Page 42 of The Memory Wood

He makes no move to turn on the torch. ‘You know we have to clean the wound.’

‘I guess.’

‘It’s going to hurt.’

‘Yeah.’

For a while, he’s silent. Then he asks, ‘Would you like me to help you?’

Hearing that, she feels like screaming:I want you to get me OUT of here! I want you to call the POLICE, Elijah! BRING THEM DOWN HERE, LIKE I ASKED!But she doesn’t. Instead, closing her eyes, she murmurs her agreement.

Elijah leaves her side. She hears him rustling around near the door: A3, perhaps, or A4. The ease with which he negotiates the darkness is disconcerting. His mental map of the cell clearly rivals her own. When she hears the scrape of hard plastic against stone, she realizes he’s sliding one of the buckets towards her. A whiff of cleaning solution reaches her nose. Some of the liquid slops over the side, spattering on to the floor.

‘How’d you want to do this?’ he asks.

Elissa feels her mind beginning to seize up. Quickly, she whispers, ‘You decide.’

Elijah seems pleased to be given the responsibility. He clicks his tongue absently, like a tradesman assessing a job. She wonders if it’s all an act.

‘If you held out your arm,’ he says, ‘I could pour some of this stuff over it. But you’d probably get wet, and then you’dget cold. What weshoulddo is dunk your whole arm in. Properly submerge it. Wash out the wound and kill all the germs.’

Elissa clenches her teeth. It makes sense, but she can’t bear thinking about how much it’ll hurt.

‘I’ll hold your bracelet,’ Elijah tells her. ‘You have to do this, Elissa. You’ve no choice.’

She moans when she hears that, and it’s such a pathetic sound – so meek and desperate – that fresh tears begin to well.

‘It’s OK,’ Elijah mutters. And of course it’s not. She feels his fingers slide around the manacle. Deprived of light, her mind paints a picture of the boy she cannot see: lamp-like eyes peering over a mouth twisted by a cleft palate into a monstrosity of bulging gums and reaching teeth. The image frightens her, even though she knows it can’t be true. Elijah suffers no impediment to his speech. If he’s burdened with disfigurement, it’s something far less obvious than that.

Bracelet, he called it a bracelet. Like it’s a harmless piece of jewellery.

‘Ready?’ he asks.

‘Wait.’ Elissa shakes her head. ‘I can’t, not yet. I’m not ready.’

‘You have to.’

‘What if …’ she begins, but she doesn’t really have a question. Her wrist is open almost to the bone. The pain, when disinfectant meets raw flesh, will be extraordinary.

‘Kneel up,’ Elijah urges her. ‘Like before.’ He lifts the manacle a few inches off her lap and she’s so worried about it touching her injury that she complies. With her free hand, she touches the bucket. Elijah guides her arm towards the lip. The chain rattles, snaking out. Soon, her hand is in position.

‘You want to go fast or slow?’ he asks.

‘Fast. Once it’s in, don’t let me pull away.’

‘I’ll do my best. Try not to knock over the bucket.’

Elissa’s teeth are clenched so tightly her reply comes out as a hiss.

‘Ready?’ Elijah asks, and before she can reply he plunges her wrist into a sea of screams.

V

The world returns slowly, a gradual awareness of time and space. It’s a while before Elissa realizes where she is, or what she has become. Her wrist throbs in time with her heart, but it’s not the barbed-wire-in-her-veins agony of before.

She’s lying on her side. In her nose is the pillow’s mildewed stink. When she investigates with her left hand, she discovers that her injured wrist has been bound with the material cut from her dress. Elijah has done a good job.

Sitting up in the darkness, Elissa listens to the silence, trying to work out if she’s alone. Her throat is raw, a memento of her scream. She shuffles over to F7, dragging her chain. Finding her rucksack, careful not to dislodge Monkey, she removes the water bottle and takes a long drink. ‘Well,’ she says, addressing the knitted mannequin. ‘I guess we should see what’s what.’

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