Abduction

Rosemary stomped into the kitchen and stood at the worktop. She pushed the plastic lever on the electric kettle, the way she always did when she found herself with guests in her house. It was a reflex action. But she didn’t take the teacup out of the cupboard. She didn’t take the spoon from the cutlery tray. She didn’t pull the top from the vintage sugar canister. She stared out of the window and listened to the kettle boiling, the water bubbling. She was still hot with irritation, a thin layer of sweat bleeding from her hairline. The con that the repairman had hinted at sounded possible. It would explain why there was no sure explanation for the fault. 

On the decking outside, a she-cat was eating a discarded chunk of cooked chicken, her sex clear from a loosely fitting pink collar. Another cat was trying to get at the chicken, but each time it made a bid for the meat the she-cat snarled, her teeth milk-white and sharp as needles. After a few attempts, the she-cat pounced, catching the thin skin of the other cat’s ear with her outstretched claw. It yelped and skulked backwards four paces before fleeing over the garden wall. As it did, an idea entered Rosemary’s head, as clear and flawless as if God himself had put it there. ‘I’ll kidnap the repairman,’ she said to herself. She had never heard her voice sound so pure and determined, as though the air in the kitchen had become a microphone. It was as if she had discovered a cure for cancer and she was announcing her brainchild to the world. ‘He’s a small guy,’ she said, reasoning with herself, ‘smaller than me. I’ll hold him hostage until he’s fixed it.’ 

There was a cream vanity case hidden under the bed frame in her room. She kneeled on the floor and pulled it out. The creases in the discoloured leather were filled with thick wisps of dust. She pressed the nickel button with her thumb and the buckle popped open with a soft ping. Inside, she found old bottles of massage oils, and a half-used tube of KY Jelly, its top glued to its body. There were unopened packets of condoms, flavoured, ribbed, Fetherlite. The white use-by dates stamped on the packaging were years old. Remnants from a past life. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had sexual intercourse. She was only thirty-seven. Apparently that was the age when a woman hit her sexual prime. But sex had been a chore since she’d had her daughter fourteen years ago. 

At first she and her husband had tried to schedule it in. They sent the kids to their grandparents. They lit tea lights. They ate shellfish and asparagus, strawberries and watermelon. They smothered one another’s bodies with edible chocolate-flavoured paint. But she worried about her stretch marks. She made him turn the lights out. She began to fall asleep in the middle of foreplay. Like a magician turning silk handkerchiefs into white rabbits, sexual chemistry vanished as soon as true biology reared its head. 

She pushed her hand deeper into the case until her fingers touched cold metal. She pulled the handcuffs out and they smelt rusty, like old coins. They were something she’d won at an Ann Summers party in Linda’s house four years ago, along with a cheap bottle of red wine. She’d drunk the wine that very night, but the handcuffs had never been used. She carried them with her arm outstretched, the way someone might carry a recovered weapon, a knife or a gun. The frames of the cuffs were decorated with bands of black ostrich feathers. She crept downstairs, missing the second-last step because she knew it creaked. She stood outside the office for a moment, listening to the silence from within. She hid the handcuffs behind her back. She opened the door. 

The repairman was sitting in her chair, staring at the pictures. ‘You know there’s something about that image,’ he said. ‘I can’t take my eyes off it.’ 

‘Really?’ Rosemary stood behind him. She rested her elbow on the back of the chair, leaning down next to him to share his point of view. His hair smelt of medicated shampoo. ‘Why not?’ she said. The repairman kept looking at the photograph, his mouth open. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, his voice a whisper. ‘It’s something about your eyes. They look sad, and happy at the same time.’ 

Rosemary reached for his hand. It was cold and almost lifeless. She looked at it for a moment, positioned in her own hand, before pulling it gently behind the chair. He wasn’t going to fight. She couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe what she was doing. Swiftly she secured the cuff around his wrist, as tight as it would go. His hand jerked as he resisted but Rosemary was too quick. She slipped the other cuff around the arm of the chair, the metal scraping against the leather as the repairman realised what she’d done. He was trying to retrieve his hand. Rosemary sat facing him on the plywood desk. ‘What do you think my eyes look like now?’ she said. 

The repairman was grinning. He thought it was a joke. ‘Fierce,’ he said, almost flirting. Rosemary kicked him in the shin. ‘Ouch,’ he said, rubbing at his leg with his free hand. ‘What did you do that for?’ 

‘I’m not playing,’ Rosemary said. ‘You’re staying tied to that chair until my Internet connection’s fixed.’ She smiled now. She swung her legs, reminding herself again of a little girl. 

