“If anyone saw you, they wouldn’t have recognized you.”
“Why not?”
“You had a wig on, sunglasses, heels, a different coat. The passport I used for you had a different name. I left your old one in the dumpster.”
You moved toward me. Again, there was that intensity in your eyes, like you wanted something, and I remembered how you’d looked at me in the coffee shop. I’d fallen completely for that piercing look then. This time it was very different. I looked at the shelves; a guidebook to Australian mammals was inches from my face. I thought about chucking it at you.
“We left your backpack in the dumpster, too,” you added. “Don’t you remember getting changed, putting on a skirt? Don’t you remember touching me? You thought it was all fun at the time.”
Salty water built up in my mouth like I was going to be sick. You moved around, angling yourself between the door and me. I reached for the mammal guide.
“You’re a new person now, Gem,” you murmured. “That old you’s been left behind. There’s a chance out here to start again.”
“My name’s Gemma,” I whispered. I held the book between us like a threat. Some weapon! “And I didn’t let you do all that.”
“You did, you enjoyed it.”
You took the final step until you were standing right in front of me. I leaned back against the bookshelf, pressing my spine into it. You reached out and touched the side of my cheek. My skin went hot immediately. I held the book up, in front of my neck.
“You were pretty obliging back then, remember?” you murmured.
“No.”
My cheek was burning up beneath your touch. My jaw was set hard as I looked back at you. But I did remember. And that made it worse. I remembered laughing as you tilted and angled something on my head. I remembered the clothes, your back. I remembered how badly I’d wanted to kiss you. I shut my eyes. A noise somewhere in my throat escaped and I was suddenly crouched over and huddled into the bookshelf. Your hand was on my back.
I lashed out, catching your chin. I used all my strength to push you away.
“I hate you!” I screamed. “I fucking hate you!”
You moved your hand away immediately, as if I’d suddenly burned it.
“Maybe that’ll change,” you said quietly.
You took the lantern with you, leaving me huddled against the bookshelf in the dark.
I couldn’t sleep that night, as usual. It wasn’t the heat. It was never hot at night out there. And it wasn’t the darkness. I’d pulled the curtain open, craving the light from the moon.
As the heat died and the wooden walls shrank around me, it sounded like there were wolves in them, growling, getting ready to pounce. I listened for you, angling my pillow so that I could see the door handle. I didn’t turn over in case that little action muffled a noise from outside. The creaks in the walls sounded like your footsteps in the corridor. I was so stiff I got a headache.
A lantern was burning weakly beside my bed. I could grab it if I needed to. I could throw it as soon as that door scraped open. I imagined where I would aim. There was a black stain in the wood beside the door frame, about the right height for where your head would be. I was pretty sure I could make it. But after that? The doors could be locked, and if not, where could I run to so that you wouldn’t find me?
You lay in the next room, only a few feet away … a thin wall between us. I tried to think about school, about Anna and Ben. I even tried thinking about my parents. About anything except you. But nothing worked. Everything came back to you. You lying there. You dreaming. You thinking about me. I pictured you, on that mess of blankets, eyes wide-open and imagining how you’d kill me. Perhaps you touched yourself and pretended it was me doing it. Or perhaps you had your eye pressed up close to a crack in the wall, watching me waiting for you. Perhaps it gave you a kick. I listened for the blink of your eyelash against the wood. But there was only the creaking.
In the end I did sleep, but I don’t know how. It must have been nearly dawn when I did, my body just packing in, exhausted by the tension. When I did, I dreamed …
I was back home. Only I wasn’t really; it was as though I could see what was going on, but no one could see me. I was leaning against the window in the corner of our living room.
Mum and Dad were there, too, sitting together on the white couch. There were two policemen talking to them, perching uncomfortably on the chairs Mum had brought back from Germany. There were cameras and cameramen. People everywhere. Anna was even there, standing behind the couch with her hand on Mum’s shoulder. One of the policemen was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, firing questions at Mum.
