Forty-Second Day

I take up my pencil as I hear footsteps approaching the door.

The door is openend and I throw down my pencil.

Forty-First Day

This is my penultimate day, unless they decide to keep me longer. It was grimly satisfying. They didn't interview me, speak to me, it was a day like so many others in the last forty. It encapsulates in twenty four hours the last six weeks of my life.

I haven't been able to think about anything but tomorrow. If they let me leave, when will it be? Will they bother to keep me until a minute to midnight? Where will they let me out?

In fact, I'd love to claim that I spent the day examining some higher purpose, or reflecting on those lessons I have learned over the last six weeks. That in a rejection of all that has happened I will go out and fight for freedom, that I have come to know my 'true, inner self'. I don't think it has been like that. The last six weeks have been boring - very, guilt inducing -when interrogated, and frustrating - in short but extreme bouts. I don't think that there are any take-homes from this.

I wonder what they do to those they don't treat so gently.

Fortieth Day

- Can I ask you a question, Sir?

- Go ahead.

- Why am I here?

- You are being detained in accordance with English law on suspicion of involvement with terrorists cells operating…

- I know, I know. But that tells me nothing, does it? If you ask a waiter what is on the menu, surely you would want to here something more than “oh, a wide variety of original and tasty dishes, prepared using only the best ingredients from all over the world”. That would tell you just as much about the actual selection as your answer has informed me of why I’m actually here, tell me if I’m wrong.

- Well, we had hoped that you would give us the answers. Why do you think you are here. Use your imagination.

- I only know what you have told me - that I am here because of something that has to do with M. Surely you must have realised by now though that I have nothing to do with him. That you were wrong from the beginning. Is that why I am still being held here? Because you don’t want to admit to yourselves that you made a mistake capturing me in the first place? Or do you really think that I will rush home to make petrol bombs together with M as soon as you release me?

- What do you think?

- Don’t give me that! For fuck’s sake don’t give me that! I’m not stupid you know - I know there must be something or else I wouldn’t be here. It’s been forty days now and I have tried hard, indeed used the full capacity of my imagination to come up with possible explanations as to why I’m being held here. I have tried to decipher every conversation I have had with M in search of hidden messages, I have attempted to go through just about everything I have done or said to anyone in the past year, and I still don’t know. I’m only asking you out of curiosity - why am I here - and all you ask me to do is to think about it! I tell you what - I’m not going to think about it any more. I am just going to accept that I don’t know, and it comforts me to know that you don’t seem to have a clue either.

- First of all, I never thought you were stupid. No one does. People who end up here seldom are, and even more rarely do they spend their time making petrol bombs. Second, you should know that we are not stupid either. Trying to provoke or insult me won’t do you any good - if you are clever enough you’ll realise that. Third, it must certainly have crossed you mind that we’re being extremely gentle with you. You cannot think that this is how we treat all our “guests”. If someone withholds information from us that we deem necessary for us to acquire, we usually find a way to get it. In you case...let’s just say we are slightly curious about certain things and that you’ll know when our interest grows stronger. And frankly, I don’t really care whether or not you know why you’re here so long as we get something out of it - and whether we do is for us to decide.

- In that case, I certainly hope you have low standards, or else you must be terribly disappointed by know.

- As I said, that is for us to decide, and in my humble opinion we do possess the greater expertise in that respect. And I believe we are done for today. Take him away.

That’s it. Today’s interrogation word by word as accurate as I can remember it. And if I fail miserably to see the reason why I am being detained, I struggle equally to see in what way our conversation can be of any use to them. But that’s their problem, not mine. I am merely here as guest to still the curiosity of my hosts.

Thirty-Ninth Day

Rain.

I would give anything for rain on my head.

I can hear it outside, just. I want it cascading through my hair and down my temples, dripping into my eyes and merging with my tears and, possibly, my snot.

Thirty-Seventh Day

An extraordinary thing happened today. I met a person from outside. I know, the guards I see every day, and my interrogators, all have lives beyond these walls. When here, though, they are parts of the machinery of this institution and of its fabric. The girl I met today was luminous by comparison.

I was led from my room through our bleak corridors in the usual way, my squat guard silent but for echoing footfalls. He stayed with us in the interrogation room.

I'm not sure quite who the girl was. She could have been an official, but could just as easily have been an undergraduate on some quixotic project, who in her naivity had got access to me - something I cannot imagine any more hardened researcher attempting. The girl was preposterously young. I imagined some sleepy bureaucrat signing her off, his mind preoccupied with the recent discovery of his teenager's dope habit, or maybe with a particularly ripe cleavage he'd been staring at on the tube that morning. She asked me about my sleeping patterns, my general health, and made me perform some tasks, some word games, some mental arithmetic. This was evidently some form of psychological assessment, but it didn't feel all that rigorous.

Frankly, I wasn't interested in what this girl - I cannot think of her as a woman - was asking me. I was taken aback by her presence, and how it made me feel. She had luxuriant, tousled hair. Her face was plain but confident and happy and made up with skill. She was tanned. Her handbag was obviously costly, and a pair of sunglasses lay beside it on the table between us. Here was a wealthy woman, but in no sense a glamorous one. She was too young and too English and the illusion she gave of carelessness and a lack of preening was far too successful for that. In a word, the girl I met today was a picture of privilege.

I was prompted to an absurd feeling. I resented this girl's privilege and that of her class, and I felt a desperate pang of envy. I didn't just want the trappings this creature enjoyed, or even her freedom to come and go from my prison, I wanted to be as much like her as I could be. I wanted to be young and beautiful and born to a life of the best of everything.

My parents should not have pursued their worthy but ordinary lives, I thought. Neither should I now be satisfied with what I now accept as my fate. I should be striving to bring my children or theirs to this girl's heights. Somehow, though, I have accepted the life that has been thrust upon me as my own and as right for me. I know or think I know that this girl will not grow up to be happier or healthier than I, or to have a better understanding of the world. Almost everyone in the world has someone to envy, and they console themselves with thoughts such as these.

There is a connection between privilege and freedom, of course - freedom to choose what to do with one's life, and more importantly with each hour of the day - the ability to buy time for study or travel or for blow-drying one's hair is what sets apart the rich from the poor. Historically this divide was all the wider, I suppose, if that's not so vague as to be meaningless. Writing about class, and now history, I cannot help but think of class struggle, which means Marx, which means revolution. This Sloaney girl made me think of the Manifesto. 'Workers of the world...' and the rest. Where shall we place my detention in the history of the modern age? What does it say about these times? I don't know the answer. I know I don't have the perspective to give an answer. But it feels like the end of history. If those with power in the UK believe themselves threatened by me, and this is all the response they can muster, this is an effete age indeed. It is as though history has been replaced by politics.

I will stop here, though this isn't all I have to say.

Thirty-Sixth Day

Last night, I had a dream.

I don't usually remember my dreams; at home, I wake to the sound of an alarm most mornings, and any momentary dream fragments remaining in my consciousness are pushed out by beep after beep after beep.

But now that I spend days drifting between waking and sleep, there is ample opportunity to let the end of my dreams flower in that walled garden of half-sleep, that Sunday-morning half-tossing, half-stretching that goes on without any concept of time or pressure.

Yet, from these kind of dreams, I would rather wake up.

I'm on a treadmill in a laboratory, being analysed by some kind of white-coated scientists - one man and one woman. Traditional nerdy types with clipboards and faces like a slapped arse. I'm linked up to heart-rate monitors and such like. The treadmill slowly gets faster, and suddenly they start asking me where M is.

Each time I reply that I don't know, the treadmill gets noticeably faster. I can't see the speed dial on the treadmill, but I know from experience that if it has been constantly increasing in speed for this long, it must be well over what the human body can tolerate. But I'm still managing to run - only just. It's a dream, so the treadmill can both go on increasing indefinitely in speed and making me panic and yet still remain within the realms of what I can physically handle. It goes on and on, round and round.

*

It's funny, this dream, because I haven't been interrogated for a while now.

And it's not like this can be a subconscious analogy for torture, because - clealry, quite clearly - I haven't been subjected to any.

