Pushing Back
I was twelve when Naumann’s Law was passed. New Democratic Alliance[1] Prime Minister Jeff Greening had just secured a historic fifth term at Number 10 in an election that boasted, at the time, the lowest voting turn-out in British political history, with something in the region of 30% of the population actually making it to the ballots. It was five years after British servicemen first joined US troops in
I grew up, like the rest of my generation, in an environment in which violence and crime were commonplace. Deadbolts, alarms, invisible electric fencing: marking out the boundaries between our safe little self-contained worlds and the hostile, dangerous one outside. My schoolbag contained the regulation Personal Attack Siren and two cans of pepper spray.
We had been born into troubled times. We were trained to survive them.
The institution of Naumann’s Law was an obvious solution. Violent crime was on the rise for something like the twenty-first year in a row. Prisons groaned and strained against the pent-up pressure of the criminals they contained. Any attempt to re-habilitate and release ex-convicts into society, it seemed, only ended in repeat offences. The country cried out for tougher sentences for criminals, but lacked the resources to meet the demands.
Medical progress had ground to a stuttering halt. Animal rights activists campaigned outside laboratories and sent razorblades and letter bombs to scientists known to be, or even suspected of being, involved in animal testing. The
At dinner parties and in wine bars, people offered up their own solutions. Why not use violent criminals for pharmaceutical and medical experimentation? And someone - somewhere in the upper echelons of decision-makers - heard these words and thought: yes, why not?
A nation sick of violence and protest and disease backed the scheme whole-heartedly: in place of laboratory animals, violent criminals were to become scientific test subjects for the duration of their sentences - a law which applied only to murderers, whether convicted before or after the law was passed.
And it worked.
With a fresh supply of new and improved, and - most importantly of all - approved guinea pigs on which to test their new procedures, pills and injections, British scientists fast became the forerunners of modern medicine. Only seven years had passed since the nationwide introduction of Naumann’s Law, and most forms of cancer had been practically eliminated. A vaccine against AIDS, it was rumoured, was on the horizon.
Crime rates had declined, the prospect of experimentation providing an effective deterrent where our forefathers’ various policies of incarceration and extermination had failed.
Prison overcrowding had ceased to be a problem. The reduced crime quota, combined with a certain degree of ‘wastage’ during the testing process, resulted in fewer convicts behind bars, living off the state, than had been known for over half a century.
Lobbyists and protestors had finally stopped lobbying and protesting. No one attacked scientists or demonstrated outside laboratories any more. People, it seemed, got a lot more sentimental over kittens and chimps than they did over convicted killers.
The world’s eyes turned to our little island and, for a while, it appeared we had found the perfect system. Overseas, in
But it had worked too well. Suddenly, unforeseeably, there were no longer sufficient murderers on which to experiment. Twelve years after the initial implementation of Naumann’s Law, scientists outnumbered their test subjects by a ratio of four to one.
Crisis: just inches from new medical breakthroughs, scientists were forced to down tools. In spite of the government funnelling huge sums of money into the Police Force in an attempt to ensure that no crime went unsolved and unpunished, the ever-dwindling numbers of killers that filtered into the nationwide testing stations could not meet the needs of our prolific new medical pioneers.
The next step was probably inevitable: the extension of the law to other forms of criminals. At first at least, it was only applied to terrorists and sex offenders. I’m not sure when this ceased to be the case. Government spokespeople used their words wisely and economically, and the few official statements that were made at the time tended to be sparse and ambiguous.
Slowly, smoothly, insidiously, more and more offences were amalgamated. Attempted Murder, Armed Robbery, Armed Assault, Aggravated Assault, GBH, ABH, Manslaughter…
By my twenty-sixth birthday, no convicted criminal was exempt from the testing programmes. Whether you were serving twenty years for raping two children, or six months for dodging your taxes, you were equally likely to find yourself at the sharp end of a scientist’s scalpel. While the lengths of prison sentences remained unchanged, whether or not they were outlived was another matter.
Everyone seemed okay with this. Everyone seemed happy or, at least, not unhappy, so nobody did anything about it. Petitions and picket lines were pretty much a thing of the past by now. No voices were raised in outcry.
Ex-cons, those who survived their sentences, were disenfranchised following the passing of a law called Article 271b. Once again, no one spoke out.
Until, that is, a newspaper article went to print almost two years later.
