by Julia Bell
‘I can’t breathe.’
‘Sleep,’ Natasha says. She’s curled up behind me, pressed right back into the hollow of the boot
‘I don’t want to sleep. I want to GET OUT OF HERE!’ I shout, turning round so I’m facing her, but it’s no good, it’s too dark to even see my hand in front of my face. I reach out and grab at her until I’ve got hold of an arm. ‘Where are we going?!’ If he’s going to kill me I think I should know about it.
She doesn’t answer.
‘TELL ME!’ I want to punch her until she disappears and I wake up in bed at home. I pinch her arm.
‘Ow!’ She fights me away with her hands. ‘Leave me!’
The car lurches and a horn beeps. My stomach hurts and I’m starting to feel sick.
‘Where are we going? Tell me.’ I try to kick her, but there’s something in the way. A box or a spare tyre, I can’t tell. ‘Where?’
‘I don’t know.’ Natasha hiccups and I realize she might be crying, but it’s too dark to know for sure. ‘Maybe London.’
My mouth is dry.
‘Why? Why does he want us?’ Then the car begins to slow down, I can hear the sound of other vehicles. Traffic lights.
‘HELP! HELP!’ I bang the side of the car. ‘HELP!’
I want to get out of here so bad it’s like my blood is trying to burst out of my body.
Natasha’s really crying now, making snivelling snotty noises. I can’t even sit a little way up without banging my forehead. This is what it’s like to be buried, I think.
‘This is all your fault!’ That’s all I can think. All your fault. I should have trusted my instincts. I should have told Mum about her.
She grabs me, clumsily, then tightly, round the wrist.
‘He wants Natasha. Not you,’ she says.
‘HELP!’ I kick my feet. If I make enough noise maybe someone will hear, and stop him. ‘HELP!’
‘Shhhhh. Really.’
The car speeds up again, racing off the lights, taking my stomach with it. The smell of rubber and petrol and no air, Natasha’s sticky hands and the panic and the outrage all slosh around my body.
I turn my head away from her just in time.
Natasha strokes my head and pulls my hair away from my face.
‘Breathe slow,’ she says. But I can’t stop. Now all I can smell is my own sick, sharp and thick.
‘This is how it was with me, the first time. When they took me to Italy. I was in the car for two whole days. Much better to sleep.’
‘Are they taking us to Italy?!’
‘I don’t think.’ She wriggles around next to me and gives me a cloth of some kind. ‘Here, for you to clean.’
‘What’s this?’
‘Your T-shirt.’
‘You took my stuff?’
‘I was just to borrow it.’ She hands me a fat bundle. ‘You can have it back now.’
‘You have to tell me.’ Throwing up seems to have cleared my head, but I can’t stop my teeth from chattering. ‘You have to tell me, Natasha. You have to tell me what’s going on. What does he want? I thought he was your boyfriend?’
I know she’s been lying about him, just like I knew Kaz was lying when she brought a photo of her cousin to school and pretended like she was going out with him.
‘I mean, boyfriends don’t throw you in the boot of their car and drive off!’
‘He wants me because I run away from him,’ she says eventually, her voice barely a whisper over the snarl of the engine. ‘He said if I run away he will drive down every road in every country until he finds me.’
‘Why?!’
I’m not sure I hear the next bit right because she’s wriggling around, turning her body away from me, the bones of her spine pressing through her clothes and against my arm. ‘Because he paid for me.’
‘Paid for you?! How did he pay for you?’
No one buys people any more, they banned that, we did it in history. And anyway, it was only people from Africa, it wasn’t like, white people. William Wilberry or something, or maybe it was Wilberforce, who banned it. I wasn’t really listening because Kaz had brought her mobile into class and was taking sneaky photos up her skirt to send to her new boyfriend.
‘No talking,’ she says. ‘Natasha sleeps now.’
‘But –’ My mind fizzes with uneasy questions. Paid for her? I don’t get it. Why would anyone want to buy a person? And I don’t understand what that’s got to do with me. Why does he want me?
‘Well, he hasn’t paid for me.’
