“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
– Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

I re-enter the study and step over his writhing body and center myself with a long inhalation by his writing desk before creaking grandly into his leather armchair.

My anger has subsided.

The volcano lies dormant.

On the table in front of me I spot a few specks of blood around my laptop keyboard and give thought to wiping them off with a cuff—but no—a distance away from the keys there’s very little chance of any of it seeping down through into the motherboard, so I’ll keep them as makeshift memento mori.

And who knows, maybe they’ll inspire me.

Fingers poised above the keys like a virtuoso over a piano, I take a rallying breath and pray the Muses don’t go quiet on me now; I’ve come too far to have a writer’s block derail my plans. Then I sigh inwardly as it all comes flooding out—as the fingers get to work and as the letters begin skittering across the page, bouncing out of nowhere onto my screen like circus fleas into a pot of bright white glue and it’s all so damn gorgeous and poetic and the prose is so taut and muscular and real and the knowledge that I’m going to be read by every single gate-keeper in every damn one of those haughtily prestigious publishing houses spurs me on, and on, and on, and yes, the knowledge that they’ll all be forced to read the tall tale of a man who took matters into his own hands when an insular literary world began conspiring against mankind (be that any kind of man), and while they’ll only be reading my work for its newsworthiness, the gatekeepers in these publishing houses will surely have to concede that I have a point and that the world has gone mad and in a way I’m opening up a can of (book)worms in holding up a mirror to the world’s most overlooked and uncared for injustice and readers, dear readers, once fully exposed to my great works, may even find it in themselves to enjoy what I do, nodding along, snorting, and I have to say that the prospect of this fills me with a rush of adrenaline that’s hard to describe in words but I do attest that TE Lawrence had something when he said that happiness is absorption because it is, it so truly is.

Scribo ergo sum.

I write therefore I am.

It’s tempting to put my foot down hard on the pedal and floor her, letting rip cathartically in a stream of consciousness that’ll go way, way back to my early days, my formative adventures, my most notably character-building pitfalls and pratfalls, looping the loop on the rollercoaster narrative arc of a life that’s been lived and brought me to this mad moment in time, but of course I know that such an urge would also bring into being so many un-killed darlings, so many loose ends, and one really has to hold oneself to a higher standard and so instead I plunge the reader in medias res into the tussle with Alistair and his wife by the door and their benzo-induced nap and drip feed the backstory as unobtrusively as one can—

Suddenly, a voice from downstairs bellows “ALISTAIR!” like a hysterical banshee, cutting my creative process short, stiffening my back with a convulsive shock.

I stop typing.

I peel my eyes away from my laptop screen to note the very same Alistair, face bloodied, his shirt a veritable prop from the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, and he’s glaring at me, panic-stricken.

“ARE YOU OKAY?” his wife shouts in raucous follow up, and his eyes widen further, and he swings his head about, rocking frantically like the front row of a mosh pit.

His desperation.

It’s all there in the eyes.

I turn the Dictaphone back on to record our interactions lest my memory fail me later.

New content is arriving in real time.

“ALISTAIR!”

I should be aggrieved by her interruption, but I’m not in the slightest, as any frustration felt is tempered by my relief in her finally coming to, fully voiced, just as lively as I’d found her earlier this morning. I’d removed her gag while she was asleep in the hope that she’d call out when she did regain her consciousness, and here she is, true to form, going off like an oven timer.

I bound over to Alistair whither I go down on my haunches to unmuzzle him.

“Let her know how you are,” I instruct him, flatly. “Do your best to put her at ease.”

“I’M UPSTAIRS!” He swallows a lungful of air before adding: “DON’T WORRY—I’M FINE!”

“ALLY!” his wife shouts back, her voice frailer now. “I’M SCARED! IS THAT MAN STILL HERE?”

“Look, pal—Christ, I don’t even know what your name is—look, will you at least keep us together in the same room? It’d hardly make us any more of a threat to you. Can’t you hear that she’s terrified—she’s alone downstairs, tied up, she must be fucking beside herself.”

I shake my head.

