The Bunker Diary (9 page)

On the way back to my room I saw Anja and
Bird again. They were still sitting at the dining table, still talking. They
must have been at it all night. Anja had cleaned up her hair and Bird
had taken off his jacket and tie. His shirt sleeves were neatly rolled up and he was
making those infuriating hand gestures that business people make all the time –
pointing, chopping, open-palmed questions. Yuh yuh yuh? Anja was leaning forward with
her legs crossed, nodding sincerely at all the right moments, flicking at her hair.

They didn’t acknowledge me.

One more thing before I leave it for
tonight. Bird said the man got him when he was coming home from work yesterday evening.
But, as far as I’m aware, yesterday was a Sunday.

What does that mean?

1) Bird works on Sundays? Unlikely.

2) Bird’s lying? Possible.

3) I’ve got the days mixed up. More
than likely.

That’s all.

We’ve had a meeting.

Anja and Bird announced it. 10.00 am. At the
dining table.

This is how it started:

BIRD
(opening his
notebook): Is everybody ready? Fred?

FRED
(staring at the
ceiling, picking burnt skin from his lips): Yeah, what?

BIRD
: Are you
ready?

FRED
: Ready for
what?

BIRD
: We need to talk.
All of us.

FRED
(grinning): Right,
go on then.

BIRD
(looking round the
table): OK, let’s start by finding out who we all are. I’ll set the ball
rolling. My name’s Will Bird. I’m 38 years old. I was born in Southend and I
moved to Chelmsford ten years ago. I share a house with my partner, Lucy, a call-centre
manager. I’ve been a management consultant for eight years, mostly in the banking
industry. Before that I worked in customer service training. In my spare time I enjoy
paintball games and tinkering with radio-controlled cars. Linus?

ME
: What?

BIRD
: Tell us about
yourself.

ME
: Why?

BIRD
: Communication,
trust –

ME
: Trust?

ANJA
(to me): Listen to
him. He’s trying to help.

BIRD
(smiling at her):
Thank you. (Turning to me with a fake smile) Hey, come on, we have to work together,
Linus. We have to pool our resources.

ME
:
Hey
, I
know.

BIRD
: We need spirit,
determination, solidarity –

ME
: What we need is a
way out of here.

FRED
: Fucking
right.

ANJA
:
Christ!

FRED
(glaring at her):
What’s the matter with you?

ANJA
: Nothing.

FRED
: Yeah, fucking
nothing. Tell me about it. You and your fucking nothing. Ever since you got here all
you’ve done is sit around all day on your tight little arse doing fuck all, then
this fat ponce comes along and all of a sudden you’re up for it.

BIRD
: Now just a
minute
 –

FRED
(giving him a
threatening look): Yeah?

ANJA
(sneering): Oh,
that’s right. Why don’t you hit him with a saucepan?

FRED
: At least
I’m trying.

ANJA
: You can say that
again.

FRED
: Fuck you.

BIRD
(hitting the
table): That’s
enough
!

FRED
: Fuck you too, fat
stuff.

Then Jenny started crying.

We took a break.

Anja and Bird went off down the corridor and
the rest of us went into the kitchen. While Jenny washed her face and dried her tears, I
made some tea and talked quietly to Fred.

‘You’re frightening
Jenny,’ I told him. ‘Keep it down a bit. And go easy on the swearing.
She’s only a kid.’

‘Kids don’t give a shit about
swearing.’

‘Some of them do.’

‘Yeah, well …’

‘You’re scaring her.’

‘It’s not my fault. It’s
them, Bird and Anja, they’re doing my head in. All this
meetings
shit –’

‘Yeah, I know. I don’t like it
either. But getting all worked up about it isn’t going to help, is it?’

He looked at me, his eyes cold with
violence.

‘You know what I could do to
them?’ he said.

‘All sorts, I imagine.’

‘You’d be surprised.’

An intimate silence hung in the air for a
moment. Dirty and hard. I couldn’t break it. Whatever words I wanted to say were
stuck in the back of my throat. It was all I could do to keep looking at Fred. His great
stone head filled the room with unspoken menace.

Then, all at once, his eyes twinkled and his
mouth broke into a grin and he leaned across the table and clumped me on the
shoulder.

‘You know what our trouble is?’
he said.

‘What?’

‘You and me … we’ve
both been fucked right from the start.’

My home is a big house in the country.
It’s got six bedrooms, three bathrooms, three reception rooms, a wine cellar, a
library, riding stables, a croquet lawn, and a swimming pool. My dad owns three cars. We
have another house in California and a villa in the Algarve. And from the age of twelve
I’ve had the best education money can buy.

Yeah, Fred, you’re right: fucked from
the start.

After half an hour we tried the meeting
again. This time we stuck to the basics.

Who, or what, is our abductor?

A psycho.

A pervert.

A people collector.

What does he want?

To watch us.

To kill us.

To keep us as pets.

Where are we?

In a basement.

A cellar.

Somewhere near London?

Somewhere in Essex?

What are we going to do?

Survive.

Escape.

How are we going to survive?

Eat.

Drink.

Keep ourselves clean.

Stay calm.

Get organized.

How do we get organized?