The man laughed, a high-pitched twitter, but his yellow eyes were murky with concern. ‘I know you’re joking,’ he said. ‘Come on, you don’t strike me as the sort of person who’d want to go to prison, and abduction is a pretty serious crime.’ As he spoke he quickly scanned the room in search of an escape route, but there were no windows in what had once been the broom cupboard. There was only the one door. 

‘I’m not joking!’ Rosemary said. ‘Just do your job. The quicker you do your job, the quicker you can go.’ She shrugged for dramatic effect. ‘Simple!’ 

‘How am I meant to do that?’ the man said. He yanked his arm towards the keyboard and the metal cuff grazed the soft black leather again. ‘I’m right-handed. I can’t do anything with these stupid things on me. Get the key.’ 

Rosemary was stumped. She hadn’t thought about this. She was silent until the man said, ‘You know, you’re not the first female client who’s tried to come on to me like this. Once, on the council estate in Ely, a girl put a pornographic video on. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t encourage it. I was kneeling down on the floor trying to fix her phone socket.’ There was an impish grin playing on his face. ‘All she had to do was ask me for my number.’ 

‘Why the hell would I come on to you?’ Rosemary said. ‘I’m a married woman with two teenage children.’ As the words hit the air they sounded unfamiliar. She was a married woman with two teenage children, and she must have used that sentence a hundred thousand times. But now it sounded like a lie. Her husband was at work. He was a partner in an accounting firm in St Mellons. These days he was in work even when he wasn’t in work. He’d come in around seven in the evening and sit at the dining table poring over other people’s tax returns. When he wasn’t there he was at his mother’s house. She was seventy-five and suffering from moderate dementia. Often she mistook her son for her late husband and she’d ring their house in the middle of the night, demanding he leave his whore of a fancy woman and go back to his long-suffering wife. 

He refused to put her into a care home. He’d suggested once that she come to live with them and Rosemary refused outright. She was the one who worked from home. She was the one who would become primary carer, attending to her mother-in-law’s whims, emptying her commode. She and her mother-in-law had never got on. When they’d first met she’d called Rosemary a ‘mumper’, a West Country description for a gypsy. And now Rosemary suspected that she was exaggerating her symptoms, causing trouble for the sake of it, because that was the kind of woman her mother-in-law was. She demanded attention every minute of the day. She’d worn a white dress on the day of her only son’s wedding, for Christ’s sake.

Rosemary and her husband barely spoke any more. It was as if they lived in a house that was haunted by the ghosts of themselves. They’d become one of those couples who sat at the table of a restaurant reading the menu over and over, staring out of the window, or at the other customers, wondering what to say to one another. They’d become the sort of people they used to laugh at when they were in their early twenties, when it was just them against the rest of the world. 

She didn’t feel much like a mother any more, either. Daniel was sixteen. He already had a girlfriend. Her parents let him stay at their house in Llandaff on weekends. ‘In the guestroom, right?’ Rosemary had said when she’d found out. For a few months he’d hidden it, claiming to have been staying at Jason’s, his friend from English class. ‘No, Mom,’ he’d said, talking in an American accent that had made her cringe. ‘In her room, duh. She’s got an en-suite as well.’ When Rosemary had tried to talk to him about contraception he said his girlfriend had been on the pill since she was thirteen. He said they’d already slept together in a tent at a music festival the previous summer. Rosemary had slapped him hard across the face, something she was ashamed of now. She’d always planned to be a liberal parent, someone her children could talk to, no matter what. ‘I was only joking,’ he’d said, holding his hand over his jaw. ‘As if I’d tell you anyway. We’ve got sex counsellors at school for that.’ 

Rosemary’s daughter, Chantelle, was fourteen. She was a child trapped in the body of a fully formed woman. Her breasts were already bigger than Rosemary’s would ever be, but she was still determined to get an enlargement as soon as she was old enough. It was a subject on which they could find no compromise. Rosemary was strongly opposed to plastic surgery. She’d tried to teach her children that all human beings were beautiful in their own way. She couldn’t understand how she’d managed to raise a daughter whose only goal was to bare her fake breasts in a tabloid newspaper. 

No matter how hard you tried, outside influences always thwarted your attempts to control your own life. Sooner or later, you turned into your own parents. The tracks stretched out before her were the ones her mother had left behind. Everything that she had hated about her mother had become characteristics in herself: her anxiousness, her impatience, her bad temper. She giggled at the irony of it. ‘Time turns us all into cantankerous old bats,’ she said quietly, thinking aloud.