Land of the Living (4 page)

‘I’ve got you,’ he said.

‘Got me?’

‘You’re wearing a hood. You’re not seeing my face. You’re being clever. If you can make me think you never saw me, then maybe I’ll let you go.’ Another wheezing laugh. ‘You think about that, do you, while you’re lying there? Do you think about going back to the world?’

I felt a lurch of misery that almost made me howl. But it also made me think. So we did meet. He didn’t just grab me from behind in a dark alley and hit me over the head. Do I know this man? If I saw him, would I know his face? If he spoke naturally, would I recognize his voice?

‘If you don’t believe me, then it doesn’t matter if you tell me again, does it?’

The rag was jammed into my mouth. I was lifted down and led over to the bucket. Carried back. Dumped on the ledge. No wire. I took that to mean that he wasn’t going out of the building. I felt his breath close on my face, that smell.

‘You’re lying in here trying to work things out. I like that. You’re thinking that if you can make me believe that you can’t identify me, I’ll play with you for a while, then I’ll let you go. You don’t understand. You don’t see the point. But I like it.’ I listened to his scraping whisper, trying to recall if the voice was in any way familiar. ‘They’re different. Like Kelly, for example. Take Kelly.’ He rolled the name round in his mouth as if it was a piece of toffee. ‘She just cried and fucking cried all the time. Wasn’t a bloody plan. Just crying. It was a bloody relief just to shut her up.’

Don’t cry, Abbie. Don’t get on his nerves. Don’t bore him.

The thought came to me out of the darkness. He’s been keeping me alive. I didn’t mean that he hadn’t killed me. I had been in this room now for two or three or four days. You can live for weeks without food but how long can a human being survive without water? If I had just been locked in this room, unattended, I would be dead or dying by now. The water I’d gulped down had been his water. The food in my gut was his food. I was like an animal on his farm. I was his. I knew nothing about him. Outside this room, out in the world, this man was probably stupid, ugly, repulsive, a failure. He might be too shy to talk to women, workmates might bully him. He could be the silent, weird one in the corner.

But here I was his. He was my lover and my father and my God. If he wanted to come in and quietly strangle me, he could. I had to devote every single waking second to thinking of ways to deal with him. To make him love me, or like me, or be scared of me. If he wanted to break down a woman before killing her, then I had to remain strong. If he hated women for their hostility, then I had to reassure him. If he tortured women who rejected him, then I had to… what? Accept him? Which was the right choice? I didn’t know.

Always and above all I had to stop myself believing that it probably didn’t matter what I did.

I didn’t count the time without the wire. It didn’t seem to matter. But after a time he came back in. I felt his presence. A hand on my shoulder made me start. Was he checking I was still alive?

Two choices. I could escape in my mind. The yellow butterfly. Cool water. Water to drink, water to plunge into. I tried to re-create my world in my head. The flat. I walked through the rooms, looked at pictures on the wall, touched the carpet, named the objects on shelves. I walked around my parents’ house. There were odd blanks. My father’s garden shed, the drawers in Terry’s desk. But still. So much in my head. So many things. In there and out there. But sometimes as I was wandering through these imaginary rooms, the floor would disappear from beneath my feet and I would fall. These mind games might be keeping me sane but I mustn’t just keep sane. I must also keep alive. I must make plans. I wanted to kill him, I wanted to hurt, gouge, mash him. All I needed was an opportunity but I couldn’t see any possibility of an opportunity.

I tried to imagine that he hadn’t really killed anybody. He might be lying to scare me. I couldn’t make myself believe it. He wasn’t just making an obscene phone call. I was here, in this room. He didn’t need to make up stories. I knew nothing about this man but I knew he had done this before. He had practised. He was in control. The odds against me were bad. They were as bad as they could be. So any plan I could come up with didn’t have to have a particularly good chance of success. But I couldn’t think of any plan at all that had any chance of success. My only plan was to stretch it out as long as I could. But I didn’t even know if I was stretching it out. I had a horrible feeling — another horrible feeling, all my feelings were horrible — that this was all on his timetable. All talk, all my feeble plans and strategies, was just noise in his ear like a mosquito buzzing around his head. When he was ready, he would slap it.

‘Why do you do this?’

‘What?’

‘Why me? What have I done to you?’

A wheezing laugh. A rag stuffed in my mouth.

