Good Morning, Sparrows

Suitable for: Adult. Contains child exploitation, drug use, death, psychological abuse, neglect

The river that year had the colour of weak tea left to stand, and the flat that looked down upon it stood on the forty-first floor of a tower the colour of a clean bone. It was a good address, or it had been; the brochures had once promised river light and a concierge and a sky that opened. The sky had since closed. A low brown weather sat over London like a lid on a pot, and through it the morning came up grey and reluctant, and into that greyness, at six o'clock precisely, the little red lights began to wake.

There were a great many of them. They lived in the corners of the ceilings and in the spines of the bookshelves and behind the two-way mirror in the hall, and in the kitchen there were nine, and in the bathroom there were two, which the family lawyers had described in a memorandum as the legal minimum consistent with content integrity. When the lights came on they came on softly, the way a cat opens one eye, and then they held, unblinking, and the flat that had been a home for the length of one dark hour became again what it truly was, which was a studio, which was a shop, which was a small bright factory whose only product was a boy.

The boy was called Sonny. That was the name the world knew, and the world knew it very well; it was stitched onto pyjamas and printed onto lunchboxes and sung, in a jingle of four ascending notes, by some hundreds of millions of children who had never met him and never would. He was thirteen years old that spring, or fourteen; the question was harder to answer than it ought to have been, because Sonny had been broadcast since before he could remember, since before he could speak, since the very afternoon he was carried home from the hospital in a blanket the brand had chosen for its photogenic yellow, and a life lived entirely in front of a lens has a way of smoothing out, of running together, so that the boy could no longer find in himself the ordinary milestones by which other people fix their ages. He knew his birthdays only as episodes. He had watched them back. He could tell you, of any year of his life, what the cake had looked like and what the sponsor had been, but he could not always tell you whether a thing had happened to him or merely been shown to him happening, and this confusion, which the clinics had a name for and which the family did not discuss, sat in him like a stone in a shoe.

He woke before the lights, as he always did, in the few cool minutes the schedule allowed him, and he lay still and listened to the building breathe. This was the only part of the day that was his. He had worked out, some time ago, that if he kept his eyes shut and did not move, the room would believe he was still asleep, and for as long as that lasted he was no one's, he was unrecorded, he was simply a body in a bed in the dark with a heart going in it. He would have stayed there for ever if he could. But the schedule did not allow for ever. The schedule allowed eleven minutes, and then the red lights opened their eyes, and Sonny opened his, and arranged on his face, before he was fully awake, the expression the morning required: a wide, blameless, sunrise gladness, the gladness that had built the tower and bought the river view and paid for the lights that were watching him be glad.

"Morning, sparrows," he said, to the ceiling, to the room, to the eleven million who would watch this within the hour. "Did you sleep? I slept brilliant."

He had not slept brilliantly. But the word was in the script, and the script was the world, and a boy does not argue with the world.

It is worth explaining, for those who came after and find the whole arrangement difficult to credit, how such a thing was permitted to happen, and the short answer is that it was permitted because it was profitable and because no one with the power to forbid it could be troubled to.

There had been, in the old days, money in children. Not the children themselves, exactly, but the watching of them; an advertiser would pay handsomely to set his sweets and his plastic toys in front of an audience too young to know it was being sold to. Then came the crash the industry called the COPPAcalypse, a tightening of the rules around the gathering of data from the very young, and the easy money fell away as suddenly as a floor giving out. The platforms did not die. They adapted, as the platforms always did, in the cold quick way of things that have no body to tire and no conscience to trouble them. If they could no longer sell to children, they would sell the children themselves, and to do that they needed the children to be worth watching, and so the algorithm, which was the true author of every life in the tower, began to learn what made people watch.

It learned that people did not, in the end, much care to watch a child be happy. Happiness was thin gruel. What held them, what made the little progress bar of their attention run green and full, was a child in difficulty: a child crying, a child frightened, a child confessing some small private shame, a child whose feelings had got loose and could be watched the way one watches a house burn. The algorithm did not understand any of this. It understood only the numbers, and the numbers said, in their flat and pitiless way, more of that, and so more of that was what the children were made to give.

