“Just Another Day” by Nicholas Clarke, London

topic: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT medium: TEXT

As shared at a PenTales event themed “Crime and Punishment”

Photo submitted by Julien-Paul Krauss

I’d love to start by saying it was an extraordinary day, but it wasn’t. It really was just another day. I’d got up, had breakfast, kissed my fiancé goodbye, taken the tube to work, moved a few paintings around, worked on the catalogue for the next exhibition, finished work, got back on the tube, got off the tube, turned the corner into my road, fished in my bag for the keys, and woken up feeling groggy sometime later in a room with no windows, which I’d never seen before.

It really was that simple. One minute I was ruing my imperfect life. The next, I was desperate to get back to it.

My first thought, oddly enough, was that everything was going to be okay. I knew I’d been kidnapped, but for some reason, I was sure life would return to normal at some point. I didn’t know why I’d been kidnapped, but I had a fair idea. I wasn’t part of a rich family or a celebrity, so I ruled out the money option pretty quickly. Then I ran my mind quickly over the other options and hoped I could rule the money option back in.

And let’s be frank here; the other options are sex, violence, or a mixture of the two. I mentally took stock of how much the flat I shared with my fiancé was worth and how much money he and my parents would be able to pool to get me back. I realized it was actually quite a lot, which calmed me down. Temporarily. I wondered how much the man – because it must be a man, it’s always a man isn’t it? – who had kidnapped me wanted. My calculations involving the part of our flat not covered by a mortgage, plus my parents’ cottage, raised about five hundred thousand pounds. Those five hundred thousand pounds became my blanket for a few moments. I mentally curled up in the knowledge that they would pay such an amount of money for me, sure that it would be enough. I was naïve enough not to start looking to the future in which we were five hundred thousand pounds poorer, but I would be back with my family, friends, and fiancé. Then I started to cry.

A bit later, after I’d looked at my watch and found it had gone, my resolve kicked in. I became determined to find out as much as I could about the room.

I rubbed my eyes and took stock. I was still wearing the white shirt, knee-length black skirt, matching white underwear, and tights in what I was already depressingly starting to consider my old life. My watch, bracelet, earrings, shoes, and handbag were nowhere to be seen, but I assumed the faceless He had taken them from me. I sat up now on a white duvet, which covered white sheets and pillows on a white, single bed in one corner of the room. There was a white, wooden wardrobe opposite me at the end of the room, next to the white door I had obviously been brought through, while on my right was a white dressing table with nothing on it. The walls were white, too, as was the carpet, and the room was about ten feet wide with two lights shining down from the ceiling. The room was so unremarkable as to be remarkable.

Two things crossed my mind. One, that the room was in the kind of flat which was left furnished with all furniture and furnishings from IKEA, a kind of all-expenses-spared type of flat. The other was that someone, again the faceless He, had actually gone to the thought and expense of putting together an entirely white room. Was that the act of a madman? Was He somehow in thrall to, or worse, turned on by an absence of color? I smiled, for the first time, as I discounted that thought. The smile didn’t last long. It wasn’t lost on me that the only colors in the entire room were my eyes, my skin, my skirt, and my tights.

I got off the bed and opened all the drawers in the dressing table. They were empty and, worryingly enough, painted white on the inside. The same was true of the wardrobe. It was empty, apart from a white rail. I looked behind the bed, the wardrobe, and the dressing table. There was nothing, except a double wall socket – white, of course, but then again everything is. I tried the door, knowing it would be locked, but couldn’t get it to budge even one millimeter. It felt too heavy to be a normal door. It felt like one of those special, heavier doors, like the ones to bank vaults. I tugged and twisted the round handle, but nothing happened. There was no keyhole.

I suppose because I was generally a quiet soul, I had been putting off doing what most people would do in this situation. I screamed and hit the door. I screamed “HELP” and then I screamed “RAPE,” as a friend had once told me that screaming “RAPE” was pretty much the only way of attracting people’s attention these days. I bashed the door, which made a tiny thud, and I listened. I knew full well the person who answered was likely to be Him, but I didn’t care. I knew I would have to face Him at some point and reasoned that it might as well be now. But I heard nothing and no one came. I looked again at my watch. It wasn’t there. After a long enough amount of time for any neighbors in the vicinity to hear me, I stopped screaming, sat back down on the bed, and cried again, controlled by my lack of control.