A bag is thrust over my head, plunging me into a sudden frightening, claustrophobic darkness. I thrash about, frantic to get out, and, as I lift my arms to try to rip the bag off my head, the iron bar slips from my grip and clatters to the tiles.
‘Maria? Maria?!’
The bag becomes tighter and tighter, and Balthus’s voice echoes from the phone, the sound of him reduced to just lost, helpless words drifting alone into the ripped, fractured room.
Undisclosed confinement location—present day
I wake up once more to find myself still alive.
Woozy, weary, my eyelids flicker as my sight takes in a panoramic view of the room, of the black, the stench. My muscles ache and throb, and in my head is a searing pain that shoots down my neck to the base of my back and stays there, pulsating, a globe of pins pricking my skin and bones. I curl my fingers into fists. The hallucination, the memory of it all floods back, the water, the feeling of drowning all fresh in my mind as if the shore were still at my feet.
‘Patricia?’ I croak. ‘Can you hear me?’
There is a cough. ‘D … Doc?’
‘Patricia?’ Hearing her voice makes me happy for one solitary, exquisite second and I let out a small whoop. ‘What is your status?’
A laugh ripples out, weak, vanilla, but there. ‘I love how—’ she halts, hacks up something from her throat— ‘I love how even in a shithole like this, you’re still so formal.’ She gags then hauls in a shoal of breath. ‘My leg’s killing me.’
‘Your leg is killing you?’ I panic, confused. ‘How can your leg kill you?’
‘No, no it’s not …’ She laughs again, but it does not sound like her, as if were altered somehow, down an octave. ‘Doc, it’s a phrase. Remember those? I taught you about them in prison. My leg’s not actually killing me—it just means it really hurts.’
‘Oh.’
Some time passes, but I don’t know how much. I drift in and out of consciousness, the blackness of the room throwing a blanket over everything, rendering each line of vision I try to establish useless. Slowly, though, after a while, an element of lucidity begins to return. It is small, the tide of it, the clarity that trickles back towards the shore, towards the solid certainty of the land in my mind, but nonetheless it is there and, for the first time since I awoke in this room, there is a grip of strength inside me.
‘Doc, where are we?’
I let out a breath, one controlled exhalation, then think. Location, logistics. How did we get here? If there are drugs in my system, then how were they administered and why? To transport me? But from where? And if so, does that mean Patricia has been drugged too?
For the next few moments, we remain silent. Patricia, lying on the floor at whichever side she is, sings some type of Irish lullaby, a song about the sea, and for ten seconds, I become calm, listen only to her melody, all whipped vanilla cream and light chocolate soufflé. I know it is wrong. I know that for her to be here means danger, being in this room trapped with me, yet still, as she sings, as her voice dances through the air, gliding through the gloom, I feel a slice of gratitude, of selfish thankfulness that my friend is near to me.
‘Hey, Doc,’ Patricia says after a while, after the serene song has faded into the dark air, ‘do you remember when we first met?’
‘Oh. Yes. It was a Tuesday.’
‘Was it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Cool. And do you remember what you said to me?’
The image of the scene flashes in my mind. Patricia, tattoos of the Virgin Mary and a blackbird on her arm, me bending forward to analyse them without saying anything at all to Patricia until she spoke again to me, telling me I was ‘getting a little close.’
‘The first words I spoke to you were about your name,’ I say. ‘“Patricia. It is the female form of Patrick. Patrick means—”’
‘Means nobleman.’ She laughs, joining in the end of my sentence. There is a sigh, small, mewed, and I find myself breathing more easy at the sound. ‘Your face was all bruised, Doc, do you remember?’
‘Yes.’ A flash comes to me, an image of a fist to the face. I swallow.
‘Doc, I’m so sorry I brought it up. Are you … are you okay?’
‘Why do people think I am a freak?’
‘Huh?’
‘Why do they call me weird?’
She wheezes into the air. ‘I don’t know, Doc. People are idiots. They don’t always see that it’s okay just to be who we are. Last time I looked, we were all, by, well, our very human nature, I guess, different to each other. At what point does different turn into weird? Who the hell knows? My answer? It doesn’t. We just are who we are, and the quicker the world accepts that, the better a place it will be.’
I sit and think about what my friend’s words mean and how, when I am confused, she seems to cut through the bewilderment, and the clouds in my head part a little quicker and the cage that surrounds makes me feel just a little less isolated.
After a few moments Patricia coughs. ‘She worked for MI5, right, that Michaela?’
‘Yes. She did.’
‘Jesus, it’s fucked up shit.’ She pauses, the blackness of the room pressing down on us. ‘I’m glad I met you, Doc, even though we’re locked up now in God knows where—I’m glad I met you. Without you, I … I wouldn’t have got out on parole so fast—that Harry lawyer of yours helped me, before he … well, you know.’ She inhales. ‘I still think about my mum, how she was in pain. It was the right thing to do to, you know … to end her life. I’d do the prison sentence all over again if I had to, just so she wouldn’t have to suffer.’
‘Euthanasia. That is what you did.’
‘Yep.’ A sniff. ‘Yep.’
‘I am sorry you are sad,’ I say after a moment. ‘Thanks, Doc. Thanks.’
We sit, the two of us, in silence and thoughts where the blackness of the room covers us almost totally. My muscles ache. I try to roll my shoulders to move the blood in them, but when I do, each bone creaks and my neck at the back goes rigid.
‘Er, Doc, you there?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘I can see something.’
I forget my sore neck and jerk forwards. ‘What?’
‘On your hand, there—some light.’
I look down. She’s right. I can see my hand for the first time, illuminated by a globule of buttered light. Adrenaline shoots through my bloodstream as inch by inch, a rash of light spreads from my hand, to my wrist, shining on the rope tying me down, then it continues up my arm to the well on my inside elbow, until it shows me something that I did not at all register until now.
‘Doc, what is it?’
I blink, check once more, but there is no denying it, because I am a doctor—I have seen thousands of them.
‘Doc! What?’
I start to shake. ‘The drugs are in my cubital vein.’