"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.
I mustn't sleep. And yet I slept, falling into a shallow, muttering dream. Then I woke with a jerk because he was there beside me. There was no light this time. And no water. At first he said nothing, but I could hear him breathing. Then he began his muffled whispering in the darkness.
"Kelly. Kath. Fran. Gail. Lauren."
I sat quite still. I didn't move at all.
"Kelly. Kath. Fran. Gail. Lauren."
It was a shuffling drone. He repeated the five names over and again, and I sat there, with my head hung forward a bit as if I was still asleep. There were tears sliding over my cheeks, but he couldn't see that. They stung. I imagined them making tracks down my skin, like snail tracks. Silver.
Then he stood up and left and I went on crying silently in the dark.
"Drink."
I drank.
"Eat."
Four more spoonfuls of sweet sludge.
"Bucket."
My name is Abbie. Abigail Devereaux. Please help me, someone. Please.
Nobody will help me.
Yellow butterfly. Green leaf. Please don't fly away.
He slipped the wire around my neck almost with a kind of tenderness. For the third time, or was it the fourth?
I felt his fingers around the neck checking the position. If I was thinking about him all the time, then I must always be in his mind. What did he feel towards me? Was it a kind of love? Or was he like a farmer with a pig that must be kept penned and fed in the days before it is slaughtered? I imagined him in a day or two coming in and tightening the wire around my neck or cutting my throat as a weary duty.
When he was gone, I began counting again. I did countries this time. I walked along a hot sunny street in Australia counting the houses. It was raining as I climbed a winding medieval lane in Belgium. It was hot in Chad. Cold in Denmark. Blustery in Ecuador. Then at number 2,351 in a long, tree-lined avenue in France I heard a door close outside, footsteps. He had been away for about five hours forty minutes. A shorter time than before. He was anxious about me. Or his time away varied at random. What did it matter?
More of the gruel fed to me with a spoon. Not as much as before. I wasn't being fattened. I was being thinned while being kept alive. The bucket. Carried back to the ledge.
"You're feeling tired," he said.
"What?"
"You're not talking as much."
I decided to make the effort once more to be bright and charming and strong. It was like dragging an enormously heavy sack up a steep hill.
"Do you miss my talk?" My voice seemed to come from a long way off.
"You're fading."
"No. Not fading. Just a bit sleepy at the moment. Tired. You know how it is. Very tired. Echoes in my head." I tried to concentrate on what I was saying, but words didn't seem to fit together properly any more. "Can you cope with that?" I said, meaninglessly.
"You don't know what I can cope with. You don't know anything about me."
"There are things I know. Things I don't know, of course, more things. Most. I know you've grabbed me. But why me? I'd like to know why me. I don't know that. Soon they'll catch you. They will. I listen for footsteps. They'll rescue me."
There was his wheezy laughter beside me. I shivered. Oh, I was cold all over. Cold, dirty, aching, scared.
"It's not a joke," I said, with an effort. "They'll save me. Someone. Terry. I have a boyfriend, you know. Terence Wilmott. He'll come. I have a job. I work at Jay and Joiner's. I tell people what to do. They won't let me go." That was a mistake, to tell him things like that. I tried to force the words in a different direction. My tongue was thick and my mouth dry. "Or the police. They'll find me. You should let me go before they find me. I won't tell. I won't tell and I have nothing to tell. There is nothing to tell, after all'
"You talk too much."
"Then you talk. Talk to me now." All I knew was that he mustn't stuff my mouth with a rag and tie a wire round my throat. "What are you thinking?"
"You'd no way understand what I'm thinking, even if I told you."
"Try me. Talk to me. We could talk. Find a way out. Find a way for me to go." No, I shouldn't be saying that. Keep thoughts silent. Concentrate.
A long silence in the darkness. I thought of him sitting out there, a foul, wheezing thing.
"You want me to talk to you?"
"Yes. Can't you tell me your name? No, no, not your real name. Another name something I can call you."
"I know what you're trying to do. Do you know what you're trying to do?"
"I want to talk to you."
"No, you don't, sweetheart. You're trying to be clever. You're trying to be a clever girl. You're trying to be, like, all psychological."
"No. No."
"You reckon that you can become my friend." He chuckled. "You're tied up and you know you can't escape. You know you can't get at me. I'm in control. The only reason you're alive at this moment is because I want you to be. So you wonder what you can do. You reckon that maybe I'm a sad, lonely man and I'm scared of girls. And if only you can be all friendly with me that I'll let you go. You see, you don't understand at all."
"I just want to talk. Too much silence."
"You see, some of them just snivel. They're just like an animal that's been half run over and it's flapping around on the road and it's just waiting to be put out of its misery, to be stamped on. And others tried to bargain with me. Like Fran. She said she'd do anything I wanted if I let her go. As if she had anything to bargain with. What do you think of that?"
I felt sick.
"I don't know."
"Gail used to pray. I heard her when I took the gag off. Didn't do her any good."
"How do you know?"
"What do you mean?"
"How do you know it didn't do her any good? You don't know."