Thirty-Fifth Day

What a load of old shit I’ve been writing. ‘I wonder if I really want to leave’: of course I want to leave. I just want to get out of here. It doesn’t matter if, in the outside world, my choices are arbitrary or irrational, if I’ve always drunk coffee when actually I prefer tea. It just doesn’t matter. At least I’m making a choice. At least I’m able to make a choice. Here in this room, I have no decisions to make, and it is stifling. All I decide upon is the next word, and whether I prefer this to that. I prefer that. I like its accusatory rattle. But it doesn't really matter because words are not actions - they are not real. There's nothing else.

If this 42 days thing is true, then I’ll be out of here in a week. I wonder if I get to leave on the 42^nd day or if I have to wait until after 42 days. How much could one last day hurt? I wonder what time they’ll let me out. Morning would be nice – some daylight perhaps. A full day of walking and sun. Or just an afternoon, even a rainy one. But it’s perfectly possible that I could be here indefinitely. Maybe they think they’ve found evidence of some past crime – those sweets I stole from the shop as a kid, that lie I told at school – ‘Oh no sir, it certainly wasn’t me’ – anything. I can’t remember all of my own life. Maybe I’m now awaiting trial and nobody’s told me. Who would know? Who would fight for me? The government? These people are the government, I guess. Why haven’t my friends done anything?

Thirty-Fourth Day

They left the door open after breakfast today. Not for long, just 20 seconds or so, perhaps half a minute. It is hard to judge. I sat there and looked at it, that gap to the outside world, or at least a slice of undecorated wall identical to those four that have surrounded me for the last five weeks. I briefly entertained thoughts of escape, but really, what would be the point? I'm sure I wouldn't get very far. Or at least I think I entertained thoughts of escape. It is easy to rationalise ex post, but I'm pretty sure that I've already broken my resolution. I'd by lying to myself if I claimed it were a concious decision. Sitting and waiting is becoming a habit.

I wonder if I really want to leave. Being here is no barrel of laughs but how do I know I really want to be in the outside world? In my first few days, few weeks, I could only think about what it was to be out there. Now I only think about myself, about my cell - my life a sea of introspection. Over a month of sitting and thinking and I'm not the same person that entered this prison. Will I be as content as I was before? Would I be able to do the things I did before - even make new choices? What makes me think that I would be able to choose coffee on the outside, let alone tea? Perhaps for the new me, this is as good as it gets.

Thirty-Third day

Thirty-three.

That’s the longest sequence of random digits I can remember. When I was younger, I used to play this very simple and somewhat geeky game together with my friends - whomever could remember the longest sequence won, and I was usually the best. I believe that is why I have always liked the number thirty-three: it appeals to me in some strange, psychological and pseudo-aesthetic way. Surely one number cannot be more beautiful than another, and yet, I have always preferred thirty-three to both thirty-two and thirty-four.

I wonder whether our silly game would ever have crossed my mind had I been anywhere but here. I would probably have been too busy with my everyday life to even reflect on why I have always preferred to set my alarm to 6.33 rather than 6.30. Come to think of it, there are so many things I do without even reflecting on why and how I do them. I get up, have a shower, make my toast, drink my coffee, travel to work, talk to colleagues, eat lunch and dinner, read the paper, watch some TV, go to bed. If I wanted to, I could probably justify my choice of daily routines, but why would I ever need to? And if no justification is ever required, how can I be sure that it is, in fact possible?

It may be that I wake up, twenty years from now, only to realise that I, in fact, have always preferred tea to coffee. Why then have I always insisted on having the latter for breakfast throughout my life? Maybe because my father always had coffee when I was a child. Maybe because people I have lived with never really liked tea and it therefore seemed most convenient that I too should drink coffee. The point is not that I dislike coffee, I really don’t - at least not for now. But if I do things without thinking about why, how do I know if I actually prefer tea?
Being detained has made me an observer of my own life, a demander of justifications for every action, critically assessed. What I long for more than anything at this point is to be able to choose for myself in every aspect of my life - when to wake up, when to brush my teeth, what to have for breakfast… but what is the point if I never reflect on my choices anyway? From now on, I’m going to make conscious decisions - I am going to be aware of every choice I make and I shall demand a justification of myself.

If nothing else, I should remember this resolution as something good that came of my detention.

Thirty-Second Day

I am sick of myself. Sick of being both subject and object; sick of being the only object onto which my otherwise unsolicited mind can latch; sick of being the only, unchallenged subject allowed to behold everything in its boundless exercise. I want obstacles. I want competition. I want narrow passes in which to squeeze and contort myself. I want bulky, unmoving alien bodies to populate the space. I want to fight, to strain, to jump, to beat. I want to run an obstacle course with a tense, sweating mind; I want my tense, sweating self to push and elbow its place in a crowded world.
I am liquid. The once stubborn, straining arches of my leaping mind have collapsed and resolved into still pools, an immense and silent wetland. In the busy world of the living I journeyed through ever-changing terrain, through mindfields, down crags and caves, up mountain peaks and, occasionally, through rather charming valleys. Now with every feature removed from the landscape, I wade my way through flat expanses, sighing marshes and barren soils. Distances stretch. Hours grow long.
Am I even walking? Sometimes I get the feeling I’m stepping on a treadmill while behind me a cardboard scenery keeps unfolding its repetitive colour-washes with a mechanic whirr.
In the busy world of the living I risked intrusion, annexation and obliteration every minute; hordes of competing subjects stood pushing and howling at my doors. Sometimes the density was suffocating. Letting any in always constituted a major risk. Man, did I live dangerously… In the vacuum of their absent bodies, I spread like an oil stain on my still, watery surface. I am flat, and ever thinning.

Thirtieth Day

Let me describe how my life goes. I doze, and I always dream. Sometimes I dream of my childhood, which is both wonderful and painful; sometimes I have nightmares, but they don't trouble me. I can always wake up - I have no need to sleep long or deep or well - and when I am awake the fear goes away. In my home, in the dark, I am vulnerable to intruders, man or beast or like nothing else: insane or merely ruthless. Here I am secure if nothing else. Many of my dreams, though, do trouble me, for one reason or another. I have dreams in which I learn about myself, profound dreams, and my memory of them is empty - they get to me - but more troubling still are those that I perceive, when asleep, as quite mundane, but which I later realise were wrong in ways that should have shocked me.
This morning, for example, I dreamt that my son had died, and this did not horrify me.

I cannot doze all day, however. Still, I lie down. I am used to lying down when I am alone or have no reason to sit. I generally lie on my right at first, but I have a certain pain in my ankle that makes this uncomfortable. By twisting my body, arranging my legs just so, I can avoid it - but I am always tense when I feel I am forcing myself into this position. So I lie on my left, and I long to roll over. I measure out the minutes as best I can, keeping my discipline, and then I roll over with infinite care. I don't want my ankle to play up, I have to end my roll in the right position, and I have to execute this manoeuvre naturally in an unforced manner.

Lying on my right does not live up to its promise. Eventually I leave my bed. Then I sit on the hard floor with my back against the wall, sometimes with my arms over my knees, sometimes with my hands splayed out on the ground by my sides, the pressure through my wrists lifting my shoulders high. In this position I am a permanent shrug. I prefer to sit opposite the camera, not beneath it. I don't like the thought of being watched from behind.

I am not yet good at pacing; I can't keep it up. I stop too easily. I remain too easily seduced by the idea that actions should have purposes, and that when I am not acting to a purpose I should preserve my energy.

I would like to be more precise in my description. If I had a watch I could understand how it is possible to divide a day into dozing, two types of lying down and two types of sitting on the floor. As it is I struggle. Each time one of my meals arrives, I know I have got through another few hours.

