That distant voice from another hill was calling to me again, but I couldn’t make out what it was saying. But it shouted every time I twanged the lumpen splinter on my bedstead. It was a comfort, a gift, a sign. When it had my attention, it whispered.
“We’re going to take action, you and me. We’re going to lead events, not be their victim. We’re going to try not to die here. This isn’t Golgotha. The wood of your cross is splintered, Natalie. Break it. Take it. It’s yours.”
I ran my hand down the length of the split wood, collecting tiny shards in my fingers. I played with it a while like this, also scratching and lightly puncturing my palm, like a stigmatum, until I slept properly.
13
I can occupy my space, what’s directly around me and about me. I can pull it into my head and live safely there. And so that’s what I did. They can’t touch you if you go inside, right inside, and mark your own time. They can watch but they can’t join in, you see? Because everything is inside my ball, and they can do what they want to Natalie out there, but they can’t get in here. In here, there’s only me, and while I rock and hum, there’s nothing, nothing in this world that can come close. I’m bored in here, but it’s a blissful boredom, full of grace and peace. They can do what they like with Nat, but they can’t get in here. Here, where no voices crowd in, where I can watch but no one can see me, where there are no secrets to be told because there’s no one to tell.
The wood broken from the bed began to form. But I didn’t know what it was for. Really. I watched myself make it, carve it, fashion it from its pointy pointless form into its new identity. It was now a thing and things have purpose, if only I could find out what it was.
I expect it was about a week after I broke it off, maybe more, but less than two, that about two-thirds of the length of that jagged splinter lay sharpened into a stiletto. In another world, it would have been just a good piece of kindling, spitting and spluttering, its thin tip aflame first. It lay between the bed and the wall, whence it came, but now that it was a thing, now that it was something that had a mysterious purpose, it had a marked place, because everything has its place and this one’s place was taped securely to the bed with the length of that duct tape they’d gagged me with when they first brought me here. It was a perfect artefact, modelled by the purest boredom, the kind of stasis that is entirely free of order and planning and ambition.
I suppose a therapist would say that it was also a small act of self-determination, a defiant little secret. They had given me a loose abaya to wear and watched as I stripped and put it on. My lavatory was a bucket and they took it away. There was nothing they didn’t know about Natalie here. But there was one tiny element that wasn’t known to those in the next room, and it was this sharpened thing with its bulbous butt that I’d shaped to my right palm. I was my own secret Lady Macbeth.
The days had fallen into a vacuous routine. The boy and the Troll took the night shifts. The film crew had not returned. The silent one was always there in the day, sluicing my buckets, bringing me fresh fruit for breakfast, flatbread and olives and tomatoes in the middle of the day, usually nothing at night but water, sometimes chicken or lentil soup. I presumed my diet was designed to avoid the least bucket cleaning in the night, calculating that my bowel movements would be confined to the early mornings, when waste was cleared. I wasn’t getting hungry in a room that took four paces to cover. I’d lie on my back on the floor in the morning and cycle my legs in the air to keep circulation going.
It was the fizzy drinks that led to my secret wooden spear. One day, early on, when the passage of the hours still sometimes bothered me, I’d mimed to the silent one with a hiss and a pop that a drink other than water would be agreeable. I’d trembled from lack of sugar and needed the rush or I feared I’d faint. Incredibly, the next day the plastic tray had a can of cola on it and thereafter various orangey carbonated drinks arrived. I said some wine would be nice too, but that was lost on Mr Silent.
With the edge of the first can, I scratched a small cross in the plaster of the wall under the window, conducting my own little ontological experiment under controlled clinical conditions. I knelt before it, sitting on my ankles, and emptied my head.
“Be still and know that I am God.”
“However deep the pit, God’s love is deeper still.”
During priestly training, I’d heard others talk of letting the Holy Spirit take vacant possession of your mind, like a squatter. But nothing came, of course, except a cramp in my ankle.
Then I toyed with mental images. I’d lay at the foot of the cross before me what I imagined to be my despair – though I had yet to experience anything that I could truly call that. And I prayed that the burden of this captivity would be borne
