I’d read years ago of a Beirut hostage who had fallen to the floor of his dungeon, never before or since a believer, begging for release from despair, even the release of death. The next moment he was dancing in a trance of ecstasy. He’d never sought to explain this radical mood swing in terms of deliverance, but as a professional Christian I calculated that I might be able to generate something similar.
But nothing. No still small voice nor answering host, no hope, least of all a sure and certain hope, as promised by scripture. Just my improvised cross, mugging at me from the wall. I was being stonewalled by God.
So by way of distraction, I’d wrapped the ring-pull from the drink can around my finger and, almost idly, like I’d cut myself in the old days to check that I was still there, I’d pushed the curled leaf of it into the finger next to it until it bled. The same blood that they would spill in their video sequel, I fully expected. I watched it closely, as a child might examine a caterpillar crawling between your fingers.
A while later, a plan to fill the empty hours had formed. I was a woman with a purpose again, a small narrative to fulfil. The radio was playing in the next room and I waited to hear the bathroom door shut next to my room. About an hour later, maybe more, it did so. I bent over my bed and took hold of the splinter. The flush sounded – a solid overhead cistern, and there was the noise of the flow and the plumbing that ran under my room as it rushed into an extended gurgling flood. I was braced across the bed now, holding the nose of the large splinter with both hands above the level of the sheet on the bed, taut to breaking point at its broad base.
A second flush from the bathroom and I pulled hard and sharply. It just sprang against itself and I fell forward with it, but with a progressive final pressure before the cistern filled it began to give, not with a crack, but rather a melee of rustling disintegration as it parted at the base in a bush of sharp fibres. I’d moaned in the effort, I realised, and as the cistern’s burble quietened so did I, holding my kindling log tightly in its place in case I’d been heard. But the radio played on.
I wish I could tell you that I began to whittle another cross, or a figurine of the Blessed Virgin. No, I’m afraid the merchant of death needs the tools of his trade. Half-wrapping the ring-pull in one of the linen cloths and wedging it between my fisted fingers, I could pull it along the narrowing length of the wood perhaps a dozen times before the ring-pull folded up and presented no cutting edge. In this way I gradually sharpened a plane that led to a slender but strong point.
So my time wasn’t entirely wasted in Cousin Derek’s shed. The shavings went in my pillowcase. Olive stones went in the empty cans to simulate the rattle of complete ring-pulls. And Lady Macbeth had her dagger.
The routine grew slightly easier. The Troll never left the front room, sitting with the expression of a surprised sea lion who’d just been served an extra side-order of sardines.
The key to the lock on the front door, I noticed, hung on an identity card around his neck. I saw this because my door was now left open and though I was rarely allowed to leave my room I was now permitted to use their bathroom, with its half-decent lavatory with a noisy cistern that needed double-flushing, a shower with a Perspex wall and a basin unit. The plumbing was efficient; the flush on the loo turned out not to be an old chain-pull, but a big handled affair.
The window of this bathroom was on the same wall as my room, also high. The frame opened from the top and stopped within six inches at a locating bar. No prospect of an exit and the Boy and the Troll left me to my toilet.
I’d long dispensed with underwear, but was chafed by the trousers I still wore during the day to make the abaya last at night, and by the lack of hygiene, so I needed some soothing in the groin. There was soap. The place, I realised, was in a state of disrepair, but wasn’t old. A flat with one bedroom, which was mine. The caretaker’s accommodation above a block, maybe, or student digs. An anonymous remote little block that would attract no attention. But I knew if I was taken there again, I’d know it instantly.
Whenever I left the bathroom, the Troll stood to cover the street-facing windows in the kitchenette and the main living room, one arm extended like a portly usher, as if I didn’t know the way to go. Stupid slug. But, by doing so, he did confirm that there was a street or some other sort of thoroughfare out there.
And then my dream started. Don’t think that it will be easy to tell. Real dreams never are. They never make sense when you’re awake.
I made friends with the Boy, won his trust. That’s the truth. The only truth. It’s the kind of verity that lies like a bloodstain on a white marble floor. I cover it with the underlay and shagpile of all that’s happened before and since, but it’s always there, the sin that can’t be absolved, don’t even ask. No point in dwelling on him, for he’s well out of it, but I’m the living expiation of guilt, the devil’s work in progress.
Actually, it’s a commonplace to say that there’s a bloody stain on a marble floor. It’s the easy way out to go for a curse, to say that there’s a bloody stain on a marble floor, like in
