was too cold.
'Hello. I was hoping you would come soon.'
'You haven't finished your water.'
'There's no hurry, is there? There are so many things I wanted to ask you.'
He made a faint guttural sound. I was shaking, but perhaps that was because I was so chilled. I couldn't imagine ever being warm again, or clean. Or free.
'I mean, here we are, two people alone in this place. We should get to know each other. Talk to each other.' He said nothing. I couldn't tell if he was even listening. I drew a breath and continued: 'After all, you must have chosen me for a reason. You seem like a man who has reasons, is that right? You're logical, I think. I like that. Logical' Was logical a word? It sounded all wrong.
'Go on,' he said.
Go on. Good. What should I say next? There was a sore patch above my lip. I put out the tip of my tongue to touch it; it felt like a cold sore. Perhaps my whole body was breaking out in sores and blisters. 'Yes. Logical. Purposely.' No. Definitely the wrong word. Try again. 'Purposeful. You're someone who is strong. Am I right?' There was a silence. I could hear him breathing hoarsely. 'Yes. I think I'm right. Men should be strong, though many are weak. Many,' I repeated. 'But I think you're lonely as well. People don't recognize your hopes. No, your strengths, I meant strengths, not hopes. Are you lonely?' But it was like dropping stones into a deep well. I spoke the stupid words and they disappeared into the darkness. 'Or do you like being alone?'
'Maybe.'
'We all need someone to love us, though,' I said. 'No one can be all alone.' I would do anything to survive, I thought. I'd let him hold me and fuck me and I'd even pretend I liked it. Anything, to live. 'And there must have been a reason you chose me, rather than somebody else.'
'Do you want to hear what I think? Eh? Do you?' He put a hand on my thigh. He rubbed his hand up and down.
'Yes. Tell me.' Oh, don't let me be sick and don't let me scream out loud.
'I think you haven't got a clue what you look like at the moment.' He gave his wheezy laugh. 'You think you can flirt with me, eh? Trap me like that, as if I'm stupid? But you've no idea what you look like, sweetheart. You don't look like a person at all. You haven't even got a face. You look like a-a-a thing. Or an animal. And you smell, too. You smell of piss and shit.' He laughed once more, and his hand on my thigh tightened until he was pinching me hard and I cried out in pain and humiliation.
'Abbie, who tried so hard,' he whispered. 'Kelly who cried and Abbie who tried. I can make you into a rhyme. Cried, tried, died. It's all the same to me, in the end.'
Cried, tried, died. Rhymes in the dark again. Time was running out. I knew it was. I imagined an hourglass with the sand falling through it in a steady stream. If you looked at it, the sand always seemed to fall faster as it reached the end.
He was lifting me off the ledge again. My toes buzzed with pins and needles and my legs felt as if they did not belong to me any more. They were stiff, like sticks, or not like sticks, like twigs that might snap at any moment. I stumbled and lurched and he held on to my arm to keep me upright. His fingers dug into my flesh. Perhaps they were leaving bruises there, four on top and one underneath. I could tell there was a light. It was dark grey not black inside the hood. He dragged me along the floor, then said: 'Sit. Bucket.'
He didn't bother to untie my wrists. He tugged down my trousers himself. I felt his hands on my flesh. I didn't care. I sat. I felt the metal rim under me and behind my back. I curled my fingers round it and tried to breathe calmly. When I'd finished, I stood up and he pulled up the trousers again. They were loose on me now. I took a kick at the bucket and sent it flying. I heard it hit his legs and tip. He grunted and I launched myself blindly in the direction of the grunt, screaming as hard as I could with the rag stuffed in my mouth. It didn't sound like a scream, but a shallow croaking noise. I hurtled into him, but it was like running into a solid wall. He put up an arm to stop me and I brought up my head and butted him in the chin. Pain filled my head; there was red behind my eyes.
'Oh,' he said. Then he hit me. And hit me again. He held me by the shoulder and he punched me in the stomach. 'Oh, Abbie,' he said.
I sat on the ledge. Where did I hurt? Everywhere. I could no longer tell which bit of me was which. Where the pain in my head stopped and the pain in my neck began; where the cold in my legs became the cold in my body; where the taste in my ulcerous mouth became the bile in my throat and the nausea in my stomach; where the sound ringing in my ears became the silence packed in around me. I tried to flex my toes but couldn't. I twisted my fingers together. Which fingers belonged to my right hand and which to my left?
I tried the times tables again. I couldn't even make it through the two times table. How was that possible? Even tiny children can do the two times table. They chanted it in class. I could hear the chanting inside my head but it didn't make any sense.
What did I know? I knew I was Abbie. I knew I was twenty-five. I knew it was winter outside. I knew other things too. Yellow and blue makes green, like the blue summer sea meeting the yellow sand. Crushed shells make sand. Melted sand makes glass; water in a glass tumbler, ice chinking. Trees make paper. Scissors, paper, stone. There are eight notes in an octave. There are sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week, fifty-two weeks in a year. Thirty days have September, April, June and November but I couldn't finish that one off.
I mustn't sleep. And yet I slept, falling into a shallow, muttering dream. Then I woke with a jerk because he was there beside me. There was no light this time. And no water. At first he said nothing, but I could hear him breathing. Then he began his muffled whispering in the darkness.
'Kelly. Kath. Fran. Gail. Lauren.'
I sat quite still. I didn't move at all.
'Kelly. Kath. Fran. Gail. Lauren.'
It was a shuffling drone. He repeated the five names over and again, and I sat there, with my head hung forward a bit as if I was still asleep. There were tears sliding over my cheeks, but he couldn't see that. They stung. I imagined them making tracks down my skin, like snail tracks. Silver.
Then he stood up and left and I went on crying silently in the dark.
'Drink.'
I drank.
'Eat.'
Four more spoonfuls of sweet sludge.
'Bucket.'
My name is Abbie. Abigail Devereaux. Please help me, someone. Please.
Nobody will help me.
Yellow butterfly. Green leaf. Please don't fly away.
He slipped the wire around my neck almost with a kind of tenderness. For the third time, or was it the fourth?
I felt his fingers around the neck checking the position. If I was thinking about him all the time, then I must always be in his mind. What did he feel towards me? Was it a kind of love? Or was he like a farmer with a pig that must be kept penned and fed in the days before it is slaughtered? I imagined him in a day or two coming in and tightening the wire around my neck or cutting my throat as a weary duty.
When he was gone, I began counting again. I did countries this time. I walked along a hot sunny street in Australia counting the houses. It was raining as I climbed a winding medieval lane in Belgium. It was hot in Chad. Cold in Denmark. Blustery in Ecuador. Then at number 2,351 in a long, tree-lined avenue in France I heard a door close outside, footsteps. He had been away for about five hours forty minutes. A shorter time than before. He was anxious about me. Or his time away varied at random. What did it matter?
More of the gruel fed to me with a spoon. Not as much as before. I wasn't being fattened. I was being thinned while being kept alive. The bucket. Carried back to the ledge.
'You're feeling tired,' he said.
'What?'
'You're not talking as much.'
I decided to make the effort once more to be bright and charming and strong. It was like dragging an enormously heavy sack up a steep hill.
