Land of the Living Read online

  I made myself breathe in one-two-three, out one-two-three. In, out. I'd seen a film once, some kind of war film, in which a super-tough soldier hid from the enemy in a river breathing just through a single straw. I was like that and the thought made my chest hurt and made me breathe in spasms. I had to calm myself. Instead of thinking of the soldier and his straw and what would have happened if the straw had become blocked, I tried to think of the water in the river, cool and calm and slow-moving and beautiful, the sun glistening on it in the morning.

  In my mind, the water grew slower and slower until it was quite still. I imagined it starting to freeze, solid like glass so that you could see the fish swimming silently underneath. I couldn't stop myself. I saw myself falling through the ice, trapped underneath. I had read or heard or been told that if you fall through ice and can't find the hole, there is a thin layer of air between the ice and the water and you can lie under the ice and breathe the air. And what ii then? It might be better just to have drowned. I had always been terrified of drowning above all things, but I had read or heard or been told that drowning was in fact a pleasant way to die. I could believe it. What was unpleasant and terrifying was trying to avoid drowning. Fear is trying to avoid death. Giving yourself up to death is like falling asleep.

  One-two-three, one-two-three, I was becoming calmer. Some people, probably about two per cent of the population at least, would have died already of panic or asphyxiation if they'd had done to them what I was having done to me. So I was already doing better than someone. I was alive. I was breathing.

  I was lying down now, with my ankles tied and my wrists tied, my mouth gagged and a hood over my head. I wasn't tied to anything any more. I struggled into a squatting position, then very slowly stood up. Tried to stand up. My head bumped against a roof. It must be just under five foot high. I sat down again, panting with the effort.

  At least I could move my body. Wriggle and hump along, like a snake in the dust. But I hardly dared. I had the sense that I was somewhere up high. When he came into the room, he was underneath me. The footsteps and his voice came from down below. He climbed to get at me.

  I stretched my feet in one direction and felt only the floor. I swivelled painfully around, my T-shirt riding up and bare skin on my back scraping along the roughness beneath me. I stretched my feet. Floor. I humped forward. Slowly. Feet feeling. Then not feeling not feeling the hardness underneath. Stretched over a space, a blank. Nothing underneath. I lay down and moved forward again, bit by bit. Legs hanging over, bent at the knee. If I sat up now, I'd be sitting over a fall, a cliff. My breath juddered in my chest with panic. I started shifting backwards. My back hurt. My head crashed and banged. I kept wriggling and scraping backwards until I was pressed up against a wall.

  I sat up. I pressed my bound hands against the wall. Damp coarse brick against my fingertips.

  I shuffled upright along the wall in one direction, until I met the corner. Then in the other direction, my muscles burning with the effort. It must be about ten feet wide. Ten feet wide and four feet deep.

  It was hard to think clearly because the pain in my head kept getting in the way. Was it a bang? A scrape? Something in my brain?

  I was shivering with cold. I had to keep thinking, keep my mind busy, keep it off things. I had been kidnapped in some way. I was being held against my will. Why did kidnaps happen? To take hostages, for money or for a political reason. My total wealth, once credit card and store card debts were deducted, amounted to about two thousand pounds, half of it bound up in my rusty old car. As for politics, I was a working-environment consultant not an ambassador. But then I didn't remember anything. I could be in South America, now, or Lebanon. Except that the voice was clearly English, southern English as far as I could tell from the soft, thick whisper.

  So what other reasons were there? I had argued myself towards an area where everything looked really, really bad. I felt tears bubbling up in my eyes. Calm down. Calm down. I mustn't get all snotty, blocked up.

  He hadn't killed me. That was a good sign. Except it wasn't necessarily all that good a sign in the long run it might be a bad sign in a way that made me feel sick even to think about. But it was all I had. I flexed my muscles very gently. I couldn't move. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know where I'd been captured, or when, or how. Or for what reason. I couldn't see anything. I didn't even know anything about the room I was lying in. It felt damp. Maybe it was underground or in a shed. I didn't know anything about the man. Or men. Or people. He was probably close by. I didn't know if I knew him. I didn't know what he looked like.

