have you slipped the ties from your wrists?’
‘What? No. I have tried but it is secured with some type of—’ A smash. I wait, swallow, ‘—with some type of hard plastic that I am unfamiliar with.’
‘Hang on. Can you feel it, the plastic?’
I touch the tether with my fingertips. ‘Yes. Why?’
‘How small are the groves on the tether?’
I feel. ‘One millimetre depth.’
‘I think I know which type it is. If it’s just one millimetre, sounds like it’s the new restraints we sometimes used at the prison.’
A flicker of hope begins to burn. ‘Do you know how I can untie it?’
‘Yes … I think so.’
There is another smash from the kitchen. ‘Then tell me. Fast.’
After three, perhaps four minutes, Dr Andersson returns. Her boots sound lighter now on the tiles as if she has changed shoes and when she walks, the drift of her perfume is softer, more weak. She marches up to me and halts. The bag, cemented still to my head, scratches at my face but I try hard to ignore it, bite my lip, keep my back steady and wait.
For a moment, there is no movement. She is crouching in front of me, I think—I can just make out the outline of her body in front of me. But more than that, more than simply her presence, is the heat of her, of another person that catches me off guard and, oddly, the thought strikes me that this, now, is the first time in six months that I have encountered, with such geographical closeness, another human being.
‘Right,’ she says finally, ‘let’s do this, shall we? The day is getting on and so is time.’
The bag is whipped from my head and my skin, slapped by sunlight, stings as, for the first time, my eyes blinking over and over, I get a complete look at Dr Andersson as she looms now in front of me. Her blonde hair is tied up into a ponytail that slides down her back and rests down her spine all the way to her hip bones. Her forehead is high and sharp and peppered with freckles, and on either side of her straight nose sit two rose crescents for cheeks, each propped up by defined, prominent bone structure. I choke, spitting out the fibres of fabric from my mouth and throat.
‘What do you want?’
She offers me a smile, the one I remember from Goldmouth, with white teeth and scarlet, plumped lips. ‘I want to do my job and get home. I understand you’re on the harsh end of this, I really do, but MI5 wants the Project to end, which means I have to deal with you, end you.’ She takes out a gun. ‘I’m really very sorry, Maria. I always rather liked you.’
And then, with one bullet, she shoots me in the leg.
Undisclosed confinement location—present day
‘Doc, are you sure there’s a needle? Can you see it?’
‘Yes. But the light is fading again.’
The blackness has reclaimed the air, but, now I know the needle is there, I will my arm to move as much as it can, wriggling my fingers in an attempt to feel the point of the metal inserted into my veins. At first, nothing shifts and I feel so thirsty, am so desperately weak and tired that my mind begins to think it has imagined the entire thing.
And then it moves, there, the needle, in the crease of my elbow. Just one pull at my skin and veins.
‘Can you see it now?’ Patricia says.
‘No. I can feel it.’
‘Doc, you know what this means, right?’
I go to speak the words they are drugging me again but instead clam up, an instinct to yell out, to cry as loud and deep as possible welling up inside of me. This was not supposed to happen again. No, no, no, no.
‘Doc, are you still there?’
‘I ran away from them,’ I say after a moment, catching my short, shallow breath. ‘I hid. The Project and MI5 thought I was dead after prison. I thought I had escaped it all.’
‘Oh, Doc. Doc, I’m so sorry.’
For a moment, in the blackness, it feels as if everything has stopped, as if, here, now, all I have is collapsing on me, folding inwards never to push out again. It feels hopeless. I sit there, silent, scared, until, on the murky moisture of the air there is a rush of something.
‘Doc? Doc, you’re groaning. What’s the matter?’
I squint as hard as I can, frantically forcing my eyes to see something, anything in the dank, suffocating space as to my direct side, the rush sounds again, distinct now, a click licking the air as what must be a liquid begins its gentle whoosh. It is only when I hear again that my groggy brain engages in the intricacies of the noises around me and I realise with a stabbing clarity what is actually happening and what it means to me—what it means to us both.
‘What if they are drugging me, so they can transport me to another facility somewhere? If they do that, what will happen to you?’
‘I’ll be okay, Doc.’
‘What if they are intending to kill you? That is what the Project does—it kills those I love.’ My breathing begins to speed up in short, rapid intakes of oxygen as the worry inside me escalates.
‘Doc, Doc I can’t get to you, so look, it’s going to happen either way, so try to breathe through it. There, that’s it …’
I try so hard to focus on her voice, slam my arms against the rope on my wrists, desperate to escape, to run, hide, because what is charging forward now like a pack of hungry wolves makes my heart stop, makes every sweat gland on my skin scream out in fear. A hallucination.
‘Breathe, Doc. Keep breathing. Keep listening to me …’
A body with multiple heads, each one of them spinning 360 degrees, hurtles towards me. I scream. My nails scratch into the wood of the chair, legs kick out, but it does no good, and I know it must be the drug, be the liquid shooting inside my veins, but there is nothing I can do. I am trapped.
The monster is on me now, here in this room. I yell out my friend’s name, hear the distant scream of her voice, but I can’t reach her. The heads in the image sway, thorns in the breeze, and I hear a voice screech and realise it’s mine, because the heads, the faces on them—they are Mama and Ramon. My mother and brother.
‘Patricia, where are you?’ I yell.
‘I’m here, Doc. It’ll be over soon. Keep calm, okay? Keep breathing …’
I try to scramble back, tell myself that none of this is real, but still they come, the heads grotesque, twisted out of shape, all images in a fairground mirror, their mouths and eyes huge, each of them laughing over and over like two sick clowns. ‘Freak! She doesn’t understand,’ they sing. ‘She doesn’t understand, the freak.’ The children run beside them, children I recall from my school days, and they skip and they chant, Weirdo, weirdo, stinky nerdy weirdo. And I ask them what they mean, scream at them to tell me what is happening, but the heads, all of them, family, children, they simply look at me, at each other, and then, just as I think they’re going to disappear, they let out one roar of a laugh and, merging together, morph into a gun as tall as a car and shoot me, point blank, in the head.
My eyes fly open. I choke, claw for air, chest ripping, struggling as I look down at myself, at the black room, shaky, scared at what just happened.
‘Patricia, the drugs …’
‘Sssh. Sssh.’
I stutter, voice cracked and it takes a full minute for my body to settle, for