That night with the girl? There was some messing, sure… she was a bit young – but none of them actually did it with her. Nothing like some of the rumours he’d heard going around. After the foster mother complained, the police had them in but didn’t even caution them. He’d wanted to apologise to her but the others told him to leave it. Surely it couldn’t be that. If not, what else?
Three or so hours steady speed on flat roads – motorway, he assumed – then endless bends, falling and climbing, now the rattle of rutted lanes. Seated on the wheel-arch, he felt only the soreness in his behind and scraping in his bones. For the thousandth time he lifted an eye to the escort sitting opposite. For the thousandth time, there was no response.
He tried one gambit. ‘I need to piss, brother.’ Another. ‘I can’t say my prayers like this, brother.’ A curl of the lip from the bleak figure facing him. A third. ‘Which way’s east?’ The figure shook his head. ‘Don’t you speak, man?’ A scowl.
The van juddered to a stop, swiftly followed by the crunch of boots on gravel and the shock of blinding daylight as the back doors were flung open. His escort shoved him out of the van and he managed not to stumble. They were on a rutted single-track road through the forest. There was no view, no contours in the land – no sense of height or terrain. He knew these men had been here before. One produced a bottle of water, filled a small basin, and gestured at him to wash and say his prayers. His heart raced as he wondered if they were to be his last. They watched and, when he’d finished, retrieved the basin.
‘I need a piss, brothers.’ They pointed to a bush and carried on watching. As he emptied his aching bladder, he stole a look to left and right but each direction led only to a canopy of forest. ‘Where are we?’
‘You’re in the back of there, brother,’ said the driver, opening the doors again.
‘Hey, you speak.’ Sami turned from driver to escort. ‘He don’t.’
The blow in the solar plexus doubled him up, arrows of agony tearing into his gut. ‘Fuck!’ was all he could say. They shoved him inside with a kick in the back of a knee. He looked down at the escort’s hob-nailed boots and excruciating pain speared into his thigh. The grinding and spluttering of an abused engine drove them ever higher. He tried to imagine sky, sun, cloud, rain. Nothing came – just the implacable expression of the man opposite.
‘You know what day it is, brother?’ The escort’s voice struck like a cymbal clash. He’d spoken. This time he’d be the one to say nothing.
‘I asked you a question, brother. Do you know what day it is today?’
‘What you mean, what day?’
‘September the eleventh. Eleven nine. Nine eleven. Remember?’ His voice leeched sarcasm. ‘Fifth anniversary.’
‘Yeah, fuck, sorry, brother.’ Sami tried to stop the cowering in his mind from showing in his face. Nor the confusion, because he didn’t know what he was supposed to say.
‘And you call yourself a brother.’
‘Fuck’s sake, I’m confused. Wouldn’t you be? Five years, yeah?’
‘That’s right. Never forget. Five years.’
The van slowed and snagged left, then immediately right. More footsteps, the tuneless squeal of a rusting gate, a door slam, then bouncing along… along what? The van stopped, turned and reversed, the doors opened. He emerged with head bowed; all he saw was a dark concrete passage, the van doors at right angles blocking right and left. He wondered what lay beyond and listened. A rustling, nothing more.
They dragged him along a ribbed concrete floor, a smell of hay and dung. Petrol fumes overtaken by shit. Stables, cows, horses? He’d hardly ever been outside the town or seen an animal beyond the halal butcher. They stopped, pushed open a door and hurled him through it. He heard the click of key in lock – his new prison. The floor was tiny squares of concrete, a bed of hay in one corner, a trough of water in another, a single tap and a bucket below. Soap and a roll of toilet paper. High up a small window, an inch or two ajar, too high and too small to escape through. Though he didn’t know what he’d be escaping from. At least it offered some sense of light and time. Were they watching his observance? He should exaggerate to make sure, make a show of it. The stink of shit was overwhelming – he felt it seeping into his clothes and pores.
‘Watch!’ A voice from outside. The door half-opened, a hand stretched towards him. ‘Gimme your watch.’
He tried to count the minutes and hours, washed and prayed according to his best guesses until, finally, the light through the window began to fade. The door opened; a new face appeared with a slice of bread and bowl of thin soup.
‘Thank you, brother.’
The reply was a punch below the midriff. He recoiled. He looked at the food and tepid liquid and a tear trickled down his cheek. Angrily he brushed it away and began hungrily to eat and drink the meagre ration. When he finished, there remained an emptiness in the pit of his stomach.
Darkness. The sound of a dripping tap on the other side of the wall. He counted the gap – every three seconds without break. It stopped. He breathed deeply, forced himself to relax, closed his eyes and laid his head on the hay. Fatigue seized him and he waited for sleep to end the waking nightmare. As his eyes closed and peace descended, the drip restarted – a loud, metallic ping. He sat up with a jolt, nerves crushing him. Was the timing deliberate? Yet there was no noise, no sounds of other humans, no breathing beyond his now hurried exhalations. He looked up and around for cameras, both overt and concealed. Nothing. Some kind of lamp outside the window cast a shaft of light on the opposite wall. He tried to close his eyes to darken the reflection. Another drip. Then he woke up, cold and cramped.
After daybreak, more bread and a mug of black tea. He said nothing and it was delivered without violence. He was given a brush to clean his teeth and managed a small defecation in the bucket. When the plate and bowl were collected, the bucket was replaced. He didn’t dare to speak words of gratitude.
On the third morning, after two more breaking, corroding days and nights, a different man looked in, less roughly dressed.
‘Come.’ Sami nodded, not opening his mouth. ‘It’s all right, brother, you may speak now.’
He felt exhausted, cramped, his legs like jelly. He forced his voice into action despite the dread of allowing the wrong words to escape. ‘Thank you, brother,’ he murmured.
‘It is time for you to meet the Adviser.’
‘It’s everything I imagined,’ said Patrick, turning the corner that brought the unique form of Pendle Hill into view. It was late afternoon – they had a couple of hours to get up and down before darkness would turn the great delineated mass visible in daylight into a brooding nocturnal shadow. ‘You see photographs and don’t think it could be like that. But it is. A blue whale. An enormous blue whale.’
‘A whale?’ Sara exclaimed with exaggerated alarm.
‘Yes, don’t you see the tail rising up from the valley and that smooth long back leading to the broad mouth feeding off the valley below?’
She turned to him. ‘I think I see a man with an unexpected imagination.’
As the village of Barlow receded and they gained altitude, he in boots, jeans and anorak, she in trainers, jeans and hoodie, the north-west wind began to flap their jackets and flick their faces. The stony path on peat bog compressed by thousands of summer tramplings was dry and they skipped easily up it. Sara felt the tensions of the encounter with Sami ebb as her breaths deepened. Nearing the final crest, the wind strengthened and, once