Mum’s hands went stiff around the sheets as she looked sharply at me. “That man is evil,” she hissed. “Why else would he have taken you from us?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “But he’s … not that.” I couldn’t find the right words.
Mum’s face went pale as she studied me, her lips pinched and tight. “What did he do to you?” she asked. “What did he do to you to make you think like this?”
The next day two police officers came: a thin man and a youngish lady. Both carried their hats in their hands. They were baseball caps, so much more casual-looking than the police hats in the UK. My parents stood at the back of the room. A doctor was there, too. Everyone was watching me, assessing me. I felt like I was in a play, with everyone waiting for me to say my lines. The thin policeman took out a notebook and leaned close enough for me to see the pimple on his chin.
“We realize this is difficult for you, Ms. Toombs,” he began. His voice was nasal and high-pitched, and I disliked him immediately. “Captives often go through a stage of silence and denial. Your parents say you’ve not been speaking much, to anyone, about your ordeal? I don’t wish to push you, but …”
I stayed silent. He paused to glance up at Mum. She nodded at him, urging him on.
“It’s just, Ms. Toombs, Gemma …,” he continued, “we are holding a man in custody. We have reason to believe that he is your kidnapper. We need you to give a statement to confirm this.”
“Who is he?” I said. I started shaking my head.
The thin man checked his notes. “The accused is Tyler MacFarlane, he’s six foot two inches in height, blond hair, blue eyes, small scar on the edge …”
My stomach turned over. Literally. I had to reach for the bedpan to be sick.
The police kept pushing. Every day they were back with their questions, each time phrased in a slightly different way.
“Tell me about the man you met in the airport.”
“Did he take you against your will?”
“Did he use force?”
“Drugs?”
There was only so long I could hold out. I had to speak in the end. Mum was always there beside me, urging me on. After a while, they showed me photographs. Some of you. Some of other men.
“Is this one him?” they asked over and over, flicking the photographs. They wouldn’t let up.
You were so easy to spot; the only man with any fire behind his eyes. The only man I could really look at. It was as if you were looking into the camera lens just for me; as if you knew I would be studying those photographs later, looking for you. You were proud in that shot. As proud as you can be in front of a smeared police wall. There was a cut under your eye that hadn’t been there before. I wanted to keep that photograph. But of course the detective slipped it back into the brown paper envelope with the others.
It all dragged on. A couple more days, at least. But I gave them their testimony eventually. I had to.
The time was a blur of injections and interrogations. I had become public property. Anyone could ask me anything they wanted, it seemed. Nothing was off-limits. The lady detective asked me whether we’d ever had sex.
“Did he make you touch him?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Never.”
“Are you sure?”
I talked to psychologists, therapists, counselors, doctors for this and doctors for that. A nurse took blood every day. A doctor checked my heart for tremors and palpitations. They treated me for shock. None of them left me alone. Especially not the psychologists.
One afternoon a lady with a short bob and a dark blue suit sat at the side of my bed. It was toward the end of the day, and I’d been waiting for the rattle of the dinner cart.
“I’m Dr. Donovan,” she said, “clinical psychiatrist.”
“I don’t want another shrink.”
“Fair enough.” She didn’t leave, though. She just leaned across to the clipboard at the end of my bed and started flicking through it. “Do you know what Stockholm syndrome is?” she asked.
I didn’t answer. She glanced back at me, before writing some notes of her own on the clipboard.
“It’s when a victim emotionally bonds with his or her abuser,” she explained, still writing. “It may be as a survival mechanism, so that you feel safer with your captor when you are getting along, for instance, or it may happen if you start to feel sorry for your abuser … perhaps he’s been wronged at some point in his life and you want to make it up to him … you start to understand him. There are other reasons, too: Perhaps you are isolated with him; you have to get on, or you suffer tremendous boredom … or perhaps he makes you feel special, loved—”
“I don’t know what you are getting at,” I interrupted. “But that’s not how I feel.”
