Cover

Dedication

To Norman: we miss you.

Rest in peace, old friend.

Saturday, 16 June 2018

Seven Days to Go

Suddenly it was so close.

Max’s birthday – his third birthday, the one that counted – was right below the date she had just crossed out.

Which meant it was one week until the twenty-third of June.

Seven days away. That was all. Seven more days until it happened. She had been trying to ignore it, but seeing it there, the very next Saturday, made that impossible.

It was a wonder she had the calendar at all. She had started keeping it on the fifth day after she had been locked in this basement. If she hadn’t, there was no doubt she would have completely lost track of how long she’d been held captive. There had been times – terrible, terrible times – when she had been unable to record the passing days and weeks as accurately as she would have liked. But as it was, she knew more or less how much time had passed, how many years – eleven, soon to be twelve – since she had seen her parents and brother and older cousin, Anne, who she had been on the way to meet when she made the mistake of speaking to the man in the car that slowed to a stop next to her.

When she’d started the calendar, she’d had no idea that more than a decade later she would still be using it. She’d expected – foolishly, as it turned out – to be back with her family and friends well before this much time had gone by, although even after five days she was starting to understand that this might be something that lasted longer than she could have ever anticipated. She was glad she had the calendar though, glad she had asked for some paper and a pencil – the pencil was a short, yellow one from Ikea, she recalled – and sketched out a calendar in tiny figures on one side. It was her only link to the outside world. Even though it was not totally accurate, on the days she thought were the birthdays and anniversaries of her friends and relatives, she imagined them having parties and opening presents, and in doing so, she felt, in a way, that she was with them.

Since Max was born, the calendar had assumed a new importance; she’d become obsessed with ensuring it was accurate. Her son – named after the boy in Where the Wild Things Are, because the storybook Max was able to escape his room through a magic door and travel to the island where the Wild Things lived, and freedom was something she longed for her little boy to experience – had been born on 23 June 2015. And ever since that day she’d had one dread eye on his third birthday.