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The question comes from nowhere, catching me off guard. I can’t seem to make myself meet her gaze. I think about the crusted semen on the underside of the desk and blush brightly. It is the only place where the camera cannot see.

She reads it in my face of course.

‘We’ll talk about this later.’

She rumbles back through the door.

I imagine that the room is shaking with each step she takes.

I listen as one by one, the tumblers click.

I realise I am crying…

* * * * *

…It is a masterpiece she wants and I can trace this whole thing back to a single story I wrote in Year 7. Probably the only decent thing I’ve ever written. It had been about him, the man who wasn’t my father, and the things he’d done. Things he’d done to me.

I thought I’d hidden that well though. The part about it being based on me. The teacher had been shocked by the piece and stunned by the maturity of it. Personally I hadn’t thought that much of it. I’d tacked on some fantasy happy ending where everyone lived happily ever after – once the man had been brutally murdered of course.

The teacher had taken me to one side after class and spoken to me about the story, about where I had gotten the idea from. He’d seemed like he was very concerned.

He’d talked very softly and gently.

I’d told him that I read a lot.

I thought that was the end of it.

That was until I got home. My mother had been alternately weeping and furious.

He had been packing his bags. Apparently the police had been around.

She said nothing to me that night when he dragged his bags out the front and disappeared into a taxi. She didn’t need to. Her eyes had said it all.

This is all your fault.

The days immediately following his departure were a whirlwind of activity. People flashing badges, being shunted between a nice, wood trimmed office where a kindly man handed me a doll and asked me to point out where he’d touched and a brightly lit doctors surgery where the severe looking doctor asked me to take off my pants and parted my buttocks. Then there was the long stay in the corridor sitting on an uncomfortable, plastic, moulded chair while stern looking men conferred with mother behind a glass door.

I had no idea what was happening at the time. I think I was in some sort of daze. How could a story have caused all this? The car trip home had been icy. She hadn’t talked; just glared ahead, out of the window.

She’d come for me that night, just as he’d used to, waiting until the grandfather clock in the hall chimed eleven. Her breath hot in my ear as she’d pushed my face into the pillows, stifling my breath. This was back before the weights so I probably could have overpowered her but the shock of it momentarily paralysed me. My head was still thick with sleep and it took me a moment to focus on her low voice as she hissed my fate into my ear.

You want to write? Well you’re going to write. A masterpiece… You’ll write me a masterpiece… Now he’s gone you need to start pulling your weight… This is your fault… You had to write your little story didn’t you…

Suddenly she’d been gone, leaving me with just her wet spittle on my ear to let me know she’d ever been there.

The next day she bought her first weight set…

* * * * *

…I force down a slice of the pizza. Familiarity has dulled its taste to cardboard. I long for the time when she still allowed me books. Back before she realised they were more of a distraction than an inspiration.

Anything to distract me from the blank sheet in front of me.

I take a slurp of the cola, feeling my heartburn protest fiercely at its bite. The sheer quantity of sugar in my bloodstream is making me feel giddy. I check the six hundred mil bottle of water on the desk but it is empty. I have no idea when she’ll bring me another because I can longer remember when she brought me the last.

Time has lost all meaning for me. The clock was one of the first things to go.

Suddenly an idea strikes and I grab my nub of a pencil, scrabbling for a piece of paper. I have a moment of alarm when I think it’s gone but as the lead touches the paper it begins to flow. I write and write and even begin to find a smile crease my face.

It feels good.

It feels right.

Maybe this time….

* * * * *

… Or maybe not. The hard-on pressing against my thigh is the first thing that tips me off. It’s more of the same. More filth as she termed it. More fantasies of the sex that I’ve finally convinced myself I’ll never get. My whole sexual experience started and ended with him. Never even been kissed. Hard to kiss when you’re bent over on all fours, a hand pressing your face into the pillows.

The thought of it kills the fantasy and in frustration, I screw up the four pages I’d written and hurl them at the bin. I want to scream but I don’t. I just sit there, uncomfortably aware that the image of him, whilst sickening, is not enough to make my hard-on wilt.

I sit very still, willing it away even though I know it won’t.

Time passes.

I have no idea how long.

It becomes too much and I slowly let my hand creep down over my gut and into the loose tracksuit pants I am wearing. Guiltily, I peer over my shoulder at the expressionless lens of the camera as though I would be able to see if she was watching.

My fingers pluck my erection free of my bulging thighs and I awkwardly scoot my seat forward so my actions are hidden further in the shadows under the desk.

I wish I hadn’t screwed up the fantasy. Because now as I begin to gently jiggle my wrist, trying to keep my upper body as still as possible, so if she is watching, she can’t tell what I’m doing; now as I begin to stroke my cock, the only thing I can think of is him hunched over and grunting in my ear…

* * * * *

…I often wonder why no one has come for me. Admittedly I was never the most popular kid at school but I did have some friends: Thomas, Mikey and Steve. Surely one of them must miss me? And I was officially enrolled too. Aren’t there people checking up on these things? Surely I couldn’t have just been yanked out in the middle of semester and no one would wonder where I went. We must have moved several times or something. Although I know she is an accomplished liar, even she couldn’t just make me disappear.

She used to drug me a lot back in the early days. I’m certain of it. Well, fairly certain anyway. She told me I was being ridiculous when I asked her about it but I know for a fact my first room didn’t look like this. She was a nurse – hell, she still could be for all I know – she had access to the drugs necessary. I find it difficult to imagine that she was still treating people though. Picture coming out of anaesthetic and finding her hulking form looming above you. You’d be back in surgery before you knew it.

