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.

Sunday, 17 June 2018

Six Days to Go

1

She crossed off another day.

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.