The Takers and Keepers

by Ivan Pope

  A young woman sat on the far end of the bed in the gloom.

  ‘Hello Jennifer,’ he said cautiously. No reply. ‘Jenni. Hey.’ He took two cautious steps into the room, still holding on to the door handle as he did so, trying to find spaces for his feet in the clutter and feeling he was in danger of toppling into the mess.

  He could see her, but she still didn’t respond as he clambered further into the room. He grinned inanely, suddenly feeling stupid.

  ‘I’ve come to talk about your book.’ He paused. ‘If that’s what you want. Your mum said you did.’

  He didn’t know whether to talk to her as a child or an adult. The heat was getting to him, there was a deep, earthy, pungent smell in the room which almost made him gag. Still she didn’t respond. He froze, willing a response from the figure in front of him.

  Then, from the doorway, her mother piped up.

  ‘Jen dear, this is the man I told you about. From the magazine, Mr Jenkins’ friend. You asked me to bring him, didn’t you? Don’t be silly now, dear.’

  Suddenly she made a strange sound. ‘Ch, ch, chey. You can sit where you want,’ she said.

  Her voice was calm and strong, a bit childish with a strange lisp crossed with a stammer. He’d spent a lot of time wondering what she’d look like, but he hadn’t anticipated how she’d sound. He took another step into the room, tempted now to jump from hummock to hummock. She turned around and looked straight at him and smiled.

  ‘Hello Jennifer,’ he said, more boldly now.

  She was a large girl, not fat but big-boned with flesh over the bones. She was wearing a skirt and striped top and makeup, as if she’d taken time over her appearance. Not the small waifish child he’d been imagining; she was an adult wearing modern clothes.

  He tried not to stare as he took in her elegant hair, styled and coloured with a silver and brown peppering, something rather trendy about it all, or maybe old-fashioned, he thought. He realised he didn’t know much about hair styles. She was clutching a tiny blue mobile phone. On the bed next to her was a laptop. He looked around for somewhere to sit and she patted the side of the bed next to herself. He climbed quickly over the bags and sat himself on the corner of the bed. He smiled at her, a large, friendly smile, intended to calm her down. Her mother hung around at the door, silent but watchful, a chaperone for her returned daughter. He was starting to sweat in the close heat of this room, he could feel the pricks of it on his scalp.

  ‘Mummy, you can leave us, thank you.’

  It was the voice of an adult but with a lilt to it, as if it had been learned from watching American television.

  He stared at the young woman sitting on the bed. She had a large, long face, somewhat like her mother’s. Her face was drawn and pale and she looked young despite the makeup.

  She stared at him. ‘What’s the matter? Do you think I should look like a troll?’

  For a moment he didn’t know how to respond. He was getting dozy in the close heat of the room. Then he laughed. ‘Actually, you look great,’ he said.

  This broke the tension and she smiled in return. ‘I don’t know what your name is.’

  ‘It’s Allen,’ he said.

  ‘OK, Allen, what are we going to do?’

  ‘We’re going to write a book?’ he said. ‘To write your book. Is that what you want?’

  She stared at him. ‘Will you be nice to me? If you’re going to write my book and I’m going to tell the world, then you’ll have to be nice to me. I’m not going to hide anymore.’

  ‘You don’t have to hide,’ he said, thinking that she did, probably.

  ‘I know I don’t have to,’ she shot back. ‘This is part of our plan; I dreamed this a lot, for a long time. I knew you would come after he let me out, don’t think you are so clever. When I stopped dreaming, when it got real, I didn’t like it. It’s been a long time, is all.’

  Allen wasn’t sure where to start.

  ‘Would you like to talk about it?’

  ‘I want to get on television.’

  ‘I understand that,’ he said, ‘but first we must write your book. You have to help me; you have to tell me stuff. We’ll do it together.’

  She sat in silence for a few minutes. ‘Aylen, promise you will listen to me and only write what I say.’

