‘Wait!’
‘Yes, Rebus?’
‘Take the fucking sack off my head at least!’ I was shrieking now, desperate.
‘Let the bastard drop.’
And with that they let me go. I hung in the air for a second, then I dropped, dropped like a brick. I was falling through space, trussed up like a Christmas turkey. I screamed for one second, maybe two, and then I hit the ground.
And lay there while the helicopter landed. People were laughing all around me. The foreign voices were back. They lifted me up and dragged me along to the cell. I was glad of the sack over my head. It disguised the fact that I was crying. Inside I was a mass of quivering coils, tiny serpents of fear and adrenaline and relief which bounced through my liver, my lungs, my heart.
The door slammed behind me. Then I heard a shuffling sound at my back. Hands fumbled at the knots of my bonds. With the hood off, it took me a few seconds to regain my sight.
I stared into a face that seemed to be my own. Another twist to the game. Then I recognised Gordon Reeve, at the same time as he recognised me.
‘Rebus?’ he said. ‘They told me you’d …’
‘They told me the same thing about you. How are you?’
‘Fine, fine. Jesus, though, I’m glad to see you.’
We hugged one another, feeling the other’s weakened but still human embrace, the smells of suffering and of endurance. There were tears in his eyes.
‘It is you,’ he said. ‘I’m not dreaming.’
‘Let’s sit down,’ I said. ‘My legs aren’t too steady.’
What I meant was that his legs weren’t too steady. He was leaning into me as if I were a crutch. He sat down thankfully.
‘How has it been?’ I asked.
‘I kept in shape for a while.’ He slapped one of his legs.
‘Doing push-ups and stuff. But I soon grew too tired. They’ve tried feeding me with hallucinogens. I keep seeing things when I’m awake.’
‘They’ve tried me with knockout drops.’
‘Those drugs, they’re something else. Then there’s the power-hose. I get sprayed about once a day I suppose. Freezing cold. Can never seem to get dry.’
‘How long do you suppose we’ve been here?’ Did I look as bad to him as he looked to me? I hoped not. He hadn’t mentioned the chopper drop. I decided to keep quiet about that one.
‘Too long,’ he was saying. ‘This is fucking ridiculous.’
‘You were always saying that they had something special in store for us. I didn’t believe you, God forgive me.’
‘This wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.’
‘It is us they’re interested in though.’
‘What do you mean?’
It had been only half a thought until now, but now I was sure.
‘Well, when our sentry put his nose into the tent that night, there was no surprise in his eyes, and even less fear. I think they were both in on it from the start.’
‘So what’s this all about?’
I looked at him, sitting with his chin on his knees. We were frail creatures on the outside. Piles biting like the hungered jaws of vampire bats, mouths aching with sores and ulcers. Hair falling out, teeth loose. But there was strength in numbers. And that was what I could not understand: why had they put us together when, apart, we were both on the edge of breaking?
‘So what’s this all about?’
Perhaps they were trying to lull us into a false sense of security before really tightening the screws. The worst is not, so long as we can say ‘this is the worst’. Shakespeare,
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They’ll tell us when they’re good and ready, I suppose.’
‘Are you scared?’ he said suddenly. His eyes were staring at the raddled door of our cell.
‘Maybe.’
‘You should be fucking scared, Johnny. I am. I remember once when I was a kid, some of us went along a river near our housing-scheme. It was in spate. It had been pissing down for a week. It was just after the war, and there were a lot of ruined houses about. We headed upriver, and came to a sewage-pipe. I played with older kids. I don’t know why. They made me the brunt of all their fucking games, but I stuck with them. I suppose I liked the idea of running about with kids who scared the shit out of all the kids of my own age. So that, though the older kids were treating me like shit, they gave me power over the younger kids. Do you see?’
I nodded, but he wasn’t looking.
‘This pipe wasn’t very thick, but it was long, and it was high above the river. They said I was to cross it first. Christ, I was afraid. I was so fucking scared that my legs wobbled and I froze there, halfway across. And then piss started to run down my legs out of my shorts, and they noticed that and they laughed. They laughed at me, and I couldn’t run, couldn’t move. So they left me there and went away.’
I thought of the laughter as I had been dragged away from the helicopter.
‘Did anything like that ever happen to you when you were a kid, Johnny?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Then why the hell did you join up?’
‘To get away from home. I didn’t get along with my father, you see. He preferred my kid brother. I felt out in the cold.’
‘I never had a brother.’
‘Neither did I, not in the proper sense. I had an adversary.’
don’t you dare
‘What did your father do, Johnny?’
‘He was a hypnotist. He used to make people come on stage and do stupid things.’
‘You’re joking!’
‘It’s true. My brother was going to follow in his footsteps, but I wasn’t. So I got out. They weren’t exactly sad to see me go.’
Reeve chuckled.
‘If you put us into a sale, you’d have to say “slightly soiled” on the ticket, eh, Johnny?’
I laughed at that, laughed longer and louder than necessary, and we put an arm round one another and stayed that way, keeping warm.
We slept side by side, pissed and defecated in the presence of the other, tried to exercise together, played little mind games together, and endured together.
Reeve had a piece of string with him, and would wind it and unwind it, making up the knots we had been taught in training. This led me to explain the meaning of a Gordian knot to him. He waved a miniature reef knot at me.
‘Gordian knot, reef knot. Gordian reef. It sounds just like my name, doesn’t it?’
Again, there was something to laugh about.
We also played noughts and crosses, scratching the games onto the powdery walls of the cell with our fingernails. Reeve showed me a ploy which meant that the least you could achieve was a draw. We must have played about three-hundred games before then, with Reeve winning two-thirds of them. The trick was simple enough.
