Someone was actually trying to get into my bedroom; a real-life horror movie. I’d locked the door, but as the intruder pushed I didn’t trust the lock to hold. I wedged the rubber door stop in the gap under the door, screaming as loudly as I could.
That was when it all kicked off. The intruder shoved and rattled the door, hard this time. I rammed my foot up against the doorstop to prevent it slipping, but the person on the other side was now banging on the door panels. Why, why hadn’t I put in an alarm the day I moved in? A panic button? A sturdy bolt as well as the lock and key? My telephone was on the bedside table on the far side of the bed. I had a choice – either lunge for it now and call 999, or keep my bodyweight against the door in case the lock gave way.
My elderly neighbours were all deaf, and although the houses were terraced, they were so solidly built that no noise leached through the walls. I screamed more loudly though, just in case someone heard through the window. But my bedroom was at the back of the house, not over the street.
I was wearing flowery cotton pyjamas. I remembered looking down at them and having the inane thought: I couldn’t be murdered wearing flowery cotton pyjamas, I just couldn’t.
The intruder kicked the door with all his force, splintering the bottom panel. With a jerk of shock I saw a huge black boot briefly appear through the hole, then withdraw. Then, worse, a black-gloved hand shot through and grabbed me in an iron-pincerlike grip around my calf, crushing the cotton flowers. When I tried to disengage it, his other hand reached through the hole too, and then he had my arm.
‘Unlock this fucking door right now and stop screaming,’ he hissed, ‘otherwise you’re a dead woman.’
I struggled but I felt like a car in a scrapyard being lifted in metal jaws, about to be crushed. He had pulled my arm through the hole, up to my shoulder, and was now twisting it backwards, threatening to dislocate it.
‘Open. The. Door.’
‘What do you want?’ I gasped in agony, as a stream of warm urine gushed down my inner thigh and puddled on the wooden floor. ‘Please stop.’
‘Do as I say, bitch,’ he ordered, ‘or I’ll snap your arm in two.’
‘I can’t reach the key unless you let me go,’ I screamed, and he released his grip enough to allow me to twist around, but kept tight hold on my wrist.
What should I do? I had no choice. I had to open it. If I didn’t, he’d destroy the door completely and break my arm. There was nowhere to run apart from into the bathroom, which didn’t have any lock on the door. My phone was out of reach. Perhaps if I just gave him my jewellery and the stack of notes I kept hidden at the back of my knicker drawer, he’d go away.
Or should I just jump through the window and take my chances? No, too risky; I’d land on the flagstoned patio and probably break my neck.
I grabbed hold of the rubber doorstop and unlocked and opened the ruined door, feeling like I’d just sealed my own fate. He let go of me, just for a moment, and I pulled my arm back through the hole, pain shooting up into my neck and through my shoulder. I turned to run, planning to barricade myself inside my ensuite bathroom with the doorstop; the door of that was more solid than the original pine panelled bedroom one. But I didn’t take more than two paces before he was on me, shoving me face-down on the bed and twisting my arm up behind my back – the arm he’d already hurt. My screams were muffled by the duvet.
I’d caught a glimpse of a well-built, featureless figure: he was wearing a balaclava – not a standard-issue, ghoul-rapists black one, but bizarrely, one in dark autumnal stripes of russet, brown and green. Like someone’s nan had knitted it. A nightmare personified, nonetheless.
‘This will be so much easier if you fucking cooperate.’ His voice was a weird combination of gruff and simultaneously high, for a man; at odds with his muscled frame.
‘I will,’ I mumbled, above the sound of the shriek of pain from my shoulder. The foxes had nothing on me. ‘Take whatever you want. I’ll tell you where it is.’
‘Just you.’ Then I heard the rip of gaffer tape being detached and he rolled me over, securing my arms together at the front and taping them together at the wrists. Next my head was pulled forwards off the mattress so he could wrap the tape round and round, covering my mouth. In his haste and my fight, at first he managed to cover my nose too, and I had to vigorously shake my head, trying to make him see that I’d actually die before he could do whatever the hell he wanted me to cooperate with. He must have seen me starting to turn blue, and pulled it down, away from my nostrils, kneeling astride me as he did so. He was wearing a massive, bulky waterproof black coat thing; I remember it rustled whenever he moved. He smelled of sweat and engine oil and just a whiff of patchouli.
When he knelt over me I assumed that was it: he was going to rape me.
But he didn’t.
No grinding or grabbing. Instead he yanked me up by the elbow and frogmarched me to the wrecked door. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
As he dragged me down the stairs, fighting as much as I could, given my bound arms – why could nobody hear? – I had a fleeting thought, clear and sharp in the panic soup of my brain, of Keats’ ‘iced foot on the bottom stair’. It was from that poem I did for A level English, the one that reminded me of Dad’s death. I hadn’t thought of it for decades, but as I saw my own bare feet stumbling and sliding, I knew it was because I was facing my own point of no return; my very own descent into oblivion.
He bundled me, resisting all the way, out of the jemmied-open kitchen door, down the garden and out to the dark street via the alleyway. I struggled, but his meaty arms were firm around my waist, the wet-wool stink of his breath in my face. There was a Luton van backed up at the end of the alley. He pulled open the rear shutter just enough to get me inside, lifting me off my feet and stuffing me through the gap and into its black maw, then climbing in after me and slamming the door back down. Surely my neighbours would hear that? It was such a loud, metallic crashing sound, like someone hitting saucepans with metal serving spoons.