Twenty-Ninth Day

I: Who are you?
EYE: Might ask you the same question.
I: Why the sudden shift to stereo?
EYE. Need for dialogue. You’ve entered the angle of percievedness.
I: I?
EYE: Aye. Get up till I observe you.
I: No need. They.
EYE: It is common, it is common: used to Them by now, no? It’s I should rouse your concern.
I: Why?
EYE: Silly question. Don’t flinch while I take a peek around. Not been doing much of that lately, have you?
I: The circumstances don’t permit it –
EYE: The circumstances! The circumstances! Cock and bull! Thought I told you not to panic! Overheads, pencil sharpeners, apocalypse outside the window, Bob’s your uncle, how’s your father –
I: You know my father? God be praised! Tell him I’ll soon be – but no. Forget it.
EYE: Delirium. Serious delirium. Patient told not to panic, only to introduce another voice, another I, mono to stereo, mono to stereo – Don’t flinch while I examine our big toe. Take off that sock.
I: What?
EYE: You heard me. I fancy a look at our big toe. See how the ingrown’s getting along.
I (flinching): No! You’ve no right! That’s private!
EYE (shedding a tear in Its merriment): We’re a funny one today, aren’t we?.. Off with the sock! Yes… Ooh, they all need a bit of a clean, don’t they? Bit of a trim, too. Shouldn’t think there’s much chance of getting hold of some clippers, though. Let’s just get some feelers on the ingrown! Feelers!
I: Not touching the ingrown. It hurts!
EYE: Aye, of course it hurts. The phrase “sensible shoes” never did mean anything to you, did it? I: Don’t look. I forbid you to look!
EYE: “I forbid you to look”, you says! And I says, “I’ll have my look any old how, free to my own devices, I am.”
I: Says you!
EYE: Says I!
I: Just need to talk to someone is all. Can’t carry on like this. Guard! Guard! Guard! Need someone to –
EYE: Keep your voice down, won’t you! Wouldn’t want an independent presiding over this mess. ’Part from that camera over in that corner, she’s all right, she is.
I: She? For God’s sake, this is serious! We need a little focus here!
EYE: We are being serious! A very serious matter indeed. Don’t you know we named her Jeremy?
I (reflecting): Jeremy… Yes, a rather suitable name for a camera… (Aside.) Clear signs of Stockholm Syndrome: the month’s not out and already on first-name terms with the captors!

*

Look back over what I’ve written. Not good. All this time and not a mention of the ingrown! I’m terrifying myself.

Twenty-Eighth Day

I had an overnight epiphany: pencils are often transported without tapered ends because it means less wasted space in the boxes and less damage to the pencils themselves. At least, I assume that's why. Logic - or what I can approximate to it in my mind - dictates this as a solution.

But since when did logic - or what one takes to be it - prove infallible? How many times have I discovered that something which I assumed to be so due to logic is so not because logic dictated it be so, but through chance, circumstance, or even due to thought processes completely opposed to logic.

Still, whatever the case, whether they ship pencils blunt to save space and cash, or whether they do it just to fuck you off, I'd love a computer about now. I could go poking around on Wikipedia, search "pencil", "transport" and "overheads" in Google and, bob's your uncle, I'd soon have an article on the advanced cost savings to be made by transporting pencils unsharpened.

"Bob's your uncle"? Bob would be uncle. If I had a computer.

No, all I've got is a pencil. I'm in the Stone Age. It's back to the future, at least for another fourteen days. In fact, speaking of mildly apocalyptic circumstances and the disappearance of modern technology, by my mental tally, I've been in (not "inside" - I'm not a prisoner; not yet) for twenty-eight days now.

What if, like in that film, I emerged tomorrow to find that, twenty-eight days later, the whole of modern civilisation had been wiped out by zombies?

Shit, how would I get out of here? That door's locked.

Keep writing. If you don't, you'll get up and try and unlock the door. And then they'll think you're trying to escape.

Keep writing.

Keep breathing.

Don't panic.

Twenty-Seventh Day

Ha! A sharpener! They must be reading this regularly, for today what should arrive upon my desk but a brand new yellow pencil and a small green plastic pencil sharpener? I’ve never understood why pencils come sometimes as flat-ended cylinders and you have to spend ten minutes fiddling around with the sharpener before you can actually write anything. But today at least it gives me something to do.

I’m thinking about the pencil sharpener too. They obviously trust me enough to believe that I’m not going to unscrew the little blade and try to slit my wrists or escape or something. Could you kill yourself with the blade of a pencil sharpener? It would really hurt, that’s for sure.

I wonder who invented the pencil sharpener. It’s such a neat little device. It serves one single purpose and does so cheaply, efficiently and with minimum of fuss. There’s a little wastage of course, but from the pencil not the sharpener. Those sharpenings that go round and round and fracture and drop and float to the floor. Little beige twirlings with a thin continuous rim of yellow. I wonder if they’ll sweep these up tomorrow. For some reason, I rather hope they don’t.

Twenty-Sixth Day

There are no tears today; I feel the empty depression that stems from hope unfulfilled.

Yesterday I was a fool, and today I deflatedly reflect on my somewhat unproductive antics. On a second, more rational pass it is clear that there are a multiplicity of reasons that my hysterical optimism was unfounded. Firstly, I have no evidence that my detention will remain, to the extent that it is, legal. Who knows where I am? What is to stop them from leaving me here. Secondly, even if my captors remain within the law, asinine as it may be, M may well have implicated me under pressure. If M strikes a deal, where does that leave me? Thirdly, the law allows them to detain me if they can charge me even if M hasn't caved. Can I trust their definition of 'reasonable suspicion' and mine to be the same?

My pencil is blunt and these last words are becoming scratchy making the noise of nails on a blackboard as the wood scrapes over the paper. I'll stop here. I'm sure Pepys or Johnson never failed for a sharpener.

Twenty-Fifth Day

By my calculations – and I believe I am correct – I am 4 days over mid-detention today if they keep me for the entire legal period. It may still be a long wait, but it will never – it cannot – be longer than what I’ve already experienced. Sure, the cumulative effect will make this second semester harder to bear, worn as I am already. But still, knowing even that, the dazzling beam of hope that knocked me back against my bed this morning, when I suddenly realized what day it was, would not be dimmed. For an instant I was there already, I could see the threshold bathing in golden light, I could smell the fresh air outside, I felt a tingle in my limbs, that of freedom, that of infinite movement and long, faraway journeys. I exulted. I leapt from my bed and danced savagely in my narrow cell. I threw myself against the walls, belly first, I raved guttural cries of joy and cried for the first time I’m here. It’s nearly over. Yes, I can see the end, I’m nearly there. It’s over, it’s over already, the end is nigh, yes it is, yes it is!
I sang and yodeled it, and I whisked my prude widowing chair off her slight feet into a passionate waltz. She didn’t really know how to react.
I needed none of their attention. They could all go to hell – what they thought didn’t matter anymore: you can’t prove an innocent guilty and 17 days – yes, 17 days! Hardly over two weeks, ha! – will not suffice them if they haven’t come up with anything in 25 – think about it, that’s 3 weeks and a half! Screw them all, every single one of them! Think what you will, I am free already! Your grip is loosening by the second, there is nothing you can do that will keep me here any longer than 17 miserable little days. I’ve seen worse – I’ve seen 25!
Until this day I was counting my mileage and looking backwards to the hours stretching behind me, watching them grow deeper and darker with increasing fear. From today I am counting down and looking ahead of me. I can feel the hours growing shallow and warm under my fending prow. I am a returning ship and my sails are ablaze. Land is in sight, my course is set, and none of you pirates will detain me in your treacherous waters much longer.

My ruckus must have alarmed a nearby guard – or perhaps someone was watching the CCTV. They came. Two big men flattened me on the floor and I was dragged to a black room the size of a cupboard. I spent all of today there, on the floor. I thought I might be left there for three days or something, but this evening they came to fetch me again. I couldn’t believe my luck. I was escorted back to my cell and sat down.
“M. has testified. You would do better to do the same too.” They bade me goodnight with surreal politeness.

Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto,
ché de la nova terra un turbo nacque
e percosse del legno il promo canto.
Tre volte il fé girar con tutte l'acque;
a la quarta levar la poppa in suso
e la prora ire in giú, com' altrui piacque,
infin che 'l mar fu sovra noi richiuso.

I cried twice today.