“I prefer one conversation at a time, and so ‘beside herself’ she’ll have to remain. Now warn her that I’m heading downstairs, will you—and reassure her that it’s to check on her health, to give her water, food if she’ll have it, and that she shouldn’t be nervous about me as I won’t harm her. Quick—we don’t have time.”

He takes a few seconds to weigh up his options, which are scant to say the least. Hurrying along his decision-making process, I point out my gun on the table.

“HONEY, HE’S COMING DOWN, BUT DON’T WORRY—” he shouts, but alas, her response is instant, shrill, and deafening:

“IS HE STILL HERE, AND HE’S WITH YOU! WHAT DOES HE WANT?”

“HE’S A WRITER.”

“A WAITER?”

“NO—A WRITER OF BOOKS.”

“YOU’RE NOT MAKING SENSE, ALLY! WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE’S A WAITER FOR COOKS?”’

“BOOKS!”

“WHAT?”

“I SAID, HE’S A WRITER OF…fuck, this is difficult!”

I’m scrambling about looking for my notebook with my back to him while I snigger darkly in amongst my stuff on his desk. The Dictaphone may have missed her voice, and this is not the sort of comic detail to be passed over lightly.

Found it!

At the sight of me hastily transcribing it all in my pad he sneers at me like a pantomime villain.

“Grist for the mill,” I say, when our eyes finally meet.

“Are you going to include every little thing we say in that psychopathic book?”

“Not everything.”

“She’s frightened out of her wits downstairs.”

“I get that.”

“You get that, do you?”

“Yes, that things are rather fraught and, well,” I say, struggling to justify myself, feeling oddly on the backfoot. “It’s levity, isn’t it, a brief glint of comedy in the darkness. That shift in tone, every story needs it. Even Hamlet has its humorous moments: the clown scene in the cemetery, for instance.”

He stares off into the distance, processing my point in silence, which I’m thankful for, brief as it is.

“So, I’m to be your clown as well as your victim?”

“No—Alistair!” I exclaim, largely for emphasis, and largely overdoing it.  “You’re to be the straight man, my foil—and heaven forbid anyone’s clown or victim. In a strange way, this may even be a win for you.” On hearing this his face grimaces in a blend of emotions, chief among them being confusion and disdain for my positive spin on recent events, and so I fill in a few of the potholes for him: “You won’t even need to put pen to paper, right, you’ll just be sitting there, and yet, in the long term I’ll be making your star shine brighter than you can possibly imagine. After I’m done with you, you’ll be smoking cigars in Rogan’s mancave, reminiscing while the world leans in, and you’ll be the recipient of more legacy media puff pieces than a plethora of nepo-babies. My cadre of fans, the Nickelodeons, they’re going to be waiting for each daily installment to be uploaded to my site, Household Turds, and they’ll be hungry, Alistair, oh so hungry, and their numbers will grow exponentially as my infamy does, and they’ll be poring over each new installment for clues as to who and where you are. Soon yours’ll be the only topic in town. You see a few close contacts already know that a crime is in the process of being committed, and they’ll already know that its victim—I, er, mean protagonist—well, is a literary celebrity of some sort. We won’t be going viral immediately (these things take time), but soon, inevitably, everyone will be reading my work to find out the who, the where, and the why in amongst the weeds of my succulent prose.”

I pause to give him a chance to speak, but his mouth hangs open in dumbstruck awe.

“Household Turds?”

“A pun on the Dickens magazine.”

“ALISTAIR! WHICH ROOM ARE YOU IN?”

I’d almost forgotten about her!

“You’re writing a journal of my kidnapping, one that you think, all things considered, I should really see as a net positive—and you’ll be uploading it to a website called Household Turds for a fan club called, what, the Nickelodeons?” I nod, solemnly, giving him the space to continue and soon wish I hadn’t: “That is the most stupid fucking retarded thing I have heard in my life!”

I skip his thoughtless barb to pick up on an earlier point.

“I’m not sure ‘journaling’ is the right verb for what we’ll be doing, Alistair. True crime in real time is an apter way of putting it: fresher and snappier if you ask —”

“ALLY,” she cuts in massively. “ANSWER ME! ARE YOU WITH HIM? DON’T LEAVE ME HERE HANGING!”

