stomach heaved and she tasted bile in her mouth. She fought the urge to be sick, but she retched again and realized she was not going to be able to stop it. She staggered to the pink bowl and leaned over it and threw up, over and over, until her stomach was empty.
Then she sat back on the mattress. The room was silent and empty, unchanged apart from the sour smell of vomit that cut through the stale air.
‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Hello?’
The words seemed to vanish, swallowed up by the walls. There were no echoes, no reverberations, no indications that the sound of her voice had left the room.
She looked at the door and got to her feet. There was some explanation for this. Maybe she’d fallen ill, or been hit by a car and the man who looked like her geography teacher had brought her here to keep her safe, unaware of her name or address. He was probably upstairs – she was sure the room was underground – waiting for her to wake up so he could take her home.
If that was the case – and it had to be, it simply had to be, because the alternative was too awful to contemplate, which was why she was ignoring it and pretending that there was an innocent explanation here – if that was the case then the door would be unlocked and would open when she tried it and she would walk up the stairs and in an hour or so she’d be at home with her mum and dad, sitting with them on the sofa and never, never leaving them again.
She took the few steps – three, she counted – to the door and reached out. The silver metal handle was cold.
And it did not move. She tried it a few times, each time with more and more force, but it was pointless.
She was in a locked room.
The thought did not quite register.
She was in a locked room.
She was – the word forced itself into her consciousness for the first time – a prisoner.
She reached in her pocket for her cigarettes. She had a sudden need for the rush of nicotine, of something familiar.
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.
She crossed off another day.
| S | Su | M | Tu | W | Th | F |
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 |
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
