Strange Sally Diamond

She told me she desperately wanted to write memories of her family, her friends and her home because she was afraid she would forget them. When I’d asked Dad on her behalf, he said it was better that she forget the past because, that way, she’d find it easier to accept the present. As soon as he was dead and gone and I was back to full health, I bought her a whole packet of coloured felt-tip pens, and a sketch pad, biros and notebooks. I told her that I’d never look at them and I respected her privacy. She could draw or write or do whatever she wanted with them.

The same week, I was returning her library books. She liked books by women. I wasn’t much of a reader. I had grown out of the adventure stories of my boyhood. All the books I had now were non-fiction, how-to books on crop rotation, DIY, marketing, entrepreneurship and occasional biographies of important men. On the way to the library, I leafed through the books, out of suspicion, and there I found her notes written in the margins of the pages and in the blank pages at the back, giving her name and my name and my father’s name, detailing what he had done to her, the date on which she had been kidnapped and a haphazard description of the route from the lake to our house.

I had to buy replacement books for the library and explain that I had damaged them by accident. I never told Lindy what I had discovered, but her mood certainly improved in the days after that. She smiled more and laughed when we watched TV together. As time moved on and nobody came to release her, I could see her confusion and anger grow. She was short-tempered with me. I didn’t react. I waited for things to get back to normal, and eventually they did. I bought her random books from the op-shop sometimes after that, told her it would be good for her to build up her own library. She glared at me then. She knew.

I had replaced Dad’s chain with a soft but strong rope. She sawed her way through it with a bread knife in two days. I kicked myself for not predicting that. She was waiting behind the door instead of at the other end of the room when I entered that evening. She lunged at me with the knife but my reactions were quick, and I turned to the side so she only stabbed me in the thigh instead of the stomach. I wrangled her back to the bed and she screamed like a banshee. She thought I was going to rape her. I was not my dad, but I did have to reinstate the chain. I wrapped the shackle in foam. I also allowed her to move the shackle from one leg to the other every week as she had developed a severe limp from carrying it on one leg for so many years.

Another time, she threw boiling water again, but I was always wary and out of her reach. She tried to poison me, too, by putting bleach or detergent in my food (she cooked for me sometimes), but the taste was obvious. I explained to her how foolish that was. If I died, she would die. Nobody would come looking for her because everyone thought she was already dead. She would die alone of starvation. I tried to protect her from herself. She wasn’t thinking straight.

I had made some adjustments to the barn over the last few years. I added another layer of insulation, sheetrock and corrugated iron on the outside of the building. Three years earlier, I had discovered that Lindy had clawed her way through the interior wall behind the fridge. She had pulled out a number of egg boxes that provided the soundproofing. I caught her in the act. I didn’t punish Lindy. I held her in my arms until her weeping subsided, and then I let go of her. I was not my dad.

No sound would ever escape, and nor would Lindy ever hear the outside world. That was her last escape attempt. She gave up. We settled into a less fraught relationship. She stopped asking why I was keeping her and when I would release her. She stopped fighting me. We had most dinners together in the barn. She sometimes sat beside me on the sofa I had bought, but we didn’t touch. I told her everything, about my childhood in Ireland, my mother, my sister, our escape to New Zealand. She made sympathetic noises and then said, ‘Maybe a burglar will try to break in here?’ I wished I hadn’t told her anything.

I let her outside a lot during the summers, a bit less in the winter, for sunshine and fresh air and exercise. I even brought her down to the hot springs and the lake behind the house. In all the years we’d lived there, I’d never seen another soul. I didn’t dare buy her a swimsuit but she had shorts and vests and T-shirts. She complained that she couldn’t swim with the chain attached, but I held the weight of it so that she could. I tried not to look at her body when she emerged from the water, but it was impossible not to notice her sleek shape, the nipples standing out from her chest. We lay on the rocks afterwards and shared a picnic. Still, I did not touch her.