“YES, I’M STILL WITH HIM! EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE OKAY—HE WON’T HURT YOU!” The bloodied state of his clothes and the regrettably vicious scythe-mark I left across his face do rather stand in stark contradiction to this final point, which I won’t be raising with him, especially now that his eyes are boring into me.

On the backfoot again, I feel the need to further contextualize, to justify myself:

“Decades ago you would cultivate a literary reputation like it was a bonsai tree. Snipping, trimming, tying, loving, cultivating. Such meticulous attention to detail, it was a subtle task. Before you speak, no, I never had one worth all that much—that’s a rep, not a bonsai—but I saw the way they moved, our exalted literati, our most venerated wordsmiths, all their subtle dances, their log rolling, their back patting and their terribly insular book reviews: mutually assured congratulation is what it was—but now the game has changed: now it’s all about immediacy, virality, and it’s all about the last desperate lungfuls of air we’ll take in order to keep our public personae alive. And that, Alistair, is what this is. In another age I wouldn’t have needed to tie you up and manufacture a scandal to generate the publicity that’ll bring about my infamy and book sells; none of that would have been necessary in a quieter, simpler age.”

“It’s hardly fucking necessary now, is it?”

“Oh, but it is—it is. You’ve no idea what it’s like to be led from boy to man to believe in society’s meritocratic values, and then to be told, no, no, no, not for you, sir, henceforth all those doors are to be closed to you, Mr Cis-White-Straight and Patriarchal Villain. Try to think what that feels like to a writer, a man of letters, a man whose febrile imagination is his be all and end all—no more romance, no open doors? I consider this an affront to my basic human rights.”

“This is insane!”

“ALISTAIR—WHAT’S HAPPENING UP THERE?”

“Is it really?”

“WE’RE TALKING, HONEY. DON’T WORRY, EVERYTHING’S FINE. Yes—these are, without doubt, the incoherent ramblings of a certified crazy; it is insane.”

“And yet you seem so rapt when I share my so-called crazy ramblings with you—”

“TALKING, ALISTAIR? TALKING ABOUT WHAT?”

“LOOK—JUST GIVE US A MINUTE, HON, AND STOP WORRYING, WILL YOU?” He fixes his eyes on me more tightly than before; he has something to say, something which amounts to more than just a playground taunt: “You understand that we live in a world where AI can knock up a novel in seconds, don’t you?”

My reply is immediate; full-bodied:

“So why risk life and limb over a bloody book, right, an anachronism that’s lost its value in the modern world—is that your point? Because if it is, I think you’re missing mine. That’s not what we’re selling here: this isn’t about words on a page—no, we’re selling the authenticity of a story that’ll play out in real time, and there’s no replicating the buzz of the knotty plot that doesn’t know its own end yet. Authenticity is the word, Alistair, it’s the name of our game. People will be asking themselves, mmm, is this merde for real? Yes, dear reader, will be our answer, it most certainly is, and you can follow it daily in your boomer broadsheet, or, should you be a young’un full of rizz and vinegar, across your media feed. Whatever your age or disposition, this is what they, the buying public, desire: to hold on to something real, authentic, something worthy of investing their time in, in this our horribly refracted world of simulacra and lies.”

“ALISTAIR!”

He begins shaking his head, shooing away my reasoning from his consciousness as if it’s nothing but the cloying afters to a bad dream. “This is utterly insane,” he says, but I sense that his heart isn’t in it, I’m wearing him down; after all, he is repeating himself.

“I’d take insane over inane—which is what your feminised brethren have been churning out,” I retort, a touch cattily, it must be said.

“DID YOU SAY HE’S COMING DOWNSTAIRS? ARE YOU COMING DOWNSTAIRS TOO?”

“And you’re going to be doing this every day?”

“I’m going to be doing this every day, yes.”

“You’re going to be sharing this—whatever this is—with the public every day?”

“PLEASE SAY THAT YOU WILL BE COMING DOWNSTAIRS WITH HIM!”

“I’m going to share it with my readers in real time, yes, as I have explained ad nauseam.”

