Land of the Living Read Free

hood. ‘Silly girl.’
    I sensed him leaning towards me. I heard him breathing and I heard my own breathing getting louder and faster. He pulled the hood up slightly and, quite gently, pulled out the cloth. I felt a fingertip on my lower lip. For a few seconds, all I could do was pant with the relief of it, pulling the air into my lungs. I heard myself say, ‘Thankyou.’ My voice sounded light and feeble. ‘Water.’
    He undid the restraints on my arms and my chest, so that only my legs were tied at the ankle. He slid an arm under my neck and lifted me into a sitting position. A new kind of pain pulsed inside my skull. I didn’t dare make any movements by myself. I sat passively, and let him put my arms behind my back and tie my wrists together, roughly so that the rope cut into my flesh. Was it rope? It felt harder than that, like washing line or wire.
    ‘Open your mouth,’ he said in his muffled whisper. I did so. He slid a straw up the hood and between my lips. ‘Drink.’
    The water was tepid and left a stale taste in my mouth.
    He put a hand on the back of my neck, and started to rub at it. I sat rigid. I mustn’t cry out. I mustn’t make a sound. I mustn’t be sick. His fingers pressed into my skin.
    ‘Where do you hurt?’ he said.
    ‘Nowhere.’ My voice was a whisper.
    ‘Nowhere? You wouldn’t lie to me?’
    Anger filled my head like a glorious roaring wind and it was stronger even than the fear. ‘You piece of shit,’ I shouted, in a mad, high-pitched voice. ‘Let me go, let me go, and then I’m going to kill you, you’ll see—’
    The cloth was rammed back into my mouth.
    ‘You’re going to kill me. Good. I like that.’
    For a long time I concentrated on nothing but breathing. I had heard of people feeling claustrophobic in their own bodies, trapped as if in prison. They became tormented by the idea that they would never be able to escape. My life was reduced to the tiny passages of air in my nostrils. If they became blocked, I would die. That happened. People were tied up, gagged, with no intention to kill them. Just a small error in the binding — the gag tied too close to the nose — and they would choke and die.
    I made myself breathe in one-two-three, out one-two-three. In, out. I’d seen a film once, some kind of war film, in which a super-tough soldier hid from the enemy in a river breathing just through a single straw. I was like that and the thought made my chest hurt and made me breathe in spasms. I had to calm myself. Instead of thinking of the soldier and his straw and what would have happened if the straw had become blocked, I tried to think of the water in the river, cool and calm and slow-moving and beautiful, the sun glistening on it in the morning.
    In my mind, the water grew slower and slower until it was quite still. I imagined it starting to freeze, solid like glass so that you could see the fish swimming silently underneath. I couldn’t stop myself. I saw myself falling through the ice, trapped underneath. I had read or heard or been told that if you fall through ice and can’t find the hole, there is a thin layer of air between the ice and the water and you can lie under the ice and breathe the air. And what then? It might be better just to have drowned. I had always been terrified of drowning above all things, but I had read or heard or been told that drowning was in fact a pleasant way to die. I could believe it. What was unpleasant and terrifying was trying to avoid drowning. Fear is trying to avoid death. Giving yourself up to death is like falling asleep.
    One-two-three, one-two-three, I was becoming calmer. Some people, probably about two per cent of the population at least, would have died already of panic or asphyxiation if they’d had done to them what I was having done to me. So I was already doing better than someone. I was alive. I was breathing.
    I was lying down now, with my ankles tied and my wrists tied, my mouth gagged and a hood over my head. I