But she must be getting money somehow, so maybe she is still in the nursing game.

Not that that mattered to me now.

I am fairly certain she hasn’t drugged me in a long time.

I don’t know if that is scary or not.

It does occur to me that she no longer needs to move…

* * * * *

…The tumblers click and I am awake in an instant. My back screams in protest as I bolt upright; stiff from sleeping hunched over the desk. Another click resounds and I frantically run over in my mind why she is visiting. I have no idea how long has really passed but it just seems too soon for another visit. Has she already bathed me? I think she has but I cannot be certain. I remember her saying she would but I don’t remember it actually happening.

As the third tumbler clicks, my eyes dart to the food tray which is my best way of judging time passed. It lies empty even though I have no recollection of having eaten it. The door swings wide just as the scent hits me and looking down I realise my t-shirt is spattered with vomit. I have no time to process this before I hear her stomping across the floor and my mind freezes.

‘Now look what you’ve done.’ Her voice drips with concern but I’m not fooled by it. I can sense the anger seething underneath. ‘I only just washed you.’

Well at least that solved that little mystery.

Suddenly her voice is very close to my ear. Very soft and full of venom.

‘You fucking stink. I should let you wallow in it.’

Her voice is gone and I am finally able to expel the breath I’ve been holding.

I hear the slosh of water behind me and wince inside because I know what is coming.

‘Get up,’ she orders and I obey instinctively, not even considering the possibility that I could do otherwise.

I turn to face her but keep my eyes down not wanting to see her. I can’t avoid the bulge of her calves though. I can see the muscles straining as though they want to burst through the skin.

‘Turn around.’

I feel her approach from behind and wince as her hand slides up and grips the neck of my t-shirt, bunching the fabric into her meaty hand. Then she yanks and I can’t help the girlish yelp of pain that escapes me as the t-shirt bites into my flabby skin. The pain is only momentary though and then the shirt tears, sending splatters of my vomit shooting across the desk in front of me.

I begin to sob as I hear the shirt splat to the ground. Her hand hooks into the waistband of my tracksuit pants and wrenches them down. I stifle a second yelp as the friction burns at my thighs.

I wear no underpants and vulnerable does not even begin to describe how I feel.

I can feel her eyes boring into my back. I can sense her disgust at the sight of my body. At my weakness.

Suddenly I am angry.

Fuck her, I think, she made me this way.

I hear the splosh of a sponge entering a bucket and then the droplets as it is wrung out and my anger dissipates quickly in a rising fog of shame. The sponge slaps against my back and the breath whooshes out of me at the frigidity of the water. She rakes it down, scoring my flesh as though the only way to get it clean is to remove the entire epidermis.

‘You’re fucking disgusting,’ I hear her mutter and then the sponge dips lower, running over my buttocks and into my arse crack.’Your fucking arse stinks.’

Her hand grips my shoulder, the fingers digging painfully, and she spins me like a rag doll. I close my eyes as I turn so I won’t have to look at her.

The sponge makes its icy way down my chest, over my stomach and down towards my genitals that have already shrunk in anticipation of the chill. Her fingers cup around my scrotum and I momentarily stop breathing, the certainty overcoming me that she is going to crush them. Perversely I feel my penis begin to swell to life and blind panic grips me. I know that if I get an erection, I will be punished. She wouldn’t even have to flex those forearms to reduce my testicles to paste.

‘You like that don’t you?’ she breathes in my ear. With my eyes closed it sounds sultry. Like what the voice of all the beautiful women I imagine sounds. This doesn’t help. As my erection rises to life I hold my breath, waiting for the blinding agony as she clenches her fist.

It doesn’t happen though and I feel her hand drop away.

The sponge splashes back into the bucket and her footsteps recede across the floor. She pauses in front of the doorway and when she speaks it is in a new tone of voice I haven’t heard before. It is a sad tone. Full of not feigned but genuine disappointment.

‘You’re not the only one being imprisoned by this... I’ll bring you some new clothes soon.’

I don’t know what she means or what to say in reply. For once I am relieved to hear the lock click shut…

* * * * *

… I awake with a start, disorientated by my sudden flight into awareness. Something woke me; a loud sound. I’m certain of it. It sounded like a gunshot or a car back-firing. Or was it just a dream? I hold my breath, listening intently but the noise is not repeated.

Hope surges through my frame as my over-active imagination churns out a reason for the noise: the police have found me; even now they are heading for my room, guns drawn, ready to set me free while behind them she lays slumped on the floor, a bullet-hole in her head.

I listen hard, willing my ears to here the slap of footsteps approaching but there is nothing, just dead silence. Maybe it was nothing? Maybe it was just a dream?

Disappointment hits me hard and fast. Before I know it I am sobbing. Through my tears I can see something on my desk in front of me. A piece of paper and a pile of neatly folded clothes next to it. It is only then that I realise I am still naked. I don’t know why but the fact that she hasn’t woken me to dress me fills me with a horrible foreboding. Usually she would never trust me to dress myself.

My sobs have stopped and I wipe away the tears from my eyes so I can read the note next to the clothes.

It is short so it doesn’t take me long.

I really wish it was something I’d written and just couldn’t remember but I know it isn’t my handwriting.