I met one of them. She was the daughter of a US magnate. He had been some lucky teenager who mastered social media in the early days and shot into the lead, that is, he shot into the lead as a money-spinner. So, she was a rich girl, still is. Why would I go to meet such a person? – such a minor descendent. She should have been a shadow in her father’s shadow, a sub-person perhaps? Rachel Grainger. Well, she had a major problem. I will tell you the story. 

Good to gain fame by virtue of a serious defect. She didn’t have to try very hard. All she did was just to be herself, if you know what I mean. I was a psychologist, trained and with a not very good degree at a rather prestigious university in the UK. The point is we fell in love. It was not so unusual, because she was good at falling in love. I wasn’t; she taught me – in her own way.

That’s the way the story starts, not in Stockholm, but with the Stockholm syndrome. I was doing some research when I was very young, in order to try to get my Masters level qualification. I hit on a rich seam, one that hits, in fact, on the emotions as well as the academic intellect. I am writing this, twenty years after she was kidnapped. She was not the eldest, but she was the easiest to kidnap. It had been the kidnapper’s intention to extract as much of the father’s fortune as possible.

She had been living with her family in Detroit, not a tourist attraction. She was sixteen at the time, and thin, anorexic really, so that I, even with my paralysed arm, could have picked her up and carried her off. But I was there to interview her about the experience but got no reply from my attempts to contact her – text, phone, her father’s media system. So I prowled the neighbourhoods till I spotted her one day after some three weeks sauntering through the uninspiring streets. Twenty years on, she was now quite plump, not especially attractive, but a friendly kind of face. Even then, after all those years she had a thuggish looking guy fifteen yards behind her, nonchalantly looking in shop windows in a most unlikely simulation of an idle shopper. He looked threatening instead, and muscular. He was dark haired, close-cropped, and thick around the neck and upper arms.

She went into a shop where coffee and pancakes were served. She sat at a table, and the evil guy eventually sat down at her table opposite her. I wondered if I should go up to the table and introduce myself. Why not? Nothing to lose – except my front teeth, if the guy took a slug at me.

In the event, she just looked at me, with a friendly stare evolving into a smile. He, the thug, did not smile but stood up and went to the next table, so I could sit opposite her. The smile continued on her face, an inquiring lilt to the lips.

“Excuse me for interrupting,” I asked innocently. She made no response and continued looking at me as if I was an interesting breed of dog or something that caught her attention. “Are you still in danger?” And I nodded briefly behind me in the direction her thug had gone.

“You never know.” Her look of enquiry had not faded. For some reason I did not feel awkward about meeting her unasked. She enjoyed being an object of special interest, I decided.

“I’m a psychologist. I just wondered if I could interview you and your experiences?” 

She looked down, almost as if disappointed. “You’re not the first.”

“Of course. You must be bored with us.”

“Not at all.” She looked slightly bored as if she had been through all this preamble too many times. She moved her chair as if about to get up. “Any time. Just contact me.”

“And I’d like to interview him.” I nodded again in the direction of her ‘thug’.

“You’d better ask him,” but she looked surprised, intrigued.

“Could we make a time now?” I asked, more insistently. And I added, “Mrs Grainger?”

“I’m not Mrs Grainger,” she said quickly. And I had a sudden moment of fear that I’d mistaken who she was. “I’m Ms Ratten, Rachel.” I must have looked a little confused. “Was it about my kidnapping?”

“It was.”

“I have half-a-dozen people a month trying to contact me. I ignore them.” And she looked bored and ready to go. “If you want me, contact me. If it’s him, go ask.”

“I’d like to arrange it now. What about tomorrow morning. Could we? Say 10-ish?”

She nodded, “Well, OK.” When I pushed her, she was surprisingly compliant. “Can I go, now?”

“Sure.” I said reassuringly. “Unless you’d like me to call them over to give us another coffee together.”

She hesitated, again surprisingly. She looked at her watch. “Sorry, I think I’d better go. I have something to do.” And she added slightly mischievously, “Otherwise I could have stayed and asked all about you.” And she stood.

“My name’s Mike, Mike Barland. Rachel.” She looked as if she had never heard of such a name. She probably hadn’t. “Where do we meet? Here? I’ll bring my recorder.”

She looked around the cafe. “OK. Ten then.”

And she moved off behind me. I heard another chair scrape the floor and knew her guard was about to prowl along behind her. I sat back in my chair. Got my coffee cup filled again and wrote a page of impressions from the contact so far.

The next day I was early, and sat at the same table, a coffee poured in front of me. She arrived ten minutes late. She beamed at me as I stood up beside my chair. She offered a hand I shook. “You’re looking good,” I said politely. If her beaming could possibly have got a bit sunnier, it did. We sat. I switched on the recorder. I had decided to plunge in with as much energy, even provocation as possible. “So, you go for dangerous men?”

