That notwithstanding, I terminated the interrogation at that point, with, I will own, no small degree of relief, before he could admit to anything specific that we might be obliged to follow up.

Jay was released the following day. I filed a report that implied we had been considerably more severe with him than we had in fact been, guessing that this was all that had been desired by the powers that be in the first place, and our skills and facilities had in effect been used as a means of punishment rather than as they were supposed to be, to discover the truth – a use of our time and resources concerning which, I need hardly emphasise, I was in some disapproval, if, of course, powerless to prevent.

Sadly, a month later, we read that Jay, our Subject 47767, the one-time police officer who had been a hero to many of us, had taken his own life, throwing himself underneath the wheels of one of the trucks that deliver giant rolls of paper to newspaper printing presses. One of my colleagues pointed out that suicide, too, was technically illegal, which to me seemed ironic as well as very sad.

Only one person was ever truly kind to her. It was one of the brush ladies. There were various brush ladies. They were all small and dark and hunched. They had brushes that sucked at the air or that swallowed dust from the floor. And from lights overhead. The brush ladies only came at night. A man who was taller than them came with them and told them what to do.

She liked the brush ladies because they did not hurt her. They left her alone. She had been afraid of them at first, because everything that happened here hurt her or confused her and they obviously belonged to this place and so she was scared of them. But in time she stopped being frightened and started to look forward to seeing them because they were not like the others.

The others hurt her. The others had clipboard things and electrical things and torches they shone in her eyes and small hard heavy things they spoke into. They had glass things that they used to put liquids into her. These were called syringes. Also they had wires that they attached to her. Lots of wires. Some tubes too. Mostly wires. The tubes hurt more than the wires but the wires could hurt as well. They all wore white coats or pale blue uniforms. The hurt came from fire in her veins, usually. Though they had other sorts of pain they could make her feel. It depended.

Some of the others did not wear white coats or pale blue uniforms but dressed like ordinary people did. These ones just sat around and stared at her. She got the impression that they could do things inside her head. This was because when she tried to think herself away from here – to escape the way she had escaped from things before, before she had been brought here – the sitting people would close their eyes or bunch their fists or sit forward suddenly and she could feel them in her head, pulling her away from anywhere she might find safety or at least a temporary numbing of the pain.

Even when she was awake she heard voices and saw ghosts. When they put the liquids into her at night she went to sleep and had bad dreams as well. At first there had been little time to watch the brush ladies or try to talk to them before sleep rose up within her and dragged her down to where the nightmares waited. Then, she had thought that the brush ladies were a part of the bad dreams. But gradually she found that, each night, she stayed awake a little longer before falling asleep.

Or perhaps the brush ladies came earlier – she wasn’t sure.

Sometimes, after they had put the night-time liquids into her, one of the others would come to check on her. She would pretend to be asleep. The next morning, when they wanted her to wake up and be washed and fed before they started to do things to her, she would pretend to stay asleep. Gradually they put less liquid in the syringe each night before the lights were dimmed. She still pretended to be asleep in the evening but she woke up on time in the morning. They seemed satisfied with this. She was happy because now she got to watch the brush ladies.

She tried talking to them but they ignored her, or – when they did come over to talk to her – they did not speak the same language.

But then one of them seemed to change, and appeared to understand her, and talked to her. The brush lady who talked to her always wore a grey cloth tied round her head. She was sure that this brush lady had been one of the ones who had not been able to talk to her in her own language, so she was surprised that now suddenly she could. Still, that was good. Even so, she still didn’t understand everything the brush lady said. Sometimes it sounded as though she was talking to herself, or using the sort of complicated, mysterious words that the others did, the ones who hurt her.

Sometimes the brush lady with the grey cloth went back to not talking to her, or seemed not to be able to understand her again.

That was confusing.

The grey-cloth brush lady seemed different on the nights when she did talk to her compared to the nights when she didn’t. She walked differently, stood differently. She was the same all the time when the man who shouted was there, then – when he had definitely gone – she became slightly different, if she was going to talk to her. Perhaps nobody else would have noticed what changed in the brush lady with the grey cloth, but she did. She was able to see these things. She was special and could see things other people didn’t. That was just one of the special things that she could do, one of the things that had made her different and worse compared to everybody else. These things had made her a Problem Child and Educationally Special and Developmentally and Socially Challenged, before they’d decided she was Disturbed and a Delinquent and A Danger To Herself And Others (the others would always try to protect themselves – she understood that).

Finally these things had caused her to have a Breakdown and so she had to be Committed Into Indefinite Non-Elective Long-Term Institutional Care With Immediate Effect and so here she was in this long-term care. It had led to a hospital like a prison. And then to another one which was the same but different. And then to this place, which was worse than either of the hospital-prisons because here even the people supposed to be looking after her hurt her. Worse, she couldn’t even use the things that made her special to get away from the being hurt.

Also, she couldn’t retaliate. She could not hurt people who hurt her because they had these people in plain clothes who sat around her, the ones who sat watching her and did the eye-squeezing, fist-pumping, hunched-over thing. Or maybe it was because they put the liquids into her, using the syringes. These things put her to sleep, or made her just too woozy to think or aim straight.

Here are some of the things that the grey-cloth brush lady said to her:

“Hello. How are you? What have they got you on? What do they call you? Subject Seven. Well, that’s caring. Remember me? How are you? What have they done to you? Evening. Me again. I don’t even recognise this, what the hell is it? Oh. Hey, Subject Seven. Been a while. How’s things? Shit, what are they pumping… Are you with us, Seven? Are you? Anybody left in there? Fuck, you poor kid. Yes, they’ve seen something in you, haven’t they? Something they think they can use. Mm-hmm. Fate help us all… What? Oh, I wish I could. What are they doing to you now? You poor…”

And so on and so on.

She replied by saying things like these:

“I spy Monty’s video. Rent me a Sunder. I’ll have that child frashed, so elp me. Crivens, Mr Givens, you’ll be the deaf of me. Swear I never heard of such a thing. On me muvver’s grave, there’s a thing. Oi sat in a satin stain. Spot of block and truckle never hurt nobody. Alignment? I’ll show you alignment, you arrant plopinjay; bend over. So help me. Hold fast there, bothers and cistern, we shall not face such girlsterous times alone! Clunch.”