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They were gone.

She sat heavily on the mattress. Despite the carpet, the floor was cold on her feet and she looked for her boots, but they were gone. Clearly the man did not think she would have much use for them here.

Her boots had been taken off and the door was locked and there was a bucket for a toilet and a bowl for a sink and a barrel for a bath, which meant that the man who looked like her geography teacher – the man who had, she now understood, kidnapped her – intended to keep her here for a very long time.

Forever, she thought. He wants me here forever. He can’t let me go because then I’d tell people what he did and he’d be in trouble. So he has to keep me here.

She pulled her knees up and hugged them to her chest. She looked around the room, taking in the brown carpet that covered the floor and ran up the walls and over the ceiling, the locked door and the lumpy mattress lit by the weak yellow light pooling out from the one lamp by the bed.

And she understood something else.

He had prepared the room for this purpose. He had a plan.

And she was now part of it.

Sunday, 17 June 2018

Six Days to Go

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She crossed off another day.

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Six days to go until his birthday. She watched him stack his Duplo blocks into a tower, then knock it down, giggle, and build it again. God, his world was so small.

A low ceiling, four carpeted walls – she hated that carpet, hated its dust and smell and drab brown colour, and she had vowed that when she was out of here she was going to have a house with clean, wooden floors in every room – the sink-bowl and toilet-bucket and barrel-bath and a door he had never been through.

That was it. That was Max’s world. He didn’t even understand what the door was for. As far as he knew, it was for the man to come in and out of. He had no idea he could use it, had no experience of all the things that were out there.

No experience of fields and ponds and schools and roads and houses and shops. All he had was what she had told him. She’d asked for books and photos but the man had told her there was no point. He was too young to understand.

And he’ll be gone when he’s three.

The man hadn’t said that, but he didn’t need to. It was implicit in his refusal. He rarely gave her anything. It was only after weeks of begging when Seb was born that he’d brought a box of Lego, the large ones for little kids. Duplo, they were called. There weren’t many, but Max – as Seb had – loved them. He played with them for hours, arranging them into towers and arches and walls. Once he had made a rectangle filled with odd-shaped objects and Maggie had asked him what it was.

Our house, he replied. Look. That’s the bath. That’s you and me. That’s the bed.

She had to bite back the tears. Other kids were building space rockets or gardens or trains. Max was building the only thing he knew.

This shitty prison.

And so she took him places in his imagination, described the blue of the sea by pointing to his blue socks, but told him the sea was a different blue, a brilliant blue, a beautiful shining blue, words that he didn’t understand but which reminded her of the world out there, of what she too was missing. She explained the coolness of the breeze by moistening his forehead and blowing on it, and the warmth of the sun by rubbing her hands until they were hot and placing them on his chest. All of it was a pale imitation of the real thing, but it was all she had.

She didn’t stop there; she told stories of magical palaces and boats and rivers where Max and she had wild adventures. Along the way they met heroic people with the names Grandpa Martin and Grandma Sandra and Uncle James and Aunty Anne and Chrissie and Fern. She told him how Chrissie was brave and loyal but could be grumpy and Fern was funny and clever but left things wherever she went. She told him how Uncle James was kind of grumpy but sweet and well-meaning, and how Aunty Anne was wise and Grandpa and Grandma were kind and loving, and how they loved him in particular. The stories ended with huge parties where there was every kind of food and all the toys a boy could wish for. She wondered what Max thought chocolate and jelly beans and burgers and milkshakes tasted like. She wondered whether he would ever find out.