  ‘I will do my best,’ he said. He felt completely adrift in the face of someone who’d been held captive for twelve years.

  ‘It’s my birthday soon.’

  ‘How old will you be?’ he said.

  ‘I forgot.’

  That was the child.

  ‘Can you remember how it started?’ he tried. ‘We could start with that. Or how you got out, if you like.’

  A long silence. He was beginning to wonder if she’d fallen asleep on him.

  ‘Can you get me on the telly?’ she said.

  ‘Probably anything if you want, but you’ll have to give me some help because I can’t do anything for you if you won’t talk to me.’

  ‘Do you write for The Sun? What sort of a writer are you, anyway? Writing about dead people? Writing about fucked-up people, is that what you do?’

  ‘I’m just a writer. I try to write about people who have problems, who have been lost – like you, I guess. I don’t write for The Sun. Do you think I should?’

  She thought about this for a long time and Allen wondered what was going through her mind. He had talked to other returnees and knew the sort of things they struggled with. He understood the darkness of it, he didn’t shy away from that, the second-hand struggle to emerge from the dark chambers. But he also enjoyed letting light into spaces where no light had shone. He never knew where it would lead.

  ‘OK.’ Her voice had changed now, become more girlish. ‘Come on then.’

  ‘Come on what?’

  ‘I will tell you the bad things. I’m not scared anymore.’

  He started to feel she was playing games with him.

  He hadn’t intended to do much more than have a chat with her, but he could feel the tension in the air. Allen slowly pulled his recorder from a pocket and placed it on the bed.

  ‘Want to start now?’

  She grinned at him. ‘I’ve got a lot to say. I’ve been practising. What do you want me to tell?’

  ‘Well, how about you tell me how it all started – what you can remember.’

  She made a little noise like a strangled laugh. ‘He got me when I was on my way to school. A horrid man, but that’s not what I thought when I met him. I liked him, he was funny at first. He took me to live with him in his flat, but when we got there he wouldn’t let me go, he made me live in a garage. Or a cellar, I’m not sure. A room, anyway. And he didn’t have any children or pets, or even a wife. He just lived on his own. And he was mean.’

  She sniffled violently, as if she was about to burst into tears. He waited for her to go on.

  ‘He took me up to his house.’

  Up.

  ‘And he threw me into this little room; he told me I had to stay there. Then he turned off all the lights and left me for a long time. That’s how it all started. He left me and I cried and cried for a few days, then he came back with some food and I was so hungry I said thank you.’

  ‘Tell me a bit more about him,’ he said.

  She folded slowly down onto the bed and lay on her side, placing her hands under her head, staring up at the ceiling as if trying to see things.

  ‘It was a long time ago. I was only little, but even then I knew it was wrong, what he was doing. I wanted to go home to my mum. I wanted that so much, I would lie in the dark and think about my mum and try to make her know I was still alive. You know I lived with him for years. Years and years. You get used to it, you get used to anything really, and he turned out quite funny. He could make me laugh. We watched television together, and he looked after me. He made me my favourite food, but for a long time he never let me out of his house.’

  ‘What about this room, what was it like?’

  Her voice was
getting quieter, smaller. ‘It was dark and cold and smelly. And I had to live in it for a long, long, time. More time than I can remember. At first he was not nice to me, and he made the room horrible, but when we became friends he let me make it a bit nicer.’

  He wanted to ask what she meant, not nice. He realised this was dangerous ground. If felt as if she was challenging him to question this. He pressed on, keeping his feelings under control.

  ‘He became your friend?’

  Jennifer was drifting away, she seemed closed off, locked in a memory of her world. It was hard to work out where to start, but he wanted to get her talking.

  ‘And when you disappeared, what about that? How did it happen?’

  ‘I didn’t disappear, you know. I was always there.’ She laughed. ‘When you say disappeared, it’s like you mean I didn’t exist anymore, but I did. Did you think I was dead? Mum did, you know. She told everyone I was dead, she lit candles for me. But I wasn’t dead. Maybe to Mum and Dad and everyone I wasn’t there, but to me I was always there, in my grave, but alive.’

