Captive (7 page)

I force the memory away and instead imagine the Downing Street garden. The trees arch over my head, corseting the blue sky. Addy is running, screaming with laughter, because Poppy is chasing
her.

My wrists are so sore. I want to sit up, just for a little bit. Maybe if I shout? I’m afraid that Scar will come, but I’m more afraid that my hands will drop off soon if I
don’t get the blood circulating. I call out, quietly at first, and then louder. Eventually the door opens and Talon comes in. The second I see him, I beg for him to untie me, knowing
it’s degrading, but I don’t care. It’s not like he doesn’t know who has the power here. ‘I won’t hurt you,’ I add, when his hand goes unconsciously to the
stab wound on his arm. ‘Please, I just have to move. Just a couple of minutes.’

Finally he comes over to the bed and cuts the flexes from my wrists with the penknife from his belt. Just as he is fiddling with the second flex, the door bangs open again. ‘What the hell
is going on?’ Feather asks. Then, as she takes in the scene in front of her, she yells, ‘You untied her!’

‘She was in pain.’

‘I don’t care. She tried to escape.’

One of my arms has gone to sleep and it flops about in my lap. I shake it hard to get some feeling back into it. Talon eyes me for a second, to make sure that I’m not about to attack him,
and then goes to Feather.

She is clearly furious but she lowers her voice as she goes on about how everything they have done will be pointless if I escape. ‘She is our last chance! You’d better not be backing
out on me because—’

‘This means as much to me as it does to you, but I don’t see any reason to make this harder on her than it has to be,’ Talon assures her.

‘You are lucky Talon is so compassionate,’ she says to me. ‘If it were my choice, your hands would stay tied up until your arms dropped off.’

She doesn’t tie me up again, though. That makes me think that Talon must have some influence. Maybe that’s something I can play on? He is definitely the kindest of my kidnappers. Can
I convince him to help me?

I have been pacing the cell since they left me. It feels good to move around and it’s easier to think when I’m not tied up. I’m back to keeping track of time,
watching very carefully for shifts in the sunlight. It’s getting dark now, so I reckon it must be about eight o’clock. Talon has left one of the flexes attached to the bedpost, so I
pull it off and experiment by dragging it down the wall. If I press hard enough, I can make an indent in the plaster. Then, because I don’t want my kidnappers to know what I’m doing, I
crawl under the bed and begin to work the flex up and down against the wall. Two marks. One for yesterday, when I was brought here, and one for today. The scratches look like the beginning of a
fence. I imagine it running around the four walls, not just once, but twice, three times, four. A wall of little fences. I won’t be here that long, though, I tell myself. Dad is coming for
me.

I roll out from under the bed and sit down on it. Then, to distract myself, I create a viewfinder with the thumb and index finger of one hand and then circle it around the room, looking for a
good shot. White walls, white ceiling, white floor, a tiny slice of window. I let my hand drop. I don’t want to take a photo of anything in here. Photography for me is about memories and
there is nothing in here that I want to remember. Before I can stop it, the familiar refrain starts up in my head again.
Come on, Dad. Find me. Please. Bring me home.

I have no appetite. I don’t know if it’s sickness or fear, but once again, I ignored the food Talon brought me for breakfast. He didn’t comment on it this time,
just took me to the bathroom. I swill the toothpaste around my mouth and spit it out in the cracked sink in the bathroom. (I have been given a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap and a small hand towel.
Thank goodness.) Then I flush the toilet and wash my hands and face. I know that I stink but I won’t take off my clothes to wash without a lock on the door. I haven’t seen Scar since
that first day – it is always Talon who brings me my food and takes me to the bathroom – but I know Scar is still here. I hear his voice sometimes, coming from the room above me.

After drying my face with the towel – I have to stop several times to clutch the sink and breathe deeply because I think I will vomit – I open the door to the bathroom. Feather is
leaning against the wall. ‘Talon says you’re not eating. Why? Don’t you like the food?’

‘I . . . I can’t eat. I think I’m sick.’

