Naomi
The computer had been there from the beginning.
Small, silver, angular. A laptop with a chunky battery and an American keyboard.
The glow of the screen was the first thing Naomi Lamar had seen when she awoke from her unconsciousness eight weeks ago.
‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’ it said in smallish black letters on a white background. Naomi had read the question and collapsed inside the well, sobbing hysterically.
She’d named her prison the well because it had rounded walls that stank of mud, faeces, slime and filthy water. Not overpowering, but pervasive. The pong lingered in the rough metal walls like cigarette fumes in the wallpaper of a smoker’s apartment.
She’d never escape from here without outside help.
She’d realised this from the second she’d first opened her eyes and glimpsed her surroundings.
Naomi looked at the bare walls, tatty and scratched, as if legions of people before her had tried to get a hold with their fingernails, in a futile attempt to climb up.
For up seemed to be the only way out in a round room with no doors and a concrete floor with a fine crack. A gap not even big enough to stick your little finger into. An opportunity for a crowbar, if one had been to hand. Naomi was wearing nothing but tattered pyjamas. Fortunately it wasn’t so cold in her dungeon; she suspected that some generators or other technical devices were warming her prison with their sticky, radiated heat. She slept on a mat that took up almost the entire room. Apart from this there was a plastic bag and a grey bucket, which was lowered every couple of days on a thin rope, smeared with Vaseline to prevent Naomi from getting any ideas about trying to climb it.
Oh, yes, she also had the computer.
At the start of her martyrdom – eight weeks ago, if the date on the screen was to be believed – she hadn’t tied the bucket to the rope properly and her faeces came pouring out on top of her. Most of it had trickled away through the crack. But not all.
The bucket was also used to supply her with food: bottles of water, chocolate bars and microwave meals she had to eat cold.
Two months.
Without a shower. Without any music.
And without any light, save for the weak glow of the screen, which wasn’t sufficient to tell where the plastic bucket disappeared to nor who it was – from whatever height – who lowered it to her. Besides the water, food and tissues, which she used as sanitary towels during her period, there would regularly be a new battery in the bucket. Naomi didn’t use much energy.
The only software on the computer was a cheap word-processing programme with no saved documents. Obviously there was no internet connection. And naturally Naomi wasn’t able to change the system preferences. Not even the brightness of the monitor, on which this single question flashed continually: ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’
For the first few days of her solitary confinement, sick with worry about Anouk, she had actually thought about her transgressions. About one which was serious enough to justify the horrific punishment she’d been suffering ever since she’d run out of her cabin that night in her pyjamas to look for her daughter. Anouk had left her a note at the foot of her bed.
I’m sorry, Mama.
There was nothing else on the piece of white paper, hastily scribbled without any explanation. No sign-off. Just: I’m sorry, Mama. In conjunction with the fact that it was half past two in the morning and Anouk was no longer sleeping beside her, there couldn’t be a more distressing message for a mother.
Naomi wouldn’t have discovered the note until the following morning if she hadn’t been wrenched from her sleep by the turbulent sea. In the well, too, she clearly felt it when the waves were rough, which is why she knew she was still on the ship, rather than having been transferred to a container somewhere.
Naomi couldn’t understand what was happening to her. How she’d got here. Or why.
After the note at the end of her bed, the last thing she remembered of her life was an open door in her corridor on deck 9, diagonally across from her own cabin. She’d thought she could hear Anouk crying. She’d knocked and called her daughter’s name. Poked her head through the door.
After that… blackness.
From that point on her memory was as dim as the hole she now found herself in.
‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’
She had no intention of giving the spider an answer. In her imagination it wasn’t a human being up there at the edge of the well, but a fat, hairy tarantula operating the bucket.
‘Where’s my daughter?’ she’d typed into the computer, replying with her own question. Naomi had shut the laptop and put it inside the plastic bag (she’d soon learned why the bag was there – the bucket wasn’t always cleaned) and tied it to the rope.
The answer came half an hour later:
‘She’s alive – safe and well.’
Naomi demanded proof. A picture, a voice message, anything. But the spider refused to grant that wish, upon which Naomi sent the notebook back up with the words: ‘Fuck you’.
As punishment she had to go twenty-four hours without water. It was only when, crazy with thirst, she started drinking her own urine that a new bottle was lowered. Since then she’d never dared insult the spider again.
This was another way in which the bucket system worked brilliantly: to discipline her. Punish her.
The second, more gruesome punishment, as a consequence of which she would probably perish, wasn’t imposed until much later. Because of her first confession.
‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’
She hadn’t answered the spider for seven weeks. With her intelligence – she did, after all, teach biology at an elite university – she’d compiled hypotheses, evaluated her options, analysed opportunities. Rather than blindly giving an answer.
Not me. No.
Naomi rocked her head forwards and back, and scratched her neck. Movements she was already making unconsciously.
Her hair was gradually falling out; it stuck to her fingers when she ran them over her head. She was pleased there wasn’t a mirror in the well. It also spared her the sight of the worms that were crawling beneath her skin.
Fuck, I had to eat that rice.
Nine days ago. She would have starved otherwise.
For a whole week beforehand the bucket had come down with only empty bowls. Each time with the same command, written in felt-tip: Answer the question!
But she didn’t want to. She couldn’t.
‘What will happen to me if I confess?’ she’d dared ask the spider.
The answer came the following day with the computer, directly beneath her question.
‘What will happen to me if I confess?’
‘You’ll be allowed to die.’
It was several hours before she’d stopped crying.
She was as convinced that the spider was lying to her about Anouk as she was about the truth of that statement.
‘You’ll be allowed to die.’
For a while she’d pondered whether there was any hope that she might escape the solitary confinement of this stinking prison, but then she’d resigned herself to her fate and made her confession to the computer, and thus the spider:
‘I killed my best friend.’