I had worked in journalism since I was seventeen, initially following dog shows and parish events for a local paper while I completed my studies, and working my way up from there. I left university at twenty-two with a B.A. in journalism and sociology under my arm, and walked straight into a nice comfortable job writing for The National Witness.
I’d had misgivings about the Prisoner Testing Programmes since I was old enough to truly understand the concept. It hadn’t seemed so bad when it had at least appeared to be working, and it certainly seemed to make a kind of sense. But over the past couple of years, the medical advances had ground to something of a standstill. Thousands of convicts had paid off their debts to society, often with their lives, yet where were our cures and chemicals?
Fantastic scientific breakthroughs, sage professors and official-looking government spokesmen assured us, were just around the corner.
But the breakthroughs never came, and I started to wonder.
Infiltrating the Scientific Testing Station was a lot easier and less dramatic than it now sounds. I applied for the post of Test Co-ordinator at Westbridge STS, a station which handled approximately one sixth of
£79.99 (or €97.48, had it not been for the
On reflection, I don’t think I need have bothered. No questions were raised about my modestly impressive resumé. I provided no proof of the qualification I claimed to have, and they never once asked me to.
When interviewed, I made all the right noises, gave all the correct conditioned responses, nodded reverently when points were made, smiled at their jokes. I was offered the job on the spot and was told to attend the station a couple of days later for my initiation and guided tour.
I would love to be able to forget what I saw, past the guards and the barriers and security checks, behind thick steel doors in soulless white rooms, but I know I never will. And what’s more, I know I can’t afford to. In a society in which mistakes are forgotten, rather than learned from, someone has to remember, and remind the world, and keep on reminding until the right people have no choice but to change things.
If I don’t remember, no one else will.
I saw humanity with its skin ripped off. I saw mankind red and wet and writhing.
I was guided through rooms slick with suffering and watched through one-way glass from a sterile observation cubicle as a girl who could have been no more than nineteen was held down and industrial bleach was poured in her eyes. Wires and speakers and microphones connected the cubicle to the test room, transmitting her screams and sobs. My guide just smiled in silent satisfaction beside me while I forced myself to keep watching as the girl convulsed and struggled and shrieked on the other side of the glass.
Show no weakness, or they’ll know. Show no surprise. Act like this was exactly what you expected. Act like this was why you applied.
After a while the girl stopped screaming and just slumped, motionless in her restraints, against the white-tiled wall behind her, head bowed, her soft whimpers mixing obscenely with the heavy, excited breathing of my guide.
For a brief moment she looked up. Bloody, blinded eyes stared out of a chemical-scarred face, wet with tears, and she seemed, for a sick, heart-stopping instant, to look right at me. Her sightless eyes seemed to burn through the one-way glass and hold me there, as trapped and hopeless as she was.
I later learned that her name was Whitworth, Naomi Jane, and she had served a month and a half of a six month sentence for two counts of shop-lifting.
I don’t know if she survived her sentence. I’m not sure she’d have wanted to.
After that, it became a little easier, though it was never easy. The shock abated a little, but the sick, wretched feeling remained.
I soon learned that there were no fewer criminals in the country, no fewer murderers, no fewer sadists. But now the killers, rapists and torturers had uniforms and government-paid salaries.
I did my best to detach myself from the viciousness that surrounded me for the month I remained in the station. I watched, a disconnected observer, as healthy limbs were amputated, cancers purposefully nurtured on bodies, spines severed and people unmade. I myself injected a man of my own age, bound to his bed, with HIV, almost proud as I did so, that my hands barely shook.
I forced myself to stay a month. In that time, no scientific objectives were seemingly met. I wasn’t even sure there were any.
And then, one day, I wasn't there any more. I clocked out on a Friday evening, flashing my pass at the security check through the window of my car without stopping, with the intention of never going back. By the time I was missed, on Monday morning, when I failed to turn in for work, the damage was already done. By then, my damning headline glared defiantly from every newsstand up and down the
The article I wrote made the front page of The Witness. In it, I named each and every scientist, test co-ordinator, lab assistant, even janitor, whom I had come to know during my time in that sterile hell. I pulled no punches, spared no one's sensibilities. I relayed, in grim and graphic detail, everything I had witnessed, dissected the system and left it bleeding, as they had done to so many of their test subjects. I dragged in front of the eyes of a disbelieving world, the not mindless, but meticulous brutality I had observed at Westbridge, and in which I had played my own hideous part.
