She breathed deeply, appreciating the calming sensation, but then shuddered abruptly – something about the uncanny feeling of quietude sat ill at ease with her. What had just happened? It was almost as if she had been temporarily drugged, and she had a feeling the Japanese woman had something to do with it. Feeling uneasy, she looked away from her and peered out through the gap, noticing then that the police officers and the truck driver had stepped back into view. She saw the truck driver – a squat Thai man whose long hair was pulled back into a greasy ponytail – counting out a stack of bank notes, which he handed over to the officers with a stormy scowl. They double-checked the amount, beaming with smug, toothy smiles all the while, then slapped him on his back, muttered a few words and shoved him back toward the truck. When one of the police officers closed the back doors of the vehicle, the thin sliver of light that had briefly illuminated Adriana’s piercing amber eyes vanished, and darkness again blanketed everything. Roxana let out a barely stifled sob, so she squeezed the girl’s hand a little tighter as the truck took off.
‘Where are they taking us now?’ the girl whimpered. ‘I want to go home, I want to go home, I wish I’d never done this…’
‘Shh little one,’ Adriana whispered. ‘This will all be over soon, and we’ll be working in the restaurant and making good money to send back to our families, just like they promised us.’
She tried to brace her words with conviction, but now it was all too easy to see through the hollowness of the lie, and after everything that had happened over the past few days she doubted that the girl still believed any of the empty reassurances that she spouted. How could she, how could any of them, after first having had their passports taken for ‘safekeeping’ by the Albanian thugs, and then being groped and harassed by every group of men with whom they had interacted on this journey through – or into – hell itself.
She thought wistfully of her home in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains, and now toiling in the fields to scrape a living off the cold soil didn’t seem so bad any more … at least not in comparison to whatever nightmare awaited them at the terminus of this purgatory. She missed that plot of land and that quiet village with an aching pain that seemed to grow ever more acute. Her existence there had once seemed so banal and uninspiring, and she had yearned with a ceaseless desperation to break free from it, but now that she had, she regretted that decision more than anything she had ever regretted before.
She missed her parents, grouchy and aloof as they were. She missed her siblings, her gossipy neighbours, the old man who sat and chain-smoked his days away on a weather-beaten chair on the side of the dirt road near her house, and the haggard, toothless hag who drove a smoke-belching two-stroke trike through the village once a week to peddle her vegetables.
And, more than many things, Adriana longed for her guitar. She had known that she would miss playing, but she didn’t realise just how badly she would miss it. That smooth neck with its worn-flat frets, the way those nylon strings eroded the tips of her fingers, the notes that rang out into eventual silence as the beautiful vibrations rippled their melodies through the air…
She rubbed the hard, smooth fingertips of her left hand together absentmindedly and began to reminisce about how proud she had been of developing those calluses, when other girls her age had been trying to keep their own fingers as soft as possible. These leather-tough fingertips of hers were her medals, her certificates of merit; evidence of the depth of her dedication to her passion. And passion it was – no, had been, she immediately thought, correcting herself with a bitter despair. There would be no guitar where she was going.
Still, she could buy one with her first month’s pay, she hoped. No, not hoped – needed. How else would she be able to release these feelings of such immense intensity that built up like volcanic gases beneath her quiet exterior but through music? Her guitar had been the conduit through which she had channelled the fires of her soul as they had fused with those streams of pure energy that was the life-stream of the universe itself. That’s how she had seen it, anyway. Now, though, like every other element of her past existence, it was no more.
She swallowed the pain that was bubbling up from within and forced it down, down, down into that deep, dark place where she would not and could not ever speak of it. The future was almost here, but she could not help but feel an iciness of terror at what it would be.
The next morning, after having had to sleep in the truck, locked down under the heaviness of the tarpaulin and sweating like pigs in the stifling heat and oppressive humidity, without so much as a drink of water let alone a morsel of food, the women were awoken at dawn by the truck driver. He leered at the women with those porcine, bloodshot eyes of his, and handed them a grimy bottle filled with greyish water.
‘Here, drink,’ he muttered in broken Russian, shoving the bottle into Adriana’s hands.
The water looked repulsive,