  That might be useful. If I could identify him, he might.. . Well, that might be worse. Professional kidnappers wore hoods so that the hostage never saw them. Putting a hood over my head might be the same thing, the other way round. And he was doing something to his voice, muffling it somehow, so that he didn't sound like a human at all. It might even be that he was planning to hold me for just a little while and let me go. He could dump me in some other part of London and it would be impossible for me ever to find him again. I would know nothing nothing at all. That was the first bit of remotely good news.

  I had no idea how long I had been here but at the very outside it couldn't be more than three days, maybe even two. I felt dreadful but I didn't feel especially weak. I felt hungry but not ill with hunger. Maybe two days. Terry would have reported me missing. I wouldn't have turned up at work. They would phone Terry, he would be baffled. He would have tried my mobile phone. Where was that? The police might have been called within hours. By now there would be a huge hunt. Lines of people scouring wasteland. All leave cancelled. Sniffer dogs. Helicopters. Another promising thought. You can't just grab an adult off the street and hide them somewhere without creating some sort of suspicion. They would be out there, knocking at doors, marching into houses, shining torches into dark places. Any time now I'd hear them, see them. All I had to do was stay alive as long as ... Just stay alive. Stay alive.

  I had shouted at him before. I'd said I'd kill him. That was the only thing I could remember having said to him, except I'd said, "Thank you," when he gave me water. I hated the fact I'd said thank you. But when I'd shouted, I'd made him angry. What were his words? "You kill me? That's a good one." Something like that. That's not promising. "You kill me?" That might seem good to him because in fact he's going to kill me.

  I tried to seize some other kind of comfort. It might just seem funny to him because I was so much in his power that the idea of me getting back at him was completely ludicrous. I was taking a risk being rude to him. I'd made him angry. He could have tortured me or hit me or anything. But he hadn't done anything. That might be useful to know. He had kidnapped me, he had me tied down and I'd threatened him. It could be that if I stand up to him he feels weakened and unable to do anything to me. If I don't give in to him, that may be the best way of playing him along. He might have kidnapped a woman because he's frightened of women and this is the only way to control at least one woman. He might expect me just to be begging pathetically for my life and that would give him the control he wants. But if I don't yield, then it's not going according to his plan.

  Or it might be the opposite. It might have shown nothing more than that he's in control. It doesn't matter to him what I say. He just finds it funny and is proceeding with his plan, whatever that is. Surely the point is to be as much of a flesh-and-blood person for him as possible so that he finds it harder to do anything to me. But if that is threatening to him, then it might make him angrier. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't fight, I couldn't escape. All I could do was slow him up.

  What was the best way of doing that? Making him angry? Happy? Scared? I lay on the floor and stared into the stifling darkness of my hood.

  There was a change of texture in the blackness around me. There was a sound and a smell. Once again there was that hoarse, croaking whisper. "I'm going to take your gag out. If you shout I'll bleed you like an animal. If you've heard and understood what I've s
aid, nod your head."

  I nodded frantically. The hands large, warm hands fiddled behind my neck. The knot was untied, the cloth pulled roughly from my mouth. As soon as I was free I coughed and coughed. A hand held my head down and I felt the straw pushed into my mouth. I sucked the water until a bubbling sound told me it was gone.

  "There," he said. "There's a bucket here. Do you want to use it?"

  "What do you mean?" Get him talking.

  "You know. Toilet."

  He was embarrassed. Was that a good sign?

  "I want to go to a proper one."

  "It's the bucket or you can lie in your own piss, sweetheart."

  "All right."

  "I'll put you by the bucket. You can feel it with your feet. I'll stand back. You try anything funny I'll cut you up. All right?"

  "Yes."

  There was the sound of him going down some steps, and then I felt his arms under my armpits, then as I slithered towards him, around me. Hard, strong hands. I was pressed against him. An animal smell, sweat, something else. One arm under my thighs. Nausea in my throat. Swung across and put down lightly on a rough floor, gritty. I raised myself up straight. My legs and back felt terribly sore. My hair was seized by a hand and I felt something hard against my neck.

