Ventriloquists (13 page)

Relationship Problems

1.

At first they had been kept apart, and that had been rough enough: cuffed to a radiator in a room that sang with echoes every time you raised your voice (suggesting there was no furniture). For the last two days, however, they had been kept in the same walk-in wardrobe: and this was proving tougher than ever. It had got to the point where they had little left to say to one another. And sometimes hours passed when Nero would not so much as look at Jess, in the hope that when he next turned in her direction (perhaps as a way of straightening out a cramp), he would find her less repulsive to regard. But it hadn’t worked so far.

The hats didn’t help, of course. One day (or thereabouts) into their abduction, the podgy little fuck who had disabled them on the railway platform had come breezing into Nero’s room and had told him that from now on he would be wearing a hat.

At that juncture, before he’d been sodomised for the first time, Nero had still been full of rage and fear at having been abducted in the first place. Accordingly, he had struggled violently against his handcuff and the radiator to which the twin cuff had been attached; and he’d told Charlie Eastlight that he could go fuck himself, he wasn’t wearing no stupid fucking hat. And he swore and he spat and he tried to get up off the carpet.

Eastlight had urinated on Nero’s left leg.
Let’s try this again,
the jailer had said.

Go fuck yourself!
Nero had shouted.
You filthy fucking pervert!

Yes, I thought we’d established that at the train station. A pervert is quite right. As for fucking myself… I wish I could, mate! And so do you, believe me! If that kind of thing was possible – well, you and your girlfriend might not be in such a fix right now… Put the hat on.

‘Nah, man,’ Nero had said, though he’d sounded a lot less sure of himself than he had a minute earlier, before the ammonia aroma of Eastlight’s urine had had a chance to waft through their confines.

At that point he had yet to be raped. At that point he had not even been stripped. And to think he’d kicked off about wearing a silly hat! How green he’d been, how green…

Silently he had agreed to wear the hat. The decision had seemed like a caving-in, a rock-slide; it had felt like a failure. But at first (at least) he had been able to pretend that he wasn’t wearing it. Even when the two men had taken turns with him the first time, Nero had tried to grip hard to the lie that he had refused to wear their hat. It had meant something: a way of holding on to his sanity, perhaps.

Back in the days when he and Jess had been held in separate rooms, Nero had counted his breaths between sexual assaults. Tried to teach himself not to struggle: the perverts enjoyed a fight, and besides, it was useless to test his strength against the radiator pipes to which he’d been cuffed. Practice had made this clear enough: he was not the equal of metal, strengthwise.

As soon as they’d moved Nero and Jess into the walk-in wardrobe, Nero had guessed that things were soon to get worse, for a hat had perched on Jess’s head too.

The hats meant that Jess and Nero had become property. When Nero had been alone he had maintained a miniscule store of inner strength: he had thought of himself as merely a prisoner. Now that Jess had joined him, he knew exactly what status they had been relegated to. This was one of the reasons why Nero had found it hard to look at her.

She was stirring now.

2.

She slept a lot, did Jess. She gave in to exhaustion in the same way that Nero fought it: with enthusiasm, with quiet vigour. Reading into her frequent departures, Nero saw a place of refuge that she would find; a space of healing. For Nero there was no equivalent: his sleep was wrecked by dreams in which he spoke the wrong language, in a place where no one could understand him – his fears, his panic, his predicament. And in these dreams he was always walking, never still; as restless as fleas on a hot plate. An ocean dreamstained burgundy; a dog that read his mind and yearned for language of its own; a wall made of a vast toenail…

Nero envied Jess, her ability to stay away from whatever place that was – or any like it. Her sleep (to Nero) felt pure and refreshing; she would send her memories away, bobbing perhaps on that same wine-hued ocean, in a boat made of folded paper. And her memories were taken from her; they didn’t haunt her… or so it seemed to her teenaged lover. So it seemed to Nero, who could not help despising her a tad more, every time that she closed her eyes to escape this.

But she was stirring now; twitchy; her nose wrinkled swiftly, tasting the air, to make sure that it was safe for her to return.