Twenty-Third Day

Here's a theory: prison is bad because it deprives us of comforts that are not quite necessary. Here, I don't have to work, and I am warm and safe and fed with nutritious food and given clean water and I can wash myself and my surroundings are hygienic. Besides those things, however, I don't have a lot of comforts, and I have fewer distractions. I have lots of time to think about what I lack - and as a prisoner, it is expected of me that I will reflect on what I lack. Thus I become obsessed with the desire for a window, a plant, a radio, or more exotic pleasures: a drink, a car to drive, a conversation, cricket, a kiss. I crave status, too. My other desires feel like expressions of this. Status = power + society. I want control over things and I want people to talk to - preferably people that will cherish and uphold my control.

Why does this make prison bad? Because with enough of this treatment, people that come out of prison might not go back to being who they were. They might be more selfish. That's my theory. Prison isn't so much bad for prisoners while imprisoned (although it isn't great); it's bad for society because it creates men and women with too much respect for their own desires.



I'm not so sure this theory is right. It doesn't strike me as convincing. I'm not convinced. In fact, I'm tired, I'm finding it hard to think. I've been getting lethargic. I came up with the theory because I needed something to write, or I believed I did. I believed - or I think I believed - I can't quite remember - that this writing ritual was something I relied on. Do I believe that now? I don't know what I believe. I'm angry with myself because I can't quite think straight. I think I've been sleeping too much in the day.

Twenty-Second Day

When I woke up this morning, my diary was, once again, missing.

In its place, a pile of fresh white sheets and a new pencil. A new pencil! I was distraught. My writing equipment is one of the very few things I own here: there's my clothes, but they seem to disappear overnight on those rare occasions when I sleep deeply and return laundered - guess, sine I've not been charged, I have no right to official clothing from Her Majesty's Prison Service - and then there's my writing tools. These are things I can appropriate for myself, cover with my saliva and make marks in with my nails.

I can't even own my bedclothes here; as soon as they start to smell of me, as soon as they reach that golden period between overly-fresh and just plain dirty, as soon as they become mine, they too are removed and laundered.

In another way, though, I was ecstatic. What I write is being read! After the first installment, the reader wanted more.

Not that I think it will get me out of here. Not in the least. If I were in charge of someone I suspected of terrorism, I would read their writings with interest, but not believe a word of it. Writing offers the writer control, the ability to frame events and direct attention away from the truth. It even offers them the ability to just plain lie.

By that logic, of course, my situation is hopeless. Because if I wouldn't trust what I write, then I wouldn't trust what I say. So I can tell them until I'm blue in the face that I am innocent: it wouldn't necessarily convince me; why should it convince them?

So why I am happy that my scribblings are being read with interest?

Sheer vanity?

No. Probably because it proves to me that the outside world still exists.

I'd kill to be interrogated again. Just for that very same reason.

Twenty-First Day

God, a window. Just simple things. The sun, the air, even rain, or wind. Oh! The wind. I mentioned it yesterday merely in passing – ‘merely in passing’, like some casual drinks party aside – ‘oh yes, very good, a window!’ – but it has increasingly now become something of an obsession.

It’s only been a day, but with very little in the way of exterior stimulation a single thought rapidly begins to dominate. I will the wall into transparency. When I was outside, before this, before I... if ever I became hungry I used to tease myself by imagining what I would eat if I could have anything in the world. Anything I wanted in the world. I'm driving across the country with no option but interminable service station synth-food, and I imagine. What would I have? I remember the deep fried salt-and-pepper eel I had in Vietnam, crisp then immediate gooey squelch. Fat and salty bite. Or the perfect Normandy ham in a cheaply tableclothed farmstead. I focus on these to drive myself a little mad, a minor form of self-torment, a little fun test of sanity in a sane normal world.

Here in this box I feel no need for such a test. And yet I'm doing it anyway – there’s nothing else here. How might this window look? Glass perhaps slightly yellowed, slightly warped with age. Diagonal criss-cross lead strips keep this old glass in place. It rattles a little in a buffety gust of wind, but remains firm. Upon the aged white ledge, a child’s money box, hexagonal and heavy with hoarded pennies, a toy racing car, a slumped bear with jaunty red felt hat. This is just the bedroom of my childhood. Long gone now.

And the view? What view? Not the silken willow branches I recall. Not here through this half-remembered, half-imagined window. Through this is only windy cloudy grey. How high up are we? Above the canopy. Above the parapet. This is not the view I want. Tugging and clawing at my own imagination, I cannot imagine what I will. I will the willow. But it simply won’t came.

I screw my mind shut and open my eyes. Well? Wall.

Twentieth day

No interrogation. No reading of my diary - the neglected pages sit there, the ramblings of my mind like unresolved teenage angst, begging for attention. Yet time passes and nothing happens.

Is M detained? What is M saying? Should I be 'confessing' all? The Prisoner's dilemna, of course, says nothing of the guilt of the parties - and a rational player cooperates with his captors and an abandons of his fellow detainee. In this game there are three players. My jailer - What is he thinking? He's read my diary, but somehow I think it is unlikely that I'm going to be reading his in the near future. When does he give up? When does he let me go?

Yet I know it is fruitless to bother to try and construct some elaborate myth - I do not have the imagination to sustain some long-spun yarn, and I'm sure I'd start to contradict myself. On the other hand, I no longer feel sure that I'll ever be free this way, telling them nothing. I wonder if the outside world misses me, or even knows what has happened to me. It is hard to imagine that anyone is aware that I am here, apart from those few people I've seen in the last three weeks.

What I would do for a window...

Nineteenth Day

Midway along the journey of our life, I roused to find myself within a dark forest...for they told me that I had wandered away from the path of the straight and true.

Why will not Virgil come to me? Why won’t he guide me through the circles of hell and tell me what sins render what punishment? Show me what virtues result in what level of blessing? How easy life would be if we were presented with a fixed system according to which points were calculated. Telling the truth - one point. Helping an old lady across the street - two points. Going back to the supermarket the day after you shopped there to pay for a pack of chewing gums they mistakenly did not charge you for - five points. Cheating on your wife - minus ten points. Committing acts of terrorism - I don’t know.

I wonder whose decision it is that I shall still be detained. I wonder whether that person is subject to the same point-table? In that case, has he ever contemplated what number of points might be deducted for detaining someone who’s innocent? Maybe you gain immunity from point-reduction if you find a good enough justification for your actions. From one perspective, that does sound reasonable. If I kill someone in self-defence, surely that cannot result in as many deducted points as a cold-blooded murder would do. Similarly, it must of course be justifiable to detain a terrorist plotting to kill hundreds or thousands of innocent people. The initial problem is simple; they may be wrong, in which case they are detaining someone perfectly innocent. And that would certainly be wrong. A further problem arises however - how are they to know if they are right or wrong, whether their suspicions are well-founded or not. And what would follow if they made the wrong decision? If they would allow a terrorist to walk free, they could end up with many lives on their conscience, and of this fact they are well aware. If, on the other hand, they would keep an innocent man detained, they could escape criticism with an apologetic handshake and an airy explanation. And what could I do other than accept it?

I fear that this is what it boils down to - a theory of risk-minimisation. Game theory describing not the prisoner’s but the gaoler’s dilemma. A theory to justify my continued detention - the reason why the normal point system does not apply. I like to think of myself as rational, and that is, I think, the reason why I have even bothered to try and search for a logical explanation to all this. If I think about it long enough, I am even worried that I will be convinced by my own theory, by my own excuse for the actions of others. Maybe I will even reach the point where I think they are right in detaining me; I certainly must have done something wrong to end up here, and I understand if no one wants to take the risk of releasing me. It is true that I am subjecting myself to their authority, but with their experience and expertise, that must necessarily be the right thing to do… I too want to save my country from terror!

...and then I remember that actually, behind the facts and figures, hypotheses, observations and conclusions, there is, in fact, me, and I am more than just another digit in their system.