  He asked her where they’d walked to and how it had happened and she started to unravel her story, in a jumpy fashion, leaving out detail, ignoring some questions. She rambled a lot, about a day on the buses and buying ice-cream. She had a good memory for something that had happened twelve years before, it seemed.

  ‘He got me on my way to school. Well, I wasn’t really on my way to school, I went to the shops and met him in there, sort of, you know. He talked to me in a nice way and we walked down the road talking, you know, sort of friendly. I didn’t want to go in to school, I was trying to think of a way to skive off for the day, but I didn’t have anywhere to go to. We chatted down the road, you know. I was shy of him.’

  ‘I went with him, I did, really,’ she said shyly. ‘I quite liked him, after we’d talked a bit and he gave me a packet of cigarettes. I knew I shouldn’t really talk to him and go off with him, Mum told me that, but I did because I was in a mood and I was scared of school. He didn’t seem scary, he didn’t talk down to me like I was a kid, he understood what I was on about and he told me he’d never been to school a lot himself, that he didn’t think I should go if I didn’t want to. He said I was almost a grown-up and I should start to make my own decisions. After a while I forgot that it was a school day and he was a man that I’d never met before, he didn’t seem much older than me and it was like we were friends. Then it was lunchtime and I was hungry and so was he and we laughed a lot and he said would I like to come to his flat for lunch. I didn’t really want to, but I didn’t know what else to do and by then we were getting on so well that I thought why not? It was like an adventure. We were in a bit of London I didn’t really know, that I hadn’t been to before, big buildings, not tower blocks, but like that, a poor part of town, poorer than I was used to, but he seemed okay, so we went up to his flat. He made me lunch.’

  Allen scratched down a few words and checked his recorder. He didn’t want to interrupt the flow.

  They watched television, she said. He didn’t try anything, but she got nervous.

  ‘I started to feel like he didn’t want me to leave. When I said I should be getting home, he talked a lot and he changed the subject so I didn’t know what he was saying. He said we could go out for fish and chips later, that he would look after me. I was scared, but I didn’t want to show it. I thought I’d got myself into a stupid situation and I started to worry about what my mum would think when she found out. I said maybe we should go for chips, because I thought that when we were out I could run away from him or shout and ask for help in the shop. Then he said, sure, let’s go. He gave me a cup of tea and said I must drink it up before they went, so I gulped it down.’

  She stopped talking suddenly. He watched her intently, trying to work out what she was thinking. He tried to make out her face, but it was in shadow.

  ‘Alright there?’ he said. ‘Are you feeling poorly? Do you want to stop for a bit?’

  He didn’t want to stop, but thought he’d better look after her, take it easy. She seemed in a frail state of mind.

  ‘No, I’m alright,’ she said. ‘I’m ok, it’s just, it’s hard to say this, it sounds stupid, but how long was I gone for?’

  He felt sorry for her, but couldn’t help thinking that he was on the edge of a great story.

  ‘A few years,’ he said. ‘A lot. People want to find out what you’ve been doing all that time,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, sure. Do they really?’ She seemed to perk up somewhat. ‘They’re interested in me?’

  He didn’t have the heart to tell her the salubrious nature of this intent. He wondered about his own desire to know, camouflaged and sanctified by his role as journalist.

  ‘What happened to the fish and chips?’ he said, restarting the thread.

  ‘We never got fish and chips. I don’t know why. I wasn’t awake for a long time after that. I don’t know what happened. I woke up in a room that I was locked in to, I couldn’t open the door. I banged on the door and shouted and nobody ever came. Then I got very scared and I cried, but I felt so sick I couldn’t stand up for long. I didn’t know that place was my new house.’

  ‘What do you mean, your new house?’