“This is a traumatic experience for us, man; what in fuck have we ever done to you?”

“ALISTAIR?”

“It’s nothing personal, Alistair. Really. You’re simply a symbol of an elite media class and the rigged system that supports it. You celebrity authors, already famous in other spheres, have been jumping the queues us plebian wordsmiths have been forced to wait in, and it’s so damn insufferable! Real talent doesn’t wait for permission; real talent innovates. Real talent carves a way through the crowd. Queuing up for a turn that’ll never come, in a system that is rigged to keep me down, it really isn’t for me, which is ironic given how English I am about queuing up for the best part. Now, unless there’s anything else that needs discussing, I’ve got your boisterous wife to attend to and the writing up of Chapter 1 ahead of me. Let it be known, Nickelodeons are an impatient breed.”

“PLEASE SAY YOU’RE COMING TOO?”

“You’re going to check on her, that’s all?”

He knows the answer, of course, but I nod to affirm anyway to put him at ease.

“I CAN’T MOVE! HE USED RESTRAINTS ON MY WRISTS AND ANKLES AND I’M COVERED IN THIS DAMN CELLOPHANE.”

Then I turn to leave the room. At the door the heartfelt tone of his voice arrests my departure, freezing me in my tracks. “Hey, man—don’t scare her any more than she already is,” he says. “Right?”

“You have my word.”

“I CAN’T MOVE AN INCH—DID YOU HEAR ME?”

“I CAN’T EITHER!” he shouts, before returning his attention to me: “Shut up about your fucking word, okay, and just make sure she’s okay.”

“Anything else?”

“There is something else—I’m going to need to use the toilet pretty damn soon.”

I sigh.

“After all our drama and tension, wouldn’t it be just my luck to have to end our first chapter on such a banal moment of bathos.”

“I don’t want to fucking bathe, pal, I want to piss,” he says, and suddenly I’m brightening, scribbling down his gaffe into my notepad and chuckling to myself.

“Hey, what about my toilet break?” he barks, as I head downstairs.

“Hold it in for now,” I reply. “Let’s not break the seal too early.”

*        *        *

I run my fingers across the long shiny kitchen worktop, absorbing its coldness, steeling myself against the hysterical onslaught that’ll be aimed my way any second now as I amble over to their Victorian-style lounge. I’m alert to every noise I make and, without meaning to sound like an old forest-botherer, every breath I take. She can’t see me yet, nor I her, but there’s a noisy struggling sound that enables me to approximate her position anyhow: she’s on the floor behind one of their impossibly large sofas, slithering and dithering and eeling about. All hell will break loose when she sees me, so I’ll need to re-gag her quickly before she can fire off a volley, a volley that’ll no doubt trigger her husband upstairs and go operatic in terms of volume and frenzy.

I bend to the floor, collect the football sock I’d previously used to keep her schtum, shape it into a nice tight ball while I’m out of sight, out of mind, while I’m readying myself to pounce.

Then I make my move.

I’m able to close in and shove the sock in her mouth in one fell swoop (oh—the terror in her eyes when they meet mine!) and then I reposition the satin shirt sleeve, loose around her neck, up and over her mouth, tightening it again, re-gagging her, before she manages a whelp, far less a full-throated scream, and then we’re done.

And I’m back in control.

It’s technically still morning but feels later what with the lights on and the blinds down. It’s also oddly stuffy for such a large interior. I guess that’ll be all the tension in the air.

My bad.

“IS EVERYTHING OKAY DOWNSTAIRS?”

“I GAVE YOU MY WORD, REMEMBER—QUIET AS A DORMOUSE NOW OR YOU’LL BE GETTING MORE OF THE SOCK TREATMENT,” I bellow back at him. I take a breath to compose myself before addressing his wife, whose eyes are fixed on mine and still bulging in terror. “You have nothing to fear,” I say, lapsing into cliché for want of anything better to say. “I am not here to harm you or your husband. You heard him, didn’t you—did he sound scared? No, of course he didn’t. Now, nod or shake your head to answer me: Are you expecting anyone to pay you a visit today?”

She shakes her head with a frantic intensity.