This trade had a name. The clever people who studied it called it playbour, a marriage of play and labour, the work that does not look like work because it is done by a child and wears the mask of a game. In other countries there were laws against it, or the beginnings of laws; in one nation a portion of what a child earned was locked away in trust until the child was grown, and in another the parents of such children were obliged to bank the money where their hands could not reach it. In England there was nothing. England had decided, in the manner of a country looking the other way while whistling, that what a family did with its own children behind its own door was its own affair, and that the labour laws written for the mills and the mines a century before had no business with a boy who was only, after all, playing. And so the playbour went unregulated and untaxed and unschooled, and The Sparrows, which was the name under which Sonny's family did business, operated with perfect legality as what they in fact were, which was a company of three directors trading in the daily life of a child, retaining for themselves the whole of what he earned, every penny of it, against the day they would no longer be able to earn it.

The two senior directors were his mother and his father. On the channel they were Mum and Dad, and they were warm; off it they were Lena and Marcus, and they were efficient. They loved Sonny. This must be said, because it was true, and because it was the most terrible part. They loved him the way a man loves a field that has been good to him: with gratitude, and with a careful eye on the weather, and with the steady underlying knowledge that a field is a thing you work.

The third director was not family, though he came to seem more so than the family, and his name was Gareth Pryce.

Pryce was the platform's man. His title changed from year to year, Head of Talent, Head of Creator Development, Head of Family Partnerships, but the title was a coat he put on over the same body, and the body's business was to keep the numbers green. He was a soft-spoken man of perhaps fifty, with a way of crouching down to a child's height to speak to them, which the parents found charming and which Sonny had learned to dread, because nothing good was ever said at that height. Pryce never raised his voice. He never needed to. He had understood, earlier and more completely than anyone, that the surest way to own a child is not to frighten him but to convince him that you alone understand him, and Pryce had set himself patiently to that work for as long as Sonny could remember.

"Your mum and dad," he would say, crouched, his voice a low confiding rustle that the microphones were never quite close enough to catch, "they love you, of course they do. But they see the business, don't they. They've got the mortgage on their minds. I'm the only one in this whole circus who looks at you and sees the talent. Sees the boy. You can tell me things you can't tell them. That's what I'm for."

And Sonny, who had no one else, who had never in his life had a friend the platform did not assign him, believed it, or believed it enough, which is all that was ever required. He brought Pryce his small fears and his smaller hopes, and Pryce received them gravely, and nodded, and made him feel, for the length of the conversation, less alone; and then in the production meeting Sonny was not invited to, Pryce would lay those fears and hopes on the table like a hand of cards and say, here, this is the thread to pull, this is where the boy is soft, and they would write the next month's content around the soft place. That was the whole of his tenderness. It was a tool for finding where to press.

The pressing, that spring, had a particular shape. The audience that paid best was no longer the children Sonny's own age; it was older, lonelier, and it did not want to watch him play. It wanted to watch him feel. Pryce scripted him accordingly into a long sequence the channel called Sonny Opens Up, in which the boy, alone in shot, lit warmly, was made to sit and disclose to the camera the contents of his heart: his worries, his sadnesses, the things that kept him awake. The audience loved it. They felt, watching, that they knew him, that they were his confidants, his secret friends; they did not consider that a confidence cannot be both a confidence and a broadcast, and that a boy who is paid to hand over his inmost feelings to eleven million strangers will, in not very long, find that he has none of his own left. Sonny found exactly this. He gave his feelings away nightly until the cupboard was bare, and then, when the schedule called for more, he learned to manufacture them, to summon on cue a wobble of the lip and a brightness of the eye, and the dreadful thing, the thing he could never have said aloud, was that the manufactured feelings and the real ones had begun to taste the same. He no longer knew which was which. He was a house with the lights on and no one home.

Wren came in the autumn, to fix the numbers.

