We were throwing away our lives, so they sent us to Roefinn School.

It’s not really a school at all. Real schools have GCSEs and (if you get that far) A-Levels to pass or fail at the end. Roefinn has exams every week, but they don’t mean anything outside Roefinn. Real schools have open evenings, concerts, sports days and other parent friendly activities. Parents are advised not to visit Roefinn, it might upset them. Real schools have government inspectors to make sure we’re all being taught right. The government pretends Roefinn doesn’t exist, like its pupils. Real schools let you leave once you turn sixteen. Roefinn keeps you for as long as it takes. I don’t think anyone has grown old here, but it’s technically possible.

In fact Roefinn School is just Roefinn Institution given a nicer name. I suppose it’s better for our parents that way. My mum can sit on her leather corner group, sipping decaffeinated coffee from a white china coffee cup, and tell all her friends,

“My daughter had to go to a special school.”

And all her business friends can sit on the matching settee and armchairs, sipping their decaffeinated coffees, and nod sympathetically.

“How simply terrible for you. But at least they’ll have specialists there, people who can take care of her properly. I’m sure she’s very happy.”

And my mum can nod and smile delicately and talk about business and build bridges and, when her oh-so-sympathetic friends leave, my mum will have three more contacts and three thousand more pounds in the bank. Then my mum can clear away the cups and saucers, pick every spot of dust off every surface, because the cleaner never does it right, and if she does think of me, it’ll only to be glad I’m not there to ruin the cream carpet…again. That’s what my mum is like.

I got her a T-shirt for her thirty-fifth birthday. It was black and had “Rich Bitch” written on it in sparkly bits. Dad had to hide a smile when she unwrapped it, but mum didn’t look impressed. Maybe even she realised it described her perfectly. Or maybe she just knew me well enough to know it wasn’t a joke. Certainly she never wore it. Even when I stole it from her drawer and gave it to my (then) best friend she didn’t say a word. I know it’s wrong to call your mum a bitch, but with mine it’s more of a scientific observation.

In case you can’t work out what Roefinn is by yourself, they actually tell you on your first day. Imagine me, 5 ft 4 of greasy skinned, semi-anorexic sixteen-year-old, sitting in a blue plastic chair with my ironed blond hair turning to static and my stuck-on nails digging little half-moon ditches in my palms. Sitting across from me, behind an imitation pine desk, is the fattest man I’ve ever seen. You know that fat man in the Monty Python sketch? The one who explodes when he’s given an after dinner mint by John Cleese. This guy was like him, only fatter…and with less hair. What little hair this man had left, he’d greased up and scraped over the top of his head like the trials of five slugs, as if this would stop the world noticing that he was as bald as a bad egg. As speckled as one too. I considered humming Humpty Dumpty, but decided against it. Fatty’s expression didn’t look like an invitation to be a smart-arse.

“Becky Sargent?”

I don’t know why he was asking, he had my file in front of him, complete with one of those cheap passport photos that make your skin go white and your spots go scarlet. I suppose it just gave him a kick to say my name in that sneery, nasally way, like he owned me. I mumbled back something that could’ve been yes, could’ve been no, could’ve been fuck-off-you-fat-bald-bastard. He went with yes.

“Do you know what this place is Becky?”

“No,” but I bet fifty quid you’re about to tell me.

“This place, this facility, is HELL.”

He said it with the air of one that had given this speech about a thousand times and was still proud of it. And yes, you could hear the capitals.

“It’s a specially designed hell, purpose built to take care of the likes of you, so that civilised society doesn’t have to.”

Meaning so my parents and teachers don’t have to.

“Don’t expect to be happy here, because you won’t.”

I wasn’t.

“Don’t expect your parents to come visit you, because they won’t”

Oh, surprise of the fucking century.

“And don’t expect the police to care if you get treated bad. The police don’t give a damn about this place and neither does the government. So from now on you play by our rules. Got that?”

I told him I’d got it. I lied. I didn’t really “get it” until later. Much later.

But what is Roefinn? I’ve said it’s not a school, and that’s true. I’ve said it’s an institution, but that can mean anything. As far as I know, there’s no other place in the country quite like Roefinn, and that makes it hard to describe unless you’ve been there. And if you have been there, god help you, because no one else will! When you’re outside Roefinn, it doesn’t exist. When you’re inside, it’s the only thing that does. I’ve never been to prison, but to be honest I don’t see how that could be as bad. At least you can get letters in prison. Cakes too, preferable with a lock-pick hidden inside. No one gets letters in Roefinn, or cakes. I’ve never quite worked out if this is because it’s against the rules or just that no one’s family bothers. I know mine wouldn’t. Anyway, I’m not sure there’s a lock-pick in the world that could get you out of Roefinn.

