Slow River

Chapter 22

Lore is eighteen. It is her birthday, or it might be. She is sitting in a tent erected inside some kind of warehouse, or maybe it’s a barn. The smells are certainly rural rather than urban: wine and garlic and oil, the occasional hint of grass too long in the sun. The Mediterranean, perhaps, or the South of France. She wonders how they got her here from the resort; she remembers nothing after the two men drugging her in the room.

She has been inside the tent for nearly three weeks, as far as she can tell. They keep her sedated. To begin with, they put it in her food, but because she does not always eat everything, they keep getting the dose wrong. One time, they gave her so much that she slept for over two days, or so they said. Now, though, her system is so saturated that they simply hand her a pill and stand over her while she puts it meekly in her mouth and swallows. But she thinks it is probably her birthday.

The tent is empty but for a sleeping bag and a bucket.

The bucket is emptied every twelve hours. Sometimes the tent stinks. She is humiliated. She is kept naked though not, she is sure, through prurience.

There are two men; one, the taller, wears clothes that always seem to smell of something frying, like fish; the other, shorter than Lore, moves fast and slightly sideways, like a crab. When they bring her food trays or empty her bucket or hand her the pills, both wear gloves, and hoods like ski masks. She has no idea what they look like, of their race or age, but she feels she could tell them apart even without the height discrepancy. The tall one, whom she thinks of as Fishface, seems nice.

He always averts his head when he enters, almost as though he is ashamed of what he is doing. The other one, though, Crablegs—she does not like him. He is the one who talks, the one who tells her to eat her pills or she will have to be tied up; the one who wakes her up and shouts at her that her family is refusing to pay the ransom.

It was Crablegs who brought in an old folding chair and a camera one time, along with a copy of a news flimsy.

“Sit on the chair,” he said, “and hold this in front of you, so they can see the date.”

Who? she wondered, but could not quite make her mouth shape the words.

He fiddled with the camera and brilliant light flooded the tent.

“Talk. Tell them you’re scared for your life.”

She was not scared. The drugs made everything seem distant and somehow irrelevant. Lore just sat there, blinking.

“Light’s too bright,” she slurred.

“You don’t like it?” He moved closer, shone it directly in her eyes.

She tried to hold up her hand to shield her face, but her finger’s felt like bunches of sausages, and the flimsy got in the way.

“In front of you, I said. So they can see the date. So they know we haven’t killed you yet.”

Yet. She thought about that. She should be scared, but all she could feel was the smooth wood under her buttocks and the slick flimsy against her stomach. Naked, she thought, naked and vulnerable.

“Talk,” Crablegs ordered, and turned up the light.

She just wanted the light to go away, to go back to her cotton-wool dreams. She whimpered.

“That’s it, that’s better.” He filmed for a moment, then adjusted something near the microphone. “Now, tell them how much you want to get out of here,”

She wanted the light to stop. She wanted to lie down and sleep. “Please,” she said. A tear slid slowly down beside her nose, under the curve of her cheekbone, across the corner of her mouth and dripped off her jaw. “Please,” she said again. “Please…”

“Tell them.”

“I want to go home.” It didn’t matter that she slurred, it didn’t matter that after all she had been through to be an adult in the eyes of her parents they would see her like this: naked, vulnerable, weeping. “I want to go home. Please…”

He turned off the light. “You can stop now.”

But Lore couldn’t stop. Her weeping turned to wet heaving sobs, to hiccoughs.

“Oh, shut up. And get off the chair.”

She slid to the floor, clutched at his trouser leg.

“Get off me. Jesus.” He wiped at the slime on his leg. “Jesus.” He threw something at her—a handkerchief. “Clean yourself up.”

He left, carrying the chair and camera, still wiping at his trouser leg.

Her sobs steadied. She cried in a low monotone for hours and hours, until they gave her more drugs, and she slept.

But today is her birthday, at least it might be. Today, she can think a little.

The day began unpleasantly, when the pill she was handed with breakfast half dissolved in her mouth before she could swallow it. Afterward, when Fishface left, she spat clots of soggy white power into her hand, and wiped her hand on the floor. She ate nearly all the food on her tray in an effort to get rid of the taste on her tongue. Some time later she noticed that the leftovers on the plates were sausage, and croissant, and juice. Breakfast. It must be morning. And that was when she started to think, to try count the days, and realized it was her birthday.

Eighteen. She now owns her share of inherited stock in the family corporation. She is rich.

When Fishface brings her lunch tray, she is alert enough to slide the pill under her tongue and pretend to swallow. She can feel it dissolving and wonders how much will get into her bloodstream before she can spit it out.

Fishface’s hood moves slightly in what Lore interprets as a smile. She stares blankly at the floor, hoping he will not notice she is more alert than usual. She catches sight of the white smears on the floor and her heart jitters. She forces herself to look away, look at anything but the floor, and after a moment, he leaves. She waits, listens. Hears a door opening somewhere, then closing. She spits the pill into her hand. Where can she put it?

There is bread with the meal. She tears off a crust and pokes a hole in the dough, then hesitates. Maybe they give the scraps to a dog. They might notice if it fell asleep. She searches the floor of the tent, finds a tiny tear in the plastic. Underneath, she can feel the long, scratchy grain of old wood.. She pushes her finger one way, then another, finds a crack between the planks. She squeezes the pill through the hole and into the crack.

By now her lunch, soup and bread, is cold. She looks at it and remembers: Stella is dead. For a moment, she wishes she had the pill back, wishes she could just drift here, not thinking, until her parents pay up and she can go home. Then she will find it is all a nightmare. She never went to the resort. Tok never called. Stella isn’t dead.

All of a sudden she is angry with Stella. You have no right to make me grieve! she thinks. Her situation is difficult enough without grief—she needs to be able to think, to plan, not to feel leaden like this, awash with memory. When she gets out of here, she will tell Stella exactly what…

But Stella is dead.

Grief is more terrible than she ever thought possible. It is as though there is a hole right through her. She shakes, her muscles spasm and ache. It’s hard to swallow because her throat feels too tight, and her heart jumps and skitters. She is sweating. And then she understands. It’s the drugs. Lack of drugs. She’s withdrawing.

Over the next few days she works out a way to taper off the sedatives. The sodden lumps she spits from her mouth aren’t easy to divide, and sometimes she takes too much, but after six days, she is back to nothing, and no longer shakes.

She makes more holes in the bottom of the tent and explores the floor, a few splintery inches a day. On the fourth day of exploration, she finds a six-inch nail. It is old, rusty black iron, and bent at one end, but it comforts her to hold it between the fingers of her left hand, let it poke forward when she makes a fist. While she has a weapon she is more than a helpless victim. She can think, she can plan. At night, before she falls asleep, she tucks the nail down by her feet inside the sleeping bag. In the morning, she holds it in her fist and smiles.

The nail becomes the center of her universe. Her fingers begin to smell of rust, but for Lore, it is the smell of hope.