The way we get organized, apparently, is by
drawing up a rota of duties. Which has now been done. So, from now on:

One of us takes charge of the shopping list,
logging requests throughout the day, thinking about what else we need, then writing the
list and making sure it’s in the lift by nine o’clock each evening.

One of us does the washing-up and general
cleaning. Any rubbish, put it in a bin liner and put it in the lift. (Put bin liners on
the shopping list.)

One of us waits for the lift each morning,
collects the shopping and puts it away.

And one of us cooks. Twice a day.
Nine-thirty and six-thirty. If you want anything else to eat at any other time, you have
to get it yourself.

We take it in turns, a rota system,
different duties every day.

Another question we tried to discuss at the
meeting was How Do We Get Out Of Here? And it was at this point that the meeting went
very quiet, and one by one we all looked up at the grille in the ceiling. It looked back
at us, mocking our silence with its cold white eye. All-seeing, all-hearing.

Fred broke the silence. ‘How can we
get out of here if he’s watching us all the time? We can’t even
talk
about escaping.’

‘You’re sure they’re
cameras?’ Bird said.

I nodded. ‘And microphones.’

‘And you can’t cover them
up?’

‘What do you think this is?’ Fred
said, indicating his burnt face. ‘Sunburn?’

‘Hmm,’ muttered Bird, scribbling
something in his notebook.

‘Give me that,’ I said to
him.

‘What?’

‘Your notebook.’

‘I’m keeping notes of the
meeting –’

‘Just give it here a
second.’

He reluctantly passed it over.

‘Pen?’

He passed me his pen.

I shielded the page with my hand and wrote:
We’ve all got a notebook. Keep your back to the cameras, write down any
escape ideas, bring them to the table at 10 each night. We can discuss.

Then I passed the notebook around. When
everyone had read it, I said, ‘OK?’

It was OK.

I said to Bird, ‘Have you kept a
written record of the whole meeting?’

‘Of course.’

I nodded. ‘Right, well, there’s
one more person to come. It’ll be easier if you just show him or her your notes
rather than having to go over everything again.’

‘What do you mean, one more person to
come?’ asked Anja.

‘It’s pretty obvious,
isn’t it? There are six rooms down here. Six plates, six
cups … there’s six of everything. But only five of us. There must be one
more to come.’

A long day.

Nothing happens.

We eat, we drink, we stay calm, we get
organized. We all look terrible. Pale, drained, haunted. Anja is developing an
unbalanced stare. When she’s not in her room she walks around looking busy all the
time, but her eyes are permanently unfocused, like a caged bear at the zoo. Bird
can’t keep his eyes off her. He keeps scratching his groin and rubbing his face.
Although he’s only been here a short while he’s already got a thick growth
of stubble on his chin. All over his face, in fact. He’s a hairy man is Mr Bird.
Fred’s beard is longer but stragglier, a bit like Shaggy’s beard. You know,
Shaggy from
Scooby-Doo
. Not that Fred looks anything like Shaggy. He’s
more like Desperate Dan. Imagine Desperate Dan with Shaggy’s beard and junkie eyes
and tattoos all over his body – that’s what Fred looks like.

I don’t know what I look like. I
don’t really care. You don’t get any points for looking good down here. I
feel
pretty scummy though, and that’s not nice. No matter how many
times I wash, my skin still feels dirty and clammy, like the dirt is underneath the
skin. My head itches too.

The whole thing stinks.

I haven’t had a chance to talk to Bird
about what day it was when he was abducted. Actually, that’s a lie. I’ve had
plenty of chances to talk to him, I just don’t want to. As you’ve probably
guessed, I don’t like him. He creeps me out. And anyway, it doesn’t really
matter what day it was. If he’s lying, he’s lying. There’s nothing I
can do about that. And if he’s not lying, and I’ve lost a
day … well, so what? Who cares what day it is?

6.30 p.m.

Time for tea.

Yippee.

10.30 p.m.

We’ve just had our first evening
meeting. As it was my suggestion, I had the pleasure of collecting everyone’s
notebooks and reading their escape ideas. Jenny was asleep, so there were only the four
of us. Four people. Four pages.

Apart from a neat little heading –
ESCAPE
 – Anja’s page was blank.

Bird had written –
Dig???
Communicate

Fred had suggested –
Fire, note down
bog

And I’d written –
Distraction.
Distract him, hide someone in lift. How? Who?

‘Dig?’ I said to Bird.
‘We’re in a bloody basement. We’re underground. Where the hell are we
going to dig to?’

‘
Shhh!
’ he hissed,
pointing at the ceiling.

‘Dig,’ I muttered, shaking my
head.

‘It was only a thought,’ Bird
said defensively. ‘I was only, you know, brainstorming.’

‘You call that a
brainstorm
?’

Fred laughed.

Bird blushed. ‘All right, maybe
it’s not such a good idea. But what about the other one? Communication. Why
don’t we try talking to him?’

‘You think he’ll listen?’
I said.

‘We won’t know unless we
try.’

‘I already have. I didn’t get
very far.’

‘Maybe you didn’t do it
properly. Communication is a delicate business. It’s not just a question of
sending a message, you have to think about
how
the message is sent.’