It’s hard to know how long we’ve been on the road. The car drones on and on and I must fall asleep, because I wake up suddenly, gasping for air, my mouth dry, head aching. For a second I convince myself that I’m dreaming, trapped in the middle of a long nightmare, and Mum will come in soon and switch the light on and tell me I’ve been shouting in my sleep. I pinch myself hard on the leg, just in case.
The car swerves and suddenly slows down. We are thrown forward together. I catch my arm on a screw or something and it scrapes a flap of skin off my elbow.
‘Ow!’
I wonder where we are. Maybe if we’re quick enough we could escape when he stops. Spring out and surprise him, and run away far enough for him not to find us. When Mrs Munson told us about stranger danger in PSE class she told us that if we ever got followed we should just go up to a house with a light on and knock on the door, make it look like you live there.
‘But, miss, what if nobody’s in?’ Kaz asked. ‘What if someone’s like chasing you with a weapon?’
‘Yeah!’ Angela said. ‘Or like what if you knock on the door of a paedo or something?’
Mrs Munson looked grim for a moment and then said. ‘Well you’d be very unlucky, wouldn’t you? You’d know your number was up.’
She showed us a public-information film about a girl who gets in a car with a man who chats her up by the side of the road. And then it doesn’t tell you what happens next – the camera-work just goes all wobbly and warped and then there’s a shot of some roses by the side of the road.
‘I don’t get it,’ Kaz said. ‘Did she get run over or what?’
Mrs Munson glared at Kaz. ‘It’s an artistic interpretation, Karen, of what might happen if you get into a car with a strange man.’
‘What might happen?’
Mrs Munson started to go red. ‘Things.’ And then she made us look at our fact sheets in silence for the ten minutes before the bell, and nowhere on the bits of paper that she gave us did it say what those ‘things’ were.
‘Natasha.’ I nudge her with my elbow. ‘Natasha.’
‘Ngh?’
‘We’ve got to think.’
‘What?’
‘We need a plan.’
‘Oh.’ She sounds sleepy, bored, even. I don’t understand why she’s just accepting this. It doesn’t make sense.
‘Well you must have run away from him for a reason. I mean, this isn’t exactly what I’d call travelling in style.’
And then she says something really odd. ‘Don’t think about me. Pretend I’m not here.’
That makes me want to cry. Not because of her, but because it makes me even more frightened. I can’t understand why she’s not being nice to me; we’re in this together now, and why doesn’t she even want to try to run away?
‘You can’t just give in,’ I say to her. ‘There’s two of us now, if we both try together we could get away. I know we could. We just need a plan.’
She laughs. ‘Ha! I had a plan once. And now I am here. Plans are no good.’ And she mutters to herself in a language I can’t make out.
Every time I think we’re stopping, the car speeds up again. Outside there’s a different kind of traffic noise, the heavy vibration of bigger engines: lorries. We’re going much faster, the wind whistles through the gaps in the chassis and the car whines.
‘Motorway now,’ Natasha says. ‘Best to sleep.’
After a while it gets so hot I can’t help closing my eyes. I can see m
anic pulses of red and yellow behind my lids. I read somewhere that when you fall asleep your eyes roll up in their sockets. Maybe I’m asleep and it’s my brain that I’m looking at: flashes of colour and light, the pattern of my fear.
8
Hope
‘Wake up!’
The water hits my face with a slap. He’s got the boot open halfway and he’s splashing us through the gap with water from an Evian bottle.
‘Get up!’
Natasha wriggles next to me and groans. She shouts and the man shouts back, but I don’t understand what they’re saying. ‘Fucking pig,’ she mutters under her breath.
When I start to scream, he jabs something at us, at first I think it’s a pen or a stick, but then I see the blade. ‘Shut up! I will stab at you silly bitches.’
I want to laugh at his accent and his bad English and his silly Swiss Army knife. Everything is like totally surreal.
‘Don’t be stupid.’ I stare at him hard, even though I’m trembling.
Then Natasha starts shouting again and I try to figure out what they’re saying, but it’s in a language I don’t know. Russian, I’m sure of it.