When did you last see your daughter, Mrs. Toombs?
Did Gemma ever talk about running away?
Would you please describe what your daughter was wearing that day?
Mum was confused, looking to Dad for the answers. But the policeman was impatient, shooting a glare at the cameras.
“Mrs. Toombs,” he started. “Your daughter’s disappearance is an important matter. You do realize you’ll be in all the papers?”
When she heard that, Mum dabbed at her eyes. She even managed a thin smile.
“I’m ready,” she said. “We must do all we can.”
Dad straightened his tie. Someone shone a bright light onto them both as Anna was moved out of the shot.
I tried to cry out, to let them know I was there, in the living room with them, but no sound would come. My mouth just gaped open, the noise stuck somewhere in my chest. Then I felt my body being pulled backward, being drawn toward the window, going straight through the glass like a ghost. And I was on the outside, in the chilly night air.
I pressed against the window, trying to melt back through the glass. I was aching and cold, desperate to be back inside. Then I felt your strong arm around me, pulling me into your chest, your breath warm on my forehead.
“You’re with me now,” you murmured. “I’ll never let you go.”
I could see Mum pleading with the cameras, sobbing as the lights became brighter.
But your earthy smell filled my nostrils. And your body was smothering me. Your arms wrapped around me like a blanket, your chest thick as rock.
I woke, wheezing and gasping. Your smell was still there, in that room. It filled that space like air.
I lay, listening. But soon I needed to pee.
I didn’t go back to bed after. I padded softly around the house instead. You weren’t around. I started searching for car keys, house keys, anything that could be useful. I was looking for weapons, too. And of course, I was looking for a phone, any way of communicating with other people. There had to be something, a radio at least.
I started with the living room. I searched quietly, listening for you constantly. I looked in drawers, under the mat, along the inside rim of the fireplace. There was nothing. I moved to the kitchen. There were four drawers underneath the work surface. The first two didn’t contain anything much, just a few cotton bags and some pegs. The third drawer had old, blunt cutlery. Possibly useful. I took a knife—the sharpest I could find (I tested them by scraping marks in the wood)—and I put it in my pocket.
The fourth drawer was locked. I pulled at it. The handle wobbled, but the drawer didn’t budge. There was a keyhole in the middle. I placed my eye to it, but inside it was too dark to see anything. I stuck the knife in the keyhole and tried to open it that way. No good. I clattered around through your tea and sugar jars, looking for the key.
I searched the rest of the kitchen, opening the cupboards gingerly. I don’t know what I was expecting, perhaps some sort of torture device or a huge knife. Whatever it was, I didn’t find it, or the key. Those cupboards contained pretty much the same sort of stuff any other kitchen would: bowls, plates, cooking utensils. Nothing of use to me unless I hit you over the head with a frying pan. It was tempting.
Then I opened the big cupboard beside the door. Inside was a pantry full of food. Cans and boxes were stacked ne
atly on shelves, and barrels of flour and sugar and rice were lined up along the floor. I stepped inside. It was well organized, most of it alphabetically. Not far from the bags of lentils were bags of dried melon, then tins of mushroom. I stood on my tiptoes to see the top shelves. There were sweeter things there: cocoa, custard powder, and fruit-flavored gelatin mixes. All the way in the back was a whole shelf of orange juice cartons.
It was awhile before I came out. When I did, you were standing in the kitchen. I stepped back rapidly, away from you. There was brownish dirt smudged around your cheeks and red dust on your hands. Your expression was serious, waiting for me.
“What were you doing in there?”
“Just looking,” I said. Instinctively I reached for the blunt knife in my pocket. You pressed your lips together tightly and glared. I felt my heartbeat quicken as I gripped the knife. “If I’m staying awhile, I thought I’d better get to know the place,” I went on shakily.
