an underwater dungeon. There could be anything in there. Rat poison. Sleeping pills. Worse. And I’d have no choice but to eat it.
Suddenly, the thought of putting even a spoonful of that sauce in my mouth made me feel panicked and ill, and I felt like flushing the whole lot down the loo along with the juice, but even as I half stood, ready to pick up the plate, I realized something, and I sat back down again on slow, shaky legs.
They didn’t need to poison me. Why would they? If they wanted to kill me they could just starve me.
I tried to think clearly.
If whoever had brought me here had wanted to kill me, they’d have done it. Right?
Right. They could have hit me again, harder, or put a pillow over my face when I was passed out, or a plastic bag around my neck. And they hadn’t. They’d dragged me here at some inconvenience to themselves.
So they didn’t want me dead. Not right now, at any rate.
One pea. You couldn’t die from one poisoned pea, surely?
I picked it up on the end of a fork, looking at it. It looked completely normal. No trace of any powder. No odd color.
I put it in my mouth and rolled it slowly round, trying to detect any strange taste. There was none.
I swallowed.
Nothing much happened. Not that I’d expected it to—I didn’t know much about poison, but I imagined that the ones that killed you within seconds were few and far between, and not easy to obtain.
But something did happen. And that was that I started to feel hungry.
I scooped up a few more peas and ate them, cautiously at first, and then picking up speed as the food made me feel better. I skewered a meatball with my fork. It smelled and tasted completely normal—with that slightly institutional air of food prepared for a large number of people.
At last the plate was empty and I sat and waited for someone to come and collect it.
And waited.
And waited.
Time is very elastic—that’s the first thing you realize in a situation without light, without a clock, without any way of measuring the length of one second over the length of another. I tried counting—counting seconds, counting my pulse—but I got to two thousand and something and lost count.
My head ached, but it was the weak shiveriness in my limbs that worried me more. At first I thought it was low blood sugar, and then, after I’d eaten, I started to worry that perhaps there had been something in the food, but now I began to count back, to try to work out when the last time was that I’d taken my pills.
I remembered popping one out of the packet right after seeing Nilsson on Monday morning. But I hadn’t actually taken it. Something—some stupid need to prove that I wasn’t chemically dependent on these innocent little white dots—had stopped me. Instead, I’d left it on the countertop, not quite able to bring myself to down it, not quite wanting to throw it away.
I hadn’t been intending to stop. Just to show . . . I don’t know what. That I was in charge I guess. A little, pointless “fuck you” to Nilsson.
But then the argument with Ben had driven it from my mind. I’d gone off to the spa without taking it, and then the episode with the shower . . .
That made it . . . I couldn’t quite work it out. At least forty-eight hours since I’d had a dose. Maybe more like sixty hours. The thought was uncomfortable. Actually, more than uncomfortable. It was terrifying.
I had my first panic attack when I was . . . I don’t know. Thirteen maybe? Fourteen? I was a teenager. It came . . . and went, leaving me frightened and freaked-out, but I never told anyone. It seemed like something only a weirdo would get. Everyone else walked through life without shaking and finding themselves unable to breathe, right?
For a while it was okay. I did my GCSEs. Started my A levels. It was around then that things started to get really shaky. The panic attacks came back. First, one. Then a couple. After a while, it seemed like coping with anxiety had become a full-time business, and the walls began to close around me.
I saw a therapist, several in fact. There was the “talking cure” person my mum picked out of the phone book, a serious-faced woman with glasses and long hair