The numbers had been sliding. A channel built on a single child has a flaw written into it from the start, which is that the child insists on growing, and the audience that had loved the round-cheeked infant felt, obscurely, betrayed by the long-limbed boy who replaced him, and drifted off in search of someone smaller. The solution was an old one in the trade. You acquired a smaller someone. Lena and Marcus travelled a long way to a country Sonny could not have found on a map, and they came back with a girl of five with enormous still eyes and a vocabulary of perhaps forty words, none of them English, and they gave her a yellow blanket for the photographs and a new name for the channel, and the name was Wren.

Her arrival was the most-watched broadcast in the channel's history. Forty million people watched a frightened child be carried across the threshold of a flat full of red lights and told, by strangers, in a language she did not speak, that she was home. The numbers went green and stayed green for a month. Pryce was very pleased.

Sonny loved her at once, helplessly, the way you love a smaller animal that has been put into your care, and he tried in his clumsy scripted way to make her welcome; but he had only the one set of tools, the broadcasting tools, and so his welcomes came out strange and bright and aimed slightly past her at the lens, and the little girl, who understood none of the words but all of the wrongness, watched him with her enormous eyes and was not comforted. She was a clever child. It took her only a few weeks to learn what the red lights meant, and a few more to understand that there was no part of the day they did not mean it, and somewhere in her second season she stopped performing. She would not smile on cue. She would not say the line. She would sit in the middle of the bright set with her arms folded and her chin down and simply refuse, with the whole obstinate weight of her small body, to be content, and no bribe or coaxing or threat could move her, and the numbers, which had loved her, began to cool.

Marcus and Lena did what the trade did. They turned the refusal itself into content. The channel pivoted, as the language of the meetings put it, to discipline, and the audience, it transpired, liked discipline even better than it had liked the homecoming. They liked to watch the parents be firm. They liked, most of all, the new recurring item in which Mum and Dad sat the family down and discussed, sorrowfully, for the cameras, with many a glance at brave little Wren, whether the placement was working out, whether some children were simply not suited to family life, whether the kindest thing for everyone might not be to find Wren a new home where she would be happier. Rehoming, they called it, the word you use for a dog. They had no intention of doing it, or no settled intention; it polled too well to spend. But they let the threat hang in the bright air of the flat like a smell, and they let the cameras catch Wren understanding it, her enormous eyes going from face to face, and the numbers came roaring back, greener than ever, and Pryce sent his congratulations.

Only Sonny understood what it was doing to her, because only Sonny was awake at three in the morning when she crept into his room and stood at the foot of his bed, not crying, too frightened to cry, and he understood in that moment with a cold adult clarity far beyond his years that the one thing he could do to keep her was to be, himself, so flawless, so green, so endlessly and bottomlessly watchable that the family would never need to spend the threat, that his own performance was the wall between his sister and the door. So he performed. He opened up and opened up and opened up. He gave them everything he had and then he gave them things he did not have, and he held the wall, night after night, with his own emptied-out heart, and he told no one, least of all Pryce, who would only have found a way to script it.

The trouble with a wall built of a boy's feelings is that the audience, in time, learns to tell the false from the true, and begins to want the true, and the algorithm, sniffing the want, demands it.

It came to a head over the dog.

The dog was called Biscuit, and he was the one creature in the flat who did not perform, being a dog, and Sonny loved him with the undivided uncomplicated love he could give to nothing human, because Biscuit had never once watched him. The audience knew this. Pryce had seen to that; the boy's love for the dog was the realest thing the channel possessed, and a real thing, in that economy, exists only to be spent. The schedule that week called for genuine tears, hysterical tears, the kind that could not be summoned by any wobble of a practised lip, because the audience had grown connoisseurs and could no longer be fooled, and Pryce, crouching to Sonny's height with his soft confiding rustle, explained none of this. He simply set the scene.

What they told Sonny was that Biscuit was sick. What they told him, with grave faces, with a vet's letter that was not from a vet, was that Biscuit was very sick, that there was nothing to be done, that the kind thing, the only thing, was to let him go, and that it would happen that afternoon, while Sonny was at the other end of the flat, and that he should say his goodbyes now. They filmed the goodbyes. Then they took the dog away into a back room, alive and perfectly well and bound for a long weekend at a kennel in Surrey, and they left Sonny alone in the bright set to wait, and at the appointed moment, from behind the false wall, an assistant played through a speaker the recorded sound of a single sharp report, a sound like a door slamming, a sound like the end of the world.

