The Bunker Diary Read Free Page B

look round. A
really
good look round. Walking about, checking this,
checking that, poking around, kicking walls, stamping on the floor.
    It’s hopeless.
    It’s like trying to escape from a
sealed box.
    After a while, I sat down at the dining
table and stared at the ceiling. I couldn’t help thinking of him up there.
What’s he doing? Is he sitting down, standing up, walking about? Is he laughing?
Grinning? Picking his nose? What’s he doing? Who is he? What? Who? Why?
    Who are you?
    What do you want?
    What’s your
kick
?
    What’s your
thing
?
    And it was then, just as all these questions
were floating around in my head, that I suddenly realized what I was staring at. There
was a small circular grille set in the ceiling, directly above the dining table.
I’d been looking at it for the last few minutes, but my eyes hadn’t taken it
in. A small circular grille, about 10 cm in diameter, made of white metal mesh, fixed
flush to the ceiling. I stared hard, making sure I wasn’t imagining it, and then I
looked round and saw more of them. One, two, three, four. Four of them, spread out
evenly along the length of the corridor.
    I got up and checked the rest of the
rooms.
    The grilles are everywhere. There’s
one in the lift, one in the kitchen, one in the bathroom, one in each of the other
rooms.
    I went back and got up on the table for a
closer look.
    Each grille is a perfect circle, split in
two. A faint breeze of warmish air comes out of one side, and an equally faint current
is sucked in the other. Ventilation, I suppose.
    Heating.
    But there’s more.
    On either side of the grille there’s a
little hole cut in the mesh. Embedded in each of the holes are two little buggy things.
One is a flat silver disc about the size of a 5p coin, the other is like a small white
bead with a tiny glass eye at the end.
    Like this.
     

    Microphone.
    Camera.
    Shit.
    I tried to tear it out. I reached up and
dug my fingers into the grille, trying to wrench it out, but I couldn’t get hold
of anything. The bugs are fixed too tight, and the grille is too strong to break. I
picked at it, studied it, whacked it with the palm of my hand. I whacked it again.
Punched it. Hard. But all that did was rip the skin off my knuckles.
    And that’s when I lost it.
    Something inside me snapped, and I just
started spitting and screaming at the grille like a lunatic. ‘You
BASTARD
! What do you
want
? Why don’t you show your bastard face,
eh? Why don’t you
do
something?
WHAT DO YOU WANT?
’
    He didn’t answer me.
    11.30 p.m.
    I’ve calmed down a bit now. I’ve
thought calm thoughts and silenced the rage in my head. Underneath it all, I’m
still dead scared and I’m still really angry and I still feel like screaming my
heart out, but I’m not on my own any more. I can’t justdo
what
I
want to do. Ranting and raving about things might make me feel a little
bit better, but it isn’t going to do Jenny any good. She’s got enough on her
plate as it is. The last thing she needs is a madman for company.
    She cried for a long time when she woke up
this afternoon, big snotty tears that streamed down her face and soaked into her
clothes. Then she curled up into a ball and lay on the floor for a while, muttering
quietly to herself. I didn’t like that, it worried me. I felt better when she
started crying again. This time the sobbing wasn’t quite so snotty and wet, but it
was a lot wilder. She called out for her mum and dad, she shook and shivered, she
wailed, she bawled.
    I did my best.
    I sat with her.
    Watched over her.
    She sobbed, she howled, her body heaved, and
I just sat with her, crying a few silent tears myself.
    I wish I could have done more to help
her.
    But I didn’t have any more.
    Later, after Jenny had cried herself dry,
she said she was hungry. She didn’t moan about it or anything. She just said,
‘I’m hungry.’
    ‘Me too,’ I told her.
    ‘I bet you’re not as hungry as
me.’
    She was probably right. I don’t
actually