“And you’re completely sure?”

She nods.

“Are you hungry?”

Her eyes squint, quizzically, as if to suggest: er, what sort of fucking question is that? Granted, this wasn’t my most pressing question, but I do want to appear somewhat sympathetic to her needs; all thing’s considered though, I could have led with thirsty.

“Let’s keep this binary for now, shall we. Nod or shake your head: are you hungry?”

She shakes her head.

“Thirsty?”

She shrugs, then shakes her head.

“Do you have any medication that you need?”

She shakes her head.

“What about a cleaner?”

At this she nods, and I wouldn’t have accepted any other answer in a stately pile such as this.

“And you’re sure that your cleaner won’t be paying us a visit?”

She nods.

“You’ll be putting her in extreme danger if you’re wrong, Harriet.”

She nods, indicating that she understands, pauses, to differentiate between her two available gestures, and then shakes her head to suggest that the cleaner isn’t expected.

“So far, so good. Now, I’m going to go through the rest of the days of the week, and I want you to nod when she, or anybody else for that matter, is likely to pay us a visit—got me?”

She nods.

“Tuesday?”

She nods.

“So your cleaner is expected tomorrow?”

She nods.

“And Wednesday?”

She shakes her head.

“Thursday?”

She shakes her head.

“Friday?”

She nods, emphatically.

“That’s Tuesday and Friday. And what about Saturday and Sunday?”

She shakes her head.

“You have this place cleaned twice a week: Tuesday and Friday. Well, we’ll have to text to cancel this week’s clean, won’t we. Anyone else due to pay you or hubby a visit?”

She shakes her head.

“Harriet, if I remove your gag, will you scream?”

She shakes her head.

“I mean it: one tiny yelp, and you’ll be on mute for the rest of the day, capiche?”

She nods.

I remove the gag.

“Who the fuck says capiche?” she splutters.

“I want you to put your husband at ease. Raise your voice to let him know that you’re well—and be careful to choose your words wisely or it might not be the gag you get: there may be another Benzo-induced nighty-night waiting for you in the wings.”

She shouts out, “ALISTAIR?”

“YEAH?” comes his immediate reply. “ARE YOU GOOD? WHAT’S GOING ON DOWN THERE?”

“NO NEED TO WORRY, HONEY: I’M BEING TREATED OKAY.”

She scowls at me, suggesting that her treatment is a rather chilly southward of ‘okay’ and I pretend not to notice.

“ARE YOU SURE?” he replies.

“I’M TOTALLY OKAY—YEAH.”

I let the conversation play out, tedious and noisy as it is, because the Dictaphone is running and I’m pleased for her contribution to Chapter 1, and sure, while it’s only padding, hers will be an important voice as our tale unfolds.

“I’LL GET US OUT OF THIS,” he shouts.

“I KNOW YOU WILL,” she replies, and pauses before adding. “AND THAT’S WHY I LOVE YOU.”

Yuck.

“I LOVE YOU TOO.”

Pass the sick bucket.

Like a Victorian schoolmaster, I cut in massively with, “ENOUGH—BOTH OF YOU!”

And they comply.

I smile down at his wife on the floor and mouth a silent ‘Sorry’, diffusing the the situation with a touch of diffidence.

Her eyes remain wide open in fear.

Underneath all the cellophane wrapping she’s in her dressing gown, which is wound tight enough around her body to spare her any blushes but does rather draw attention to her shape. Not that I was looking, mind. I’d averted my gaze, as one would expect of any gent, avoiding any opportunity to ogle in strict adherence to the knights’ chivalric code. Nonetheless, propping herself up against a sofa, she curls her legs under her body as if to hide them, sensing her vulnerability, increasingly aware of her relative state of undress or my unwelcome proximity to it.

“I’ve changed my mind,” she says. “I do want some water.”

Nothing but a device to put me to work of course, to gain momentary space from me, but I’m all the happier for it. “Certainly,” I say, with the briefest of bows.

I fetch her a glass of tap water and, on my haunches to lower myself, using my fully outstretched arm to maintain my distance, I bring the glass to her lips.

A few meagre sips later: “That’s enough,” she says.

