Shortie raises the telly above her head and lobs it through the last unsmashed window, and they are chanting, smashing, punching, it’s going around — This … this … this is how we say goodbye to our own!
Smash.
The whole surveillance window shatters, and I see them — turning on their fucking tails — the experiment, for a fraction of a fucking second: exposed.
38
YOU HAVE TO do the first things first — you have to begin at the beginning. This is the last time, I will never do this again.
Begin at the beginning, pick a birth. You have tae do it like it is important, like it counts.
How about a birth just like this: an ordinary baby is born, on an ordinary day, in a hospital just outside London. The labour takes fourteen hours, the baby is eventually delivered by Caesarean section. The mother cries — the father cries. Everyone is happy.
Pull my hat further down, tweak the rim so it turns up, it’s a 1920s-style hat, with a wee pin and a cherry on it. It matches my 1920s coat — and shoes. The train pulled into King’s Cross at 10.22 a.m. I didnae travel in the toilet. I didnae think I was dead; in fact, I have never felt this alive — every single breath feels like a first chance.
Next is the biological mother: Claire. She was the eldest of three sisters; her younger sister died in a boating accident and she passed on a few years later from ovarian cancer. Biological father: had a stroke and died six months later.
Now I’m an orphan. There are far worse things a girl can be.
‘How much are your lilies?’ I ask a woman on a flower stall by the river.
‘Four for a fiver, love.’
‘I’ll take them.’
‘Just four?’
‘Aye.’
The lilies are flat, so they’ll be easy to float — the river is calm. Walk down some steps to the shore. A wee laddie up on the pathway watches me. Down by my right a man is making a sofa out of sand. His wee dog runs around him and people throw coins down. They clatter into his bucket and some just land in the sand.
I unwrap the flowers and kiss each lily in turn. They smell that sweet way. The river is grey and they will disappear in seconds, but it doesnae matter. I place them on the water one by one. One for Teresa, one for Tash, one for Isla, one for Anais.
The tide whorls them away.
It took me ages tae walk down here, all the way past the tourist sites. Big Ben. Parliament. The wheel. The trees, the Christmas lights, the boats, the Christmas market and performers on stilts. And not one person has looked at me twice.
The buses here run all the time. In the village I’d wait for fifty minutes if I’d missed one. Here there is an LCD that tells you: due, 2 mins. I walk along to the steps and run up them, to the bus stop. A bus comes straight away and I get on, sit down next tae a man who is wearing a wee black skullcap. His sideburns are curly. The bus stinks. I breathe into my scarf until we pull up outside St Pancras.
I’ve got it straight now, in my head. I know how I began. I cannae think of the unit, or anyone I’ve left behind. I dinnae look left, or right, just straight ahead, and there’s no queue at the sales booth, so I walk right up.
‘A single ticket,’ I say.
‘No return?’ the woman asks.
‘No. Thanks.’
I put the ticket in my pocket.
It is what it is. Some people are blonde, some people are poor — some people get up and die on a day when they were gonnae go dancing. I’ve been playing the birthday game for years, and this is it: game over. There are no brothers, no sisters, no palazzo in Italy — no free perfume from Harvey Nichols. Just a plain ordinary life, the only one I will ever own.
I have to run for the train: the man’s putting his whistle into his mouth as I jump up onto the carriage. My heart is going pit-a-pat as I scan the platform, but there’s no-one there; no polis, no Angus, no experiment.
Weave down the aisle — this is it, just breathe, it’s all you have tae do.
I am in carriage F. My seat is 64B, opposite an elderly guy. I take my coat off and fold it neatly, place it down on the seat next to me and sit down. There are eighty-four seats in this carriage. The carpet has a swirly pattern, yellow on blue. The train is racing away from the city, out into the green. A hostess trolley rattles down our aisle; she stops at our table.
‘Can I get you anything, sir?’
‘Tea, please, no milk,’ he says.
The woman pours, and the man smiles — and I smile back, but just quickly. ’S alright. Sometimes you can just tell the goodness of a person by their face.
‘What’s your name?’ he asks me.
Tuck my hair behind my ear, look up.
‘Frances,’ I say.
‘That’s a nice name,’ he says.
And it is. It’s a nice name, if you look up its origins: it means freedom.
Paris.
Paris it is.
I am Frances Jones from Paris. I am not a face on a missing-person poster, I am not a number or a statistic in a file.
I have no-one watching me.
All I own is a lipstick I stole this morning, several hundred quid — and a lucky domino. This is it: no more experiment, no more meetings, no files, no straight to a secure unit, no giving up, no giving out, no beating up, no getting fucked, no looking over my shoulder, no locked cell, no broken vertebrae.
Paris — it is.
If you go there, you might see me working in a café, watching the people go by: smoking coloured cigarettes and patting my wee dog.
I’ll learn French and get a room on a back street — maybe I’ll walk my rescue-dog by the river four times a day. I’ll go to galleries, and read everything in their libraries, even the manuals, even the papers. I’ll eat chocolate croissants for breakfast. And I won’t take any lovers for ten years. I’ll wash my hair in lavender shampoo. I’ll browse couture shops, and junk bazaars. I’ll go to the Moulin Rouge. I’ll write poetry in the back of dark bars. I’ll watch live sex shows, and wank forty times in a row.
I’m just a girl with a shark’s heart — Frances Jones. You wouldnae know me from anyone else if I walked by you. This is it, I’m getting out. So, Vive freedom. Vive Paris. Vive le mad artists and drunken whores. Vive le girls with tits and hips and perfumes and perfumers. Vive absinthe and cobbled streets, vive le sea! Vive riots and old porn, and dragonflies; vive rooms with huge windows and unlockable doors. Vive flying cats and cigarillo-smoking Outcast Queens! Vive Le Revolution. Vive Le Dreamers. Vive Le Dream.
I — begin today.
Acknowledgements
Thanks, and appreciation (in no particular order) to:
Jason Arthur, Tracy Bohan, Ali Smith, Joseph Ridgwell, Cherry Smyth, Suzanne Dean, Freddy Chick, Kevin Williamson, Liz Hope, Darran Anderson, Laurie Ip Fung Chun, Michael Langan, Rosie Gailer, Adelle Stripe, Mark Burgess, Emma Finnigan, Dave Oprava, Arts Council England and Iona Davis.
I would also like to thank everyone at William Heinemann and the Wylie Agency.
About the Author
Jenni Fagan was born in Livingston, Scotland, and lives in Edinburgh. She graduated from Greenwich University with the highest possible mark for a student of Creative Writing, and won a scholarship to the Royal Holloway MFA. A published poet, she has won awards from Arts Council England, Dewar Arts, and Scottish Screen among others. She has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize. Jenni works as a writer in residence, in hospitals and prisons.