Page 27 of The Trap by Catherine
I remember reading in the papers that they knocked on his door at 6:30 a.m.
Once you leave urban areas and stay off major roads, the chances of you encountering a camera or a license-plate reader drop dramatically. Yeah, there’s still a chance some rich guy with a gaudy mansion in the arse-end of nowhere will have a camera on the gate, or that you’ll whizz past a speed van parked up on some potholed road, or that you’ll pass some wanker with a dash-cam at the worst possible moment, but that would be some very bad luck. The countryside is your friend, basically, is what I’m saying.
That’s why we’re out here.
But I went a step further than simply sticking to the sticks. I went analog.
First, I traded in my car. I had only one requirement beyond it being within my budget: it had to have a dash that didn’t look like the cockpit of the Space Shuttle. I wanted a dumb car, with no built-in GPS or any other kind of internal computer system. What good would it do to avoid the powers-that-be ifmy own vehiclewas recording everywhere I went and when? So I ended up with this, which—I don’t know if you noticed before you got in—is a one-three-one reg. With what I got from my old car—which was practically new—I was able to pay off what remained on the car loanandcover the cost of this, so I could tell Amy I did it because I wanted to reduce our outgoings.
And we needed to do that because, let me tell you, the mortgage iskillingus.
Which reminds me: life assurance. I’ve been trying to find out for months whether Amy would get a payout on my policy if I was found, after the fact, to have committed crimes. You wouldn’t happen to know that, would you? It’s not the sort of thing you can ring up your broker and ask, you know?
Anyway.
After that, all I needed to do was to leave my phone at home. But here’s the thing: I do that regularly. At least two or three times a week, I leave the house without my phone—and when I do have it on me, I rarely use it. I’ve cultivated the persona of someone who doesn’t like smartphones, and I’ve made sure that everybody in my life knows about it, so my not having it doesn’t raise eyebrows or cause me any undue stress. Because people lose their goddamn minds when you go somewhere without your phone, when you render yourself uncontactable. Isn’t that mad? Considering that until... what? Twenty-five, thirty years ago, for all of human existence we’d managed just fine like that.
Now it’s a cause for immediate panic.
I give myself no reason to have it outside of texts and phone calls. I don’t use social media, or convenience apps, or even Google Maps. I use road signs.
Road signs!
Imagine that.
So I’m always driving this dumb car and I’m regularly away from home for long stretches without my phone, and I know if I’m in the countryside, sticking to local roads, I’m unlikely to be caught on any camera.
Now, this is going to sound like a total contradiction of everything I’ve just said, but the next most important thing—and, in some ways, I think this is even more important—is not to plan it in advance. Notonight’s the night. I don’t decide that I’m going to go out and find someone, that before I get into bed I’ll have taken one more. I don’t prepare.
What I am is always prepared—so I can do it at any time.
Think of it this way... Every now and then, you like to go for a swim in the sea. But you’re not a great swimmer and the waters can be rough, so you only ever go in when conditions are exactly right. When the water is calm. When the weather is good. When the tide is at a certain point of retreat, and you feel strong enough for the swim, and when being soaking wet afterward isn’t going to feck up your plans for the day. But that’s a lot of what-ifs, so you can’t really know in advance when all those things are going to come together for you. Your house is a ways from the beach; you don’t know before you leave home whether or not you’re going to be able to have a dip. So you keep all your swimming gear in the boot at the back of the car, always. You drive past the beach regularly. And, occasionally, maybe one time out of ten or fifteen or even as much as twenty, you stop and park up and get out and go for a swim.
It’s safer that way. You’re never disappointed that you didn’t get to go for a swim, only happy that you unexpectedly did. And if, say, someone was watching you, trying to figure out how often you go for a swim, if there’s a schedule or a pattern to it, if maybe the next time you go they can fix it so they’re there too and they catch you in the act, well...
They can’t.
Because evenyoudon’t know when the next time will be.
Things with you were different, of course. But then, they had to be.
When she opened her eyes it was to a darkness so complete that when she closed them again, it made no difference. Her mouth and throat were dry and her lips felt rough and sticky at the outer corners; the airless heat had silently invaded her insides while she slept. There were pools of slick sweat in the folds of her body and at the places where her bare limbs touched, and her hair was stuck to the back of her neck, her cheeks, her forehead. She felt nauseous despite her empty stomach and the skin on her face burned like she’d sat too long in the sun.
This is what it feels like, she thought,to be cooked.
She licked her lips and swallowed and gathered all her hair in a bunch behind her head, but it made no difference. She needed water and fresh air and to not be in this room, but she couldn’t just get up and go get those things.
Not any more.
Not here.
Not with all hisrules.
Elsewhere in the darkness, a body stirred. Three women slept in here, which was the half of a derelict stone cottage that had been made slightly less derelict. Its walls were solid and thick, the expert work of some long-ago builder, but the roof of corrugated steel sheeting was a more recent addition installed by someone who was no expert at all. The glass in the windows was long gone, the portals left behind covered with thick, cloudy plastic that had been nailed into place. The only thing new and solid and fitted right was the door. As a home, its most impressive feature was that it managed to be completely unsuitable to live in no matter what the weather.
He kept promising they wouldn’t have to stay here for much longer, but it had been months since she’d believed him.
She’d already spent a summer here, but that one hadn’t been as hot, and anyway, she’d been too preoccupied with just making it from one day to the next to complain about the conditions. The winter months had been the worst; there was nothing you could do to get the place to hold any heat. Her bed had been a wedge of what might have been insulating foam thrown on the rotting wooden floor and a cocoon of old but thick sleeping bags, and even though back then they were still allowed to build a fire in the cottage’s hearth, she’d woken up on too many mornings with ice crystals in her lashes and pain in her limbs from the cold.
