"Do you get scared?"
I didn't answer at first. I took another sip of coffee and a bite of my biscuit. Then I said, "Yes, of course. I mean, I think I get scared in different ways I'm scared thinking about what it was like; remembering it all over again, almost as if I was still inside it and had never got away. The whole thing kind of closes in on me, like I'm underwater or something. Drowning in it. Most of the time I try not to let myself remember. I try and push it away from me. Perhaps I shouldn't do that. Do you think it's healthier to go over it?" I didn't give her time to answer. "And the other thing I get scared about is the idea that he hasn't been caught. And that maybe he's just waiting for me to come out and then he'll grab me again. When I let myself think of that I can't breathe properly. Everything in my body seems to be breaking up with fear. So, yes. I get scared. Not always, though. Sometimes I just feel very, very lucky to be alive. But I wish they'd catch him. I don't suppose I'll be able to feel safe again, until that happens."
Irene Beddoes was the first person I'd met whom I could talk to about what had happened to me in that room, and what I had felt. She wasn't a friend. I could tell her about my sense of losing myself, of being turned, bit by bit, into an animal, or an object. I told her about his laugh, his whisper, the bucket. I told her I'd wet myself. I told her about how I would have done anything, let him do anything to me, in order to stay alive. And she listened, saying nothing. I talked and I talked until my voice grew weary. Then I stopped and leant towards her. "Do you think you can help me remember my lost days?"
"My concern, my job, is what's happening in your head, what you've been going through and what you are still going through. If it results in anything that helps the investigation, then that's a bonus. The police are doing everything they can, Abbie."
"I'm not sure I've given them much to go on."
"Your job is to get better."
I sat back in my chair. I looked up at the floors of the hospital surrounding us. One floor up a small boy with a high forehead and a solemn face was looking down at us. I could hear the hum of traffic outside, the sound of horns.
"You know one of my nightmares?" I said.
"What?"
"I've got lots of them, actually. Like being back in that room again. And I hate being in this limbo, I feel trapped. But sometimes I fear that I'm going to leave hospital, go back to my life and it'll just go back to normal and the man will never be found and the only trace there'll be will be the bits of memory of him like a worm crawling around in my head eating me up."
Irene Beddoes looked at me; her eyes were keen. "Didn't you like your life?" she said. "Don't you like the idea of getting it back?"
"That's not what I mean," I said. "I mean that I can't bear the idea of nothing coming of all this. And I'll never be able to get rid of the idea as long as I live. You know the people who get that sort of deafness, except it's not deafness. It's not silence. It's a noise in their ears and it never goes away and it drives people mad until sometimes they kill themselves just to shut it up."
"Could you tell me about yourself, Abbie? Before all of this."
I took a sip of my coffee. From being too hot, it was now too cold. "Where do I start? I'm twenty-five. Um .. ." I stopped, at a loss.
"Where do you work?"
"For the last couple of years I've been working like a lunatic for a company that furnishes offices."
"What do you mean?"
"If some company is setting up a new office, we can do as little or as much as people want. Sometimes it's just designing the wallpaper, sometimes it's everything from the pens to the computer system."
"Do you enjoy it?"
"Kind of. I can't believe I'll still be doing it in ten years' time or even in one year's time, when I come to think of it. I just kind of wandered into it and discovered I was quite good at it. Sometimes we're sitting around, but when the pressure's on we work all night. That's what people pay us for."
"And you have a boyfriend?"
"Yes. I met Terry through work. That's the way most people meet, isn't it? I don't know where else I'd meet anyone. He works with company computer systems and I moved in with him about a year ago."
She just sat and waited for me to say more, so of course I did, because I've always talked too much, especially when there's a silence and because I wanted to talk, I suppose, about things I'd never put into words before. So now I took the plunge in a gabble.
"Actually, the last few months haven't been exactly brilliant. Well, they've been awful in many ways. I was working too hard and he was working too hard and when he works hard, he drinks hard. I don't think he's an alcoholic or anything, he just drinks when he wants to unwind. But the trouble is, he doesn't unwind, or not for long. He gets weepy or he gets angry."
"Angry about what?"
"I don't know, really. Everything. Life. Me. He gets angry with me, because I'm there, I think. And he, well, he-' I stopped abruptly. This was very hard to say.
"Is he violent?" Irene Beddoes asked.
I felt I was slipping down a slope towards things I had never properly told anyone.
"Sometimes," I muttered.
"Does he hit you?"
"He's lashed out a couple of times. Yes. I always thought I was the kind of woman who would never let myself be hit more than once. If you'd asked me a few months ago, I'd have said that I would just walk if a man hit me. But I didn't. I don't know why. He was always so very sorry, and I guess I felt sorry for him. Does that sound stupid? I felt he was doing something that hurt him much more than it hurt me. When I talk about it well, I've never really talked about it before now, actually, but now, I feel that this isn't me I'm describing. I'm not like the woman who stays with a man who treats her badly. I'm more well, more the kind of woman who escaped from a cellar and now just wants to get on with life."
"And you did terrifically," she said warmly.
"I don't think of it like that. Really. I just did the best I could."
"By the sound of it that was very good indeed. I've made something of a study of these sort of psychopaths .. ."
"You didn't tell me that," I said. "You said you were a psychiatrist and that you weren't interested in all that side of it."
"The way you handled yourself was first amazingly resilient, just to survive at all. Then there was your remarkable escape. That is almost unprecedented."
"You've only heard my version. Maybe I exaggerated it to make myself seem more heroic'
"I don't see how that's possible," she said. "After all, you're here. You're alive."
"That's true," I said. "Anyway, now you know all about me."
"I wouldn't say that. Maybe over the next day or two we can meet again."
"I'd like that," I said.
"I'm going to get us lunch in a minute. You must be starving. First I'd like to ask a favour."
"What?"
She didn't answer. Instead she started rummaging in her shoulder-bag. While she did this I thought about her. I had to make an effort to prevent myself feeling that she was the sort of mother I would have invented for myself: warm where my mother was detached, assured where my mother was nervous, intelligent where my mother was, well, not exactly Einstein, and just sort of deep and complicated and interesting.
She pulled a file out of the bag. She put it on the table and removed a piece of paper, a printed form, which she put in front of me.
"What's this?" I asked. "Are you trying to sell me insurance?"
She didn't smile. "I want to help you," she said, 'and I want to make a proper assessment and in order to do that I want to build up as complete a picture as I possibly can. I'd like to have access to your medical records, and for that I need your permission. I need you to sign this."
"Are you serious?" I said. "It's just bundles of stuff about injections for going on holiday and antibiotics when I had a chest infection."