  "You know what this is?"

  "No."

  "It's a blade. I'm going to untie the wire holding your hands together. Try anything and I'll use it."

  "I won't. I want you to leave me alone."

  "It's dark. I'll step back."

  I felt pressure as he freed a knot behind my back. He stepped away. For just a second I thought of trying something until I saw the absurdity of it. Partially tied up, hooded, in a dark room with a man carrying a knife.

  "Go ahead," he said.

  I hadn't really meant it. I just wanted to be moved. I felt my clothes. T-shirt, slacks. I couldn't do this.

  "You'll have the bucket again tomorrow morning."

  Tomorrow morning. Good. Some information. All right, all right. He said it was dark. I unfastened my trousers, pulled them and my knickers down and sat on the bucket. Nothing but a dribble. I stood up again, pulled the trousers up.

  "Can I say something?"

  "What?"

  "I don't know what this is about. But you mustn't do this. You won't get away with it. You may not realize what'll happen when they find me. But you can let me go. Drive me somewhere. Turn me loose. That'll be it. I'll have been reported missing, they'll be looking for me. I know you can do what you like to me and it probably won't do me any good but you'll be caught. If you let me go, we can just go back to our lives. Otherwise, you'll be caught."

  "That's what they all say. When they say anything."

  "What?"

  "Stand still."

  "All?"

  The sensation of knots being refastened. The sensation of being lifted up high, set down like a small child being put up on a high shelf. Like a doll. A dead animal.

  "Stay there," he said. "Right there."

  I sat there, thinking he would go away now.

  "Open your mouth."

  He was beside me. The rag was pushed in, another cloth tied hard around my face. I heard footsteps then felt a new pressure around my neck. Tight. I was pulled back. I could feel the wall behind my back.

  "Listen," the voice said. "This is a wire looped around your neck. It goes through a loop behind you and fastens on a bolt in the wall. Understand? Nod your head."

  I nodded.

  "You're on a platform. Understand?"

  I nodded.

  "If you move, you'll slip off the ledge, the wire will throttle you and you'll die. Understand?"

  I nodded.

  "Good."

  And there was silence. Just silence. And my heart, pounding like the sea. The wire burned my neck. I breathed, in and out, in and out.

  I was standing on a wooden jetty and the lake around me was still as a mirror. Not a ripple of wind. I could see smooth pebbles far beneath me, pink and brown and grey. I bent my knees slightly and brought up my arms to dive into the cool, quiet water, and then suddenly something caught me round the neck, and I was falling with a sickening lurch but being held back at the same time, and the water disappeared, became inky darkness instead. The noose was digging into my neck. I sat up straight. For a moment I was a blank, then fear rushed in, filling all the spaces in my body. My heart was pounding and my mouth dry. Sweat ran down my forehead, under the hood, and I could feel wisps of hair sticking to my cheeks. I was clammy with fear, itchy and sticky and sour. My fear was so real now it was something I could smell.

  I had fallen asleep. How could that be? How could I sleep when I was trussed up like a chicken waiting for its neck to be snapped? I'd always wondered how prisoners could sleep before the day of execution, but I'd slept. How long for? I had no idea perhaps a few minutes, nodding off on this ledge before the noose woke me; or perhaps several hours, longer. I didn't know if it was night still or morning. Time had stopped.

  Except that time hadn't stopped. It was marching on. It was running out. Silence roared around my ears. Something was going to happen, and I didn't know what and I didn't know when, but I knew something was going to happen. It could be now, as soon as I stopped this thought, or it could be ages away, through the sludge of days. His words came back to me, and with them came a burning sensation in my stomach. It was as if there was an animal inside me, a scabby rodent with sharp yellow teeth eating away at me. "That's what all the others said." What did that mean? I knew what it meant. It meant that there had been others before me. They were dead and I was the next here on a ledge with a noose round my neck, and then after me after me .. .

