Her mind’s made up. If I was on death row—just me and a dead squirrel that couldnae vouch for me—I’d ask for three last things. First: to fly. Second: to achieve something. Third: to look my real mum, or dad, or granda in the eyes, so I’d know the experiment werenae really what made me.

Imagine knowing that you came from people with hearts and souls.

The chairwoman settles a sheaf of papers back down and sighs. I bet if she saw that squirrel she’d have run it right over.

Aye. Aye, I do. It’s this: here is what you don’t know—I’d lie down and die for someone I loved; I’d fuck up anyone who abused a kid, or messed with an old person. Sometimes I deal, or I trash things, or I get in fights, but I am honest as fuck and you’ll never understand that. I’ve read books you’ll never look at, danced to music you couldnae appreciate, and I’ve more class, guts and soul in my wee finger than you will ever, ever have in your entire, miserable fucking life. I wonder if I should tell them about the squirrel?

Paris and its cobbled streets, and a beautiful mother who wears head scarves and big Jackie O sunglasses and drives barefoot without a seat belt on. She’s a burlesque star. Or a brain surgeon. She’s let me drink wine since I was seven. I never get drunk. Just mellow. She reads me poetry and we bake fairy cakes.

I’ve so much nothing to say that I can feel my throat closing up. It happens like that sometimes. Once when I was four I stopped speaking for six weeks. They said it was a protest but it wasnae.

“It is my opinion, Miss Hendricks, that you are going to re-offend. Once you have done so, you will go into a secure unit. And when you get released from there, you will offend again and you will go on to spend your adult life in prison, which is exactly where you belong, because you, Miss Hendricks, present a considerable danger both to yourself and to all of society.”

The chairwoman sits back. She has a gleam of sweat on her collarbone. She’s underweight. She probably lives on Ryvita, and anger. She looks like she’s never laughed—not even once in her whole life.

I used tae count the places I’d lived. In bed at night I’d count each one, and the things I could remember about living there. Things like bad breath, or poppies in a garden. I remember a wee dog that wore a tartan blanket. Countless foster brothers or sisters going: They’re not your parents, you know. A weird cuckoo clock, a purple settee. A car smelling of custard. The dampness of piss on a carpet. A room without windows or doors. The

I’ve had enough. I’ve had so much enough that I feel like I’m falling and I cannae bring myself to care.

“You’re a clever girl, Anais—I am sure you could put your mind tae something better than that. Don’t you want tae do anything with your life?” “I want tae do lots of things.” “Like what?” “Own a dog.”

I dinnae say I might paint when I grow up. I dinnae say I’ll learn French, so I can read every book in the main library in Paris one day, including encyclopedias and obscure manuals. I dinnae say I’ll volunteer to help some old lady with her shopping, and her cleaning, and if I’m really fucking lucky she’ll take me under her wing and get tae like me and feed me apple pie and gin—and tell me all her stories about the good old days. Those urnay the things I say.

Can you imagine it—a life in a secure unit, then prison? I wouldnae mind if it was for something I’d done! I mean I would, but it’d be different. It makes me burn when I think about it, right inside, like I just want to—disappear. Just like that. That’s how it happens. You blink one day and what was there a second ago is gone.

Hayley was quiet, and kind. Kindness is the most underrated quality on the planet. I feel hollow just now. Hollow where a heart should be. Like when you know someone loves you, but you urnay good enough—that it will go. That you’ll make it go, it’s only a matter of time.

Seriously. How not? How can you not stop it? If you take a kid who is in danger out of a place where it’s gonnae be tortured tae death—well, that kid would not be murdered then. Fact. It was a head social worker said that headline. What kind of message is that to send out to baby murderers? What kind of apology, or acknowledgment of responsibility, is that? It’s not an apology. It’s not an explanation. It’s a fucking insult, that’s what it is.

As specimens go, they always get excited about me. I’m a good one. A showstopper. I’m the kind of kid they’ll still inquire about ten years later. Fifty-one placements, drug problems, violence, dead adopted mum, no biological links, constant offending. Tick, tick, tick. I lure them in to begin with. Cultivate my specimen face. They like that. Do-gooders are vomit-worthy. Damaged goods are dangerous.

am not an experiment. I am not a stupid joke, or a trippy game, or an experiment. I will not go insane. Something bad is gonnae happen, though. I can feel it. It’s in the way that crisp bag has faded from the rain. I am not an experiment. If I keep saying it, I’ll start believing it. I have to try. I am not an experiment. It doesnae sound convincing. It sounds stupid.

Today, one finds one is not, in actual fact, a social experiment. One is a real person. This is real actual skin as seen containing the bodily organs of a real actual human being with a heart and a soul and dreams.

I, the young Miss Anais, understand wholly that I am just a human being that nobody is interested in. No experiment. No outside fate. I am not that important, and that is just fine by me. I propose a stiff upper lip and onward Christian soldiers, quick-bloody-march!

I wish I had someone who wanted me as much as that—like really wanted me like that. Maybe I just need a wee dog, and an artist’s studio, and a side street in Paris. Not everyone needs people, ay.

“I bet you even smell of strawberries,” Dylan says. I turn around and give him a wee kiss on the cheek. He’s gonna grow up to be a really nice guy one day. He’s flushed, and happy, and I look out the window—there’s a world out there, you know. One that isnae here. We shouldnae be here; I shouldnae, I should be in Paris. It’s still nice, though. Today. The sound of the engine, the motorway, just a wee band of outsiders, and I feel alright, quite liked. Sort of content.

Angus reckons all kids should be able to read any of their files, anytime, without even having to apply for permission.

Several Panopticon residents refer to themselves as Inmates. They say this because they believe they are in training for the “proper jail” (their words). While this may seem like negative or dramatic terminology, the reality is that up to 70 percent of residents leaving care do end up either in prison, or prostitution, mentally ill or dead.

The young people who refer to themselves as “Lifers” do so because they have always been in (care) and/or adopted (with subsequent adoption breakdowns) and they now think they will be in care for the remainder of their upbringing.

It’s a tradition; her and Teresa used to do it nearly every night. She first poured me half a tumbler of vodka when I was nine, and I drank it straight then as well—I thought my throat was on fire.

What if there was no experiment? What if my life was so worthless that it was of absolutely no importance to anyone?

Bad. Bad feeling. Bad in the gut. Bad in the air, and just like that—wee faces flit across the walls, exactly the same as the concrete ones, but these ones are in plasterboard. It’s like someone has half-flicked a light switch, so you can see that the spirit world is actually always there, watching us live our lives.