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began his muffled whispering in the darkness.
    ‘Kelly. Kath. Fran. Gail. Lauren.’
    I sat quite still. I didn’t move at all.
    ‘Kelly. Kath. Fran. Gail. Lauren.’
    It was a shuffling drone. He repeated the five names over and again, and I sat there, with my head hung forward a bit as if I was still asleep. There were tears sliding over my cheeks, but he couldn’t see that. They stung. I imagined them making tracks down my skin, like snail tracks. Silver.
    Then he stood up and left and I went on crying silently in the dark.
    ‘Drink.’
    I drank.
    ‘Eat.’
    Four more spoonfuls of sweet sludge.
    ‘Bucket.’
    My name is Abbie. Abigail Devereaux. Please help me, someone. Please.
    Nobody will help me.
    Yellow butterfly. Green leaf. Please don’t fly away.
    He slipped the wire around my neck almost with a kind of tenderness. For the third time, or was it the fourth?
    I felt his fingers around the neck checking the position. If I was thinking about him all the time, then I must always be in his mind. What did he feel towards me? Was it a kind of love? Or was he like a farmer with a pig that must be kept penned and fed in the days before it is slaughtered? I imagined him in a day or two coming in and tightening the wire around my neck or cutting my throat as a weary duty.
    When he was gone, I began counting again. I did countries this time. I walked along a hot sunny street in Australia counting the houses. It was raining as I climbed a winding medieval lane in Belgium. It was hot in Chad. Cold in Denmark. Blustery in Ecuador. Then at number 2,351 in a long, treelined avenue in France I heard a door close outside, footsteps. He had been away for about five hours forty minutes. A shorter time than before. He was anxious about me. Or his time away varied at random. What did it matter?
    More of the gruel fed to me with a spoon. Not as much as before. I wasn’t being fattened. I was being thinned while being kept alive. The bucket. Carried back to the ledge.
    ‘You’re feeling tired,’ he said.
    ‘What?’
    ‘You’re not talking as much.’
    I decided to make the effort once more to be bright and charming and strong. It was like dragging an enormously heavy sack up a steep hill.
    ‘Do you miss my talk?’ My voice seemed to come from a long way off.
    ‘You’re fading.’
    ‘No. Not fading. Just a bit sleepy at the moment. Tired. You know how it is. Very tired. Echoes in my head.’ I tried to concentrate on what I was saying, but words didn’t seem to fit together properly any more. ‘Can you cope with that?’ I said, meaninglessly.
    ‘You don’t know what I can cope with. You don’t know anything about me.’
    ‘There are things I know. Things I don’t know, of course, more things. Most. I know you’ve grabbed me. But why me? I’d like to know why me. I don’t know that. Soon they’ll catch you. They will. I listen for footsteps. They’ll rescue me.’
    There was his wheezy laughter beside me. I shivered. Oh, I was cold all over. Cold, dirty, aching, scared.
    ‘It’s not a joke,’ I said, with an effort. ‘They’ll save me. Someone. Terry. I have a boyfriend, you know. Terence Wilmott. He’ll come. I have a job. I work at Jay and Joiner’s. I tell people what to do. They won’t let me go.’ That was a mistake, to tell him things like that. I tried to force the words in a different direction. My tongue was thick and my mouth dry. ‘Or the police. They’ll find me. You should let me go before they find me. I won’t tell. I won’t tell and I have nothing to tell. There is nothing to tell, after all.’
    ‘You talk too much.’
    ‘Then you talk. Talk to me now.’ All I knew was that he mustn’t stuff my mouth with a rag and tie a wire round my throat. ‘What are you thinking?’
    ‘You’d no way understand what I’m thinking, even if I told you.’
    ‘Try me. Talk to me. We could talk. Find a way out. Find a way for me to go.’ No, I shouldn’t be saying that. Keep thoughts