Only in retrospect now, can I see that the storm had been brewing for a long time. My exposé was merely the first lightning strike, and I held my breath and waited for the thunderclap.
At first, nothing seemed to happen, or at least nothing to speak of. A few ceremonial sackings took place, as is inevitably the way with these things. Government spokesmen decried the behaviour of 'a minority of rogue scientists' operating at the Westbridge Testing Station, and assured the public that this affair, while regrettable, should not be viewed as an indictment of an otherwise compassionate and invaluable institution. It could probably have all ended there, had I let it. In hindsight, I possibly should have.
But I didn't, couldn't. I had seen too much of the truth and it burned inside me, desperate for a way out. I was young and idealistic. I thought I could take on the world. I thought I could change it.
I did the tour of the more topical late-night talk shows, editorialised in subsequent articles in The National Witness, and wrote freelance columns for various other publications. My fame, or infamy, grew. By the end of the first week after my article went to print, my mail constituted over 70% of The Witness' total correspondence. I received letters and emails from friends and relatives of convicts who had been mangled by the system I sought to expose. Some of them had survived their sentences, in body at least. More had not. I replied to as many as I could. If you, reading this, were one of those to whose posts I did not reply, then I can only say that I am sorry, and hope that my subsequent actions and their repercussions have gone some way to making up for it.
Less than two weeks after my first article went to print, the first of the protests began. Ashen-faced, my editor walked into my office (since my sudden shunt into the public eye, I had been granted my own office), and he flipped on one of the bank of television screens that made up one wall. Aerial footage: a mass of people gathered around the front elevation of the Westbridge Testing Station. Their voices were drowned out by the rhythmic whirr of a helicopter rotor. He flicked through another couple of channels. Each told the same story. Up and down the country, outside every Scientific Testing Station, the same scene. A voice-over cut in: '... while no official spokesmen for the demonstrators have yet come forward to issue a statement, it is unsurprisingly assumed that the events we are witnessing here today are as a direct result of this month's damning exposé by National Witness correspondent, Christie Heller. Heller's recent stand against the...' Feeling suddenly weightless and insubstantial, the remote control in my hand the only thing in the world that seemed real, I turned the television off. The TV reporter's voice was replaced by static silence.
All my editor said to me was: 'I hope to God you know what you've started.'
By one of those bizarre coincidences that seem to happen all the time, the head office of The Witness, now home to 'the nation's most intrepid and relevant reporter[2]' was located a mere twenty minute walk from Westbridge Testing Station. Within five minutes of seeing the television footage, I was out of the office and on the streets, running as fast as I could until I could feel my heart pounding in my head in time with every footfall. I didn’t know myself why I was going, whether my motivation was professional or personal. Was I here as a journalist to cover a story, or out of a sense of responsibility to oversee a chain of events I had set in motion?
Why now? Why me? A country too tired and impassive to revolt for generations, suddenly up in arms because someone they'd never met had told them something they could have found out for themselves?
Closer to the station, closer to the eye of the storm.
I was still a street away from the testing station, but already a few of the more cautious or less convicted protesters straggled in untidy groups. Some of them recognised me; someone shouted to me. I didn't stop.
The street ended and opened up onto what would, under usual circumstances, have been a wide, roomy, cobbled square, with the testing station set back, safe and secure behind its high barbed wire-topped fences and checkpoints and barriers. But these were not normal circumstances.
The crush of bodies filled the square to bursting.
Police, unaccustomed to dealing with protestors, had positioned themselves between the mob and the station, looking very much like people who wished they were somewhere else. They loitered, edgy and uncertain, behind riot shields in which they seemed to have little faith. I could see that they were all heavily armed.
As I approached, a ripple appeared to spread through the crowd of protestors and a path opened up in front of me. A hush descended on the mob which suddenly felt more like a congregation, and I heard my name whispered and echoed around the square in reverential tones. Too many eyes to count turned upon me, and I found myself pinned by their collective gaze, crushed by the weight of their expectations.
The police too were watching me, apprehensively, as though I might charge at them, or explode. The only person who didn't seem to be theorising as to what I might be about to do was me.
Slowly, every step a struggle, as though wading through treacle, I walked down the aisle that had opened before me, to the steps of the steps of the testing station. None of it seemed real.