“Yep. Sure.” She sat back completely relaxed and unruffled. “What about you?” her beaming had changed to a friendly and appreciative smile.

It was my turn to stay calm. “I prefer beautiful women, I guess.” And I put on my most benevolent beam. She unwound a silk scarf from her neck and looked as if I had said she was one of those beautiful women. “Like you,” I said to please her. She looked up, straight into my eyes, as if she was already inviting me to bed. “But first, I wanted to get on with this interview I have to do.” I wasn’t sure why I had said ‘but first’. It seemed as if I was expecting something afterwards. Perhaps I did want to accept her inviting smiling at me. To my mind she was not particularly beautiful, except in her soft invitingness (if that is a word).

At that point the guard came up to the table and said, “I go, put car?” She looked up at him in a significant way. It was as if there were messages in the interchange, as if he were asking if she was comfortable with this stranger, me. And she responded affirmatively, letting him go.

Back to her and me. In this public coffee bar sitting at an often-wiped plastic-topped table with customers walking up and down the aisle next to us, there was a sudden intimacy, a sort of excluding intimacy, as if the rest of the bustle was on some cinema screen. She looked relaxed, open. I felt invited to ask anything I wanted. It was positively homely. But something held me back, despite my experience as a researcher. ‘Get on with it’, I told myself. So, “You are kind to let me listen in to your experience. They must have been terrible. Tell me the worst moment of your kidnapping and the best.”

Her smile had not altered, and she leant forward looking onto my eyes as if she were about to savour a beautiful dish of food. My mind immediately moved to her ample figure which had blown out a little since the pictures of her after her rescue. I imagined her soft skin and even thought of stroking it. “The best moment, first. You know, they grabbed me. With their arms, two of them. My father had always kept me safe, so safe, and anyone I went out with he had to find out about them. But these two, because they were just uninvited criminals were unknown to him, or to me. The held me down, hard. But it felt like a freedom, you know. You probably wouldn’t understand. It felt like they wanted me. I was in the bedroom and in my nightdress, and they’d been hiding there for some time, till I came to bed. They pinned me down to the floor, and first they strapped something sticky round my mouth so I couldn’t scream. But I didn’t try. Like I said it felt like a freedom. I didn’t have to have his permission to be wanted.” She sat back as if satisfied, or she might have been thinking of something else to say to try to make me understand, though she seemed to believe I would not. “I wasn’t crazy, you know. It seemed a perfectly simple way to be me with anyone else.” I was nodding my understanding. This precious girl that her father kept locked up has, she seemed to be saying, been rescued from him. “They tied me. My wrists to my ankles; my knees to my throat. Have you ever been tied up?” 

I stopped nodding. “No, er… it could be uncomfortable.” She was waiting for me to expand. “So you had felt locked up by your father, all your life, I guess. 

Now she nodded, “You got it.” And she glanced away as if noticing the world around for the first time. “I guess it is nice to be precious for him. I’ve got Alberto who follows me around. Alberto from Mexico. He keeps me safe.” And she glanced to the door as if she expected him to come in.

“OK. He’s gone out to check the car. Do you feel safe with me, right now?”

She laughed, almost silently as if I was being ridiculous. “You’re a nice guy, right? You’re not dangerous. There was still a laugh in her throat as if she was mocking me. “I’ll do what you want.” 

I was uncertain what that meant. It seemed like she was giving me a very wide permission. “Let’s get back to that moment. Freedom you say. But you couldn’t move.”

She put up her hand to stop me, “Freedom from my Dad. That’s what I said. I didn’t have to have permission to be wanted by someone. I was nineteen then. My Mom had left years before. It had just been me and my Dad for years. I loved him. I’d have done anything for him. Well, I would now. I asked him if I should talk to you. He said I should, so I am talking to you.” She put her head on one side as if asking me what I thought of that. She was not talking to me because I had asked, but because her Father had said she should.

It put me in my place. I wanted to ask her what it would feel like if I tied her up. But that was not my interviewing technique. “It sounds very uncomfortable to be tied like that?”

“Yep,” she said as if disinterested. “But I liked it. It seemed something so new. It was…. kind of exciting. You know. They carried me out of the house. I don’t know how no-one noticed. But they did it. I was in the boot of their car, and they drove off.”

“You weren’t frightened?”

“Yes, I was. Yes and no. It was exciting, as well, I told you.  They were taking me to something new.”

Sounds like you were bored with your life at home?”

“Well, wouldn’t you be?” Then she stopped and changed her tone, “Look I want some more coffee, and I’d like a doughnut. I saw some on the counter.”