So Nero looked away.

3.

‘I’m hungry,’ Jess muttered eventually on another day.

Five days in? Six?

Nero ignored her. Never had the phrase ‘same shit, different day’ meant so much or been so apposite; and no longer did he care to tell her to change the record about her hunger pains. She was hungry. Like,
yeah
? Well, the
world
was hungry, rah?
Stop whining and that…
Try as he might not to move, however (an attempt to pretend that he hadn’t heard a sound), a left thigh muscle twanged and a spasm shot through his torso. He’d been seen.

‘I said:
I’m hungry,
Nero.’

He turned to her. ‘I’ll pop out and get some fried chicken, shall I? You dickhead.’

‘No,
you’re
the dickhead,’ Jess spat back.

‘Like rah,’ Nero added wearily. As usual he was cuffed to the radiator, which wasn’t turned on, but this time the cuff was only on his left wrist. His right hand was free… not that he could do anything with it.

Unlike Nero on the carpet, Jess had been given a narrow camper bed. She had been restrained so that she could sit up slightly – her right hand cuffed to one of the bed’s pole-like legs – but so that her legs remained widened, with two sets of cuffs securing her ankles to the legs of the bed at the other end. As was Nero, Jess was now naked: if he glanced her way, she had been positioned so that he stared directly at her vagina.

4.

More days had passed. Nero was getting muddled up.

To begin with, Nero hadn’t seen a reason why they’d positioned Jess like that: positioned her so that her legs were open on the camp bed. Positioned her so that any time he glanced in her direction, the first thing he saw of her was her widened vagina. The point was what exactly? He’d seen it before and this new, fresh torture – with Nero still cuffed to the radiator in the walk-in cupboard and Jess cuffed to the camp bed by one wrist, tied the ankles to the bed’s legs so that her thighs were kept parted – was nothing more or less than weird.

But it hadn’t taken him long to learn a grim secret about your girlfriend – one of those secrets that rap or porn didn’t much cover.

You could get too much of a good thing.

Now that the light was left on around the clock, Nero’s only view was of Jess’s labia (the walk-in cupboard had no windows, and he couldn’t stand up anyway), so the new game seemed to consist of artificial light and the sight of sore flesh.

The jailers were not teasing Nero. They were punishing him.

On balance, he had preferred it when he and Jess had been left in the dark for days on end. The artificial light screwed with your body clock. And the company had seemed better… But then, one day, while he’d trembled through a troubled doze, the two men (or at least he’d only heard or seen two so far) had stripped Jess down to the skin. They had probably fucked her as well. And they’d stripped Nero too, the cunts. Left them naked as the day, Adam and Eve in chains.

Nero was sick of the sight of it. Probably Jess thought something similar about the sight of his penis, Nero imagined; but at least he could lift up a leg to block her view; he could shuffle around on the carpet, although the damage done to his rectum made some sitting positions uncomfortable or downright painful. He could show – he could exhibit – some dignity. That was what it boiled down to.
Dignity
… Which seemed an odd ambition in the circumstances – to be dignified, given everything – but it was the only thing that Nero believed he had left.

Suddenly he started crying. Fury went through his body like volts; he expelled a cry of impotent rage and kicked repeatedly at thin air. Putting everything he had into the action, Nero tugged at the pipe, the bracelet of the cuff chewing into his wrist

The pipe did not move.

He had known that it wouldn’t so why bother? Because he had to do
something
, that was why. Because he had formed opinions, and plenty of them, about their captors.

The fit passed quickly. Nero leaned against the wall (the same creamy off-white colour as the other three walls, and the door) and hunched himself together in a shaking bundle. The tears were gone; they hadn’t lasted long – they never did. It was anger that he felt now, not sorrow, not grief: anger at his own helplessness. Anger at being in this so-called room. Anger at Jess.

I will kill them.

Nero was as certain of this promise as he was of the disgust and shame that he had experienced, the instant the fat man’s semen had leaked out of his anus that first time, and dribbled between his buttocks, on to his scrotum.