  ‘I had to stay in that room for all the time I was there. I hardly ever got let out again for years and years. Do you think The Prick would let me out, even if I begged him? I stayed in the same place for such a long time. He said it wasn’t safe to go out.’

  ‘Why do you call him that?’ Allen said.

  ‘The Prick? Because he’s a man and he’s got a, you know? That’s why I call him that. Why do you think? He’s the man I met at the shop, the same man.’

  ‘Can you describe him, what did he look like, what did he do every day? Did he have a job?’

  She told him she’d been locked in the same room, almost without respite, she said. It was really two rooms, one big and one small. The rooms had no windows. The big room had a bed in it and a bookshelf, though there were no books at first. She said the room was cold sometimes, there was no heating and she would spend all day under a blanket, and sometimes it was very hot and she could hardly breathe. She thought she was at the top of the building they’d gone to on that first day. Other times she came to believe she was in a cellar, though she thought maybe that was only a dream. She could hear noises through the walls sometimes, but she couldn’t work out what they were. Her days were spent sleeping and waiting for him to bring her food and water. She was dependent on him for everything. At first, she said, she had nothing, not even a covering for the night, and she slept in her clothes and shivered. She had no clock for the first year and lost track of time. Time had not meant much to her during what she said was her lost time, she’d slept and woken as she needed to.

  She’d spent a lot of time at first wondering why nobody was coming to look for her. When she asked The Prick why he would not let her go, he told her that there was a gang of people who stole and killed children, and that he was saving her from that gang.

  After a long time, she said, he brought her comics and some books and some clothes. She said it took some time before he knew what she wanted, like he had to learn.

  ‘He was a bit funny in the head, he couldn’t really talk to me, to girls. I don’t think he’d ever had a girlfriend.’ She stopped suddenly. ‘But of course, I don’t know. I don’t know what he did. At first, he was stupid, then he learned a lot and he made me laugh, he brought me nice things. Life became more comfortable,’ she said.

  Allen wondered about her mental state, whether he should be doing this interview. It was a bit dubious, he thought, maybe even unethical, not a word he’d ever considered before. It was starting to feel too much like a confessional and he didn’t want to be a priest. Twilight was beginning to draw in. He was starting to feel cocooned in the room, as if they had in some way returned to Jennifer’s prison, the strange room she was talking about. Time itself was as lost here as it had been there. Through his i
ncreasing sleepiness he forced himself to concentrate on her story, to think about what she was saying. He didn’t know what was important, what might explain everything.

  ‘He brought me food every day at first, or he left it for me when he disappeared. Tins and that.’

  ‘Disappeared?’

  ‘He did,’ she said. ‘He went off, sometimes for a week or even more. I don’t know where he went, he wouldn’t tell me.’ He left her with the food and a bucket for a toilet. ‘After a few months he got one of them chemical toilets,’ she said, ‘but it smelled much worse than the bucket.’ She made a face. ‘It was better though. He didn’t like emptying it, see?’

  Allen tried to imagine how twelve years could pass in a tiny space, how she had coped with not seeing daylight or talking to any others. He asked how she passed the time.

  ‘He brought me some books. Another man came sometimes and talked to me. Then there was a video machine, and films. I slept a lot; I think it was in the food, something to make me sleep. I liked to be asleep more than awake. When The Prick came to visit I wasn’t allowed to talk much, but when the other man came we talked a lot and watched television together.

  ‘He did buy me nice clothes, but sometimes I had to wear the same clothes for a long time, maybe even a year. Sometimes he didn’t come to visit me for a long time. I opened tins of food when I wanted to, but I didn’t like it.

  ‘I missed my mother and my brother all the time, then in the end I forgot about them. What I mean is, I couldn’t really remember what it was like to see them every day. It was different: my life before the room became like a dream that I could hardly remember. In my room I was safe. I dreamed that my room was on top of a huge tree blowing in the wind and I was a princess who could not be allowed to escape because a prince wanted to marry her, a prince from a tiger kingdom who would eat her up.’