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Chapters (65)
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  65. Acknowledgements

She unwraps something.

Rustling paper or plastic.

Tobias says, ‘Please, Tuva. It’ll be much more pleasant for all of us if you can cooperate. Now. Open wide, please.’

I can feel the sweat leaving my pores, even though it must be five degrees inside here. I’m hot with fury and panic and chilled to the bone, all at the same time.

‘Open,’ he says.

‘No!’ I scream.

And then it’s happening. Julia’s hazel eyes joining Tobias’s cyclops giant-eye directly above my face. Her fingers pinching my nose. How many more senses can they deprive me of? I look at her with pure, distilled hate. Venom. My body tenses against its restraints and in my mind’s eye I lift from this sun lounger and I slap her right across the face.

How did it ever come to this?

Her fingers squeezing my nostrils so hard they might bleed. Him staring at me. Waiting.

I open my mouth a millimetre and breathe.

Tobias sees my chest move up and down and then he pushes his fingers into the corners of my mouth, like I’m a cat who needs to swallow a worming tablet.

My mouth opens and I start to gag.

Her hands are still on my nose.

I feel suffocated.

Locked down.

My mouth opens wider and I taste his latex gloves. Some kind of powder coating.

I open my jaws more.

And then I bite down on his fingers as hard as I can.

55

He lets out a yelp and the pleasure that gives me is indescribable.

How do you like it, shithead.

Blood erupts from his finger and drains down his latex glove. His uniform has a red trickle up its sleeve and it’s almost straight. Like a stripe. Like a conscious design decision.

He runs his finger under the tap and Julia looms right over my face. She has a clipboard over my mouth, so I can’t bite her or spit at her. She says, ‘A doctor like Tobias. The skills he has. The artfulness of his fingertips. I cannot believe what you just did.’

‘It’s nothing,’ says Tobias, applying a plaster and a new glove. Washing the glove. ‘A shallow cut, that’s all. Now, nurse, if you could be so kind as to bring me the speculum,’ he pauses, ‘and your gun.’

I scream as loud as I can, ‘Help me. Help! I’m inside the train! Help me!’

But my voice echoes inside here, bounces off the walls and falls back down to me.

‘Only the deer can hear you out here, Tuva.’

Speculum? No.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Let’s talk. I can help you. I have money.’

‘He’s a doctor, Tuva,’ says Julia, walking back in with a gun in one hand and a plastic speculum in the other. ‘He doesn’t need your money.’

‘Open wide, please.’

I open my mouth.