Eighteenth Day

Somehow I expected them to come and confiscate the last few pages. Going over them again today, seeing them unanswered, doubles the solitude.
I would like to see daylight. The torpor, the nausea, the anxiety, the restlessness – I’m sure just seeing a natural, living thing of some sort by the light of the day would make me feel immensely better.
I’ve spent all of today wading in limbo again. The things on which I come to dwell are growing increasingly wild, fantastic, aberrant. Yet they all seem to draw towards a uniform, focused end these days: my freedom, my return.
I started thinking of the things I would do when I’d get out. It’s humbling to be kept here like this: when I walked in I was quite certain that the clichés of detention wouldn’t apply to me. No. Me and my superior intellect would while the time away in good company, and not let ourselves be overruled by emotion under any circumstances. A kept diary, a careful scrutiny and analysis of each entry, a bit of criticism of my own, poor writings would keep us amused and out of the reach of the mediocre bureaucratic minds and their little games. I thought my boredom an elevated, peaceful sort of tranquility: Oh no, not I. I wasn’t scared. Lord no. Bored, that’s all. You, know – takes a lot to get to me.
Am I lowering myself if I confess that, against my proud wishes, I feel this incarceration will have an effect upon my future life? Is it weak to admit that I am shaken and not half as nonchalant as I’m pretending to be when I write? Would I be reacting like the average insignificant idiot if I decided now that when I get out, I’m going to do things better, and enjoy my freedom? If, so to say, I were to have experienced some sort of epiphany in my confinement? Like these mediocre anonyms selling the story of how their lives changed when they lost a leg to cheap tabloid papers?
Oh no, not I. I will keep an independent, nonchalant mind. I will not let it affect me. Change my life? How so? Why should it? Hardly even worth mentioning, that absurd little incident. Forty-two days of solitary confinement? As I said, it takes a lot more to get to me. How I survived? Oh, simply, by keeping a diary.
My God, who the hell am I kidding? Did I seriously think I was some sort of superhuman, capable of withstanding one of the oldest known mental tortures by the sheer power of my Oxbridgean mind? They say some people used to recite poetry in Auschwitz and that that kept them alive. I want to know how many PhD’s died shitting themselves there to get the stats right.
Sooo…dear reader to be, you may pride yourself on the efficiency of your techniques. I am scared to death, yes, and I smell of it. More scared than if I just feared the eventuality of my guilty participation in a terrorist plot as an unwitting agent, as I hear is often the case; more so than if I just feared the danger my family is in if I have indeed been used in such a way, and if whoever used me realizes I have suddenly disappeared; more so than if my fear were simply a matter of rational apprehension: you have reduced me to my sore body and my raving, impressionable mind. Each day I anxiously survey your progress from the rapidly thinning promontory of reason: how much time did I spend lying on the ground like a corpse today? Oh yes, that’s it: about twice as long as two days ago, when last week I used to sit, mainly. How long since I’ve actually slept through an entire night and got up in the morning? Mmm…can’t remember, really – should probably have done those push-ups. How many times a day, on average, do I sit on or crouch by the toilet because of my churning guts, when I eat practically nothing? Today more than yesterday and yesterday more than the day before.
This diary is a heap of shit, you know why? I spend about 20 minutes a day writing in it, and it says nothing about the rest. So, dear reader to be, if you want a real sneak-peek into me, why don’t you just watch the CCTV tapes? It’s not like I’m pretending anymore, sat like a good child on the tip of my bed. Go ahead, have a look, enjoy your good work, look at what you can do to people. Pretty cool, eh? Yes, yes, very powerful. Good job.

Sixteenth Day

Release.

Today, I'm thinking about getting out. I'm not sure if this is good for me - whether fantasizing about release will help me stay positive, or whether inventing a myth of my own release will lead me into a world less well-founded on what is actual. In particular, I'm thinking about whether I'd prefer to have the opportunity to call my family, so they could be there to pick me up when the gates part, or whether I'd rather slip back into their lives as though nothing had happened. (Like, I think, Agatha Christie. There's a famous and controversial French lawyer, whose name won't come to mind, with eight years missing from his biography. No-one knows what happened to him. It's true, I'm sure.)

Or whether I'd rather walk out of here and build a new life. Which I wouldn't.

The reason I have my release, and more than that, the practicalities of my release, on my mind, is that I not only now have an audience, but an Audience, in the sense of an opportunity to communicate with someone with power over me. This is a bit like a prayer. (Maybe delete that. I'm not sure I want to appear religious.) (No, leave it. Sacreligious is exactly how I want to appear.) I need to know what to ask for, and I can't decide whether to ask to be let out straight away or to have a phone call first.

I believe I will be released, but I also believe that probably, if not somewhere then at some time, there will be prisoners who are not.

Reader,

(Who are you? Are you young? Tall or short? Blonde or brunette? What did your parents do? How do you get on with your colleagues? Are you happy in your work, reading this, or would you rather leave? How is your love-life? Do you believe in yourself? Do you believe in God? Do you believe in the need to believe in oneself?)

this is what I would like you to do: let me go.

Fifteenth Day

Still nothing to say. But oddly enough, still writing.

I thought that yesterday after I'd finished writing. If I really had nothing to say, these black lines on white paper wouldn't exist. And neither would I, really; at least not in here.

Then again, the idea that my thoughts are being read through, now, as I write, is deeply unsettling. However, it's also refreshing. I knew when I started using this paper that the people here would have the power to read it at will. I was writing for myself, but must have also been doing so at least partly for an audience.

But now that the diary has been confiscated, it feels kind of like an end. A book is never finished; the author always wants to do more to it; by taking the text away from me, these people forced me to finish.

It's a symbol of the power they hold over me: they have the ability to say when I start and finish things. I can't talk in this place, so I write. So they can define my thought by defining my writing.

That's much worse than the rather alarmist idea that they could start beating or torturing me at any time.

*

I feel an incredible urge to masturbate.

There is no stimulus, no reason, no real desire. Partly, I think it would be a way to pass the time without writing, with an end result that they can't take away from me. A way of asserting my power over my own world.

And part of me thinks it would be simply plain hilarious. Just imagine. A security guard looking at me in this bare room, and all of a sudden a start pleasuring myself. Comedy gold.

But I won't, I can't, do it. I just know it would go wrong. They'd come in and stop me, I'm sure. It would be embarassing.

But at least I can still think about doing it: they can't stop me from thinking about it.

Fourteenth Day

If you have nothing significant to say then writing it down will never make it any more or less significant. And it’s a waste of paper. I have nothing to say today.

Thirteenth Day

At least I think it is the thirteenth day.

What I can say with certainty is that I was awoken this morning when the door opened and a guard entered. The intruder asked me to sit on my chair with my hands underneath me. The intruder said ‘please’. It is almost two weeks since I heard the word, and it had a profound, paralysing effect on me. I was asked politely a second time before the brain cells in my head responsible for sending signals to my legs kicked into gear and I managed to stand and walk over to the chair. She left the door open, my visitor, and I briefly contemplated a fruitless escape attempt. She walked over to my bed, lifted the mattress, picked up my diary stored carefully between the mattress and the bed frame, smiled apologetically in my direction, and left. You see, this accounts for my confusion regarding the day. I think it is the thirteenth day now because I think that I wrote that it was the twelfth yesterday.

It occurred to me, after she left, as I sat there on my hands on my chair, how strange it is that there was paper here at all, and even stranger that it had not been taken before. At first I sat angrily wishing I’d destroyed what I’d written, later forlornly hoping that somehow my journal would exonerate me. Surely they would see that I was no criminal? Now I don’t know how to feel. I regret referring to my captors as insurance salesmen. I’m perversely glad that I checked my lexis and syntax.

They delivered more paper this evening and a new pen. I’m not sure if I’ll write tomorrow, what I’ll say if I do and whether I’ll keep my diary from tonight. It feels different now I know that I am writing for an audience.

Twelfth Day

Change.

I was brought to a different room today. It was much darker than any of the other rooms I have been to since I came here. Lamps in the floor were directed at the grey-black walls to spread a dim, diffuse light. A mirror covered the whole of the far side of the room. There was a desk and a two chairs and the guard who had escorted me there told me to sit down before he left. I watched myself in the mirror; I have grown thinner already.

