Authors: Donna Malane
‘… the cops after me saying I killed her … whole fuckin’ nightmare started up … and then you’re snooping around my place setting me up again … no way, man, no way am I going to have my life destroyed all over again …’ He had a glottal click, probably caused by too much spit. He needed to swallow more or talk less.
Concentrating on sounds and analysing them was working — my panic was beginning to subside. Unfortunately, as the adrenalin settled, the pain started to filter through. It was nudging at my senses already, impatient to be registered. I knew when the pain did successfully breach my brain’s flimsy resistance, it would be brutal. I needed to know where I was, and I needed to know before the pain hit.
Tuning Ross’s voice out again, I focused all my attention on the other sounds. The Holden’s motor had the whine of a sleep-deprived three year old — it sounded to me like the transmission was shot. That was going to be a costly fix for Ross, I thought, and was not surprised at the lack of sympathy I felt about that.
The low hum of traffic shifted in register as the car drove up what felt like a ramp or turn-off, veered right, then down again. An overbridge? We slowed, then accelerated through what I thought
might be a roundabout, and then the car slowed and stopped, engine idling. Traffic lights. I heard the whirr of the driver’s window sliding down, the rustle of a wrapper being crushed in Ross’s fist. I focused on the new sounds through the open window — something soft, repetitive and familiar. The sound tickled at the edges of my memory, but before I could place it, the window whirred back up and the car lurched forward. Pain was pushing solidly at me now, demanding to be acknowledged. I had two, maybe three heartbeats before I’d have to let it take over. I wrenched my head around so that both ears were off the carpet. Stereo. Two things happened at once. I realised what the sound I’d heard was. Waves. Little shushing waves. The other thing that happened was an electric jolt of pain so fierce, so encompassing, so overwhelming, that I felt myself lurch into blackness.
I
surfaced to a kind of wakefulness, and then sank again. It was as if I was floating on a sea of consciousness. A wave of awareness would swell beneath me, and I’d open my eyes to a race of clouds whipping across a pastel-blue sky. Occasionally a break in the clouds would reveal a glimpse of the moon, or maybe it was the sun. I didn’t care. The howling wind and the lonely cry of seagulls surrounded me always. My thirst was a terrible thing. I could hear the sound of teeth grinding. Was it me? Was I doing that? My hand wouldn’t move, caught somehow. I let myself sink again into the deep, long, oily blackness.
I surfaced again. I knew time had passed. Deathly cold. Maybe I’m dead, I thought. Maybe this is what death is. A surging, swelling kind of nothingness. With that thought came a little bubble of fear. I noticed my legs were shaking so hard my ankles thumped on a concrete floor. Your body can’t shake if it’s dead, I told myself. I’m alive — and with that thought I gratefully sank again into a kind of semi-death.
That time, long, long ago, when Peaches had walloped me
over the head with a cricket bat, there had been no sense of time passing. One second I was in Snow’s bedroom, and then, wham! What seemed like the very next second I was in a different room with one hell of a sore head, and the incongruous sight of Peaches in an evening dress swinging a Kookaburra.
But this time I surfaced again and again from unconsciousness, and at each surfacing, though I didn’t know where I was — didn’t care where I was — I knew more time had passed, and that at every surfacing I was colder and thirstier. And then eventually I became aware of myself in a place — a freezing, windy, lonely place. And then I sank again into the sweet, soft, breathing darkness.
Time surged by. An achingly slow, painful torture of minutes passed like a nightmare where you try and run but can’t move. After what must have been hours, maybe days of this, I drifted to the surface of consciousness; and this time, like the flipside of going under an anaesthetic, I made myself stay there, counting one, two, three — willing myself with each subsequent number to reach a higher level of wakefulness. It was like slowly rising out of a deep hypnotism.
At twenty I opened my eyes. A whip lashed across my eyeballs, and I felt warm liquid dribble down my cheeks. I immediately fell back into the comforting blackness. Minutes, maybe hours passed, and then I was aware of myself again, and again I forced myself to stay conscious by counting. This time when I reached twenty I kept my eyes shut and focused on myself. It was like opening floodgates as the awareness of pain and thirst smashed into me.
The torture of thirst was far greater than the pain. My tongue had swollen to an enormous hard dry muscle. It feels like a parrot’s tongue, I thought, and rested on the image of a parrot — took refuge in remembering the sweet beauty of garish feathers, paint-box blue and Lego yellow — and from there my mind wandered to
favourite children’s stories I’d read aloud to Niki. Lines from
The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch
echoed in the distant, timeless void — out there? In my mind? I couldn’t tell the difference any more. I tried to remember the name of the lighthouse keeper — Grinland? Grinning?
