NINE

Only the boy is awake to watch the next scene with us. The others have argued themselves to exhaustion and they now lie contented, each one of them sure of their own theory’s truth. For a full hour after the event, they searched for the hidden speakers, the projector, the holographic screen inside the glass. They had found nothing, scrabbling in the dark. But that didn’t stop old man Rashid from declaring the Russians as evil puppeteers and chewing out the rim of his hat in case it had bugs woven into the very fabric. He did not look as if he enjoyed chewing his hat, but he did so methodically and with minimum effort. Perhaps he had been trained for such an event.

And now they are asleep. Huddled together for comfort and scant warmth, at the end of the carriage furthest away from the sludge of watery faeces dubbed “toilet corner”. The smell of it lies on everything like a film of grease, but that corner is the worst. The boy holds on to his mother’s hand as she sleeps and he dares not close his eyes.

This time there is no blank canvas, no outpouring of blood. The scene is no longer a widescreen presentation on the carriage’s window; it now glows solely from the face of his digital wristwatch.

Down here in the dark, this watch is the boy’s most treasured possession. The little backlight grants him a kind of power. People ask him to use it to look at their reflections in the windows, or to look at their companions. To find things. Handing it over, like he had for the recent camera/projector search, always tugged at his heart, but he felt better about the others that they should ask and not just take, and he felt better about himself to be willing to share its light. It would be a mistake to imagine the battery failing, as everyone else’s had failed before, so he doesn’t.

And besides the useful searching, there was the game they played. The boy was in charge of the game and no-one questioned this. At some point, a person would say the time they thought it must be. This was especially difficult in the dark isolation. And so the boy would decide whether enough time had passed to warrant a look, and if he felt it was so, he would feel for the small button on the side and press it. The time would be there and although it had ceased to give much meaning to them, people were always glad to know. The boy was especially pleased when someone’s guess hit close to the mark. And Clara, she was good at the game.

And so we see that on his own little screen, there is a net of light caught on water. The light on the surface quivers, as if urgent to be free of the trapping water. Porcelain smoothness underneath, curving to a flat bottom. The smallest hairline cracks in the white, and a small pink toe comes into view. The boy holds the image closer to him and we don’t trust the sickly glow that reflects onto his face.

He looks for the thing he dreads to see, and finds it; the ragged shadow, and the man. Standing over the girl in the bath, the man drops a green-blue bar of soap into the water, causing a splash and then a muffled thud. The little girl’s hair fans out like a veil and moves in the disturbed water.

The man takes something from the bathroom cabinet – swinging the mirrored door too quickly to show us his face – and fiddles with it in his hands. He works something open, and pulls out a string of dental floss. He pulls out a great length of it, and keeping the end between his fingertips, he places the spool on the edge of the bath. He plucks the girl’s hand from the water and makes it clear he wants her to hold it out to him. She does so, trembling only slightly. She does not cry.

The man ties the floss around her little finger, pulling it just tight enough to squeeze. He stands, takes the spool of floss from the bathside and puts it into his pocket. He exits the scene and the floss pulls taught and slowly unwinds with his leaving.

The girl sinks back into the water. Only her left hand is now in view, curled over the edge of the bath. The floss pulls sharply twice; some kind of signal from the man. A quiet sobbing now, and such tiny, plump fingers.