I will kill them. I will do it.

In his mind, Nero said the words slowly, testing them for weight and plausibility. Not only did they seem right, they seemed inevitable: they were the future. Not only would he find pleasure in making them suffer (or so he believed), he would sense that there was no alternative anyway.

‘You finished?’

Nero sighed. Wearily he asked, ‘What now, Jess?’

‘Your little paddy. You had enough?’

‘Yeah.’ Nero didn’t want to face her. He knew that he would though. ‘Yeah, I’ve had enough. Enough of a lot of things.’

And he faced her. She had sat up as well as she could; their eyelines simmered.

The beanie hat she wore said BE MY BABY. So did his.

Hers was pale blue. His was pink.

‘And what good did it do?’ Jess demanded.

‘No good at all.’

‘So you might as well’ve saved your energy.’

Nero sighed again. ‘Yeah, I might’ve,’ he admitted. ‘For what exactly?’

And he turned away. ‘Close your eyes,’ he added as he reached for the slops bucket. He needed to urinate. Without bothering to check if she had closed her eyes (or had lain back down to stare up at the ceiling) Nero did his business while experiencing the twinned emotions of hope and panic. Both of these emotions concerned a visit from one of the two perverts (but probably the fat one; the Italian-looking one appeared less in control). Nero hoped that the fat bastard would come soon to empty his bucket. And he panicked that while he was here he would think up something new to do to his prisoners involving their waste products.

‘Nero?’

‘What is it?’

‘I know this is my fault.’

‘You bet your
arse
it’s your fault. How do you feel about it?’

‘Rancid, boy.’

‘Yeah. And you’re not the one who’s been buggered. Imagine how
I
feel!’

‘I’ve been wondering about that,’ Jess continued – so carefully and slowly that the words did not sound like hers to Nero’s ears. The tone made him face her once more.

He waited.

A few seconds passed before Jess said, ‘About a year ago, my mum and dad were having problems, right? Mum was gonna leave him. And she wanted me and Vanessa to go with her. So at the weekend we had to go with her to see all these houses on the market – she wasn’t gonna live in their house when the divorce came through, she said.’

Nero waited.

‘And I can’t tell you how many we saw, and Mum going
Yes, yes, this is the one,
all excited, and me feeling bad when we drove home and Mum told Dad all about what she decided.
The girls and I
, she kept saying – as if Nessa and me had any fucking say in it. I started to hate her for that. But the point I’m making is – most of the houses looked just like this.’

‘Like what?’

Jess waved her free hand around to take in the confines of the walk-in cupboard, but at the same time she also meant the bedroom to which it was attached – the bedroom in which both of them had been raped repeatedly after they’d been drugged. The bedroom without any furniture - just a porridge-grey carpet of a hard-wearing fabric and heavy blinds fitted over the window. The bedroom with the locked door… through which both of them had tried to escape when they’d been teased that they could run away. Or when they’d thought they’d got lucky; when they thought their captors had got attention-sloppy after orgasm. (
What’s stopping you, fuckhole?
the fat one had asked one day near the beginning. And she had tried the door handle. Behind her back he had held up the key, just below the bulb blazing in its ceiling fixture.
But you’ll need this first, won’t you... Get on your cunting knees. Now.
)

‘Painted cream walls, beige carpets,’ said Jess. ‘No bed or chairs. Probably one of them fireproof doors… It makes me think this house is for sale or rent.’

Growing interested, Nero said, ‘And? Assuming you’re right, what of it?’

‘Well… Sooner or later someone’s gonna make an appointment to view it, to look around. And when they do, fucking Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee will have to move us out of sight.’

Nero snorted. ‘If they haven’t killed us first,’ he answered. ‘We’re
already
out of sight! We’re in a fucking cupboard!’

‘
Killed
us?’

‘…Don’t say the thought hasn’t occurred to you.’ As he spoke, the sense of panic won out over the hope that he’d harboured. ‘They haven’t even bothered to mask their faces or covered our eyes, apart from a few days at the start. You think they’re gonna let us go back after this?
Grow up.
’