Even now, the sound of the shutter door at the rear of a van, any van, going up or down makes me weak with terror. I have to sit down and jam my head between my knees to stop myself fainting, no matter where I am. On the kerb, or the middle of the car park, if there’s nowhere else. In my mind it has become conflated with another, long-ago sound; the metal shutters across the windows of the record shop in Salisbury. I’ve always thought that was a shame. I’d liked that job, working with little hippie Caitlin and grumpy Alaric. Now the memory of it is ruined, in a jumble of other bad stuff, like Dad dying, what happened with Samantha, falling out with Pete. That grinding, shuddering sound would forever confuse and shut me down.
As I lay panting with shock, the floor cold and smooth beneath my right hip and shoulder, I felt my ankle being yanked, then encircled in cold metal – handcuffs, with a chain welded to one half. The other end of the chain was attached to a metal ring, and I had a mental flash of a defeated, bow-backed donkey chained to a fence. Why was the floor so smooth and slippery beneath me? It wasn’t like the rough floor of a normal van.
It took me a moment to realise I was lying on thick plastic sheeting. Oh Jesus, oh God, I knew what that was for; it was so my guts wouldn’t stain his van.
He heaved himself in, the engine juddering into life with the turn of the ignition key. The radio came on at the same time – some sort of hideous techno – quiet at first, then he turned it up, presumably once we were out of my street. It seemed to represent my panic. I tried to force myself to breathe deeply, to listen to the music and subsume myself into it, use it like mental blotting paper to soak up the terror.
He drove for some time – twenty minutes, half an hour? I couldn’t tell, and couldn’t see my watch. I was freezing cold in my PJs, with a soaked crotch and piss-stained legs. I could smell my own urine, further soured with fear, and my shivers had turned into shudders that convulsed me as I lay on the slippery van floor in a foetal position, convinced I had just minutes to live.
If I survived, I vowed to make up with Pete. Fresh tears rose in my eyes at a brief mental flash of throwing myself into his embrace. The scent of urine was replaced, just for a second, by a memory of the smell of home: woodsmoke and Dad’s pipe – which, in my fevered, sentimental imagination still lingered all these years after he’d gone; Pete’s teenage aftershave; Mum’s gentle lavender. Oh God, please, I prayed. Please let me see Pete again. It seemed so trivial now, and me so stubborn. I’d treated him badly, him and Mum. No wonder they’d been angry with me for just walking out on my family, leaving Pete to pick up the pieces, too arrogant to think it mattered, too traumatised by Dad’s death to think about anyone else’s feelings.
Family was all that mattered. And now I’d never get the chance to tell him that.
Eventually the van came to an abrupt stop, somewhere so silent that my ears rang with it after the techno and engine noise. Door opening again. Heavy footsteps. Shutter up.
‘I have to do this, Merry,’ he said as he hauled himself in and put a hurricane lamp in the corner, his weird, high voice indistinct behind the hot, damp wool of the stripy balaclava. The emphasis on my stage name sounded mocking, full of intent.
He pulled the shutter back down again, sealing us in this windowless Tardis of torture. When he turned around I saw he was holding a knife so long and sharp-looking that I almost fainted.
‘Why?’ I tried to say through my tape gag and the encroaching blackness, but it just came out as a moan. I had backed myself into the corner, my knees hugged to my chest, the metal ring pressing into the small of my back, instinctively and pointlessly trying to make myself as small as possible. I didn’t want to die here, not in this cold metal box, with the lamp casting menacing shadows in the van’s interior and making the knife’s blade flash. He was actually waving it around, as if he’d seen too many martial arts movies, like the crazy person he must be. But he couldn’t be that crazy, surely; were full-on mad people capable of buying or hiring vans, working out how to get into my house, how to get me out without anybody seeing, all the logistics that must have been involved? He knew my name, so it must have been premeditated.
Much later, I wondered if the waving around of the knife was some kind of prevarication. He didn’t seem to hate me, particularly; at least not until he dragged me out of the corner of the van by my wrists as far as the chain would reach, and repeatedly kicked me in the kidneys and spine until I felt like my body was a sack filled with shards of vertebrae and feared I’d never walk again. I couldn’t believe my back wasn’t broken.
‘You had it coming, you bitch,’ he said almost casually, his voice mean, although not angry. Then he stopped, took one step towards me, raised the knife up high, and held it with both hands, like a sacrificial sword. I put my own bound hands in front of my face to protect me, looking desperately from side to side to see where I could escape to – somewhere to roll out of his reach – but there was nowhere to go, and my back was too sore to move anyway. For a moment I thought this was it, it was all over. I closed my eyes, not even realising that it was me making the high-pitched squealing sound that was all I could manage inside the gag.
Then, out of nowhere, a banging, and a quavery but firm voice from outside of the van: ‘Everything all right in there? What’s going on? I’m going to go and telephone the police!’
My attacker brought the knife down towards me, full force. The voice must have thrown him, though, because the knife missed whatever target he’d been aiming at – eye, throat, heart? Instead he caught my hand, the knife striking and breaking the bone leading to my middle finger, then slipping between that bone and the next, my ring fingerbone.
I rolled back, the knife still stuck in me, blood spurting everywhere and splashing my face as I kicked out at him with my free leg now that he was disarmed, determined that he wasn’t going to get another go. The knife was mine now – in me, through me, of me – and the shock was so great that it kept the pain at bay, just for a few seconds.
I’m sure he’d have had another go, had there not been someone outside. It would have been easy for him to overpower me and pull out the knife, but he must have panicked, or decided to cut his losses and make a run for it, shoving up the shutter just far enough to throw himself out and vanish into the dark stillness of the night.
I’d never believed in God, but the appearance of that Good Samaritan, right at that moment, made me change my mind.