I suppose I should try to describe the place. At the centre of Roefinn is the Roundhouse, a circular stone structure built by some architect with more imagination than sense. At one point it was just an enormous open hall, the domed ceiling acting something like the whispering gallery at Westminster Abbey. In the end they divided it into three floors and gave the top two over to staff accommodation. The ground floor was left open, but they made the ceiling far too low. Stone floors, round walls and low ceilings make for some really weird acoustics. Even from five corridors away, you can still hear someone walking through the Roundhouse. Whether by chance or design, all corridors eventually lead to the Roundhouse, and there are a lot of corridors.

It seems like there hasn’t been a day since Roefinn was built that they haven’t been expanding it, adding offices, dormitories, canteens and classrooms. For some reason (maybe that crazy architect again) the new additions are always built to the left of the previous one, so the buildings spiral out from the Roundhouse, getting newer and brighter as stone is first replaced by red brick, then concrete, and finally, in the case of the entrance building, glass. A continuous curving passage runs through the entire snail-shell complex, but there are hundreds of other corridors connecting the rings together, all pointing, as best I could ever make out, towards the Roundhouse. All corridors lead to the Roundhouse. I often wonder about that.

I also wonder what sort of numbskull plans the numerous extensions. The buildings are joined together, but they don’t fit together, and in the gaps where brick doesn’t quite meet concrete are the Gardens. Not real gardens, most are too dark and too polluted for anything but weeds to grow, but they’re gardens to us all the same. Secret places, only reachable by climbing through windows or across roofs. Most are just tiny spaces between walls built at strange angles, ranging between the size of a wardrobe and that of a large kitchen table. Hidden away in these are dustbins that no one ever fills or empties; abandoned pieces of furniture, broken and weather stained; and the openings to blocked drains, where rats the size of terriers pick through the walled up rubbish. Those are fairly unpleasant when you discover them by accident, but they’re nothing next to the day I slithered off the algae coated roof of the biology department to find a grave at the bottom.

After recovering from the shock I tried looking for a name or date. There was a lot of writing on the stone but lichen made it mostly unreadable, even after some hard scrubbing with the sleeve of my jumper. I did however, manage to make out what looked like the Ten Commandments further down. It seemed a pretty strange thing to write on a gravestone, but then again it was a pretty strange place to bury someone. I supposed there must have been a graveyard here before Roefinn expanded, back before it was Roefinn. Must have been a majorly bent MP that allowed that one.

I had to rest my foot on the top of the gravestone to get back out again and I surprised myself by feeling a little guilty. Maybe my moral compass hadn’t quite died a death just yet.

That, with the exception of the grave, is what the vast majority of the Gardens are like. But a few of them are bigger and they’re the special ones, the real sanctuaries. There’re trees in a couple of them; pale, gangly trees that reach towards the light like Evangelicals at prayer. In a rare few there’s enough light and earth for twisted shrubs to grow, even flowers sometimes. In one I found a stone bench with a stone man reading a stone newspaper seated on it. There’s space beside him for another person, but it’s a little creepy sitting there and no one likes to hang around there for long. You keep expecting the man to turn the page.

The Garden most people use is called the Kitchen. Don’t ask me why. It’d been called that for a long time before I came to Roefinn. It’s by far the biggest of the Gardens. Fifteen foot by ten of cracked concrete and the toughest plants you’ll see this side of the Arctic Circle. A scum filled pond called the Kitchen Sink takes up half the space and a fruitless pear tree provides easy access from the second floor. If I could ask one question about Roefinn, it would be why on God’s Earth would someone bother to dig, seal and fill a pond that you can only get to by climbing out of the East window of Classics 4? It’s ridiculous, it’s pointless and I would often spend my Latin and Classics lessons looking down at the Kitchen Sink and wondering just what sort of melon-head the architect had been. In one particular Latin lesson, however, I had better things to worry about.

It was the spring of my first year at Roefinn. Birds, such as there were, were singing; the algae on the surface of the Kitchen Sink was blooming; and Ashtray had just thrown a stone into the side of my neck.