  Breathe and think. Make plans. Plans of escape were futile. All I had was my brain and the words I spoke to him when he pulled this foul rag out of my mouth. I counted in my head. Seconds into minutes into hours. Was I counting too fast or too slowly? I tried to slow down. I was thirsty and the inside of my mouth felt soft and rotten. My breath must stink by now. I needed water, ice-cold water. Gallons of clean water pulled up from a well deep in the earth. I was no longer hungry at all. Eating food would be like eating twigs or gravel. But clean cold water in a tall glass tumbler, chinking with ice, that would be good. I kept on counting. I mustn't stop.

  One hour, twenty-eight minutes, thirty-three seconds. How many seconds was that altogether? I tried to continue counting while doing the sum in my head, but everything scrambled, and I lost the time and I lost the sum. Tears were rolling down my cheek.

  I shuffled forward and stretched my body out as far as I could, leaning back my neck until the noose cut in just under my chin. I balanced myself on the ledge, its edge sharp in the small of my back and my lower body hanging over. The wire must be about three feet long. I was like a see-saw. I could tip backwards again, and go on sitting and waiting and counting seconds and minutes and hours, or I could tip forwards into the darkness. He would find me hanging there, the wire noose around my neck. That would be one way of beating him; beating time. It would be that easy.

  I shuffled myself back into a sitting position. My whole body was trembling with the effort. I concentrated on breathing, in and out. I thought of the lake in my dream, with its still water. I thought of the river and its fish. I thought of the yellow butterfly on the green leaf. It quivered there, almost as light as the air around it. One whisper of wind would dislodge it. That's like life, I thought; my life is that fragile now.

  My name is Abbie. Abigail Devereaux. Abbie. I repeated my name to myself; I tried to hear the sound out loud. But the sound quickly lost its meaning. What did it signify, to be Abbie? Nothing. Just a collection of syllables. Two syllables. Two mouthfuls of air.

  "I had this dream," I said. My voice sounded hoarse and feeble, as if the noose had already damaged my windpipe. "I slept and I had this dream. Did you have a dream? Do you dream?" I'd rehearsed this sentence while waiting for him I didn't want to tell him personal things about myself, because somehow that
felt risky. And I didn't want to ask him anything specific about himself, because if I knew anything about him he could never let me go. I asked about dreams, because they are intimate but abstract; they feel important but their meanings are vague, insubstantial. But now, speaking my sentence out loud with him beside me, it sounded famous.

  "Sometimes. Finish your water and then you can use the bucket."

  "Did you dream last night?" I persisted, though I knew it was futile. He was a few inches from me. If I put out an arm I could touch him. I resisted the sudden urge to grab hold of him and wail and howl and plead.

  "You can't dream if you haven't slept."

  "You didn't sleep?"

  "Drink."

  I took a few more sips, making the water last as long as I could. My throat was sore. It had been night, and yet he hadn't slept. What had he been doing?

  "Do you have insomnia?" I tried to appear sympathetic; my voice sounded horribly artificial.

  "That's crap," he said. "You work and then you sleep when you need to. Day or night. That's all."

  There was a faint grainy light showing through the hood. If I lifted my head up high and peered downwards, perhaps I would see something; his outstretched legs beside mine, his hand on the ledge. I mustn't look. I mustn't see anything. I mustn't know anything. I must stay in the dark.

  I did exercises. I pulled my knees up and let them down again. Fifty times. I lay down and tried to sit up. I couldn't do it. Not even once.

  People in solitary confinement often went mad. I had read about that. I must have imagined briefly what it would be like, to be locked up and all alone. Sometimes they recited poetry to themselves, but I didn't know any poetry, or if I did I could remember none of it. I knew nursery rhymes. Mary had a little lamb. Hickory dickory dock. The cheery, insistent rhythm felt obscene and mad, like someone inside my sore head, tapping away. I could make up a poem. What rhymed with dark? Stark, hark, lark, park, bark. I couldn't make up poems. I'd never been able to.