More knee pull-ups. I couldn’t do more than sixteen. I was getting worse. My legs hurt. My arms ached.

Why me? I tried to stop myself asking the question but I couldn’t. I’ve seen pictures of murdered women, in newspapers and on TV. But not murdered. Hardly ever. No. I’d seen them when they thought their lives were going to be ordinary. I suppose that when the families give the photos to the TV companies they choose the prettiest, smiliest pictures. They’re probably from high-school yearbooks most of the time. But they’re blown up larger than they were meant to be. It gives them a slightly blurry, creepy feel. They don’t know what’s going to happen to them and we do. We’re not like them.

I couldn’t believe that I was going to be one of them. Terry would go through my stuff and find a picture. Probably that stupid one I got for my passport last year in which I look as if I’ve got something trapped in one of my eyes and I’m smelling a bad smell simultaneously. He’ll give it to the police and they’ll blow it up so it looks all blurry and I’ll be famous for being dead and it’s so unfair.

I went through the unlucky women I knew. There was Sadie, who was left a month before Christmas by her boyfriend when she was nearly eight months pregnant. Marie has been in and out of hospital for her chemotherapy and has been wearing a headscarf. Pauline and Liz were made redundant from the firm when Laurence did the belt-tightening the year before last. He told them on a Friday evening when everybody had left, and when we came in on Monday morning they were gone. Even six months later Liz was still crying about it. They’re all luckier than me. And some time in the next few days they’ll know it. They’ll hear about it and they’ll each become mini-celebrities in their own right. They’ll be saying to acquaintances, colleagues at work, with excitement covered with a thin layer of deepest sympathy, ‘You know that woman, Abbie Devereaux, the one in the papers? I knew her. I can’t believe it.’ And they’ll all be shocked and they’ll all tell themselves secretly that they might have had their problems but at least they weren’t Abbie Devereaux. Thank God that the lightning had struck her and not them.

But I am Abbie Devereaux and it’s not fair.

He came in and slipped the wire around my throat. I was going to count this time. I’d been thinking about this, planning it. How would I stop myself losing count? I worked out a plan. Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour. That’s 3,600 seconds. I would imagine walking up a hill in a town beginning with A. A hill with 3,600 houses and I would count the houses as I walked past them. I couldn’t think of a town beginning with A, though. Yes, Aberdeen. I walked up the hill in Aberdeen. One, two, three, four… When I got to the top of the hill in Aberdeen, I began again in Bristol. Then Cardiff, then Dublin, Eastbourne, Folkestone and then, when I was half-way up the hill in Gillingham, he was back in the room, the wire was slipped off my neck. Six and a half hours.

If you are in a hole, stop digging. A stitch in time saves nine. Don’t cross a bridge till you come to it. Don’t burn your bridges. Was that right, two sets of bridges? What else? Think, think, think. No use crying over spilt milk. Look before you leap. Too many cooks spoil the broth and many hands make light work and don’t put all your eggs in one basket and birds of a feather flock together and one swallow doesn’t make a summer. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. My delight. But red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning. How many roads must a man walk down, before… ? No, that was something else. A song. A song not a saying. What was the tune? I tried to remember, to put music in my brain and to hear the sound in this dense and silent dark. No use.

Pictures were easier. A yellow butterfly on a green leaf. Don’t fly away. A river, with fish in it. A lake of clear, clean water. A silver tree on a smooth hill, with its leaves furling in the breeze. What else? Nothing else. Nothing. I was too cold.

‘Hello. I was hoping you would come soon.’

‘You haven’t finished your water.’

‘There’s no hurry, is there? There are so many things I wanted to ask you.’

He made a faint guttural sound. I was shaking, but perhaps that was because I was so chilled. I couldn’t imagine ever being warm again, or clean. Or free.

‘I mean, here we are, two people alone in this place. We should get to know each other. Talk to each other.’ He said nothing. I couldn’t tell if he was even listening. I drew a breath and continued: ‘After all, you must have chosen me for a reason. You seem like a man who has reasons, is that right? You’re logical, I think. I like that. Logical.’ Was logical a word? It sounded all wrong.

‘Go on,’ he said.

