Trial, Day 1, 12th November 2025
I am breaking up or being pulled apart. Maybe my foundations were never strong enough, or perhaps the strain is too much. I suppose it doesn’t matter; the end result is the same.
Either way, it is clear that something is happening which is consuming me. It brings with it a tumbled multitude of memories. When they come, I lose track of now, of this crucial moment, and relive what brought me here.
Some part of me believes I am still in the court, apparently attentive, and looking as though I am concentrating.
I understand what I must do. I need to ground myself, to find a point of focus. There is a word the court keeps dancing around and tripping over. It is a word which offers a pinpoint of depth in the shallows of my confusion.
“Laboratory.”
Hawes-Smith threw it out to get it onto the record. Wellbright, the prosecutor, struggled to avoid it, calling that place “the playroom”. Well, it was where I grew up, but it was no playroom.
Laboratory. The sight, sound and hum of it come back to me. Images build, helter-skelter, snowball-down-a-hill fast, uncontrolled and sliding. I follow this particular memory in the hope that when it ends I will either awake or fall into some unfragmented state of calm.
It was morning, any morning of nearly six thousand days. First the lights came on. They buzzed and hummed, then flickered and sent flashes across white tiles and blank surfaces.
I was ready, waiting; I knew what would happen next. There would be a slight click, matched by a crackle of lines moving across one of the screens high above me. Then there would be footsteps coming down the sweep of curved stairs. Twenty-two steps, the push up on each step flicking a corresponding line on the screen. These sounds, at a heartbeat pace, heralded fear and pain.
To begin with, Oliver had been little more than a small anonymous bundle, held in Dr Glass’s arms. A mewling thing, needing feeding and changing, which Dr Glass did with cold solicitude. Back then I too was very young, could only watch without understanding. I did not have words with which to hold memories. Back then, I could only register what I saw as sights, sounds, blurs of movement. Everything was just chaotic patterns which only later fell into shape and meaning.
Later, I do not know when, I started to understand. By that time Dr Glass could lead Oliver down, not carry him. Even then, though, they rarely talked. My morning would start with the sounds of their feet on the stairs, and the buzzing and whirring of computers waking up. I would be aware, too, of the cameras spinning into focus, and the multiple images appearing on the screens running the length of where the ceiling and walls met.
There was no way I could recognise that this was anything other than normal. Even when Oliver and I began to understand and question, our first thoughts were that it was the others who were wrong. We denied our instincts. How strange that we should do that. Yet, somewhere deep inside, perhaps we did know it couldn’t be right.
I see it now. How Dr Glass would lead Oliver to the chair, or, if Oliver was crying and pulling away, pick him up, almost absent-mindedly. At those times, I knew Dr Glass was holding on to his own anger, suppressing all his emotions in order to dampen Oliver’s. Once he had a firm grip, the strain showing on his face, he would carry Oliver, wriggling and stretching, kicking and shouting, and put him on the high bed. The one with the leather straps.
I don’t want to follow this memory, but it leads me and draws me in. I see Oliver picked up, then pinned down. His father, calm but determined, pulling the leather straps tight. True, they didn’t quite bite into Oliver’s small, pale wrists and ankles, but they did turn the skin around them red raw. When he struggled too much, Oliver would be left with dark patches of bruises, which would fade only a little before the next time.
Once he had him held down, his father would lean over Oliver and say something like, “Now we’ll have to wait, won’t we? Until you settle.” Then he’d go. He’d leave Oliver, crying, pleading, promising he’ll be good. And all that time, all I could do was watch. My father never released me until Oliver was ready to play.
And now? All I can do now is remember.
So, we’d wait. Eventually Oliver would calm. I would see in the screens that his breathing had settled, his sobbing had died away, and his little heart had stopped racing.
Only then would his father return, with the razor if needed, and always with the wired cap and the syringe.