I refrain from offering a sarcastic comment when no ‘thank you’ is forthcoming.

I’m bigger than that.

After her morning shower and nap on the floor, her curly hair, having been permitted to dry without due care to the feminine process has frizzied out like an eighties glam rocker’s. It’s pure comedy. She shakes her head to flick away a loose strand from her eyes and then a new fear dawns on her: that the flick may have looked coquettish, too playful, and (gasp!) for my benefit. The guilty look written across her face is not without its comedic quality. To disabuse me of any thoughts of her intended flirtatiousness she doles out a new portion of sass, ending our moment of comedy in a heartbeat: “You know, for a house robber, pal, you sure are taking your time about stealing our shit.”

“This isn’t a theft.”

“It isn’t?”

“I want nothing of yours but your time and liberty.”

“Don’t get cryptic—why do you have my husband and me tied up? What’s this all about?”

“We don’t have time for long explanations—there will be people missing you.”

After the debacle with her husband’s mobile phone, I’d already checked to see if hers had been turned off and I’d also kept a close eye on her incoming messages: she’d received several, but not nearly as many as hubby. “Is your mother still with us?”

I collect her mobile from where I’d left it on a nearby table and then hover its screen up close to her face so that the facial recognition kicks in and unlocks it.

“With us?”

“Is she alive?”

“What sort of a question is that?”

“She may have passed.”

“Yes, she is still with us—why are you so interested in my mother, Sigmund?”

“Does anyone at your work know her personally?”

“Why would they? Where’s this all going with my mother? Jesus Christ—you’re not planning on kidnapping her as well? She’s got varicose veins; she wouldn’t cope! Why are you—”

I cut short the quickfire questions, raising a hand like a traffic cop during the school run.

“You’re going to excuse yourself from work for the week. You’ll tell them that your mother has been suddenly taken sick and that you urgently need to be with her. This excuse will enable you to absent yourself without further question and it’ll also ensure that no one comes around your home to check on you, because you won’t be here, will you: if anyone asks where you’ll be, you’ll say Scotland, but you won’t be any more specific than that.”

“A week?”

“A week.”

“You want a whole week of my life?”

“For now, yes.”

“Why the hell would I lie about my mum being sick? You’re the one who’s sick—not her!”

“Harriet, I want you to park your emotions and think soberly. Recall how I recently told your husband to be quiet and lo, he obeyed without complaint. Why do you think that might have been? Is your husband generally known for his quiet obedience?”

Her husband is not.

Au contraire.

“I can give you ocular proof, should you need it, of the fully loaded Smith & Wesson I have close by, but then that would only slow things down, bring on the inevitable panic attack, and I do so love brevity.” She shakes her head to suggest there being no need of any proof. “Harriet, do you know of Freytag’s Pyramid?”

She doesn’t and continues to shake her head to tell me as much.

“The reason I ask is that you probably consider this turn of events to be so painfully dramatic. Intense. Fraught. Hellish even. Harriet—this is nothing but our story’s exposition. Freytag’s dramatic pyramid begins with an introduction before leading into an inciting incident, which leads, step by step, towards a climax.”

Her mouth opens as if to speak and then remains that way, silently, in an incredulous O.

“What’s Freytag go to do with me, you’re thinking. I’ll tell you. We see our lives as stories and in that way you’ll be no different. You’ll be imagining that yours is at its most dramatic point—its climax—when Harriet, we’re not there by a long, long way; this, what you’re experiencing here, is only the beginning, our story’s set-up. We’ve got so far to go together, you and I and hubby, you wouldn’t believe, so buckle up and sit tight, our ride’s just getting started.”

She nods.

Her mouth is still ajar in a dumbstruck O.

I’ve over-egged the ominous tone, so it’s time to dial it down with a little expository detail:

“We’re going to go through your messages and missed calls. One by one, you’re going to call them back. Something bespoke to dissuade any further nosy interference from the curtain twitchers in your life. Do not deviate from the script unless you absolutely must: Your mother’s sick and she needs you by her side. You’re in Scotland and you expect to be there for at least a week. If you’re pushed, and I mean really pushed, you may add that it’s The Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Are we on the same page, Harriet?”