“I didn’t say it was. I was just wondering if you knew about it.” She looked at me carefully, raising an eyebrow. I waited for her to keep going, mildly curious. “Whatever he did,” she continued softly, “whatever Mr. MacFarlane did or said to you, you know he hasn’t done the right thing, don’t you, Gemma?”
“You sound like my mum,” I said.
“Is that so bad?”
When I didn’t answer that, she sighed deeply and took a thin book from her briefcase.
“They’ll discharge you soon,” she said. “But doctors will keep quizzing you until you understand, until you realize that what Mr. MacFarlane did—”
“I know Ty did the wrong thing,” I interrupted quietly. And I did know that, didn’t I? But it was almost as if a part of me didn’t want to believe her. A part of me understood why you’d done it, too. And it’s hard to hate someone once you understand them. I felt so mixed up.
Dr. Donovan paused, looking at me, not unkindly. “Perhaps you need some help working through your thoughts?”
I was silent, looking straight ahead at the pale gray wall. She put the book on my bedside table. It said something about Stockholm syndrome on the cover. I didn’t look at it any more closely.
“You’ll have to talk to someone at some point, Gemma,” Dr. Donovan urged. “You’re going to have to figure out your real feelings soon … what’s true.”
She dropped her business card on the table. I took it and put it inside the drawer, next to where I’d placed your ring. Then, when she left, I stared at the ceiling. I wrapped the blankets around me, suddenly cold. I felt naked … as if I’d shed my skin in the desert like the snakes do. As if I’d left a part of me behind somewhere.
I wondered if you were being interrogated, too. I shivered as I pulled the blankets over my head entirely, enjoying the darkness they gave.
Mum and Dad handled the reporters. They made the appearances on the news and spoke to the papers. I was grateful for that. Right then the thought of a camera in my face was enough to start me hyperventilating.
When they were both at a press conference, I got out of bed. I paced around the room that I’d been trapped in until slowly I made my limbs work again. The leg that had been bitten was still stiff and sore. It felt good to move it.
I tried walking down the corridor, testing how far my leg would carry me before the pain got too bad. Could I walk right out of the hospital? Two elderly patients stared hard at me as I passed. They knew who I was. Their looks almost sent me running straight back into my room. It was almost as if I were famous. I swallowed and forced my legs to keep walking.
I continued to the foyer, to the flapping plastic doors where I had last seen you. I touched their hard edges, and stepped through them. There was a pregnant lady waiting at the reception desk. She looked up, too, as I passed, but I ignored her. I walked to the sliding doors leading out of the hospital. I stood in front of them, and the doors slid open with a purr. It was hotter outside, and sunny. I blinked at the brightness. There were cars and lampposts and people, and birds twittering in the leafy trees. The blacktop of the parking lot rolled out before me. And beyond that, flat, red dust.
I took one small step. But almost immediately, there
was a nurse at my side, placing her hands on my arms and not letting me go.
“You haven’t been discharged,” she whispered.
She turned me around and walked me back to that room. To that tiny, tiny room … so much like a cell, with its gray walls and lack of light. She tucked me back under those sheets, and pulled them close around me.
Later, Mum came in with a plastic bag. Inside were hundreds of articles, all clipped carefully from the newspapers.
“I don’t know if you realize how big it’s all been,” she said. “The whole world knows about you.” She placed the bag on my bed and thumbed through the pages of words. “These are just the pieces I’ve collected since we left Britain. There’s more at home. I just thought …” She paused, choosing her words. “I thought you might want to catch up, see how people care.”
I pulled the bag toward me, feeling the weight of the papers on my legs. I pulled out a bundle. The first thing I noticed was the photograph. The last school photograph that had been taken of me was blown up, huge, on the front cover of The Australian. My hair was tied up in a ponytail and my school shirt tight around my neck. I hated that shot, always have. I flicked through some more of the articles. That photograph was nearly always with them.
