Page 7 of You Can't Hurt Me

“Needles?”

He nods. “They’re superfine, more like acupuncture,” he says neutrally, selecting a couple from the trolley that look anything but superfine to me. “Now I’ll need you to raise your left leg slightly. We want to get to the fleshy part of your calf.”

I roll up the side of my skirt, grit my teeth and look away. The sensation feels like a hot knife, as if my nerves are fizzing. “Eleven!” I cry. “You said you wouldn’t hurt me.”

“That was unexpected.” He hands me a small circular ice pack, holds it to my calf, and the relief is almost tear-inducing. A wave of nausea rises in my stomach and my back arches.

“It was more than unexpected. You promised,” I say, shaking. My breath feels uneven, as if all the air has vanished from the room.

“Some people barely notice this test but it really depends on the lateral peroneal nerve. Unusual that you had such a strong reaction,” he says, evidently pleased. “You see, the peroneal nerve winds around the outside of the fibula and it can be exquisitely painful if you catch it. It’s an easy one to stimulate. In fact, yours appears to be particularly sensitive. I told you, it’s all subjective.”

Nate notices my teeth still chattering and looks as if he wants to say something, but then he shakes his head. “Right, so Kate, our researcher, will pop you in the scanner and I’ll be checking your reactions on-screen over in the corner.”

He walks away while she takes me through a list of instructions. Slowly I slip into the machine and a small screen above me flashes READY in green lettering before each sensation is administered. Yet again I picture Eva, trapped like me in this rattling metal tube, blissfully safe from whatever agony was about to be inflicted.

A series of red flashes and I feel an acute burning like a blowtorch deep within the muscle of my arm. Another needle slips into the skin around my ankle close to the bone. I think of all those useful adjectives the pain specialists devised back in the ’60s. Throbbing, shooting, drilling, lacerating, crushing, sickening.

The problem is that these are only lame explanations. Once pain strikes, language shatters. Memory makes it difficult to describe precisely since we try to block it out, but so does the sensation itself. I see and feel it in colors more than words. Shutting my eyes, I focus on the orange patterns at the back of my eyelids, morphing into silver shards.

The scanner vibrates and an alarm sounds. My bed moves slowly into the light and I open my eyes. I try to stand up but my legs are unsteady. He walks briskly back over to me, checks my pulse, the tips of his fingers pressing into my wrist.

“So how did I do? Do redheads really perceive pain that differently?”

“They appear to,” he says, his head tilting as he studies my scans. “But in conflicting ways. Their pain tolerance can be higher and yet they can also require more anesthetic to be sedated. So I’m not surprised you’re a complex respondent,” he reflects. “Resilient at points I wouldn’t expect, but then over-responsive at others. On the whole, unpredictable as far as the data is concerned.”

He flips through a series of images where regions of my brain glow orange and red like a forest fire. “It’s a fascinating start and, if we had longer, I could talk you through all your results, your pain profile, but I’m afraid we’re out of time. Is there anything else Kate can help you with for your article?”

I realize I am being dispatched. The interview is over.

“Is that it?” I say, still jittery from the tests. “What happened to my interview?”

He shrugs, polishing his reading glasses.

“No.” The pitch of my laugh takes me by surprise, and I touch the tender skin inside my arm. “It’s been great hanging out in Room 101, being poked and burned and prodded. So you get what you want and I get nothing?”

“Not exactly nothing. It will add to your profile, surely?”

“Amazing,” I say. “But you haven’t really kept to your side of the deal.”

“I disagree. As I said before, you’re the first journalist to set foot in here. You’ve had a unique opportunity to see my work, to experience it firsthand for yourself. Anything else, background, facts, more quotes, I’d be happy to follow up by email.”

“That doesn’t work for me.” I stand up, aware that my face is hot, my hand trembles as I grab my bag off the floor. “It’s a cover story. Readers will want to know more about you, a bit of background. We can talk about your work, but there needs to be a personal element to my article too, for color and context.”

I inhale sharply, instantly regretting my show of impatience. This was meant to be a charm offensive but now I’ve sabotaged all that. I’ve let my emotions surface, disaster for an interviewer, let alone a prospective ghostwriter. “Look, I’m sorry. I think those tests may have thrown me slightly.” I massage my arm, laugh awkwardly.

“No, you’re right.” His tone softens too. “The truth is I don’t do interviews, but Rhik is very persuasive, and there isThe Pain Matrixto promote, so I gave in. But I value my privacy above all else and, as I think we both know, there are good reasons for that.”

“Okay, well, how about I send you a list of questions first so you know exactly what I’m going to ask you? Could that work?” He considers this for a moment and I press on, “You don’t have to answer anything that makes you feel remotely uncomfortable, I promise. Completely up to you. I trusted you and now—”

“It’s my turn?” He looks faintly amused. “Okay, fine. But I may as well say now that I won’t answer the really personal stuff, particularly what happened in the past. I’m not keen on raking through all that, not yet.” He picks up his phone and scrolls through the diary. “I’m away for a while from next week so I can do...this Friday?”

“Fine. Do you have a home office?” I suggest, as casually as I can.

He hesitates. I see a small pulse in his jaw line. “Yes, but—”

“Well, that sounds ideal,” I say, jumping in before he can change his mind about the prize that’s being dangled in front of me, an open invite to Algos House that has always been very much off-limits to journalists.

“Just to clarify, Anna, my home office, not an at-home interview. You do understand? I don’t want to disappoint you on that one.”

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