Then You Were Gone. Claire Moss

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       Chapter Four

      Jessica didn’t know what time it was, only that it was dark. It was often dark here. They were a long way north for one thing – further north than she had ever been before – and it was winter, but also there were so many shadows in these forests. She had gone outside yesterday at midday just to get some air, and she had barely been able to see the rutted mud track beneath her feet. The trees, uniform in their silence and solidity, gave nothing away, standing aloof and impenetrable, the low clouds getting trapped in their highest branches. They let in no light and would let out no sound. If she screamed and cried, begging for help or rescue, if a gun was fired, if the cabin blew up, these trees would hold the sound in, and nobody would ever know what had happened to her.

      The baby shifted inside her and pushed its feet up behind her ribs; she sighed and got out of the damp-smelling fold-out bed. This was why she could never sleep. This was why she never knew what time of day it was, whether it was morning or midnight, whether she was hungry because she’d missed breakfast or because she’d missed dinner or because this little creature was sapping her of every ounce of nourishment and she was simply starving bloody hungry all the bloody time.

      She stood up and, feeling her feet shrink from the grainy, ice-cold lino, wished for the four-hundredth time that she’d brought her slippers. She wished she’d brought a lot of things. Like a phone, for God’s sake, or her iPad – not that he would have let her use them even if she had. He wouldn’t even switch his own phone on. ‘That’s how people get caught,’ he kept saying.

      She waddled to the small hold-all in the corner of the little room and took the small crocheted blanket from the bag she had packed ready to go to the hospital when the baby came. She put the blanket round her shoulders and crept back to bed, tucking her feet under her to try and warm them up.

      He had made her bring the bag with the baby things in it, even though he’d kept saying she shouldn’t bring too much stuff. ‘We don’t know how long we might have to be away,’ he had said. She had thought he was mental. Well, obviously she had thought he was mental anyway; what other explanation could there be for what he was doing? But she still had nine weeks to go before her due date. He really was crazy if he thought she would still be in this shack in the woods with him by then.

      But now days had passed – maybe a week? She couldn’t tell. All those grey misty mornings that never materialised into a real day, those long, black, wakeful nights wheezing and coughing and trying to get comfortable. All those hours had passed and she was still here.

      She could hear sounds now. He was starting to move around in the other room, coughing and shuffling and being conspicuously quiet, as though if he tried not to disturb her in the mornings then that would make up for everything else. For it must be morning, if he was up. Another day, more long hours where nothing happened and still she could not go home. Jessica pulled the baby’s blanket tighter around her shoulders, lay back down and closed her eyes.