‘Nonsense.’ But her eyes travel over my face again, assessing. ‘You’ll die if you don’t eat. We didn’t bring you here to die.’ She scratches at her neck
under her mask, as though the wool is irritating her skin. She has a different one on today, one with a cutout for her mouth. She is speaking again, but I don’t hear the words. I am
fascinated by the movement of her mouth: the flash of white teeth, the tip of ruby tongue, the rosy flush of her lips. The colours are so bright against the black mask. I lean forward, tilting my
head. Her mouth is a shell and her tongue a sea snake, the deep darkness of her throat its home. The snake darts out of its carapace, jet-black eyes watching me.

‘Robyn!’

The snake flicks back into its hole, becomes a tongue again in a pink mouth full of tiny white teeth.

‘Robyn.’ She hauls me into a sitting position. Somehow I am on the floor. My forehead is tender as if I have hit it against something. I am watching Feather’s mouth again:
open, close, open, close. The muscles in her jaw contract and expand. Contract. Expand.

Now the floor is moving and somehow I am above it, suspended in the air. I look down. My legs are moving, my feet scrabbling to grip the slippery floor. Just before I black out, I see that
someone is holding me up. Then—

I can’t breathe. My nose, my eyes. Clogged. I can’t see. I draw a breath and cough and gasp – and rise up to the surface. I splutter until I am finally able to draw a lungful
of air. I pull in another one. In front of me is a white face. Grey eyes. It takes a second to realise that I am back in the bathroom and looking at myself in the cracked mirror. The sink below me
is full of water. Feather is holding the scruff of my T-shirt as though preparing to give me another dunking. Seeing that I am conscious again, she lets go and steps away from me. ‘You kept
fainting,’ she says, as if that is a reason to nearly drown someone.

I breathe in slowly a few more times as she sits down on the edge of the bath. ‘No one wants you to die,’ she says. ‘That isn’t part of the plan.’

This seems a little ironic, given that a few seconds ago she was holding my head in a sink full of water, but I say nothing. When my head and lungs are clearer, I turn to face her, gripping the
sink behind me, to offer some support in case I feel dizzy again.

‘What do you want to eat?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know. I can’t.’ I woke up feeling ill this morning. Day three, and I’m ill. Maybe it was the water I drank from the sink on the first day?

‘You can’t get sick and you can’t die.’ She stands up as if that is an end to it.

She leads me back to the cell, her arm supporting my elbow. There is a cheese sandwich on a paper plate on the floor next to a plastic beaker of water. She nods at it. ‘Eat.’ Again
‘
Eat!’
when I hesitate. The bread is soft and fresh, but the taste of toothpaste is still in my mouth and bile rises after only a single bite. Feather is watching me and I
swallow it, breathing through clenched teeth.

She stays with me, sitting silently, until I have forced the whole sandwich down. ‘You know animals in the labs at Bell-Barkov wouldn’t be treated with the same respect,’ she
says, handing me the beaker of water. ‘If one of them got sick because they refused to eat, it would be put down and another animal brought in to replace it. Animal life is cheap to
humans.’

I don’t know how to respond to that, so I don’t answer. I’m the one being kept in the cage here.

‘What do you know about animal testing?’ she continues without giving me a chance to talk. ‘Nothing, I’m guessing. Do you know whether the drugs you take, the make-up you
wear, are tested on animals? Do you even
care
?’

She stands up. ‘You’re just like the majority of people in this country. No one gives a shit about the planet. Well, they need to be
made
to care. Violently, if necessary.
People are so stupid. We’re trying to make a difference and what do they do? Lock us up for crimes we didn’t commit, just to get us off the streets.’

‘Please,’ I ask, ‘what does this have to do with me?’

‘You’re human, aren’t you? You
live
on this planet?’ She laughs nastily. ‘If what you mean is what does it have to do with you being here, in this cell, then
say so. Well? Is that what you mean?’

I nod. ‘What . . . what do you want?’

‘I want many things. An end to all animal testing in the UK. I want them to stop drilling in the Arctic Ocean. I want no more deforestation. There is so much I want for this planet, but my
priority right now is to secure the immediate release of Kyle Jefferies – or Marble, as he is known to his family and friends.’ Her eyes are jet black in the bright light. ‘You
want to go home, Princess? You get my brother freed.’