You nodded. You seemed pleased with that. You stepped aside and let me pass. I breathed out, as quietly as I could.
“Did you find anything interesting?”
“A lot of lentils.”
“I like them.”
“There’s a lot of food.”
“We’ll need it.”
I stepped around the kitchen table away from you, relieved and feeling slightly braver. “Isn’t there a shop here, then? Somewhere to buy more?”
“No, I told you.”
I looked back into the pantry. How did you get all this here? And what would happen if I destroyed it all? Would you go out and find more? I ran my hand along the back of one of the chairs tucked under the table.
“How long will it last?” I asked. I was looking at the food, trying to calculate it. There was enough for a year, maybe. Perhaps more.
You shrugged. “There’s more food in the outbuilding,” you said. “Lots more.”
“And when that runs out?”
“It won’t. Not for a long time.”
My heart sank. I watched you turn the tap slowly, until a small trickle of water bubbled out.
“Anyway, we’ve got chickens,” you said. “And when you’re—” You stopped to look at me before choosing the right word. “When you’re acclimatized, we can go walkabout, pick up some bush foods. And we should catch a camel, too, sometime, maybe a couple. We can keep them in the boulders, stick a fence around.”
“Camel?”
You nodded. “For milk. Or maybe kill one for meat, if you want it.”
“Camel meat? That’s mad,” I said.
I caught the warning look in your eyes immediately, saw the way your shoulders tensed. It made me shut up, made me grip hard on the back of a chair.
You washed your hands. The water ran a reddish brown, like blood. I watched it spiral down the drain. You used a scrubbing brush to get the dirt out from under your nails. As I said, I was feeling a little braver that day, for the first time since I arrived. Don’t know why, but I wanted to ask you more. It didn’t feel like you were watching me so intently all the time, either. I walked around the kitchen table, and stopped beside the locked drawer.
“Why’s it locked?” I asked.
“For your safety. After your wrist trick …” Your words drifted away as you turned back to the sink and kept scrubbing. “I don’t want you hurting yourself again.”
“What’s inside it?”
You didn’t answer that one. Instead, when I started tugging on the drawer again, you stepped backward from the sink and lunged at me, wrapping your arms around my waist. You dragged me back, through the kitchen and down the corridor. I screamed and kicked out, but you kept going until you got to my room. You dropped me on the bed. Quickly, I crawled away from you. I felt for the knife in my pocket. But you’d stepped back to the doorway by the time I had it out.
“Lunch will be ready in half an hour,” you said.
You slammed the door behind you.
That night I lay with the blunt knife in my fist and the lantern beside my head. The curtains were open, the moonlight illuminating the door. One thing I was certain of: You wouldn’t do anything to me without a fight.
I watched you carefully, learning your routine. If I was going to escape, I needed to know more about this place and I needed to know more about you. I watched where you put things and I looked for a pattern to what you did. I was scared, some days I was stupid with terror, but I forced myself to think.
I used the knife I’d taken to make notches in the side of the bed. I couldn’t remember how many days had passed already, but I guessed about ten or so. I made ten small slits into the wood. Anyone else looking at that bed might think it was a record of how much sex we’d had there.
Your routine was pretty simple. You woke early, in the coolest part of the day, when the light was dim and purple-gray. I heard you washing in the bathroom. Then you went outside. Sometimes I heard you banging and hammering near the outbuildings, the sound echoing around. Other times I heard nothing. I strained my ears for the roar of an engine, a car or an airplane howling toward me. I found myself longing for a highway. But there was never anything. It was amazing how quiet it was. I wasn’t used to it. I even spent a day or two thinking I had hearing damage. It was as if all the sounds I was used to had disappeared from the world. Compared to the bombardment of noise in London, the desert made me feel deaf.
After a few hours, you came back in. You made tea and breakfast, and always offered me some. It was a kind of porridge, nutty-tasting and watery. Then you went out again for the rest of the day. I watched you walk the hundred feet or so to the nearest building. You closed the door behind you. I didn’t know what you did in there for so long every day. For all I knew, you were keeping other kidnapped girls inside. Or something worse.