Once I had gone as far as the police cordons would allow, I turned around and looked back at the sea of faces. I'd never seen a demonstration first-hand before, but I'd watched enough films and seen enough photographs (from other countries, other eras) to know that this wasn't how they were supposed to go. There was something important missing here, something indefinable. These people had forgotten how to protest. And, as would - in just a few short moments - become horribly, abundantly clear, the police had forgotten how to deal with protestors.
I opened my mouth to speak, although I hadn't a clue what I could possibly say. Should I tell them I had only tried to do what I thought was right? Should I commend them for being here, thank them for listening to me, send them all home? No matter what I decided to say now, I realised, it would no longer make any difference.
The thunder that had been building finally broke.
Since that revolt, which has been dubbed 'the Westbridge Square Massacre', I have heard innumerable conflicting accounts of what exactly happened next. Some say that a protester, drunk on the spirit of rebellion, pitched a loose cobble stone at the ranks of police, that the stone's sharp impact against a riot shield, sounding like a gunshot, prompted a nervous, inexperienced officer to open fire on the crowd. Some say that there had indeed been a gunman in the mob, that it was he who had fired first, and that the police retaliation, while extreme, had been justified.
I was there and I don't even pretend to know what happened. In any event, before I'd had a chance to say anything to the assembled throng, the air around me suddenly erupted into a rage of screams and bullets. Chaos engulfed the square, as too many tightly-wound tempers snapped and a full-scale riot broke out. People fell to the ground to be trampled underfoot by their fellow protestors, bodies peppered with new, bleeding holes tripped fleeing feet. Skulls cracked under the blows of police batons. By the time reinforcements arrived, it was already over. The demonstrators had been decimated. Those who had not yet taken flight were no longer able to, sprawled in bloody puddles on the cobbles of the square, slumped insensibly against police blockades. I had been buffeted, bruised, caught in the cross-current as the two opposing sides had clashed around me, but I found myself unable to move of my own volition. As the crowds ebbed, I stood rooted, committing to memory every broken body, every crimson smear on every riot shield, until heavy hands took hold of me and there was a sharp chemical hiss. My eyes burned, blinded, a pain like nothing I'd known before, and I could hear myself screaming as though from a long way away. I recalled Naomi Jane Whitworth and the industrial bleach. Then something unseen hit my temple hard and the world reeled away from me.
I came to in a cell: a glorified concrete box, metal bars on one side, a narrow, uncomfortable-looking bench running the length of the opposite wall. The place stank of urine and vomit, stale sweat and fear.
I was cold and alone. And I hurt.
When I tried to raise my head, a searing pain flared behind and between my eyes. For a couple of seconds, everything turned horrifically, brilliantly white. My stomach lurched, out of my control, and I retched wetly, adding to the cell’s unpleasant sour-sick smell.
Once I had stopped heaving and the pain had subsided to a more moderate level, I attempted a more thorough appraisal of my new surroundings. There was little to be added to my initial assessment. On closer inspection, I noted that there was quite a lot of blood on the floor where I had been lying. At least some of it had to be mine. There was blood in amid the vomit too, as well as a tooth, looking lost and unnatural.
There was no window in the cell. Set into the concrete ceiling, behind a metal grille, a strip light was either switched off or broken. The only illumination was a dull, headachy yellow light, the colour of a bad hangover, that slanted into the cell between the bars. There was no way of telling what time it was. I checked my wrist, but unsurprisingly, my watch was gone.
Footsteps approached, echoing along the hall outside. A guard came into view and stopped outside the cell. He threw a newspaper through the bars at me. It hit the side of my head, eliciting another blaze of pain in my wrecked face, before landing in the mix of blood, sick and sputum on the floor. ‘Celebrity Journalist Held in Custody: Heller Charged with Incitement to Riot’.
As it turned out, incitement to riot was just one of a long list of charges (including resisting arrest) that they threw at me: they, the nameless, faceless powers that be, the invisible, intangible few. Not all of the charges stuck, but they didn’t need to. The trial - a foregone conclusion - passed by like a surreal bad dream. I was sentenced to twelve months. That is to say, I was sentenced to death.
Following my conviction, I was transferred to HMP New Reading, one of the glut of prisons that had sprouted across the British countryside in the early 2020s, to accommodate the nation’s seemingly ever-increasing criminal element. Squat and sprawling, an ugly, grey blemish on the picturesque
I am writing this (which will more than likely be my last ever dissertation) from my cell at New Reading. For the time being, I am alone.