Mum calls as soon as Dad gets back to the hotel. I’ve barely had a chance to say hello to him. So much for some time, just him and me. Dad sits in the desk chair and I
pull up a chair of my own. He puts the phone on speaker and props it up against his briefcase, so we can both talk into it. I don’t say much.

‘Are you having a good time?’ Mum asks.

‘Bobs nearly caught pneumonia today,’ Dad says, with a wink at me.

Mum misses the joke and takes it as an opportunity to worry. ‘You need to wrap up, darling. Make sure you wear your scarf tomorrow. Stephen, make sure she does.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Dad says as I roll my eyes.

‘How’s Addy?’ I ask before Mum insists I start wearing thermal underwear.

‘Itchy,’ Mum says. ‘What have you two done today, then? You’re not very talkative, Robyn. Tell me all about Paris. Wish I was there, rather than stuck in the Goldfish
Bowl.’ It’s what Mum calls Number 10. ‘Seventeen journalists by the gates this morning. Seventeen! Really, don’t they have something more important to report than whether I
wore the red Burberry jacket rather than the blue?’

Dad laughs.

‘It isn’t funny, Stephen. I am sick of this. Sick of it!’

‘Well,’ Dad says sombrely, ‘take comfort. At this rate, we won’t win the next election.’

‘Oh don’t be ridiculous. Of course you will,’ Mum replies in a tone which implies that dreams – hers at least – do not come true.

To deter Parental Armageddon, I tell her about the Eiffel Tower and then about the underground catacombs Gordon took me to this afternoon while Dad was in a meeting. The tombs were full of
skulls arranged in all sorts of patterns and shapes.

‘Sounds absolutely hideous,’ Mum says. ‘Good grief, Stephen, couldn’t you have taken her to a gallery or something?’ Then she asks about the briefing, saying the
deputy prime minister’s wife called ‘in a right flap’ about something.

I stop listening. Pushing my chair back, I go to peer out of the window. We’re in the small study just off the main living room of the suite. There’s no view from here, only a
white wall opposite, and a small inner courtyard, ten floors down. For security reasons, we never get a view. All the suites that overlook the courtyard on this floor and the one above are either
empty or occupied by members of our staff.

Mum is still rabbiting on about something completely irrelevant, like what colour she should paint the Terracotta Room or did Dad know that the Fitzwilliams are spending the summer at
Martha’s Vineyard.

Dad is always telling me to make more of an effort with Mum, and I try, but . . . I don’t know. It annoys me the way she nags at Dad. I am not the biggest fan of Downing Street and I
find the fact that I am expected to call my own father ‘Prime Minister’ in public ridiculous, but this is who Dad is. And I love him. God, that’s cheesy. But I do. Yes, he is
embarrassing, and last week he called only the most famous boy band in the world the wrong name in front of the entire nation, and don’t even get me started on his dancing – it could
start world wars.

Yet, he is the prime minister of Great Britain. The decisions he makes every day affect so many people. Not just Britons but people across the globe. And that is phenomenal. I lie awake at
night worrying about whether I’ll get an A in my GCSEs while he is deciding how best to deal with North Korea, or China, or the global fiscal crisis, or the NHS, or the benefit system, or . .
. brain freeze.

Allowances have to be made for having that level of stuff on your mind. Mum doesn’t agree, though, and still goes off on him for leaving his clothes on the floor, or not asking the
Scotts to dinner, or not taking me to a gallery in Paris.

It’s hard for Mum too, though. She hates Downing Street. She likes the parties but she hates the chit-chat and the constant back-stabbing. And the press are always having a go at her.
They’ve spied a chink in Dad’s armour and they stick a knife into it as often as possible. But that annoys me too. Why can’t Mum just get it right?

Dad says I need to have more sympathy. He says me and Addy are her everything. She had four miscarriages before I was born, and then, of course, there was my brother, Robin. He was a
stillbirth. Dad says I can’t begin to imagine what they went through, especially Mum.

I was born four agonising years later, after endless rounds of IVF. Dad says Mum called me her ‘little miracle’ and held me for a whole week before she would put me down. I find
that hard to imagine now. I always think of my sister as the miracle baby, born to Mum when she was really old with no IVF, no nothing. Adriana is a miracle; I’m the girl who should have been
a boy. Is that why Mum and I don’t always get along? Has she been disappointed in me since I was born?