“OK, of course.” And I waved to a waitress till she saw me and came over for my order. This waitress looked hard at me. She was slim, fresh, innocent. What a contrast to the tired and bored Rachel. I felt I was invited to meet a challenge from this young girl, in contrast to Rachel’s heavy predictability. I turned back to my job. “Can I ask you; had you had relations with men, were you an experienced woman of nineteen?”

She looked at me with a new blank disinterest, “What do you think?” I wondered if she had noticed my interest in the sexy waitress. 

“Did you think they were taking you away to…. err, use you for sex? What did you think it was all about?”

“I knew what it was all about. They would sell me back for money. It was obvious, wasn’t it?” And then she said more reflectively. “Of course I wanted to be used for their sex. I was a pure young girl wanting to be impure. That’s obvious too. Isn’t it?” I nodded. 

“Didn’t you want sex at that age? Whatever the conditions?” I wasn’t going to answer that. She went on, “I was excited, I told you. My worry was I’d get pregnant.” She continued to look reflective. “But I might have wanted that too. I wanted a woman’s body. It was as if I’d been kept in a prison, wrapped up in a condom as it were.” I was surprised at her inventive imagery. She had seemed to have so little sparkle in her.

“And did they use you, Rachel?”

“Of course they did. In fact….” And she stopped. The doughnut arrived. I didn’t look in the direction of the waitress. But Rachel remained hesitant. “I haven’t told anyone else this. I asked them. I fucking asked them.” For the first time something like shame or embarrassment clouded her expression for a moment, and then her inviting smile returned. “I asked them to rape me because I wanted to know what it was like.” This time there was a little laugh that was more like a scoff. It was scoffing at herself, as if it was silly and juvenile.

“I can see,” I said.

She looked at me sharply, “What can you see?”

“You wanted to know what it was like to be a woman.”

She looked at me sharply again, as if surprised that I would understand. “Perhaps you understand.” She seemed to be reluctant to admit she was a little impressed by my understanding her. She gave a deep sigh as if she was not accustomed to being understood. The sigh heaved her ample breasts up and then down. I think she noticed me looking at them.

“So did you find out what it was like to be a women?”

She hesitated again. “Yes, I did. Fuck me, I did. They were good at it. Both of them. I know what good sex is.,” and she added ruefully, “ There’s not much else in my life.” She sat back and was looking at me. “The only other thing in my life is fuckers coming around and asking me about it.” She was getting crude, and implied her scoffing might be returning. “You can have me if you want.” She said it in a very matter-of-fact way, as if she was asking for another doughnut.

“That might be very nice,” I said politely, “But first let’s get back to the interview.” 

Her smile was now fading. She looked down at her plate. “OK. OK, it was exciting. Of course. I admit it. I don’t care what you say in your report.”

“Because you felt wanted. Desired.”

“Well - wanted in a different way from my Father. I loved him. Don’t get that wrong. And he wanted the best for me. And he paid out four million for me, didn’t he. That’s love, isn’t it.” She looked up at me and repeated her invitation. “Are you sure you don’t want to stuff my vagina.” She sniggered at her own crudeness. “I’m waiting, you know. I’m anybody’s.” She waved her arms slightly in a distracted sort of way as if being absurd could cancel everything people said about her.

I tried not to sound pompous, “I am not here for that, Rachel.” She really was not very attractive. I felt a sadness for her. She seemed so lost as this kind of celebrity, or anti-celebrity who had no respect in the public media. “I am just interested in the experience you had. It must have been bad and good at the same time. I think that’s important.”

“Huh,” she started. “I’m just a thing. An ornament on the shelf. An ugly ornament, aren’t I?”

“I don’t know about that. You are someone who had a terrible experience. And can teach everyone else something about it. Something about human beings, the good and the bad.” 

She shook her head, as if giving up. “OK, what you wanna know?”

“Well, I guess I want to know all the things I don’t know about it. About what it was like.” I tried to look serious and sympathetic – because I did feel it, even in this now tense situation. “I guess it is pretty traumatic to go over it all again – just remembering.”

“You’re sounding like my therapist!”

“Good,” I said, no longer knowing how to handle this distraught women. Perhaps I should just go home with her and stuff her vagina – as she put it – If it could make her feel better. “It’s OK. You’ve had an experience only a few people have had. Perhaps we should all know more what it was like.”

“Why?” She was now asking a question difficult to answer. “Why can’t you be interested in me. Not just interested in the one experience I’ve ever had. That’s all I am for everybody. The fucking body that was raped by my kidnappers.”

“It is not quite like that. I’m sorry you feel like that. Maybe we should start with everything else you are.”

And the interview went on….

 

She told me about her mother and her father, and other relatives, the social occasion, last thanksgiving, and so on. She was very compliant. It was all very prosaic. She was right she is of no interest except what had happened to her those five years ago. I was feeling sorry for her. And she asked for another doughnut. I couldn’t help myself from looking at her slightly expanded waistline. I did call for another doughnut, but said, “If I really wanted to be good to you I’d say ‘no’. I’d control your eating so that you lost a bit of that weight and you’d show that slim beauty that is hiding inside your body.” 

