It happened to her, you see, not to me.
We drove urban streets for perhaps half an hour. I heard no talking and my breath became damp and muggy around my hooded head. Some movement on the seat beside me heralded a fresh intervention, and I was pulled up by the shoulder, my head following trunk like the lagged response of one roused from sleep. The hood snatched off like a magician’s reveal and a wordless, dark young man next to me, holding a small plastic cup to my mouth, the size of a tablet dispenser. He pinched my nose with a reversed hand, the palm covering my eyes and I ingested the contents of the cup. It was viscous liquid and tasted like a bad soda I drank on that last night in Sudan. The hood rustled back; I was less a falcon being returned to blind calm than a parrot being put to sleep in its cage. The arrhythmic road had straightened and I vacated myself, neither asleep nor now fully conscious but in a parallel peace.
So I can’t say how long I was in that car, nor even properly when I left it. I believe I can remember some stairs, though that seems like it was longer ago, which either I negotiated well, leading my mysterious escort party like old friends, or up which I was partially carried, my feet tentatively exploring where they might find some purchase.
I was asleep for a long time, I think. I could have slept for ever and I don’t think anything awoke me. My room came to me in episodes. There was a radio somewhere and it had been playing long into my consciousness, a man’s voice telling me in Arabic how good minted fluoride was for the gums, maybe. Or it may be that the voice was occupying my head, as the tongue I located in it, which had clearly been up and about its business before others of my components had awoken, was exploring the remains of the viscous film behind my teeth.
It was tranquil, like sleeping in as a child, the sun shining insistently through a high window beyond numb feet, covered absurdly with a candlewick bedspread. Fingers still played at the base of my throat and I heard unrestricted airflow through my nose, expelled air from a dormant windpipe. I recognised the fingers as my own, raising the index and middle to tap at my chin. There was some gluey stickiness around my mouth and I supposed I’d been gagged.
Above me, a hexagonally tiled ceiling. I felt no desire to move, ever again, until a deep breath, perhaps even a raucous snore catching the back of a dry throat, raised me to consciousness properly and the sun had passed the window.
This time, my head moved to my right side and my eyes followed. The bed was a divan, wooden framed, and against a distempered wall to my left. The floor was a beige-brown rope-cord carpeting that had been neatly cut against a thin skirting board, painted magnolia. The room was twenty-two feet by twelve, because I paced it out in the early days when I thought the detail might be important in any subsequent debrief. It was the kind of room an estate agent might describe as a single bedroom, or even ambitiously as the study. The only window was the high little one to the right of my feet, more of a skylight really, through which the sun now shone what I guessed to be its afternoon tone. The door was at the opposite end of the wall to my bedhead and flush with it. There was a small alcove, no more than a recessed fitted cupboard really, at the foot of the bed. Nothing on the walls, no other furniture.
Swinging my legs and sitting up without having made any real decision to do so, I saw a black length of fabric-reinforced duct tape on the floor beside the bed, about eight inches long and still curved from the shape of my chin. My gag, still sticky. I picked it up.
Instantly, I needed to pee. It was time to tell Dad I was awake. I called a “Hello”, rather cheerily under the circumstances.
The air of human presence and the changing blink of shadow on the wall indicated the arrival of the young man who I presumed served my in-flight cocktail in the car. Tidy dark beard, sleeveless navy shirt, fashion combat pants, late-twenties I’d guess and reassuringly unarmed. He looked at me blankly.
“I need the toilet,” I said like a child, ridiculously, and he indicated the alcove to my left with an upturned palm, expressionless and without judgement, a simple declaration of direction.
I stood gingerly and my head expressed alarm, like a conning tower in fog. Through slightly tunnelled vision, I saw the alcove contained two white enamel buckets, a pitcher of water covered with a coarse grey towel and two large white linen napkins. I squatted over a bucket and then laid one of the linens over it, like an altar offering. The young man reappeared by and by, collected and returned it empty, without speaking, as I sat on the bed.
It never occurred to me to ask where I was. It was both obvious and irrelevant. It wasn’t, anyway, a question that could be answered with a geographical reference. I was in my own clothes, I noted, but my watch and wrist-purse were gone and, of course, my mobile phone. I propped the single, foam-filled
