55 | Gemma
She has a series of nightmares, but she cannot seem to wake up. She is riding the dodgems at the fair on Clapham Common, but the controls won’t work. She twists the wheel and stamps on the pedal, and the car does exactly what it chooses, flings her about, head jouncing on her neck as though it’s barely attached. Then she’s in a coffin, padded satin beneath her skin, and she’s being walked towards the church hoist high on strangers’ shoulders. But someone has sewn her lips closed and however hard she tries she cannot move her limbs. She tries to scream for help, to let them know she is alive, but no sound comes out. And then she’s deep underground, in a cave, in the dark, and she’s wedged in a tube of rock and her arms are trapped by her sides and the ground above is pressing down and she’s screaming.
Her eyes open to darkness. There’s something clinging to her face. Her lashes brush fabric. And something’s in her mouth, holding it open but blocking it, and she cannot shift it.
Still dreaming, she thinks. It’s that paralysis you get when you’ve come awake too fast. I need to get this off my face. I’ve got tangled up in the bedclothes.
And she tries to move her arms and discovers that they are bound together at the wrists, behind her back. And then she is sharply, fully awake.
Blind. The something on her face is wrapped tightly around her head, enveloping it. And the something in her mouth is strapped there so she cannot spit it out.
A couple of inches below her eyes, a tiny patch of light. Breathing holes, she thinks. There are breathing holes. It’s a mask. But it is tight and compresses her nose, and she’s not getting enough air for someone whose body is pulsing with fear.
No, she thinks. No, no, no, no, no, this can’t be. And the earth lurches as hypoxia takes her and she plummets once again into the dark.
The object in her mouth tastes of chemicals. It gives a little when she presses down with her teeth. She knows what it is. It’s a ball gag. She’s seen them in films. Never ones with happy endings.
The brain adjusts. The fourth or fifth time she regains consciousness, she knows already what she will find, and blind panic no longer takes her mind away.
It’s almost worse than when it does.
She’s on her side. Hands behind her back and legs tied together at knees and ankles. The bed – she assumes it’s a bed – on which she lies is soft and forgiving, but the surface beneath her skin is plastic and she is sweating where her naked body touches it.
Somewhere nearby, the boom of water shifting against a hollow wall. She remembers the sound from her cabin in Cannes.
I’m on a boat, she thinks. They’ve taken me and put me on a boat.
Panic is bad, but despair is a good deal worse.