So far, I have not been subjected to the tortures of the Testing Station, but have been assured that a ‘special programme’ is being put into place for me at Westbridge. This is due to commence in two week’s time. In the meantime, every measure has been taken to restore me to full health. It transpired that I sustained three broken ribs in the riot, a hairline fracture to my jaw, some internal injuries. I have received treatment for all of these. It seems to be of the utmost importance to my captors that I am quite repaired before I am to be completely broken.
Regulation here dictates that two people share each cell. To date, I have outlived three cellmates. The first two I tried to get to know, albeit briefly, until they were carted off to Westbridge, brought back lobotomised, cauterised, paralysed, amputated, and then they were replaced. By the third cellmate, I knew better than to bother.
He lasted a little longer than the other two. They all used to scream in their sleep, after their first visits to Westbridge. To begin with, it used to wake me up. After a while, I learned to sleep through. I can’t decide which is worse.
Now I share my cell with a man called McGovern. Had things turned out slightly differently for him, with an education and a little more discipline, I don’t doubt that McGovern would have made a fine addition to our nation’s body of scientific researchers. Convicted of the murders of two adults and seven children (which he is always more than happy to discuss, at great length), he has a capacity for sadism and a kind of sick ingenuity that would make him a potent asset at any testing station. However, he made the decision to go freelance, as it were, got caught, and now we find ourselves on roughly the same side.
I just wish he wouldn’t talk so much. Every day, non-stop, he speaks in a slow drawl about what he seems to consider his glory days. He talks more for his own benefit, I think than for mine, but I still have to hear it. Incessantly and with meticulous attention to every horrific detail, he recounts the series of inhuman acts that he visited upon his victims. His voice is a constant, steady monotone, his pitch and tempo only fluctuating when he reaches a part of his story of which he is particularly fond. He preferred the children, he says. After killing three children he’d felt that he needed a change, so murdered the owner of a local convenience store, along with his wife. He’d held the couple hostage in the flat above the shop for three days before he finally killed them both. He was creative and resourceful in the extreme, to the point that police pathologists had to resort to DNA testing to confirm the identities of the two bodies when they were found in their home a few short days later.
Not as good as the children though, he says. It had been fun and good practice, but his heart hadn’t really been in it.
I’ve started to miss the screaming that used to wake me in the night. It was easier to block out than this.
Two weeks until they take me to Westbridge. Fourteen days. Three hundred and thirty-six hours 'til payback time. I wonder what they have in mind for me.
Unless... No.
There's a way out, but not one I can really allow myself to consider.
My stint as a Test Co-ordinator at Westbridge taught me more than I ever wanted to know about the abattoir that lies behind the eyes of men like McGovern. But it also taught me other things, about the station itself, about floor plans and protocols, the whereabouts of emergency exits.
It's not a real plan. It's barely even an idea.
***
The testing begins in three days. But I'm pretty sure the plan will work. I've thought about it every waking moment and dreamed about it the rest of the time. I'm almost certain, but I can't do it on my own.
I just need one other person and it would be almost perfect. A two-man bluff, a bit of sleight of hand, then we both disappear.
McGovern's stretched out on his bed, possibly asleep, possibly just pretending. I consider waking him.
Can I do that? I mean, can I really do this and live with it? A real man in this situation would surely just sit tight, take what was coming to him and try not to let them see that you're scared and hurting.
I think about my cellmate. I think about the things he's done and what he might still be doing if it wasn't for these walls and bars. I think about the way he smiles when he talks about children.
And then I remember the bleach, the needles, the sick mingled smells of anti-septic and fear. I remember Naomi's eyes.
We're not really victims. This isn't about a big bad government trying to crush our spirits. We find ourselves where we are (you, more than likely safe in a house with alarms and deadbolts; me, in a cell with a remorseless killer, and probably about to die), not through the actions of an evil, unseen oppressor, but through our own inaction. There's no Big Brother, really: no Man to fight. The situation has not been forced upon us by a malevolent dictator. This has happened to us because we let it. It's the way of governments to push people as far as people are willing to be pushed. And we never pushed back.
I hope McGovern pays for the terrible things he has done in his life. I hope he's caught before he can cause more destruction and pain. I pray that somehow, my motives justify my means.
But first of all, I hope this works.
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