“We’re on the same page,” she repeats.

“Because if you decide to rewrite your story, our narrative arc will have to change course, and a meaningless moment of exposition may become the stuff of nightmares.”

“I understand,” she says, before adding, flatly, and without a trace of irony: “Everything’s capiche.”

Wrapped in cellophane like an over-protected piece of luggage, staring up at me meekly on the floor, I nod back at her, paternally, because yes, it is capiche.

And we’re finally on the same page.

*        *        *

Upstairs, I’ve finally cut Alistair loose—mind you, only of his cellophane wrapping and the zip restraints on his wrists and ankles; I’ve granted him freedom of bodily movement for the briefest of toilet breaks under the close eye of the gun.

It was a nervy few minutes.

In order for me to respond to any of his deviant acts not quite worthy of a bullet but still necessitating some pushback, I bought along a mace, and no, not the fifteenth century bludgeon, the chemical kind, the handbag accessory favoured by independently minded ladies as reassurance while alone on those mean city streets, out on the lash protecting their gash from all manner of beastly interference.

“How was she?” he grumbles, exiting the toilet to the sound of a flushing cistern.

“Noisy and needy,” I say, nodding at a pair of cuffs I’ve lain on the floor before him.

The gun is hanging down by my side in one hand, the mace is aimed at his face in the other. He has full body autonomy for the first time since I stuck the needle in and I’m as anxious as hell about his next move, trying like a bastard to project sangfroid and desperate for some coerced compliance on his part to immediately kick in.  He picks up the cuffs without further instruction and puts them on, leaving them open for me to click securely tight around the wrists.

Now there’s a good boy!

(As an aside, I’d opted for a pair of heavy-duty security cuffs, 6cm stainless steel, with a natural shine that would out-sexy any of the kinky bedroom kind on the market.)

“Don’t mess me about! How was she?”

“Relax. She’s fine. I put the boomer box on for her in the kitchen. A cookery show. Nothing likely to inspire any black pilling thoughts of doom and despair; I avoided Come Dine with Me and MasterChef. As a matter of fact we had a similar conversation to the one we’re going to have up here: one about how you’re going to phone your employer, Talk It Through, make your apologies for not being able to host your debate-a-retard phone-in show for the week as your wife’s mother has been suddenly stricken sick and is on her way out (bless!). You’ll say your sorrys for not having been in touch sooner, explain that the shock of it all has rather taken you all aback, not least your wife, who’s beside herself (and has already phoned in, so if any of her colleagues know your colleagues, they’ll have explained your absence and corroborated the story). You’ll hear all manner of sympathetic bleating from your interlocutor worried about appearing insensitive and bear witness to a range of insufferable if-there’s-anything-we-can-do-for-you-at-this-end clichés. Do not engage—instead, explain that you’ll be in Scotland for a week and fully incommunicado. No embellishing, keep it all vague, and Alistair, it should go without saying that if they don’t believe your story, I will kill you.”

I give the gun a noteworthy shake for good measure and tuck the mace into a trouser pocket. Out of sight, out of mind.

“I’ve already phoned in today,” he says, flatly.

“You’ve what?”

“I phoned in earlier—much earlier—with a migraine.”

“With a what?”

A moronic thing of me to blurt out, admittedly—but he doesn’t repeat himself, thank god, for fear of sounding sarcastic and risking more of my wrath.

“You haven’t mentioned a migraine before—are you messing with me, Alistair?”

“I’m not messing, I promise.”

I slip the gun from hand to hand while thinking this revelation over, while judging him, reflecting on the gun’s heft, the weight of the power I hold over him.

He continues to shake his head as if to shoo away my doubts. “I can prove it,” he says.

“Why didn’t you mention any of this earlier?”

“Because I, er, had a billion other things on my mind, right, not least of all our safety—you see in the past few hours I’ve been knocked out, tied up, held hostage in my own damn home, and even struck across the face with a laptop for speaking out of place—so forgive me, yeah, it may have slipped my mind.”

He’s talking from an honest place, that much is clear, but he’s still holding something back.