Go on. Good. What should I say next? There was a sore patch above my lip. I put out the tip of my tongue to touch it; it felt like a cold sore. Perhaps my whole body was breaking out in sores and blisters. ‘Yes. Logical. Purposely.’ No. Definitely the wrong word. Try again. ‘Purposeful. You’re someone who is strong. Am I right?’ There was a silence. I could hear him breathing hoarsely. ‘Yes. I think I’m right. Men should be strong, though many are weak. Many,’ I repeated. ‘But I think you’re lonely as well. People don’t recognize your hopes. No, your strengths, I meant strengths, not hopes. Are you lonely?’ But it was like dropping stones into a deep well. I spoke the stupid words and they disappeared into the darkness. ‘Or do you like being alone?’

‘Maybe.’

‘We all need someone to love us, though,’ I said. ‘No one can be all alone.’ I would do anything to survive, I thought. I’d let him hold me and fuck me and I’d even pretend I liked it. Anything, to live. ‘And there must have been a reason you chose me, rather than somebody else.’

‘Do you want to hear what I think? Eh? Do you?’ He put a hand on my thigh. He rubbed his hand up and down.

‘Yes. Tell me.’ Oh, don’t let me be sick and don’t let me scream out loud.

‘I think you haven’t got a clue what you look like at the moment.’ He gave his wheezy laugh. ‘You think you can flirt with me, eh? Trap me like that, as if I’m stupid? But you’ve no idea what you look like, sweetheart. You don’t look like a person at all. You haven’t even got a face. You look like a-a-a
thing
. Or an animal. And you smell, too. You smell of piss and shit.’ He laughed once more, and his hand on my thigh tightened until he was pinching me hard and I cried out in pain and humiliation.

‘Abbie, who tried so hard,’ he whispered. ‘Kelly who cried and Abbie who tried. I can make you into a rhyme. Cried, tried, died. It’s all the same to me, in the end.’

Cried, tried, died. Rhymes in the dark again. Time was running out. I knew it was. I imagined an hourglass with the sand falling through it in a steady stream. If you looked at it, the sand always seemed to fall faster as it reached the end.

He was lifting me off the ledge again. My toes buzzed with pins and needles and my legs felt as if they did not belong to me any more. They were stiff, like sticks, or not like sticks, like twigs that might snap at any moment. I stumbled and lurched and he held on to my arm to keep me upright. His fingers dug into my flesh. Perhaps they were leaving bruises there, four on top and one underneath. I could tell there was a light. It was dark grey not black inside the hood. He dragged me along the floor, then said: ‘Sit. Bucket.’

He didn’t bother to untie my wrists. He tugged down my trousers himself. I felt his hands on my flesh. I didn’t care. I sat. I felt the metal rim under me and behind my back. I curled my fingers round it and tried to breathe calmly. When I’d finished, I stood up and he pulled up the trousers again. They were loose on me now. I took a kick at the bucket and sent it flying. I heard it hit his legs and tip. He grunted and I launched myself blindly in the direction of the grunt, screaming as hard as I could with the rag stuffed in my mouth. It didn’t sound like a scream, but a shallow croaking noise. I hurtled into him, but it was like running into a solid wall. He put up an arm to stop me and I brought up my head and butted him in the chin. Pain filled my head; there was red behind my eyes.

‘Oh,’ he said. Then he hit me. And hit me again. He held me by the shoulder and he punched me in the stomach. ‘Oh, Abbie,’ he said.

I sat on the ledge. Where did I hurt? Everywhere. I could no longer tell which bit of me was which. Where the pain in my head stopped and the pain in my neck began; where the cold in my legs became the cold in my body; where the taste in my ulcerous mouth became the bile in my throat and the nausea in my stomach; where the sound ringing in my ears became the silence packed in around me. I tried to flex my toes but couldn’t. I twisted my fingers together. Which fingers belonged to my right hand and which to my left?

I tried the times tables again. I couldn’t even make it through the two times table. How was that possible? Even tiny children can do the two times table. They chanted it in class. I could hear the chanting inside my head but it didn’t make any sense.

What did I know? I knew I was Abbie. I knew I was twenty-five. I knew it was winter outside. I knew other things too. Yellow and blue makes green, like the blue summer sea meeting the yellow sand. Crushed shells make sand. Melted sand makes glass; water in a glass tumbler, ice chinking. Trees make paper. Scissors, paper, stone. There are eight notes in an octave. There are sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week, fifty-two weeks in a year. Thirty days have September, April, June and November — but I couldn’t finish that one off.