The tears were real. They got their tears. The boy came apart in a way that no script could have written, a way that broke through whatever was left of the smooth broadcast surface and showed, for ninety unbearable seconds, the actual child underneath, screaming, and it was the most successful thing the channel ever made, and it is the thing for which, in the years after, when people came at last to be ashamed of all of it, the clip was most often shown. They did not tell him the truth for a long time. When they did, when Biscuit came trotting back from Surrey unharmed, it did not mend anything; it had broken in Sonny some final fitting that held the world to its meanings, so that ever after a thing could be true and false at once, a death could be a stunt, a grief could be a number, and he moved through his days now in a kind of fog, jumping at sounds, unable to be sure of anything, and the clinic the parents quietly engaged prescribed a small white tablet to be taken at night, to let him sleep, to calm the body that would no longer believe it was safe. He was fourteen, or thirteen. He took the tablet. He slept. The lights watched him sleep, and in the morning he woke and arranged his face and said good morning to the sparrows, and the numbers were green.

The meet-and-greet was Pryce's idea, to celebrate the channel's hundred-millionth subscriber, and it was held in a dead shopping centre on the eastern edge of the city, a vast vaulted ruin of a place from the age when people had gone out to buy things, its fountains dry, its escalators stopped, its great glass roof furred brown with the weather.

There were no rules for such an event, because there were no rules for any of it; a footballer or a singer would have had barriers and stewards and a hundred conditions written by lawyers, but Sonny was not a footballer or a singer, Sonny was a family channel, and a family channel was understood to be a wholesome and a harmless thing, and so the only preparation was a stage, and a banner, and a single bored security guard, and then the doors were opened to a crowd that no one had thought to count.

They came in their thousands. They had queued since the night before. They wore the pyjamas and carried the lunchboxes and sang, when Sonny appeared, the four ascending notes, all of them together, a hundred-throated hymn, and Sonny stood on the little stage in the brown light with Wren's hand in his and felt the love of the crowd come at him like weather, like a front moving in, and understood that it was not love. It had the shape of love and none of the safety. These people did not know him; they knew the boy in the ceiling, the boy who told them his secrets, and they felt, every one of them, that he was theirs, that they had a share in him, that the confidences he had sold them were a debt he owed them in person, and they pressed forward to collect. The single guard was swept aside like a reed. The crowd came up over the lip of the stage.

Pryce was at Sonny's ear, somehow, in the middle of it, soft and urgent. The numbers, he said, were astronomical. This was the moment. The crowd wanted a show, wanted the boy to give them something, wanted him to wade out into them, to be touched, to be held, to be passed hand to hand above their heads the way a crowd passes a thing it loves and means to tear; and Pryce wanted Sonny to do it, to go out into them, because it would be the most-watched footage in the history of the form. Go on, he rustled. They love you. Give them you.

And then Wren began to scream.

She had felt it before Sonny had, the way she always felt the wrongness first; the closing-in of the bodies, the smell of them, the hands, the noise, the brown light coming down through the filthy glass, and she went rigid and then she went down, folding into herself on the floor of the stage with her hands over her ears and her eyes screwed shut and a high thin sound coming out of her that cut clean through the hundred-throated hymn, a sound of pure animal terror, the sound of a small creature being killed. The crowd, sensing content, surged closer. Phones came up like a field of flowers turning to the sun. Pryce, calculating even now, half-turned toward the better shot.

And Sonny picked his sister up off the floor and ran.

There was a storage cupboard behind the dead escalators, a low concrete room that had once held cleaning things and held now only dark, and Sonny got the door open and pulled Wren inside and got it shut and found, blessedly, a bolt, and shot it, and then the two of them were alone in a blackness so complete it had a texture, and the noise of the crowd came through the door reduced to a sea-sound, a far-off booming, and there were, for the first time in either of their lives, no cameras.

