Torture

Things given and then things taken away. Just for entertainment. Not even to extract information. Just for her torturer’s amusement.

She’s in a dark room, on her own. It’s not a prison cell. Just a dark room. She sits at a table, small and square. The chair is wooden, ladder-backed, uncomfortable. Her hands are tied behind her back. There is no light for most of the time she is in there. There is no window. She doesn’t know if it’s night or day.

She sits and waits. She forgets how long she has been there; for how long this has been going on.

She thinks she might be blindfolded. Sometimes, it feels as though she has a blindfold across her eyes, and it’s that which is preventing her from seeing the light.

And then the solitary lightbulb that hangs unshaded above her head is switched on, and she is blinded by the brilliance of sudden light filling the room.

He comes in and sits in the chair opposite her; the chair that has always been present in the room with her. She forgets that it exists, in the darkness. What she cannot see no longer exists. It is only her alone in the dark with no other being and only the table and chair, which she can feel and sense and almost taste.

He sits in the chair opposite her, and talks to her as though they are meeting for a drink in a pub. He talks as though there hasn’t been silence and darkness and solitude between them. It takes a while, but slowly her brain wakes up, stimulated by his presence, by his interest in her, and she talks back.

There is no touching. Her hands are tied, and he remains seated across the table from her, his hands hidden beneath it. She flexes her fingers, bends her hands away from each other where they are bound at the wrist; the ghostly impression of touching, caressing, reaching out for something, anything that confirms they both exist and this isn’t just a figment of her imagination.

But she can smell the freshness of clean clothes when he enters the room. She can smell the soapiness of him.

They talk, and she basks in the glow of his attention. She is grateful for the company. She forgets to be angry. She forgets to question him, to hate him, to spit venom at him. She is too happy to remember to do those things.

In between these times, her brain goes onto standby. Once, at school, in an English lesson, trying to feel enthusiastic about Martin Chuzzlewit, she remembers that the teacher said that hostages and people placed in isolation often try to recall the characters and plots of Charles Dickens novels. That the activity prevented them from going insane. She prefers standby. She believes that trying to remember plots of Victorian novels is the greater of two evils.

She sits in the darkness with her brain ticking over. It could be a form of depression; his return a form of mania. In those first few moments when he sits in front of her, while her eyes are adjusting to the light, she is confused. Her brain feels like liquid trying to solidify, her tongue cannot wrap itself around the words she wants to say. In the first few moments after he leaves and the light once again is shut off, she feels bereft and the conversation they just had seems like a dream. The sight of him sitting across the table from her becomes a vision that is imprinted on her retina for as long as it takes the blackness to erase it.

If she sleeps, she doesn’t know it. She can no longer tell the difference between eyes open and eyes closed. There is no contrast between the absence of waking thought and the numbness of sleep.

She is aware that the times when he is there could also be dreams. She has a recollection that sometimes it is possible to smell things and taste things when you are asleep. Dreams can sometimes be as real as waking life.

The darkness and the silence and the feeling of her hands tied behind her back could also be a dream.

He asks nothing of her, during their brief encounters in the too bright light from the naked lightbulb. He requests no information. He gives no explanation. She no longer knows how to ask questions. She spends most of the time smiling and feeling shy; feeling flattered but confused by his gracious attention, lavished on her in these moments. She feels like a princess.

And then the light goes off again, and she remembers to forget.

© J R Hargreaves October 2006