back. I had to smash you up a bit. You fought worse than anybody. I had to give you a few thumps, quieten you down.'
'Good.'
'What?'
'Nothing.'
Do the knee-ups. Don't give up. One, two, three, four, five. Have to do ten. Try. Try harder. Six, seven, eight, nine. One more. Ten. Horrible sickness rising up in me. Don't give up. Breathe, in and out. Never give up.
All right, then. My last letter. It's not to anyone. Well, maybe it's to someone who doesn't exist, whom I might have met in the future. Like writing a diary. I used to write a diary when I was a teenager, but it always had this embarrassing tone. It made me into a stranger, and one I didn't particularly like. I never knew who it was for, or to.
Where was I? Yes. My letter. When did I last write a letter? I can't remember. I write lots of emails, and every so often I send postcards, you know the kind of thing, the rain is raining or the sun is shining and I'm thinking of you, here, now. But real letters, well, it's been ages. I had a friend called Sheila who went and lived in Kenya in her gap year, doing voluntary work and living in a thatched hut in a small village. I wrote her letters every so often, but I never knew if they were going to arrive, and I discovered when she came home that only a couple of them ever did. It's a strange feeling you get when you're writing to someone and not knowing if they'll ever read it. Like those times when you're talking to someone, really talking, I mean, and you turn round and they've left the room. What happens to those words and thoughts? Things that don't ever arrive.
My mouth felt horrible, full of blisters. My gums were soft and swollen. When I swallowed, it was like swallowing poison, the taste of the rag and the taste of my own decay, so I tried not to do it, but it was very hard.
I sat in the dark, I twisted my hands together. My nails had got longer. One of the facts that everyone knows is that nails go on growing after you've died, but I've heard or read or been told that's not true. It's just the skin shrinks, or something. Who told me that? I couldn't remember. There's a lot I'd forgotten. It was as if things were falling away, one by one, the things that bound me to life.
The letter. Who would I leave my things to? What have I got to leave? I don't have a house, or a flat. I've got a car that's rusty round the edges. Terry tuts when he looks at it, but in a pleased kind of way, as if he's saying, 'Women!' A few clothes, not so many. Sadie can have those except she's bigger than me after having a baby. Some books. A few bits of jewellery, nothing expensive, though. Not much. They could all be sorted out in a couple of hours.
What was it like outside, I wondered. Perhaps it was sunny. I tried to picture sunlight falling on roads and houses, but it was no use. Those pictures had gone the butterfly, the lake, the river, the tree. I tried to put them in my mind, but they dissolved, wouldn't hold together. Maybe outside it was foggy instead, all the shapes shrouded. I knew it wasn't night yet. At night for six hours, five hours he put a noose round my neck and left.
I thought I heard a sound. What was it? Him, padding towards me? Was this it, then? I held my breath, but my heart pounded so fast and blood roared round my head that for a moment all I could hear was the rushing inside my own body. Could you die of fear? No, there was no one there. I was still all alone on my ledge, in the dark. It wasn't time yet. But I knew it would be soon. He watched me. He knew I was coming apart, bit by bit. That was what he wanted. I knew that was what he wanted. He wanted me to stop being me, and then he could kill me.
And I watched myself blindly in the darkness. How can the brain know that it is failing, the mind feel itself disintegrate? Is that what it is like to go mad? Is there a period of time when you know, with the bit of you that is going mad, that you're going mad? When do you give up and, with a ghastly kind of relief, let yourself fall into the abyss? I imagined a pair of hands gripping on to a ledge, hanging on, and then very slowly the fingers relax, uncurl. You fall through space and nothing can stop you.
The letter. Dear anyone, help me, help me, help me, I can't do it any more. Please. Oh, Jesus, please.
My eyes stung and prickled. My throat was sore, sorer than usual, I mean. As if there were bits of grit in it. Or glass. Maybe I was getting a cold. Then I would gradually stop being able to breathe. All blocked up.
'Drink.'
I drank. Just a few sips this time.
'Eat.'
Four spoonfuls of mush. I could barely swallow.
'Bucket.'
I was lifted down, lifted back up. I felt like a rubbishy plastic doll. For a brief moment, I thought about writhing and kicking, but I knew he could squeeze the life out of me. I felt his hands holding me around my ribcage. He could snap me.
'Noose.'
'Piece of shit,' I said.
'What?'
'You. Rubbish. Piece of shit.'
He hit me in the mouth. I could taste my blood. Sweet, metallic.
'Garbage,' I said.
He stuffed the gag into my mouth.
Five hours perhaps, and some minutes. How many was it last time I counted? I couldn't remember any more. Then he'd come back. Perhaps he would be carrying a piece of paper and a pen. Outside, it must be dark now; probably it had been dark for hours. Perhaps there was a moon, stars. I imagined pricks of light in the black sky.
Here I was, alone inside my hood, inside my head. Here I was and nothing else seemed real any more. At first, I had not let myself think of life beyond this room, of ordinary life as it had been. I had thought that would be a way of taunting myself and going mad. Now that I wanted to remember things, I couldn't, or not properly. It was as if the sun had gone in and a storm was brewing and night was coming. It was coming.
I tried to put myself in the flat, but I couldn't. I tried to see myself at work, but I couldn't. Memories lay in gathering darkness. I remembered this, though: I remembered swimming in a loch in Scotland, I couldn't recall when, years ago, and the water was so brackish and murky that you couldn't see through it. I couldn't even see my hands clearly when I stretched them out in front of me. But when I did the crawl, I could see silver bubbles of air in the dark water. Cascading bubbles of silver air.
Why do I remember that when other memories were shutting down? The lights were going out, one by one. Soon there would be nothing left. Then he would have won.
I knew what I was going to do. I wasn't going to write any letter. I wasn't going to wait for him to come into the room with his piece of paper. It was the only power I had left. The power of not waiting for him to kill me. It wasn't much, but it was all I had. No memory, no hope. Just that. And it was perfectly simple, really. If I went on sitting here, sooner or later and probably sooner, tomorrow or the next day, I could sense the moment was near he would murder me. Any doubt of that had gone. I was quite sure that he had murdered the other women and he would do the same to me. I wasn't going to outwit him. I wasn't going to escape when he lifted me down. I wasn't going to persuade him that he should set me free after all. The police weren't going to burst into the room and rescue me. Terry wasn't going to come. Nobody was. I wasn't going to wake up one morning and discover it had all been a nightmare. I was going to die.
I told myself this at last. If I waited, he would kill me, as sure as anything was sure. I felt no hope at all. My pitiful attempts to change that had been like hurling myself against a solid wall. But if I threw myself off this ledge, the noose would hang me. That's what he had told me, and I could feel the wire round my neck if I leant forward. He must have known that I wouldn't try. Nobody in their right mind would kill themselves in order not to die.
Yet that is exactly what I was going to do. Throw myself off. Because it was the only thing left I could do. My last chance to be Abbie.
And I didn't have much time. I would have to do it before he came back, while I still could. While I had the will.
I breathed in and held my breath. Why not now, before I lost courage? I breathed out again. Because it's impossible to do it, that's why. You think: Just one more second of life. One more minute. Not now. Any time that isn't now.