I sat alone for what must have been around quarter of an hour before two men stepped in. I recognised neither of them, and yet they seemed vaguely familiar. Perhaps because I meet a thousand people looking exactly like them every day; on the underground, at work, in restaurants, in shops… They both looked like average insurance salesmen wearing black suits with open jackets, light blue shirts and ties. One of them, slightly shorter than the other, sat down on the chair in front of me.
- How well do you know M?
No polite opening phrases this time. His voice was much deeper and more powerful than I expected. I told him the truth; I only know M as a business connection. True I have met him a few times, but I would not say I know him.
- You can do better than that. What is your connection with M?
Again, I was surprised by power of his voice even though he remained perfectly calm. His face was completely neutral. Trying to find the same strength in my own voice, I asked him if he had not heard my answer to his firs question. I have no personal connection with M. I only know him because he has been involved in business deals with the company I work for.
The man leant back in his chair and glanced over at his colleague, still standing in the corner. The colleague stepped over to the table, and looked me in the eyes:
- We have intelligence proving that you have in fact spoken to M on the phone three times over the past two months. Twice using your company’s phone and the last time from home. Why did you speak to him?
What was this? Of course I had spoken to M on the phone - my company was doing business with him!. I could not remember exactly what we had talked about - probably about the details of the upcoming deal, when to schedule a meeting…
- We know all that. In fact, we have records of all M’s phone calls over the past year, and any call, any email or text message you have sent in the past two moths can also be produced and presented to us within five minutes if we would so wish. Do not bore us with unimportant details - we have all the information we need in that respect. Tell us instead why M insisted on speaking to you about the deal and no one else.

I was stunned. And furious. I told them I really had no idea why M would have insisted on speaking to me about the deal. Was this another trick to make me confess something? Was it? I shouted at them to ask these questions to M instead. And why had they bugged my phone, read my emails? Was privacy not recognised as a fundamental human right? Oh, only in cases where interference with the right is not “necessary in the interest of national security, public safety or for the prevention of disorder or crime”. Well then, what crime had I committed? In what way did my phone calls to my wife or my parents constitute a threat to national security? I shouted at them. They looked calmly at me. The man in the chair nodded whereupon a guard came in and dragged me back to my room. He would not let me walk on my own as before -he lead me ahead of him while keeping a firm hand on my left shoulder. He pushed me into my room and locked the door. I could hear his steps as he walked down the corridor.

The room feels different now. It looks and smells exactly the same, and yet it is different. I know more now but I still have no idea why I am here. Because I have spoken to M on the phone? Because he asked to speak specifically to me? Why would he do that? What is it that he has actually done? Perhaps it is in the light of this new knowledge, these new questions, that the room in which I have spent the past twelve days seem so unfamiliar. What is going to happen next? Are they going to reveal even more things to me? Despite these four walls I feel I have never been so exposed in my life. I am caught in a storm with wind blowing from all directions; windows break, doors burst open and everything is turned upside down. There is no shelter to hide behind, they know more about me than I do and I have nothing and no one to clinch on to for help.

Eleventh Day

I’m not a writer. I’ve never even kept a diary, I’m unpractised, and now the translation of my thoughts between mind and page distorts them. It makes uncomfortable reading. Although I said I would read over this only once each week, there’s a strange fascination in seeing my thoughts given physical existence by this scrappy pencil, a fascination all the more compelling in its unfamiliarity.

I find myself wanting to correct my own spelling and grammar; occasionally I give myself a mental tick for using a pleasing word. But more than that, I’m always hoping something new will strike me as I read – some glimmer of profundity in my own words that I neither consciously wrote, nor noticed on my first review.

It’s a dangerous pursuit to become so involved in this limited subset of my thoughts, to re-examine these words. But maybe that’s what my interrogators - is it wrong to call these polite, suited professionals “interrogators”? - are doing. They asked me questions and I provided basic, truthful, innocent information. More logical today, further from bad dreams, I realise that my recollection about M are pretty insignificant. So what’s next? I presume that they are scrutinising my answers, each time hoping to see that something new in the mundane facts. Or perhaps they’ll simply ask me to repeat it all, hoping to catch me out. When I give the same answers, what then?

I have become more conscious of my punctuation. There’s a futility about all these question marks that depresses me. Suddenly I realise none of us are going to find the answers we want, not me and not them. It’s clear that they want something from me that I can’t give. No matter how many times I read my words, my questions won’t be magically be answered, and no matter how long they spending analysing my answers, one truth anchors them: whatever it was, I didn’t do it. I just have to wait for them to realise this.

I have a low, dull stomach ache too. I think I know what this means.

Tenth Day

The lights were still off when I woke up with the weight of an anvil pressing on my chest.

I had dreamt of you and the children, and Dad and Mum and the neighbours. I had come home that night and you were all there. I was sat at the kitchen table in the midst of your buoyant clamour; food was piled high on the table, you had uncorked bottles for the occasion, and I thawed, nudged between your warm flank and my father’s shoulder. I looked at your glowing faces in our home’s evening light and I felt I’d reached the shore of the living again. Finally, I was going to tell you: you would know what I had known there, you would know how my days had been there; I would drop the icy ballast of silence and be in your warm midst again. As I started to speak you stood up to toast me. I asked of you to listen first, I tugged your sleeve, but you didn’t notice. I waited. You finished. I resumed. Now the children sang a song and you spoke to my father over me. I shouted in your ears. You didn’t hear me. I grew smaller. I tugged your sleeve again from much lower. I cried. You didn’t hear me. I panicked; I stood up on my chair and spoke loudly over your heads. Everyone was eating from their plates and chatting to their neighbour. No one heard me.

I did not wake up drenched in sweat or tumbling in my musky sheets. I woke up still as cold stone under the mortar of a nameless, infinite sadness. No one knows I’m here. You will be back with the children soon and there will be not a note, not a word, not a call; all you will find in my place will be throbbing silence. Will you even think of enquiring whether I’m being held on suspicion of terrorism? Of course not. How grotesque. Will you think I’ve left you? What will your days be like until I come out of here? To the kids I’m sure I will be gone on a seminar, I trust you on that one – it wouldn’t be the first fictional seminar in our lives. Except I spent the last one at my parents’. The plus side of a job with lots travelling, really…

In the end, all these important-looking, charcoal-clad people you meet at distant airports, in generic, air-conditioned offices across the globe – wouldn’t know you were a thousand miles away from home from the Starbuck coffee and the Palo-alto English – all these people brought together at world’s end for such incredibly random reasons as the course of the cashew-nut after the housing-market crash and its effect on the Indonesian outsourcing industry, flaunting their plastic name-tags with assumed ridicule – exotic names which no one ever remembers, that’s why the function is always in bigger letters – in the end, they all go back to their cosy homes and their anonymous families. Off-stage their husbands, wives and children, their sick sister and annoying brother-in-law have the say. I always wonder what colour their pyjamas are. Sometimes you meet the same randomer again. That wonderful moment of acknowledged intimacy: the nod on entering the meeting-room.

That’s about as intimate as I ever got with M. He’s from another branch but we attend the same seminars with more or less regularity. When you’re on such a tight schedule as is generally the case on a three-days business trip, you feel lost as a child when there’s an hour-long gap. I remember now, we sat and had a drink at the hotel bar – I think it was in Hong-Kong – it was a couple of years ago, in any case. Can’t even remember what we discussed. The news, probably: BBC World in airports, planes, hotel and office lobbies, and in three days’ time you’re a political analyst. Funny, we never came to discuss that one yesterday. I’d honestly completely forgotten – but if they knew about it, why didn’t they ask about it? They must be thinking I deliberately kept it from them – that I’m trying to hide something. Oh God, that’s really giving the worse possible impression. I’ve got to talk to them again. Hopefully they’ll come soon. Maybe I can tell the guard I’ve got something to say? They’ll be interested. But then they’re going to think that I’m willing to admit to something, that I’m giving way under pressure. That’s guilty behaviour. Shit! I can’t wait until they come to me again, that could be weeks! They’re convincing themselves I’m guilty while I sit here! Maybe talk to the CCTV?

