24

Rowan Isle House, 27 September 2004

I have passed the test, that’s what he just told me. I’ve passed the bloody test. And he thinks that matters. He thinks the fact I’m still here in body means I’ve come out of it okay but he’s wrong. He’s so wrong it’s scary.

Because the truth is, something broke inside me while I was in that room, some vital part that can never be brought back and never be mended. My fingernails are still bleeding from where I scraped them on the rope, desperately trying to untie my wrists. My eyes are red and sore from lack of sleep. There was no chance of sleep in there because every time I closed my eyes I saw his face, not the face I’d grown up knowing, but the other one, the new one. It was a stranger’s face. An evil face.

But I don’t want to talk about that now. I never want to think about it again.

Before he let me out he put a blindfold on me and lifted me into his arms. I was so tired I fell asleep and when I woke up I was back in my own room, tucked up in my doss bag.

I say ‘he’ because that is what I’m going to call him from now on. That’s what he is to me: a thing, a being; not a person and certainly not a sergeant. A sergeant has to earn the respect of his soldiers and I lost any respect for him when he put me in that room. I screamed and cried and begged to be let out but he just left me there like a rotten animal. So he will never be Sarge to me again. He is nothing to me. In fact, he may as well be dead.

Tonight, he came to my room and told me to come down to the kitchen as he had a surprise for me. I didn’t want to go to the kitchen but I didn’t want to risk another punishment so I got out of bed and went with him. When I stepped into the kitchen I saw he’d laid the table with proper plates and knives and forks and brought out a rib of beef from a cow he’d shot, presumably while I’d been in that room. I sat down and watched as he lifted it out of the oven and put it down on the table, the blood oozing out of it as he stuck the knife in, and I felt sick.

‘You must be starving,’ he said, piling up my plate with bleeding meat. ‘Go on, get stuck in.’

And he smiled. He smiled like this was all normal. Like I hadn’t just been imprisoned for days, like we were some kind of ordinary family like the people in the village, sitting down to have Sunday lunch and talking about the weather.

I tried to eat the beef but it stuck in my throat. I started to cough and he passed me a cup of water. I went to drink it then hesitated. I looked at him looking at me and for the first time in my life I felt afraid. What if the food and the water were poisoned? What if the meal was a trick and he was planning on putting me back in that room?