He opens the boot all the way, grabs me by the wrist and pulls me so I have to stand up and jump out. I get really scared again then, when I see where we are. In the distance I can see a road through a chain-link fence, a car sweeping past. In front of us are low, corrugated factory buildings. It’s damp and grey, clouds hanging low in the sky. I can’t tell if it’s early morning or evening. There are no streets, no houses, no friendly lights on in the porches.
He looks at me and laughs. Natasha swears at him as she clambers out.
‘Prick.’
‘Past’ zabej, padla jebanaja!’ He shouts at her. ‘Blyadina!’ And he waves the knife in her face.
She flinches when he says this and looks at the floor.
‘Where are we? Are we in England?’ I look for familiar signs, clues, anything.
‘Come on.’ He shoves me in the back and stabs the air in the direction of the factory. Tox is spray-painted on the walls, the doors. I must remember this, for when I talk to the police. For a moment it’s like I can see my life as a storyline on TV, on CSI, with all the detectives having cool FX flashbacks and Jorja Fox pouting and frowning and looking pensive over partial fingerprints. But all that stuff usually happens after the event . . . when they’ve found a dead body buried in a shallow grave.
A train thunders past close by, making the ground shudder. Natasha slouches and scratches her face. I can’t believe she’s not even that nervous or scared. She calls him ‘Durak’ over and over. I wonder if that’s his name, though from the way she’s saying it, spitting the word out of her mouth like it has a nasty taste, I don’t think so.
Inside is gloomy and dark, piles of boxes line the walls, and it smells of damp and dust and cardboard slowly going soft.
Water drips through the holes in the roof, and there’s stuff spilling out of the boxes on to the floor. Happy Millennium 2000! it says on a faded plastic banner. I look in one box that is full of Muppets, green Kermit legs dangling over the side. Another box is full of Playboy calendars from 2003. A landslip of naked Katie Prices. Mr V. C. Rocci Trading Company it says on one of the delivery notes, then, London E8.
‘We’re in London!’
Natasha doesn’t even blink. ‘OK.’ She shrugs.
‘Durak’ fumbles around for the lights until one bare strip light flickers and holds. I can see now that we are at the back of the warehouse. In front of us, boxes going forward all the way to the far end. Everything you could ever want – TVs, washing machines, DVD players, dishwashers, PCs.
Another train goes past, this time even louder, a screeching noise echoes around inside the building. He points with a penknife to the floor. ‘Sit!’
When he gets close I can smell his breath, see the blunt stubbly hairs on his chin.
It makes me think of how Kaz got really bad skin after making out with Jason, the manager of the Liquid Bar, when he hadn’t shaved. Red blotchy stubble rash where his hairs had scratched her face. I was staying at hers supposedly doing homework and she moaned about it all the way back in the taxi – that she looked like a freak and thank God it was Friday night, so she could stay home all weekend with face packs on. Next time we went to Liquid she blanked him and we all got barred for being underage. Didn’t matter anyway, because they still let us in at the Planet.
But I don’t know why I’m thinking about them now, they seem so small and far away from here it terrifies me.
Natasha shouts at Durak in Russian again. He’s tying her hands together behind her back with Millennium parcel tape and she’s wriggling and spitting at him. It’s my turn next. He ties it hard, the plastic pinching the skin on my wrists.
‘Ow!’
Then he takes Natasha’s bag and empties it all over the floor. My clothes, my underwear and my secret savings purse that I kept hidden in the wardrobe all drop out.
‘You took my money,’ I say flatly, too shocked to be cross.
She won’t look at me. ‘I will give back.’
‘I would have lent you stuff if you’d asked.’
Some twenty-pound notes flutter out of the bag, Durak picks them up and stuffs them in his pocket. Then he goes up to Natasha and slaps her and shouts at her again in Russian. When she shouts back he gets really angry. Finally he tapes her mouth with dusty Millennium parcel tape. illennium it says across her mouth in sparkly letters.
I don’t say anything. I don’t want him to do that to me. He kicks all the clothes in the bag into a dusty corner – my Paul Frank T-shirt, my Gap jeans – and paces up and down not even looking at us.
My mind hums with panicked questions. Why am I here? What are they going to do to me? Will it hurt? How can I escape? Like I can’t shut it off. More trains scream past.