“Why did you give them that photo?” I asked.
Mum frowned, pulled the bag back toward her. “You look pretty.”
“I look young.”
“The police needed a recent shot, sweetheart.”
“Did it have to be a school photo?” I thought of you then, sitting in a cell somewhere. Had you seen all those articles, too? Had you seen the photograph?
I read bits of the stories.
Gemma Toombs, the 16-year-old abducted from Bangkok airport, has been admitted to a remote West Australian hospital, apparently taken there by her captor….
Anxious parents of Gemma Toombs charter a plane from London to be by their daughter’s side….
Mum’s face was blotchy and tear-stained in the accompanying photograph, Dad with his arm around her. Anna was in the crowd behind them, staring worriedly at the camera.
The articles went on and on, mostly saying the same thing. I flicked through the headlines:
Gemma: Found!
Gemma Toombs Released From Desert Drifter!
Is This the Face of a Monster?
I paused at that one. It was dated the day before. In the middle of the article was a line drawing of you. Your head was bowed and you were sitting in a courtroom, your hands in handcuffs … your blue eyes not sketched in. I skimmed for the details. The article stated it was your preliminary hearing, and had lasted just a few minutes. You’d kept your head bowed the whole time. You had said two words only: “Not Guilty.”
At that, I looked up at Mum.
“I know.” Mum shook her head. “He must be mad. It’ll never hold up. The police have witnesses, video evidence from the airport, and you, of course. How can he even think to plead not guilty?” She shook her head again, annoyed. “It just proves he’s insane.”
“What else has he said?”
“Nothing, for now. We’ll have to wait for the trial. But the police think he’ll say you came of your own free will, that you wanted to join him.” She stopped abruptly, wondering if she’d said too much. I could see in her eyes that she still wasn’t sure how affected I was by you.
I smiled, thanking her, trying to reassure her. “You’re right, that is insane,” I agreed quietly.
Mum started fussing then, tidying up the clippings around me before I’d finished reading them. “Would you like to go back to London?” she asked. “Until the trial? Then we can really prepare ourselves. Maybe you’d like some time to sort out your thoughts, to be with your friends?”
I nodded absently. “I just want it to be over,” I said. “All of it.”
We would change planes in Perth before flying back to London. We’d wait there, in our house, until the trial. Until then, the police would gather evidence against you, and I’d work on my statement. I would return to school if I thought I could handle it, and I’d continue talking to the shrinks. Mum made it seem so straightforward when she told me.
“In a few months, life will start to get easier,” she said. “You’ll see. Things will work out.”
I hadn’t found out much about you. I knew you were in a high-security unit, somewhere in Perth. You had a solitary cell. You hadn’t been allowed bail, and you weren’t speaking to anyone. That’s all the police could tell me. Apparently.
I took the window seat on the flight to Perth. It was a small plane, specially chartered for us, and it rattled and shook as the wheels left the ground. It was strange, being the only ones. Apparently the British government had paid. I called the airline attendant and asked for a glass of water. It came right away.
I pressed my hand against the plastic windowpane as we started to gain height. Dad took my other hand and held it tightly. His solid gold wedding ring was cold against my fingers. He was talking to me about life back in London, about my friends who’d sent messages and would be waiting to see me … about Anna and Ben.
“You can invite them all round, perhaps,” he said. “Have a kind of … party?”
His voice was questioning, so I nodded; I wasn’t really listening. I just wanted to stop his questions, however well meaning they were. I shut my eyes as I realized something: No one seemed to have any clue about me, about what I was really thinking. It was like I existed in a kind of parallel universe, thinking thoughts and feeling emotions that no one else understood. Except for you, perhaps. But I didn’t even know that for certain.
