Photo by Jenni Fagan
There are people with real names and there are those who will never know such a thing. Those with real names have had them called out loud in the valley of their soul. Those people are not the property of weeping angels. I have an angel assigned solely to weep by me day and night. The river of an angels tears is a damned thing. A cursed dash of the darkest rapids. The creatures that swim there! Winged eels with electric teeth. Octopi in buttonhole suits. They see my faded scales. I sit by their mirror smoking. I am unafraid of damnation. Such a thing was foretold for me. There are those with addresses and amalgamations of numbers and streets they know for some time. I have never known anything for long. It isn’t my way. There are those who have something they may call home and it may be bad or it may be good but they are not tied to it by invisible ribbons or bows. They will have seen it. They will have slept in it. Their feet understand they must return their owner to there and so that is where they go. The bones of my feet ache. They resent shoes. They resent places. They want to return to the river. There are those that are vouched for by others who have known them since they were a drunken night, or since an uncle danced in a way that his not yet conceived a nephew would later copy his particular show of movement (or lack of) whichever it may be. There are those who are defended by mother to suspicious father. There are those who have people who know them. There are those who sit with those they know under to the glare of nurses inspection. When they stand before teachers and bus drivers and the tyranny of all other children there are those who are in some way vouched for and then there are those that are not. No concept of what it means to truly know their face in another eyes, or to actually have the right to even a few letters they should be recognised by. Or perhaps another human who knows them for more than a second or a day. Raised by people paid to keep them for a contracted time. There are those who feel death may be their only truthful companion. They have a longing to return at all times. Even when they do not know where that place might be exactly — that they could return to. So they do not! There are those who are considered suspicious by nearly all who encounter them on some deep and primal level. Like foundlings, or fairies, or any other being who arrives unknown — their presence can incite revulsion or cruelty or pity at best. If lucky their presence might even incite care. They are an open wound. Lacking the kind of a skin that can protect from bacteria. Devoid of layers. They pass without concealment. Those who will never have the right to a name! I am of those. Somehow always assumed to be guilty, unworthy, most certainly contagious. We must be contained. I gave you kindness, what did you take from me? That’s what they often say. It is not often kindness that they have given. The things they have done would render the river of the damned even more impenetrable than it already is. They will always deny it. What they did, they will always blame the one to whom it has been done to. Always! I never met one of them or they or those kinds who would not say I was a liar, they said it to themselves, they said it to everyone else but most hideously — they said it repeatedly for their entire lives to me — so here is my lie, you may read it as truth but it would not be, it would be more than truth, it would be certainty. To those who will also not-be-named I must point out — I did not believe them then and I do not now.
I know words.
I know terrors.
I know monsters.
The truth of irrevocable realities — do not belong to them: cannot be named by them: cannot be contained by them — truth is the most garish of foundlings, it is the eternal spirit companion of weeping angels.
This is my imprint.
It belongs to me.
. . .
Dr Jenni Fagan is an award-winning, critically acclaimed novelist, poet and artist. Published in global translations the author of four fiction novels, one non-fiction memoir, eight poetry collections, exhibitions, adaptations and with another two new fiction novels due out next year. She has won The Gordon Burn Prize 2025, was a Granta Best of British Novelist (a once in a decade accolade), Scottish Author of the Year and has been on lists from The Women’s Prize, BBC International Short Story Prize, The Sunday Times, Encore and more. Fagan has worked extensively with vulnerable groups including those in prison, and the care system where she herself grew up. Described as The Patron Saint of Literary Street Urchins, Fagan’s work responds to the centre always from the margins and without compromise.
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