She puts the cloth back in the bowl, blood mixing with the water. She wrings the cloth out and reaches out to your face. You lean back.
‘I know the choker’s tight.’ She smooths the cloth across your forehead. ‘And I know you can stand it.’ She’s dabbing the cloth tenderly over your cheek. ‘You’re tough, Nathan.’
You turn away slightly.
She puts the cloth in the bowl again, mud and blood and water mixing together. She wrings the cloth out and hangs it on the side of the bowl.
‘I’ll loosen it if you ask.’ She reaches over and brushes your cheek with the back of her fingers. ‘I want to loosen it. But you have to ask,’ she says again so quietly and gently.
You pull back and the choker cuts in.
‘You’re tired, aren’t you, Nathan?’
And you’re so tired of it all. So tired you could cry. But there’s no way you’re going to let that happen.
No way.
You just want it to stop.
‘All you have to do is ask me to loosen it and I will.’
You don’t want to cry and you don’t want to ask for anything. But you want it to stop.
‘Ask me, Nathan.’
And the choker is so tight. And you’re so tired.
‘Ask me.’
You’ve hardly spoken for months. Your voice is croaky, strange. And she wipes away your tears with her fingertips.
the new trick
The routine is the same as ever. And so is the cage. And so are the shackles. The choker is still on, loose but there. If I try to leave, I’ll die, no doubt about it. I’m not at the point of wanting that just at the moment.
The morning routine is the same. I can do the outer circuit in under thirty minutes now. That’s down to practice and the diet, which means I’m a lean, mean running machine. But mainly it’s down to the new trick.
The new trick is no easier than the old trick.
The new trick is to stay in the present … Get lost in the detail of it … Enjoy it!
Enjoy the fine tuning of where I put my fingers when I’m doing press-ups, I mean really finding the finest tuning of where my fingers are in relation to each other, how straight or how bent, and how they feel on the ground, how the sensation changes as I move up and down. I can spend hours thinking about the feeling in my fingers as I do press-ups.
There’s so much to enjoy, too much really. Like when I’m running the circuit, I can concentrate on the deepness of my breathing but also the exact dampness of the air and the wind direction, how it changes over the hills and is slowed or speeded up as it’s funnelled through the narrow valley. My legs carry me effortlessly downhill – that’s the bit I love best, where all I’ve got to do is spot the place to put my foot: on a small patch of grass between the grey stones, or on a flat rock, or on the stream bed. I do the spotting, looking ahead all the time, and move my leg to the right position, but gravity does the hard work. Only it’s not just me and gravity; it’s the hill as well. It feels as if the earth itself is making sure I don’t put a foot wrong. Then the uphill section and my legs are really burning and I’ve got to find the best foothold and handhold if it’s steep, and push and push. I’m doing the hard work and gravity is saying ‘payback time’ and the hillside is saying, ‘Ignore him, just run.’ Gravity is heartless. But the hill is my friend.
When I’m in my cage I can memorize the colour of the sky, the cloud shapes, their speed and how they change, and I can get up there, be in the clouds in the shapes and colours. I can even get into the mottled colours of the bars of the cage, climb into the cracks beneath the flakes of rust. Roam around in my own bar.
My body’s changed. I’ve grown. I remember my first day in the cage and I could only just reach the bars across the top, had to do a little jump to grab them. Now when I stretch up, my hands and wrists reach freedom. I have to bend my legs to do pull-ups. I’m still not as tall as Celia, but she’s a giant.
Celia. I admit she’s hard to enjoy, but sometimes I manage it. We talk. She’s different from what I expected. I don’t think I’m what she expected either.
the routine
Don’t get me wrong. This is no holiday camp, but Celia would say it’s no gulag either. This is the routine:
Get up and get out of the cage – same as ever, at dawn Celia chucks the keys to me. I asked her once what would happen to me if she died peacefully in her sleep. She said, ‘I think you’d last a week without water. If it rains you could collect water on the tarpaulin. You’d probably starve rather than die of thirst, given the rain here. I’d say you’d last two months.’
I keep a nail hidden in the soil. I can reach it from the cage and I can unlock the shackles with it. I’ve not managed to undo the padlock to the cage yet but I’d have plenty of time to work on it. But then I’d have to get the collar off. I reckon I’d last a year with the collar on.