I jumped up and stepped forward.
There was a flicker of movement and suddenly I was slammed back against the wall with Foxglove’s face centimetres from my own and an ominously cold line across my throat. I was close enough to see little flecks of silver and gold that surrounded her pupils. Later I would speculate that those colours were unlikely to have been produced by the melanin concentration in her iris or Tyndall scattering in her stroma. But at that precise moment I was a bit more worried about what I assumed was a knife at my throat.
Behind her on the landing mat the white takeaway bags were still bouncing.
Without moving my head I glanced down to confirm that she was holding something to my throat with her right arm while pinning me to the wall with her left. I seriously doubted it was a paintbrush.
I looked back up at Foxglove who, when she was sure she had my full attention, stepped back and raised her knife for my inspection. It had a wickedly curved blade of white stone shading to a translucent pink at the edges – agate, I learnt later. I didn’t even know you could chip and polish a stone to such a beautiful, smooth and, above all, sharp edge.
Foxglove gave me a meaningful look and tilted her head to one side.
‘Never even occurred to me,’ I said.
Foxglove looked sceptical but backed away, the knife vanishing under her smock.
‘And you’ve made a mess,’ I said, straightening my collar to hide the tremor in my hands.
One of the white bags had split and was leaking orange coloured sweet and sour sauce onto the landing mat. Foxglove frowned at me as if it was my fault.
‘I’ll clean it up, shall I?’ I said, and she skipped back to give me room.
Fortunately it was just the sauce. The rest of the generic plastic food containers had stayed sealed. I surreptitiously checked for receipts or any other identification but there was none.
Foxglove approached with a roll of kitchen roll held out as a peace offering.
‘Thank you,’ I said, and finished cleaning up, dumped the rubbish into one of the plastic bags and held it out to Foxglove for disposal. She gave it, and then me, a suspicious look.
‘There’s no bin down here,’ I said. ‘So you’ve got to get rid of it.’
After a while I put it down on the mat, took what looked to be half the food and retreated to my bed. Foxglove took her half and retreated to hers. In addition to what was left of the tub of sweet and sour sauce I had pork balls and egg fried rice but no, I noticed, cutlery. I looked across the oubliette at Foxglove, who saw and raised her eyebrow.
‘I know a knife and fork are out of the question,’ I said. ‘But what about a spoon?’
In answer she opened her rice tray and stuck her face in it and methodically ate the whole lot without coming up for air. Towards the end I could see her long tongue through the semi-transparent sides of the tray, snaking around to get the last bits. When it was all done she looked straight at me with a triumphant smile.
There were bits of rice stuck to her face so I ripped a couple of sheets off the kitchen roll and, cautiously, crossed the floor to hand them over. She took them graciously enough and wiped her face. I went back to my bed and ate with my fingers.
Afterwards I packed up the rubbish in the last plastic bag and left it pointedly in the middle of the landing mat. Then I washed my hands, unwrapped the toothbrush and cleaned my teeth. Foxglove sat cross-legged on her bed and watched me with interest while picking the occasional sliver of food out of her teeth with her fingernail.
The daylight coming in through the hole began to fade.
At this time of year sunset was around nine o’clock, which meant it had been at least twenty-four hours since I’d been taken.
‘I’m having a wee,’ I said. ‘You better not be looking.’
She shrugged and lay down on her futon – I chose to believe that she kept her eyes averted and thank God it was just a wee.
She was under her duvet by the time I’d washed my hands so I got under mine before it was too dark to see. I lay there with my eyes closed and tried to feel the changes in the vestigia around me. I thought for a moment, while I was drifting off, that I felt a bubble rhythmically expand and contract as if it were breathing.
But that might just have been my own breath.
27
An Unlikely Premise for a Sitcom
I’m an only child so I’ve never been that comfortable sharing a room. It took me a while to get used to sharing a bed with Beverley. Mind you, Bev is a very active sleeper and, if she’s not trying to snuggle me off one side of the bed, she talks in her sleep. One night I swear she was reciting the Shipping Forecast – Sole, Fastnet, Lundy, Irish Sea. And giggling after every one. She seemed to find the prospect of Thames: gales imminent particularly funny. When I asked her about it in the morning she insisted that I’d dreamt the whole thing up.
I woke up that first morning in the oubliette feeling sticky in my clothes and decided that I was going to have to ablute and perform bodily functions whether Foxglove was watching or not. Fortunately she seemed just as keen on my cleanliness as I was, or at least that’s how interpreted her pointing emphatically at the shower before leaping up and out of our cosy little home.
And that became the pattern for the days that followed.
After my shower she dropped in with breakfast – pitta breads stuffed with cold falafel and a limp salad. More takeaway, so I was definitely within range of a Chinese and kebab place – which narrowed my location down, I calculated, to somewhere in the UK.
Or possibly the Costa del Sol, although I think I might have noticed a flight.
Foxglove bounced out of the hole with the rubbish and when she didn’t return after half an hour I sat down and picked up The Silmarillion again.
I lasted about an hour before the naming of the Valar drove me to exercise.
One advantage of training in a gym that was last updated in 1939 is that I’ve learnt to do without equipment. You can give yourself a good workout in an hour if you push it, but I broke it up into twenty minute chunks to stretch it through the day.
Once in a while I’d have a go at creating a forma, because you never know. But they all sputtered out without catching. Even lux, which I can normally reliably do while standing on my head.
Foxglove returned at lunch with bread, cheese, some loose tomatoes and a bottle of beer, and again later in the evening with half a roast chicken, chips and salad – probably from the same place the falafel had come from. She watched me eat and then left me alone until it was dark.
This time I wasn’t knackered from a long day of being kidnapped, so it was much harder to sleep. Still, in the quiet darkness I did my breathing and slowly tried to feel out the parameters of the bubble that held me. I think it rained that night because I could hear drops splattering on the skylights far above the entrance and got ‘May It Be’ by Enya stuck on an endless loop in my head. But I also sensed a ripple as Foxglove dropped through the entrance and onto the landing mat. She stared at me for a long moment and then slipped silently over to her own bed.
The next day after breakfast – this time a selection of Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain breakfast bars and a bottle of Lucozade Zero Pink Lemonade – Foxglove reappeared with a basket full of clean bedding, which she dumped in front of me. She stripped her own bed and stood around tapping her foot until I got the message and stripped mine. Then she vaulted away with the basket full of used linen. While she was gone I made both our beds, being particularly careful to do a good job on Foxglove’s. I had a thorough look round while I was doing it, but the thing about futons is that they’re a bit short of hiding places – I suspected that was the point.