A part of me knew what was happening: my brain was comforting me with pleasant memories, free-wheeling from one anodyne thought to another, trying to help me out by imagining pleasant, comforting, everyday things, so I wouldn’t have to face the horror of my reality. I felt a welling of gratitude for that and observed myself weeping. But there were no tears; everything about me was parched and dry as bleached, windswept driftwood.
I think it was hours later that I surfaced again. This time I lifted my eyelids fractionally, exposing only slits of eyeballs. Something lashed my cheek — a thick swatch of matted hair, crusted with blood and salt. So that’s what the whip was — my hair.
I focused on my body. There was something wrong with my left hand. I couldn’t move it. Okay, leave that for now. I forced myself to stay conscious as I took in the immediate surroundings. I was curled up in an enforced foetal position, my body wrapped around an iron ring cemented into a concrete floor, my left wrist secured to it by a hard plastic pull-through handcuff. I was inside what appeared to be a three-sided bunker, my body curled towards a concrete wall built into the clay bank.
Okay, I congratulated myself. Well done. Now for the big one. I needed to know where the bunker was, and that meant turning my body to face the freezing whip of wind at my back. I took a long, deep breath and rolled my body over. The wind slammed into me like a car crash. The open side of the bunker faced a heaving black mass of water stippled with moonlight. I counted ten deep, slow breaths, willing myself not to black out again. I knew where I was:
Fitzroy Bay on the hill above the Pencarrow lighthouse. I was in an old WW2 lookout bunker, dug into a hill above the deep, unsettled waters of Cook Strait.
Grinling. That was the name of the lighthouse keeper whose wife had fought so valiantly to stop the seagulls eating her husband’s lunch. It was Grinling.
A couple of years ago, Sean and I had hired mountain bikes and cycled around the winding clay and shingle coastal track as far as Fitzroy Bay where the Pencarrow lighthouse winked at the ferries, and container ships hacked their course between the North and South Islands. I remembered it as a pleasant, easy jaunt of maybe six or seven kilometres from Eastbourne to the Bay. The memory of that was reassuring. Beyond this bay, the track became rougher, stonier, and much more difficult to ride on, and then increasingly tricky for some twenty kilometres before it finally reached Palliser Bay.
We’d decided the lighthouse was far enough for us that day. We weren’t doing the ride for fitness, and were happy to lie around on a little grassy knoll above the lighthouse and lick salt spray off each other’s skin. I suddenly remembered with a lurch of excitement that there was a lake, somewhere inland and not far from this bunker. Rather than return by the same coastal track, we’d ridden our bikes inland from the bay looking for a short cut back to town, and we’d come across a small reedy lake where we stopped to watch the resident ducks skidding in to land on the water, their webbed feet stuck out in front like toppling water-skiers.
The memory of the lake was excruciating. I knew I didn’t have a hope of finding it again. Reluctantly, I forced myself to abandon the possibility, and turned my thoughts back to the coastal road. Presumably Ross had driven his Commodore in from the Eastbourne end, but I had no idea how he’d got me from the dirt
track up the hill to the bunker. Maybe I’d climbed with him; maybe he’d dragged or carried me. I couldn’t remember anything after realising his car was heading along the foreshore of Petone.
I imagined myself dying up here on this wild, windswept outcrop of land, and merged that image with one of Niki dead on the manicured lawn of the Island Bay golf course. There was a strange sort of rightness to it. Niki had always been the tidy one, had never lost her compulsion to put things in order, tidy them away. She’d stopped counting lamp posts once I’d convinced her that the
Good Luk!
knickers would work their charm, but she’d continued to snip, trim and pluck at herself obsessively. She tried to keep it hidden from me and I let her think she succeeded, but there was little she could keep secret from me. That’s what I thought anyway, until recently.
I slitted my eyes open again, and this time made out a sprinkling of the city’s lights in the distance. So it was coming on to evening. I let this thought ping-pong around in my brain for a while until I could work up the courage to accept what it meant. This wasn’t the same night I’d been kidnapped. One whole day at least had passed while I’d risen and fallen in and out of consciousness. I had to work very hard to hold down the panic that threatened.
Broken glass, graffiti, and the remnants of a fire meant people had been here in the bunker at some time. The thought brought some comfort. I wouldn’t let myself dwell on the possibility the debris was years old. I wouldn’t let myself think about what a god-forsaken place this was. Bikers and even walkers did the coastal track, but that was way below where I was. No matter how loud I screamed, only the seagulls would hear me, and they didn’t care. I couldn’t make any noise anyway. My swollen tongue made even breathing difficult. Some hardy, intrepid off-road bikers might take it into their heads to come up here, but it was unlikely.