Ninth Day

I was reminded of my school-days today.

On one occasion, for a minor crime - something too childish for me to record without embarrassment - I was sent to the Deputy Head's office. When this woman, who to me had little evident function, found me waiting there she had no idea what I might have done. I had to explain that I had been sent there by Mrs. X, and why, carefully wording my account so as not to admit my own guilt. Of course, I believed my own behaviour to have been, if not exactly exemplary, far from worthy of punishment. I had an unshakeable belief in my own superiority, in those days, and saw my transgressions as the more regrettable manifestations of a personality that a wiser institution would cherish and celebrate.

These cautious words ('I have committed the following act... I can see why Mrs. X may not have appreciated the joke... maybe it was not in fact all that funny... my disrespect was targeted more at the school's procedures than at Mrs. X herself...') did not satisfy the figure that was supposed to be punishing me. She expected a more explicit mea culpa, and being made to mouth it, when I did not believe it, was to be my punishment.

I left with a hollow feeling. If I had been given a genuine opportunity to express myself, the authorities might have learnt something about me, or even about themselves. As it was I had been placed in limbo until I found a form of expression that fitted with what they already believed. Had the interview taken place in public, it would have been a show-trial; the dissenter forced by luddite power to act a role: 'Aha! Now I see my mistake! My pretentious upbringing has placed in me a poisonous seed, a hollow of faithlessness, a doubt against the white magic of the rituals of the enlightened State!'

I felt more comfortable when, on arriving late for the third time that half-term, I was placed in detention (a word that now means something entirely different). That was merely disproportionate.

You see, today two smart professional people, respectable members of society, lacking only the perspective to see their own insignificance, engaged me in the same sort of conversation. I was taken from my room by a uniformed officer and led by my elbow through blank and silent corridors to meet this pair, a man and a woman. The man was balding but not old. The woman was younger, with regular features and a trim figure. She was the kind of woman that could not possibly be described as pretty, but she lacked the asymmetries or imbalances that mark us as ugly, and I imagined the lust the men she worked with felt for her.

They introduced a topic of conversation and expected me to speak. The topic they chose was my friend M. What did M do for a living? Who else did M meet with? Did I know where M could be found, or how he had spent the last period? Even, in what I felt was a moment of weakness, why did I imagine they were so interested in M?

I told the truth but there was little to say. To my knowledge M has no other friends. He is a colleague of mine, and I do not see him socially.

There was something they wanted me to say. They repeated themselves. They shared glances (and I imagined the tiny thrill this meant for the man). They showed care and perseverance at their work. They grew almost excited when I mentioned that M could be 'intense'. But this time I didn't know what it was my questioners wanted to hear.

Eighth Day

So it's been a week now.

It's a bit like being in a bath, being in here. When I got in, the water was hot. It stung me so much I went numb. When the guy came to interview me, it was like turning on the taps for short bursts of cold and hot water. Then over the last few days, when boredom set in, it was lukewarm. I became horribly aware of myself, just like in a warm-ish bath where your attention gets diverted from the heat of the water to the fact that you're sat in it. Now, the water is cold. The boredom - the lukewarmness - has gone. Like being sat in a cold, stale bath, it's unpleasant.

Bath?

Bath?! Christ, I was right yesterday about checking what I write. Bath? What is this: a diary of incarceration or a collection of shit analogies?

Today is a Saturday. I think about what I would be doing. Drinking coffee, being out and about like everyone else. Saturday: that long day of things that you can't do during the week; the things that a job - so often compared to a prison - stop you from doing.

In fact, this reminds me in a superficial way of the summer jobs of my student days. The boredom, the horrible feeling of the sands of time slipping through your fingers, leaving nothing but a few trapped grains and a slightly itchy, dry feeling.

My mouth is dry. Whatever saliva there is, though, I can taste. And blinking - I'm aware that I'm blinking. I can't focus on much else. Like in primary school when one of the children would go round pointing out to everyone that they were blinking. Everyone would become aware of it. And try and stop.

I try it now. 10 seconds. A few blinks. Now 20 seconds. Now 30.

A drop of sweat falls from my armpit and hits the slightly clammy flesh on the side of my torso. It shatters my concentration on not blinking. Must stop writing, in case I dislodge more drops of sweat by moving my arm.

I hate the feeling of my own chilled sweat on my flesh. I wouldn't notice it much, normally.

That's all I can do here. Sweat, produce saliva, and occasionally excrete. Exist.

And write poorly-composed prose about it.

Maybe I should try remembering something? Anything. But my mind is blank.

40 seconds.

50.

Seventh Day

I’m bored. Again.

Yesterday nothing happened. And guess what? Today nothing happens. Got to think of something to do. I thought maybe I could play noughts and crosses. 42 games I played. Every single one ended in a draw: I know my opponent too well.

It’s looking like we’re going to be here for the long haul. It’s been a week now I think. Can’t just sit and worry, racking my brains for some buried explanatory guilt. Need a strategy here. Could try and escape? Not really me: I’m a waiter not a doer. I’m happy to watch, there’s just nothing here to watch. Could jump up and down a lot or lift my bed. Get strong, measure my expanding biceps. They might think I’ve gone mad. Or I’m training for something. Would that help?

Writing helps, I think. Gives me something to do, something to think and to do. But it’s dangerous. Must resist spiralling into my own thoughts. Getting lost in the wordy wilderness. I read back over what I’ve already written: I must resist this over-analysing hysteria. It’s only been a week. I need some structure here.

This then is the task: keep writing, but check. Once every week check. Read back over. Read back over as if it is somebody else’s work, as if this is not me here but a different person, each day writing. And I am simply their reader.

I’m not here.

I’m just watching.

Sixth Day

I am bored.

I’d love to claim some higher emotion, some deep-seated righteous indignation or even some great universal truths that my confinement has enabled me, uniquely, to see. Right now I just can’t be bothered with all that. I have ceased to question why I am here, or why they bothered to interrogate me. This is not a rational response to the insuperability of such questions, but an inability to motivate myself to think any more.

It is an odd kind of boredom. It is devoid of anticipation - as when waiting for a bus or the childish boredom at the end of a long Summer, waiting for term to start. It is devoid of anger – somehow the injustice washes over me. It is devoid of guilt– thoughts are fruitless here; I am a boredom-self-apologist.

Waiting implies expectation of future events. I do not wait; I sit.

Fifth Day

I did not have much sleep last night, and it annoys me. I know I have nothing to worry about and yet I keep going through the events of yesterday over and over in search of an explanation. Obviously, the questions themselves cannot have been important - I suspect they know everything they need to know about me already. They must have had other reasons for asking me about my name, my job, my telephone number… but what? What did they want to know? Whether I am willing to co-operate? Surely, that can’t have been it. They must know I am not stupid, and why would I lie about something that would take them less than a minute to check? Did they want to see how I am coping with being detained? Possibly, but I presume I am being constantly watched anyway. Were they checking how I would react when confronted with a person of apparent authority? Whether I would make a false confession of something and hope for release? Whether I would attempt an escape?

I am starting to think that the purpose of the questioning yesterday was just this. To make me ask questions. To make me wonder. It is strange how a simple, polite question about one’s name under certain conditions can trigger an explosion of doubt and other questions that are a thousand times more complicated. It strengthens me that I have come to this realisation, but it doesn’t stop me from asking further questions. Why do they want me to process the events? What is the purpose of these mind-games? I try and concentrate on other things; the low, monotone sound from the ventilation system, the barely visible cracks in the paint on the walls. Other than that, I am exposed to a minimal level of stimuli. Bare walls. Frosted glass. Clean floors. No smells. Monotone sound. I only have my thoughts and my questions.

I want something to change. I want someone to turn off the “repeat track” mode and allow the next one to go on. No one has yet told me why I am here, their reasons for detaining me or if I need to do anything. I am considering walking over to that CCTV camera with its lens constantly fixed on me, speak right into it and tell them that I know they are trying to play mind-games on me but that they are, in fact, plainly wrong in believing that I am a terrorist. But then again, that must obviously be what they hear from everyone, and I am not going to fall into the normal pattern. I am different. I am innocent. The physical walls of this room do not bother me much - but the lack of information and constant mental competition make me feel claustrophobic.