I leaned my head against the window and it juddered against my temple. I watched the land move by below. From up there, the desert was made up of so many colors … so many shades of browns and reds and oranges. White dried-out creek beds and salt pans. A dark river, curling like a snake. Burned-out blackness. Swirls and circles and lines and textures. Tiny dots of trees. Dark smudges of rocks. Everything stretching out in an endlessness of pattern.
It took two hours to cross all those hundreds of miles, all those billions of grains of sand, all that life. From up there, so far above, the land looked like a painting, one of your paintings. It looked like your body when you’d painted onto yourself. If I squinted, I could almost imagine the land was you … stretched out and huge, below me.
And then I realized something else: I knew what you’d been doing, all this time, in your outbuilding in the desert. You’d been painting the land as it looked from above, just as a bird would see it, or a spirit, or me … your swirls and dots and circles drawing out the pattern of the land.
The reporters were waiting. Somehow they knew we had to switch from the domestic terminal to the international; they knew we had three hours to wait until our flight back. They crowded around us, closing in on me, their camera lights flashing.
“Gemma, Gemma,” they shouted. “Can we have a word?” They spoke as if they knew me; as if I was a schoolgirl who lived down the road from them.
Dad tried shielding me, tried pushing them all back, but they persisted. Even the ordinary people at the airport—the other passengers and taxi drivers and coffee shop staff—even they knew me. I actually saw some of them snap photographs, too. It was ridiculous. In the end Mum took off her jacket and put it over my head. Dad got angry—well, angry for Dad anyway…. I think he even told someone to fuck off. That surprised me, and I paused for a moment to study Dad’s face. He really did care for me then; he really did want me safe. He held me close to him as we passed a TV crew.
But something was clear: I was no longer just an ordinary schoolgirl. Instead I’d turned into a celebrity. My face sold papers. Millions of them. It made people tune into the news. But, right then, with a coat over my head and all those men in leather jackets yelling at me, I felt more like a criminal. They were like leeches, wanting to suck up every tiny thing that had happened between you and me in the desert … wanting to know it all. You’d made me famous, Ty.
You’d made the whole world fall in love with me. And I hated it.
We made it to the other terminal. There were reporters there, too, and onlookers, and police, and noise and noise and lights and noise. My breathing sped up. I just kept thinking of that huge plane, on the runway, waiting to take me back to England and the cold and the city and the gray … waiting to carry me away from you. I felt the sweat on my skin, the way my clothes stuck to me.
I couldn’t do it. I broke away from Mum and Dad. And I ran. Mum was grabbing on to my cardigan, but I slipped out of it, leaving her holding the empty sleeves. I ran straight past the reporters with their flashing lights and noise. I ran past the shops and other passengers and straight into the restrooms. I found an empty stall. I wedged the lock shut. I kicked the door so I was sure it was secure. Then I sat on the toilet lid and leaned my head against the toilet paper roll. I stuck my mouth against it to stop myself from crying, to stop myself from shouting and screaming and tearing the place down. I breathed in its chalky, fake-flowery smell. And I just stayed there. I couldn’t face them, any of them. Everyone wanted answers I wasn’t ready to give.
Mum found me. She stood on the other side of the bathroom door with her red shoes pointing in toward each other.
“Gemma?” she said. Her voice was shaky and weak. “Come on, love, just open the door. There’s no one else coming in. I’ve made Dad block off the entrance. It’s only us.”
She stood there for ages before I pulled back the lock. She came in and hugged me, awkwardly, with me sitting on the toilet lid and her kind of crouching beside me, kneeling in the dirt and scraps of toilet paper and old splashes of piss. She pulled me into her lap, and for the first time since she’d arrived, I hugged her back. She leaned against the toilet bowl, covering me with her jacket, and I wondered something. This Mum, hugging me close, didn’t seem like the same Mum you’d been telling me stories about. For the first time, I wondered if all the stories you’d told me in the desert were even true; all those conversations you’d apparently overheard about my parents moving away or being disappointed in me. Had you been lying all along?