‘You won’t get away with this, you know,’ I say finally, my voice sounding indignant and prim after the loud screeching of the trains. ‘My father’s a businessman. He’s got money, he could pay . . .’
‘Eh?’ He snarls like a cartoon, his lip curling almost up to his nose. ‘Eh?’ He comes closer, his fist clenching.
I don’t want to see his teeth or the hairs up his nose or the slick of his hairstyle. I look at the dusty concrete floor. While we wait, he paces around and shouts at Natasha.
I don’t know how long we’re there before they arrive, an hour maybe. Long enough for my arms to get sore and ticklish and for Durak to get bored and start flicking through a Playboy calendar.
The longer we wait the harder it gets to breathe. Surely they will realize they’ve made a mistake when they see me. I’m English. It’s just a mistake. It’s Natasha’s fault.
There’s some shouting and laughing and then four men turn up. They stand around Durak, shake his hand, cuff him on the shoulder. He laughs and tries to look relaxed, but I can see that he’s sweating.
Then a fifth man comes in, tall and impassive in a stripy business suit. He’s got the kind of shiny orange tan people have in the south of France. He must be the boss. The men all shut up and look at him. He talks fast, pointing at me and Natasha.
Then he comes over to us. He pulls the tape from Natasha’s mouth which makes her squeal but she doesn’t say anything. He grabs her by the elbow and makes her stand up. He twirls her around, pats her bottom, looks in her eyes, like he’s examining her.
Durak pulls some passports out of his pockets and shows them to the boss. He holds them up to the light. Then he turns round and looks at me and asks me something I don’t understand. I shrug my shoulders.
‘He wants to know, are you Russian or Ukranian?’ Natasha hisses in English.
‘I’m English! Tell him I’m English! What’s going on?’
I’m not sure this makes things better or worse. The men start shouting at Natasha and at Durak and then one of them gets a gun out of his pocket and starts waving it about. For a second I can’t believe it’s real, but then I
look at Natasha – she’s got her eyes closed and she’s mumbling like she’s praying. I can’t stop my body from trembling. Durak puts his hands over his head like that’s going to protect him. He keeps pointing at Natasha and shouting.
Suddenly, without warning, the boss shoots Durak in the head, right through the hand he is holding up. His legs crumple underneath him, and he falls over, like someone’s cut his strings. Baf! Gone. Just like that.
Natasha shrieks and starts to cry. I scream and then retch, but there’s nothing in my stomach. I wonder if it hurts to die like that.
‘Where’s Marie?’
My cheek stings from the slap. I didn’t even see him coming at me.
‘Eh?’
Then he does the same to Natasha.
‘I ordered two girls! Two classy girls is what I paid for! And now I have two worthless bitches!’ His voice echoes around the warehouse. ‘How old are you?’ He looks at me.
‘Fif – fif-teen.’ I can hardly get the words out.
He taps his thigh with his gun like he’s trying to weigh up a decision.
‘My – my parents will be looking for me. I don’t know what all this is about I—’
Slowly he lifts the gun and points it at me. I close my eyes. It’s really weird, but I think if I’m going to die, if he’s going to shoot me, then I don’t want his face to be the last thing I see. Instead Mum’s face appears in my head and that makes me start to cry. I hope it won’t hurt.
I hold my breath until I start to feel dizzy, white stars blink and explode behind my eyes. I’m really afraid I’m going to pee. Natasha whimpers beside me. Then there’s a loud shot, a fizz in the air above my head. I flinch, but I’m not hit. I open my eyes a little bit, just to check, and I wonder for a second if I have died. The air is full of pastel confetti – horseshoes, wedding bells, hearts – snowing down around me. I look up and get a face full of dust and shot-up bits of box.
He laughs, but it sounds more like screaming, kind of tense and hysterical. ‘An English girl! No one brings me English any more, not with so many other varieties to choose from.’
He shows me the photo page of a British passport: Marie Evans, b. Luton 1990. The girl in the photo is a dirty blonde with sharp cheekbones and dark eyebrows; she doesn’t look very English and she definitely doesn’t look like me. My face is rounder, my hair a mousier brown.