I took a ragged breath, and opened the floodgates of sensation again. Thirst. My whole being craved water. I pushed that down, down. What else? Cold. Freezing. Ice cold. Wind. I realised I was still lying down, curled around the concrete plinth in the middle of the floor. I dragged myself inch by inch into a half-sitting, half-crouched position. The plastic tie had sliced into my wrist and the wound was raw and oozing, crusted with dried blood. There was a lot of blood too on my free hand, my face and hair. I figured it must have come from my smashed nose. The light summer dress I had put on for my dinner date with Robbie was filthy with blood and whatever else I had been lying in — it smelled like shit and urine from some animal, possibly human. Possibly me.
Both my legs were scratched, knees grazed. No one ever died of grazed knees, I told myself. No shoes. No feeling at all in my feet. Numb with cold. With my free hand I systematically prodded and pressed every part of my body, forcing myself to register pain so I’d know how bad a shape I was in. I was sore from bruises and abrasions over roughly eighty per cent of my body but no bones were broken as far as I could tell. There may have been some smashed cartilage in my nose — it seemed to be encrusted with a mix of blood and salt from the freezing southerly whipping spray up off Cook Strait — but my face was entirely numb so no matter how hard I pressed I couldn’t feel anything.
There was something I still had to check. My brain told me not to do it but I ignored that advice. My undies were gone, vulva swollen and sore to touch, pubic hair caked with dried semen. I registered what this meant. My brain said, ‘I told you not to do that’, and then everything went black again.
This time I knew I was dead. I was in a freezing cold hell. Spirits screamed all around me, and Satan’s eyes with their burnt-amber vertical irises studied me impassively. I tried to cry out but there
was no sound from my swollen, parched throat. I was beyond thirst. Even the sibilance of the word ‘thirst’ tinkling in my head drove me mad. The constant shushing of the waves below was a torture.
Dawn. Cold, harsh, white dawn. The devil was no longer there but the thirst was worse than any pain I’d ever endured. I’d have done anything for water. I’d have killed for water. What a beautiful word it was. Water. I went over all the words — water, moisture, stream, liquid …
Seagulls circled overhead, screeching insults at each other. So that was the sound I thought was the screaming of spirits. It was only seagulls. If I was to survive, I knew I had to use my desperate craving for the one and only thing I still cared about — water. I thought again about the lake Sean and I had found, but I knew I could roam for days in these barren hills and never find it. I wouldn’t last days.
Reluctantly, I let that thought go, though the fantasy of it — a big blue mass of shining water — still shimmered in my imagination. Then, with a yip of pleasure, I remembered a trickle of water, maybe a couple of kilometres back along the coast road: a beautiful little run-off trickle of water that drooled down the hill and across the shingle into the surf. Sean and I had stopped to watch a line of ducklings follow that trickle across the track. The memory of it was a sweet torture. It was little more than a two-finger-width dribble of water, but it was a thing of shimmering beauty in my memory. If I could just get my hand free I could go to it. I could drink. The plastic tie looping my hand to the iron ring looked flimsy enough but proved to be unbelievably resistant to everything I tried. Yanking and tugging opened the wrist wound until it oozed and then poured, but even using the blood as lubricant I still couldn’t pull my hand free. My thirst was dreadful. I whimpered in a kind of shame as I licked at the blood.
What must have been an hour of rhythmical sawing on the rusted iron ring resulted in nothing more than a few scratches on the plastic handcuff and a lot more on me. I tried using my mouth but my cracked lips bled profusely before my teeth could get any purchase. I persevered, starting with my front teeth. I tried to snip at the tie and when that failed I snarled my lips back for the bicuspids to have a go. I worked away at it for a long time before I rewarded myself with a look at the result — just the faintest of fraying to one edge of the handcuff, plus bleeding gums, a cracked cuspid, and painfully split top lip. This wasn’t going to work.
From the position of the sun, I figured it to be late morning. I forced myself to do the maths while I scrabbled around looking for anything sharp I could use as a tool. Start with Tuesday. I was kidnapped on Tuesday night. My fingers closed on a small round stone and I tried rubbing that against the plastic handcuff. I was pretty sure a whole day had passed since then. A whole day of bright light and seagull cries. A whole day on which my brain had slammed a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign up.
The stone was useless. I put it in my mouth for comfort while I systematically searched every centimetre of the floor within my reach. Okay, after that full day, I’d seen the lights across the harbour as night was falling. That would have been Wednesday night. And now it was day again. So it must be Thursday. Late Thursday morning.
For the first time I allowed myself the luxury of a thought that until now I hadn’t let myself indulge: They’ll be looking for me. Someone will be looking for me. I’d been missing for two nights and a full day. As if in response to this realisation, my stomach clenched.
Manoeuvring my bum as far from the shackle as possible, I held my dress away from the hot, stinging shit that burst out of me. When
I was sure the spasms were over, I used my bare foot to kick loose leaves and rubbish over the stinking acrid mess.