Free The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan Page B

you alright in there?’ he calls.
    ‘Aye, just a minute.’
    Grab a box off the shelf and walk out. Eric closes the cupboard door and locks it twice.
    ‘I know that Angus is your support worker, but if you ever want a chat, I’m totally happy tae listen. Any time.’
    ‘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-strapsdangle 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’show 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.