Consequences #8 — Jessica

Nor­mally, of course, you don’t get the lux­ury of know­ing that in advance. Nor­mally an abduc­tion would come without warn­ing, without pre­par­a­tion. But this, you see, isn’t nor­mal. It’s part of a train­ing course I’m on, teach­ing me how to do my job in a dan­ger­ous place. My boss has decreed I may be going on an assign­ment in a par­tic­u­larly dan­ger­ous place, so I have to pay par­tic­u­larly close attention.

We’ve been given a scen­ario, and we’re driv­ing around Hamp­shire pre­tend­ing to be in a con­voy trav­el­ling through East­ern Europe. We’re stopped at check­points and roughed up, and I’m almost traded for a bottle of whisky. But we drive on and then, out of the blue, we’re stopped and dragged from the jeep and told to lie face down in the dirt. We’re shouted and screamed at in Afrikaans. We’re hooded and tumbled down a slope and made to sit with our legs apart, lean­ing for­ward, hands on heads. Sit­ting down feels like bliss but after a minute like that, it feels like agony.

This isn’t for real, I whis­per. It isn’t for real, it isn’t for real. They’re real guns, but they’re fake bul­lets. This isn’t for real. Then they smack me around again and tell me going to die. I don’t care how tough you are. You ima­gine that. You ima­gine that and ima­gine not being scared, not being angry. Well, I am. And since I can’t scream at these guys and tell them to go and fuck them­selves, the adren­aline cours­ing round my body has to go some­where, and I feel my eyes prick­ling and sud­denly my face is stream­ing with tears and dirt and snot. I get sand rubbed in my hair and on my face. And when my abduct­ors come and talk to me, offer me a drink of their filthy whisky, I can barely bring myself to talk.

It feels like hours, but it must only be about twenty minutes later that they start lead­ing us away, one by one. When it’s my turn I stag­ger up the steep slope. I give up my watch, but they don’t shoot me. They let me go. Then one of the instruct­ors comes up and tells me it’s fine. Go and clean up, she says. Get a drink of water.

When I see my col­leagues again they’re all try­ing to tough it out. I was bored, says one. It doesn’t com­pare to some of the check­points I’ve been through in Africa. I couldn’t stop laugh­ing, says another. I catch sight of myself in a car wind­screen and my face is streaked with dirt and sweat. I look frightened and filthy. I hate them.

We drive back to our digs and are told to clean up and have a shower. Later, I go down­stairs and am amazed to see all our South African captors, cleaned up, talk­ing lazily to each other. One comes up and tells me how sorry he felt for me. You’re all right, he says. You grabbed on to my hand so tightly and you wouldn’t let go. I couldn’t shoot you while you were hold­ing my hand. I laugh. Do you know, I say, I have no recol­lec­tion of that whatsoever.

In a par­al­lel uni­verse, I died — hot, dirty, con­fused. Hold­ing someone’s hand. I hope it never hap­pens for real.