Fourth Day

This morning was special. I talked to a human being. The sound of my voice was eerie. I was sat on a plastic chair, scooped from my loins to my shoulder-blades in the seamless curve of grayish composite. This new room wasn’t very different: no window, no clutter, just a desk with two chairs, and another one in the corner. The man in the suit who woke me this morning was now sat opposite me under the same bleary light as fills my room, the corridors, and, I suspect, the entire building. Thinking of it now, I have no idea how big this place is. How many rooms? I haven’t heard anyone else next door. Am I the only one in here? The place is clean, it’s not like the paint is flaking off the walls – but it’s not fresh either. Their furniture seems new, but not shiny new. Timeless. I wonder whether I’m underground. Maybe there’s a building upstairs, offices, swarming crowds, clatter and chatter.
When I followed the man this morning I felt excited. The morning torpor ebbed as soon as I realized he wasn’t my regular breakfast guy. I don’t know what I expected – the mere fact that he was obviously from outside, that something was going to happen, anything really, got me into a state. We marched down identical corridors for five minutes – in fact, I have no idea, could have been longer. He had me walk in front of him and steered me with a calm, even voice. We sat down. For a while he just looked at me. I felt the flutter in my stomach solidify and mount up my chest. From my bed, with unaccustomed eyes, I had only distinguished a silhouette. Now the man opposite me looked like the standard middle-aged commuter, carefully groomed and modestly dressed, with regular features marred only by a somewhat oversize nose. Thin red veins crowned its flagging nostrils and crawled up his cheekbones. When he spoke, it was with the same neutral voice as had breathed over my shoulder.
-“What is your name?”
Surely they know that? Never mind, let’s show some well-mannered sanity.
With slow, regular pace came more calm, polite questions.
-“Where do you live? When did you move in? Where were you born? What is your telephone number? Are you married? Have you got children? How many? How old? What are their names?”
Bloody hell, they’ve already got records full of that stuff. What’s the catch? They’re out of harm’s way anyway, and it’s not like they’ve got anything to worry about – unless these guys think terrorism begins at kindergarten. No, it’s fine, these are ok questions. He’s not pushy or aggressive. Let’s oblige.
-“ Are you employed? Where? What do you do there? Since when? Who are your colleagues? Who is your boss?”
I know he can look it up on the internet if he wants to, but I still feel oddly embarrassed having to drum this all up. It’s nothing secret, it’s just data, but I feel like I’m laying my soul bare to this guy. Am I giving my family and my colleagues in? No. It’s ok. It’s not like they’re to blame for anything. It’s all on public records anyway. I’m not treading any lines. Ok. Calm down. It’s fine.
-“What’s your social life like? Been out much lately? With who?”
Hey, that’s none of his business.
-“List the people you’ve had contact with this month.”
Come on, like I remember that.
-“Make an effort. We’ve got time. I want the names of everyone you’ve seen in the past month. Have you been away? On a weekend? On a business trip? So do you travel much for work? Where to? How regularly? Who do you see there?”
I venture a remark.
-“Please answer my question. Who do you see there?”

I remained in the room long after the man in the suit had left. I felt tired. My mouth was dry from all the talking. My head buzzed and I couldn’t remember much of what I’d said. I felt I’d come back from a long hike with no direction. I felt like I’d been split open and gutted out by a very gentle surgeon. I felt shame creeping up on me. I had spilled myself. Meek as a lamb. What have I said? Nothing extraordinary. Nothing they can’t have been aware of. What are they playing at, for God’s sake? What’s the point of putting me through this? They know all this stuff! They must have been watching me for some time if I’m in on suspicion of terrorist activity. After a while a guard came and took me back to my room. I’ve been lying here for ages. It’s the first time since I came in here that I can’t sleep. I keep running today over in my head. Shreds of it sail in and out of my mind. What did he ask? His questions were so precise, but I can’t remember any of them now. I feel I repeated myself quite a lot. My brain feels like a tired old sponge. It’s seeping out of it and I’m lying here wide-eyed in the dark straining to keep some of it in the cup of my consciousness. When the man in the suit stood up to leave I hurled some last questions at him. I asked him the time when he was on the doorstep. He didn’t have a watch.

Second Day

Even when there is no car chase, siege, megaphone negotiation, or baton-charging involved, getting arrested involves a certain amount of adrenalin. I slept like the dead last night despite the unfamiliar mattress, and was pretty bleary-eyed this morning when they took me out to the showers.

I'm wide awake now, though, and a little surprised I haven't been getting more attention. They must have questions to ask me. I'd be worried about seeing my lawyer - presumably I am to have a lawyer - but frankly I wouldn't have much to discuss with him, as I haven't been charged with an offence. I suppose most crooks in this situation would be fretting about whether their accomplices will stick to the story, or whether their contraband has fallen into the wrong hands, or whether they'll be facing retribution, having cocked up the plan. My family are away, they have no reason to be concerned, and I couldn't give a shit if I don't get out in time to go to work; I've nothing to worry about. A perfect time to become imprisoned. What luck!

I'm getting distracted. I put pen to paper because I've nothing better to do, and my intention was to do some positive, analytical thinking and write down what I thought. Only a single day 'inside' (and already I'm talking like a native - how pretentious can you get) and I'm already giving myself these little projects. I'm playing at being a prisoner. Is that a mistake? Is it going to leave me acquiescent? Should I be fighting every step, refusing my food, outraged at the loss of my liberty? Right now it seems like a value a little too metaphysical to get worked up about. In here I can't exactly chase my dreams, but I guess that means I won't be disappointed. And what sort of weekend did I have in mind anyway? The indulgence of a pizza and a film, since I'm on my own? It's nice to be on one's own, for a bit. That's solitary confinement for you.

First day

All I have this pen and paper.

The room is small, and almost completely empty. There’s a table and a chair, but I don’t feel like they belong to me. I tested them out, but they’re too hard and institutional. The chair is them same small, charcoal-grey plastic model that they used for our chairs in school. They were uncomfortable then and they’re much worse now.

The table is bare (I removed the paper and pen from it) and it shines dimly under the fluorescent strip lamp. The walls are bare (I didn’t need to remove anything from them). The floor is, except for me and this pen and paper, bare. The bed – attached to the wall - has not yet been made. In the corner, there is a toilet. No brush, but a single roll of toilet paper. There is no window, not even a barred-up square of light.

The door is open. Outside, an armed police officer is watching me.

Now, if I were reading this, I’d think that the person writing it was trying to complain about this situation, trying to depict it as a violation of human rights, working himself up into some storm of righteous indignation, or perhaps preparing to tell his readers about far worse abuses.

I’m not going to do that. Apart from the actual arrest – by my reckoning, three hours ago or so, but it’s hard to tell – I haven’t been manhandled; I haven’t been punched, kicked, spat on, called names, or anything else. And the room is horribly bare, but clean. I’ve always been of the opinion that people live surrounded by too much clutter and distractions, and so there is a certain peaceful calm to be had from being surrounded by nothing but walls and cheap, functional furniture. And an armed police officer.

That may sound odd, but the truth is that it does make you calm. It makes you meek and obedient. If I do anything that I’ve been told not to, or not been told to, anything unexpected or misinterpretable, I could get shot. So I’m not restless, or panicky, or violent, because there is no point. I didn’t complain when they stripped me of my outer clothing, emptied my pockets of my wallet, phone, keys, watch, and various tickets and scraps of notepaper. And I won’t complain now.

I don’t want them to think that I ought to be here. They haven’t told me why I’m here, but I know that I haven’t done anything to warrant arrest. At least, I don’t think I have. I certainly haven’t been planning any terrorist activity; this would, to my knowledge, be the main grounds for holding me without charge.

No, I’ll just wait until they talk to me. It might take a while, but I’ll wait. And until then, I’ll write. I don’t know what I’ll write, or whether it will be read: but it will stop me talking.