Then I heard lots of footsteps leaving the room and a door closing but not being locked, and I might have supposed myself alone but for the fact that I could smell the smoke from a cigarette. I would have asked for one myself if I thought I could have smoked it with a hood over my head. There was that and the chance I might get kicked or punched again. So I stayed quiet, telling myself that despite their threats this was the opposite of what they wanted. Unless you’re going to put a man on a gallows trapdoor and hang him, you hood him for only one reason: to help soften him up and make him talk. The only thing was, I couldn’t imagine what they wanted me to say that I hadn’t already told them.

Ten minutes passed. Maybe longer. But probably less. Time starts to expand when they take your light away. I closed my eyes. That way it was me in control and not them. Even if they took the hood off now I wouldn’t see anything. I took a deep breath and let it out as steadily as I could, trying to get ahold of my fear. Telling myself I’d been in tighter spots. That after the mud of Amiens in 1918 this was easy. There weren’t even any shells bursting overhead. I was still wearing four limbs and my balls. A hood was nothing. They wanted me not to see anything, then that was fine with me. I’d lived through black and sightless days before; they don’t come much blacker than Amiens. The black day of the German army, Ludendorff called it, and not without justification. What else do you call it when you’re facing a force of four hundred fifty tanks and thirteen divisions of Anzacs? With more arriving all the time.

I heard a match and caught the smoke of another cigarette. A chain-smoker, perhaps? Or someone else? I took a deep breath and tried to get ahold of some smoke in my own lungs. American tobacco, that much was clear from the sweet smell. Probably they put sugar in it the way they put sugar in almost everything—in coffee, in liquor, on fresh fruit. Maybe they put sugar on their wives, too, and if the men were anything to go by, they probably needed a little sweetening.