I found the darkest, coolest part of the house—in the corner of the living room, next to the fireplace. Then I sat and tried to think of ways to escape. I wouldn’t let myself give up. I knew if I did, that would be it. I might as well be dead already.
You tried talking to me when you returned, but it didn’t work too well. You can’t blame me. Every time you even looked at me I stiffened, my breathing quickening. When you spoke, I wanted to scream. But I gave myself little challenges. One time, I made myself watch you. The next time I asked you a question. And on the thirteenth night, I forced myself to eat with you.
It was dusk when I stepped from the living room into the kitchen. Oil and pungent spices pushed into my nostrils. There was a weak light over the stove—one of the few in the house—with moths and other small insects bashing against it. You were using it to cook by. You were hunched over, throwing things into a pot, stirring quickly. The rest of the room was lit by a couple of lanterns and a candle or two, throwing shadows onto the walls. You smiled when you saw me, but the low light in the room made it look like a grimace.
I sat at the table. You put a fork next to me. I picked it up but my hand started shaking. I put it down again. I looked at the blackness on the other side of the window. You took bowls and dished out the meal. You did it carefully, extracting the best bits first. You placed a bowl in front of me. There was too much food, and it smelled heavily of white pepper. I coughed.
There was meat in it—maybe chicken, maybe not. Lots of fat and gristle, bits of bone, too. A leg stuck up vertically from the middle. Whatever it was, it was clear you’d used the whole animal instead of just parts of it. I pushed my fork around the bowl as I looked for the vegetables. I found some small pealike things, wrinkly and hard. My hand was still shaking. It was making my fork tap against the side of the bowl. I found something that looked like a bit of carrot and I chewed.
By then I’d given up on starving myself. If you’d wanted to poison me, you’d have done it already. But I can’t say I enjoyed the meal. Of course, you noticed. Anything to do with my health you always noticed.
“You don’t eat properly,” you said.
I looked down at my shaking fork. My throat felt too choked up
to swallow right away. Plus, it tasted as if you’d emptied a garbage can in my mouth. But I didn’t tell you that. Course not. I kept quiet and watched you shovel your food between your lips. You ate like a street dog, wolfing everything down as if it were the last meal you’d ever have. You picked up a bone and gnawed at it, pulling strips of meat off with your teeth. I imagined those teeth biting into me, pulling my flesh apart. I pushed away the bones on my plate.
The moon was starting to rise already; a small beam of moonlight fell on the floor around my feet. Outside, crickets were beginning to creak their repetitive choruses. I imagined I was with them, in the dark … away from you. I swallowed the remnants of the carrot thing, and summoned up my courage.
“What do you do all day?” I asked.
Your eyebrows shot up in surprise. You almost choked on your meat. I wished you had.
“When you go outside,” I continued, “when you go into that building, what do you do in there?”
You put your bone down, the grease on your cheeks shining in the candlelight. You stared at me wide-eyed, as if no one had ever asked you something like that before. I suppose they hadn’t.
“Well, I …,” you started to say. “I suppose I make things.”
“Can I see?” I said it quickly, before I changed my mind. I looked again at the window. If I could just get outside, to somewhere else … Anything had to be better than being in that house every day.
You looked at me for a long time. The tips of your fingers rubbed at the flecks of meat still stuck on the bone, pushing them back and forth. Your fingertips were greasy, too.
“If you come with me, I don’t want you trying to escape again,” you said.
“I won’t,” I lied.
Your eyes narrowed. “It’s just … I don’t want you getting hurt.”
“I know, you don’t have to worry,” I lied again.
You glanced at the blackness behind the glass, at the stars beginning to appear. “I’d like to trust you,” you said. Your eyes darted back to mine. “Can I?”
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