Sonny understood this slowly. He sat on the cold floor with his back against the door and his sister shaking against him, and he registered, like a man patting his pockets for a thing he is sure he has lost, that no light was watching. The dark held no red eyes. Whatever he did in here would not be seen, would not be counted, would not be green or red, would simply be done, by him, in the world, the way other people did things all day long without a thought. He had never had it before. He had imagined, in the eleven stolen minutes of his mornings, that it would feel like freedom.

It did not feel like freedom. It felt like falling.

Wren was crying now, properly, the terror passing off into ordinary grief, and she needed, Sonny knew, to be comforted; that was the simplest thing in the world, the first thing, the thing every parent does over every cradle since the start of people, you take the crying child and you make the small sounds and you say the small words and the child is soothed. He opened his mouth to do it. And there was nothing there. He reached down into himself for the words and the words were all script; every tender thing he knew how to say was a line he had been given, aimed past the person at the lens, and here in the dark there was no lens, and without the lens he found that he did not know how to do it, did not possess, had perhaps never possessed, the plain unwatched human act of comforting another person for no reason but that they were sad. He had been given everything a child could be given except this. He held his sister in the dark and he could not soothe her, and the discovery went into him deeper than the dog, deeper than anything, the discovery that they had taken even this, that he had been so completely turned into a thing to be watched that he no longer worked when no one was looking.

Outside, the sea-sound of the crowd was changing. He could hear it. He had a broadcaster's ear for an audience and he could hear the love going out of it, the patience curdling, the attention beginning its terrible drift, and he knew, with the cold clarity that had come to him the night Wren stood at the foot of his bed, exactly what was being decided out there in the brown light. A boy who hides is a boy who is not watched. A boy who is not watched is a channel losing numbers. A channel losing numbers is a family that must cut its costs, and the cost it had already, on camera, many times, in front of forty million people, marked for cutting was the small one, the difficult one, the one who would not smile, the one now sobbing in his arms in the dark. If he stayed hidden he kept his moment of being no one, and he lost the wall, and he lost her. They would rehome the dog.

He sat in the dark a little longer. It could not have been more than a minute. He would think of it, in the years he had left, as the only minute of his life that had ever been entirely his, and he would think of what he did at the end of it, and he would understand that it was the bravest and the worst thing he ever did, and that they were the same thing.

He reached up. He found the bolt. He slid it back.

He picked his sister up, and he arranged on his face, in the dark, where no one could yet see it, the wide blameless sunrise gladness, and he opened the door, and he carried her out of the only privacy either of them had ever known and back into the blinding storm of the flashbulbs, where the crowd, seeing him, roared its love, and the numbers, somewhere, in the only place that was real, went green.

Five years is a long time in that trade. It is nothing at all to the rest of the world, but to the algorithm, which lives faster than we do, it is a geological age, and over the course of it the algorithm did to Sonny the one thing it does to everyone in the end, which is that it grew bored.

It is no one's fault. That is the worst of it; there is no villain to hang it on. Pryce did not turn on him. The audience did not turn on him. They simply, by tens of thousands and then by tens of millions, found someone newer, someone smaller, someone whose feelings were not yet spent, and the green bar that had been the whole weather of Sonny's life began, gently, without malice, to fade. The river view went first; the family moved to a lesser tower, and then to no tower at all, to a low damp flat in a district where the smog came down to the level of the streets and sat in the alleys like standing water. Wren was rehomed in the end, quietly, off camera, when the discipline content too lost its shine; Sonny did not learn where she had gone, and the not-knowing was a wound he carried under all the other wounds, and never showed.

And then Sonny himself aged out. He turned twenty, and twenty does not poll. The contract was not renewed. There was a final meeting, at which Pryce crouched to no one's height because there was no longer a child in the room, and shook Sonny's hand, and said some warm true-sounding things, and left, and that was the whole of the severance. The channel went dark. The red lights, in whatever flat they now lived, closed their eyes for good.