“Does your wife know?”

“Does my wife know what—about the migraine?” He pauses here to roll the question over, but my gut says it’s a stall for time. “I don’t know. Maybe. How is it any of your business?” he snaps back, after a less than free flowing reply.

“My life is currently entangled with yours, Alistair, for the foreseeable future, so that makes all of your business mine. Once again, does she know?”

“No, er, I don’t think so.”

“You were all set to chuck a cheeky sicky, on the sly from your better half, and thought it better to avoid any awkward conversations which may have aroused her suspicions, so you kept your phone turned off this morning. But why? That’s the million-dollar question.”

“I get frequent migraines—and she gets worried—I didn’t want to trouble her.”

“Nope, too thin.”

“It’s the truth!”

“The first words I heard from your wife this morning were about your singing—in the shower, presumably—which for her would have been a sign of your rude health.” Alistair shrugs his shoulders to suggest the lack of importance to my point; unfazed by his reaction, I continue unabated: “This made your unconscious state by the front door all the more inexplicable to her.”

“Well, I don’t remember singing.”

“But your wife does—which leaves you here, caught in the crosshairs, incapable of producing any decent fiction to defend yourself, all the while expecting me to accept open-mouthed this low-quality slop that I’m being fed. What we have here is a much larger problem in miniature: this is another failure on your part to create good quality fiction. Not to worry—we can’t all muster believable narratives out of thin air, but you’ll have to try a lot harder on your second attempt.”

“Try harder? It’s the truth!”

“Either you speak more candidly, or I go downstairs and ask your wife for her thoughts.”

“No—there’s no need for that.”

“I appear to have touched on a sensitive spot. Why shouldn’t I ask her, Alistair?”

“Fuck you!”

“Remember what I said: your business is mine until such time as I deem it no longer so.”

He sighs.

Were he to be tasked with portraying Defeat in mime, a master like Marcel Marceau or Chaplin would not have outdone Alistair’s wilting posture, as the weight of the world bears down on him, forcing his shoulders to droop and his head to fall in weary resignation to his fate. “Speak,” I say, nudging him into life.

“Someone was coming around this morning.”

“More.”

“A lady.”

“Ahh! There it is.”

“You really are a fucking arsehole, do you know that! I don’t even know your name, and here I am opening up my life to be dissected like a dead frog on a classroom table.”

Given that most of the arseholery appears to be coming from him, at least as far as his wife’s concerned, I do so want to hit back in my defence—alas, self-righteous asides are currently off the menu with this many loose ends to be tied up.

Needs must.

“What have we here, then? Your paramour was all set to pay you a visit for an extra-marital tumble but didn’t make the call. Why? Because I made a call instead. She parked her car further away so as not to draw unwanted attention to her visit, passed by the building on foot, for safety’s sake, and here she would have noted your wife’s car in the drive, presumably, or the curtains closed, a signal that led her to think twice about calling in on her beau.”

I leave ajar a window of opportunity for him to speak into, which he passes on.

“Your little rendezvous has introduced an unnecessary layer of complexity to what was an otherwise airtight reason for your absence from work, Alistair. In short, you’ve bought yourself a day off from work when what I need is a week.”

After pausing to offer him yet another window through which to speak, I say:

“You’ve become a Trappist monk, wrapped in a cloak of silence and mystery. Fine. That’s your prerogative. Take your damn vows, for all I care. However, I do have one more question before I leave you to brood. You asked earlier about my keeping you and your wife together in the same room. If I were to say —hand on heart—that our secret would stay hidden from her, that your affair will never see the light of day so long as these burgundy brogues stand uninvited on your premises… are you still willing to take her on as a roommate?”

He looks down at the floor, dejected, incapable of meeting my eyes, let alone answering. With just a soupçon of spite, I add: “I’ll take that as a ‘no,’ then, shall I?”

He raises his head, and when his eyes meet mine, they burn with a fiery contempt. And it’s here, in this furnace of anger, that I sense a new chapter in our relations coming into being. The power I hold over him shall henceforth outweigh the humble weight of a gun—that much is certain. But at what cost to me in the long run?