Her smile returned and she looked intensely at me. “Would you do that for me?” I had pleased her for once – my reference to her slim beauty, I supposed. 

And at that moment, she did appeal to me. It was not her physical presence but that she could appreciate me, could appreciate something I’d said to her. It switched on an electric light in her that shone in her smile in a different way from before. For a moment I felt very drawn to her. Well, to be honest, it was more than a moment. I put my arm across the café table and laid my hand on her arm. She looked at it as if it was a wasp or some uninvited insect about to prey on her. “It feels good to touch your arm,” I persisted.”

“Oh,” she said, almost as if triumphant, “So you do want me?”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just that for a moment I saw something warm and alive, and beautiful in your heart.” She looked blank. “You just think you’re a pile of trash, don’t you?”

“I’m not garbage,” she said defensively. “That’s what those two bastard’s told me I am.” She was looking hard and angry.

“I’m not saying you are garbage or trash. “I’m saying you’ve got beauty in your heart.”

“Are you?” she said suspiciously. She was not going to let me get away easily. She’d misunderstood me, and wasn’t going to let that easily go. “You think I’m garbage. You think you can touch me up when you feel like it.” So I took my hand away. She noticed and seemed momentarily reflective. “I liked your hand on me.” And then she quickly reverted, “Is this what your interviews are like. Just a way to get to fucking me?”

“No,” I said, “I’ve abandoned the interview. I made you feel a specimen, Just an ornament. I’m sorry about that.”

“So now you just want to stuff me instead.”

“No. Not at all. Well, I mean….” I didn’t mean to say that to her. “I mean, that may come later. Right now, I was trying to say, I know what it’s like to feel I’m a waste of space, no confidence no use to anyone. It’s what I used to tell myself when I was a kid.”

She was looking with some curiosity, but perhaps not believing I could possibly understand how she felt. “So,” she enquired eventually, “What changed?” She looked sceptical.

“Well, it changed a bit after my book. You know I wrote a book about holocaust survivors – the non-Jewish ones who get neglected. Everyone thought I was great. They told me good things about my sensitivity. I hadn’t had many compliments in my life.”

“Why?”

“Oh. My parents put me up for adoption when I was a few years old. Then the agency couldn’t find anyone who wanted to adopt me. I think it was because I was black.”

“Yeah,” she said as if beginning to be a little sympathetic. “Probably the same over here in the States.” She looked a little speculative. “If you’re black, you can give a good fuck. That’s all.” She seemed to be relenting a little. “If you’re rich you’re an ornament, if you’re black you’re just a fuck-machine.”

I nodded, not so much because I agreed with that, but because she seemed to be commiserating; we had something in common. “Seems like you’re interviewing me, now.”

She laughed out loud for the first time. “Tables turned. You’re not an ace interviewer, are you.” I smiled at her glee but didn’t feel the humour. “Sorry, she said. “We’re both garbage. Two bits of litter.” But she was obviously feeling in a better mood.

“But,” I said, wanting to change the subject, “You should write a book. Seriously.”

“What?” she said looking aghast. “Why?”

“Well, you’re intelligent. You’ve got time; and connections. And you’ve got this horrendous experience everyone is fascinated with.”

“They’re not fascinated with it.”

“Irresistible fascination. The worst trauma this side of being murdered. Right. And it is exciting, too. What could be more complicated, complex, intriguing. How could anyone ever cope with such a combination – everyone will ask that.”

“Rubbish.”

“It is not rubbish. You don’t know what your life’s about. You can’t give yourself a reason to exist. Well, this is it. And if you want help with the writing, you know a writer. Me!”

She looked at me with surprise as if she could not have conceived of a black being a writer. “Yeah,” she mumbled as if she had to keep her thoughts to herself.

So, I said, “A black writer. What would Daddy say to that?” She did not answer.

As we left the coffee shop, she put her arm in mine and said “Wish the world didn’t hate your lot so much – cos I could fall in love with you.” I squeezed her arm with my elbow.

“We could emigrate to Nigeria!” 

She pulled her arm from mine abruptly and stopped, staring into my face with an angry gleam. “If you want me, have me. If you don’t, fuck off, and stuff your own ass.” She turned to start walking again. “That’s your choice.” And as we started walking again, I put her arm under mine as before. It is no use to me, except for a nice lady to hold; it is withered and I don’t know what it felt like to her. I was thinking about the choice he gave me. As we walked away close together, I think she thought I had chosen the first option. I wondered about the other kidnapped victim I had lined up for my research sample. Falling for the first of them, did not promise well. Her thug-man fell into step some twenty paces behind us.

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