The money was gone. This was the part the law had made possible, the part the whistling country had looked away from: the millions the boy had earned, every penny of every year, had been the company's and the company was the parents' and the parents had spent it, on the towers and the river views and the long lavish living of the years of plenty, in the entire and untroubled confidence of people who have done nothing illegal, because they had not. There was no trust. There was no locked account. There was a young man of twenty with the most recognised face of his childhood and not a pound to his name and no schooling worth the word and no skill in all the world except the one, the being watched, for which there was no longer any demand. When the views stopped, the parents, who loved him, who had always loved him, found that they could not afford him, and did the thing the field does to the field hand at the end of the season, which is to let him go.

He came apart slowly. The clinics, when he passed through them, used the careful language of withdrawal, and it was apt, for being perceived had been the drug of his whole life, mainlined since infancy, and the body that had been raised on it could no more live without it than a body raised on any other drug, and when the eyes went away he felt the lack of them as a junkie feels the lack, a craving in the marrow, a screaming absence where the watching had been. He chased the feeling in the usual places. He found, in drink, and in the chemical kicks that drink led on to, a thin grey imitation of the old high, the old sense of being lit up and looked at and real, and he chased it down through the lessening flats and the lessening company into the standing water of the alleys, and the same papers that had cooed over the yellow blanket now ran his photograph under the word trainwreck, and tutted, and turned the page, and not one of them, not a single one in all that great machine that had eaten him, recognised the thing in front of them for what it plainly was, which was a wound, a child's wound, dressed in a grown man's ruin.

He died in the early spring, in a squat in the east of the city, not far, as it happened, from the dead shopping centre, on a night when the rain came down through the brown air and washed nothing clean. He was twenty-two, or twenty-three; the question was harder to answer than it ought to have been. He died as he had spent the only free minute of his life, in a dark room with no light watching, and there is a mercy in that, perhaps, if you look for one, that the last of him was at last entirely his own.

The authorities came in the morning. They found a young man, well-nourished once, you could tell, gone now to the grey thinness of the streets, and they went through the squat for anything that might say who he was, and found nothing, no card, no letter, no name. They photographed the face. It was a striking face, an oddly familiar face, and more than one of them paused over it with the nagging sense that they had seen it somewhere, long ago, in some other life, perhaps in childhood, perhaps on a lunchbox, but the sense would not resolve, and there was a great deal of work that morning, and in the end they wrote on the tag the only thing they could be sure of, and tied it to his toe.

Unknown male, it said. Approx. 22 years. No identifying marks.

He had been watched, every waking moment of his childhood, by more eyes than have ever attended an emperor or a saint; eleven million in a morning, a hundred million at his height, more pairs of eyes than there are stars you can see with the naked one on the clearest night the old world ever had. And he went into the ground with none of them. He went in as no one. The machine that had known his every secret had not troubled to keep his name, because a name is a thing you keep for a person, and he had never, to any of them, for one single hour of his short bright watched-up life, been quite that.

The river, that morning, was the colour of weak tea left to stand. The lid sat on the city. And somewhere out in the brown weather, on ten million screens, a small new face was opening its eyes, and arranging its expression, and saying good morning to the sparrows, and the numbers, the only thing that had ever been real, were going green.

Authors Note

This story is fiction, but it is not invention. It was drawn, loosely, from the real lives of the child stars of Hollywood's past and the child stars of social media today: a single cycle of exploitation we keep repeating, and have not yet chosen to learn from.

I considered letting the darkest part of that history onto the page. The real record holds a strand of sexual exploitation as well, and though it is true and well documented, I decided it was a line that should not be explored here.

What troubles me most is how little we seem to have learned. The same thing is happening now, in plain sight, to the children of today's family vloggers: monetised from the cot, worked without rest, watched by millions. I have deliberately named none of them, and I will not. The figures listed below are grown or long gone, and their stories are part of the historical record; the children being filmed today are still children, and they deserve protection, not one more stranger turning them into an example. The point is the pattern, never the child.

If these pages have moved you, I would ask one thing of you: go and read about the children themselves, not the bright versions that were sold to us. You might begin with these names.

Jackie Coogan

Jackie Cooper

Shirley Temple

Bobby Driscoll

They were not the faces on the lunchboxes. They were children, the things done to them were real, and they deserve to be known as themselves. We have been here before. We need not stay.