Hellsborough Exposed — madness

Netherland junkyard was an ecosystem for the mentally unwell — but then the whole world had broken backs and brains a long time ago.

"Once it has you, you're not a person anymore, you're a document - and documents get filed."

Thomas Bean and Dani Hinchcliffe surfaced from the River Dun bedraggled, half-naked, and with no memory of how they'd arrived — the last thing either recalled was accepting an inoculation against a ripperthroat airborne virus that came, as a sweetener, with a hit of rockcrust. That sweetener is now a primary item of suspicion. The murk, for once, was not the problem.

Hellsborough properties are documented to learn their occupants — not metaphorically, but physically: foam compression, appliance calibration, every surface slowly adjusting to the exact weight and warmth of whoever sits still long enough. Mrs Atherton's notepad, recovered from her vacated flat during the Hellsborough residential survey, charted this process in shrinking handwriting across several weeks. 'The flat is learning me the way the chair learned me,' she wrote, 'and I don't want to be learned anymore.' Her final entry was a single line. I haven't included it. I haven't forgotten it either.