Captives

by Tom Pow

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  [CONTENTS]

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE: THE DIARIES

  Captives One: The Nightmare Begins

  Captives Two: A Game to the Death

  Captives Three: A Glimmer of Hope

  Captives Four: The Bloody End

  PART TWO: A SECRET RIVER

  Chapter One: don’t you like water?

  Chapter Two: a flower in her hair

  Chapter Three: a horse struck by lightning

  Chapter Four: the failure of friendliness

  Chapter Five: like all prodigal sons

  Chapter Six: you think we don’t listen

  Chapter Seven: promise me something

  Chapter Eight: not anyone’s slave

  Chapter Nine: nada por nada

  Chapter Ten: another life to live

  Chapter Eleven: what scares you?

  Postscript

  Copyright

  Captives

  is for Delia Huddy

  and for my family,

  Julie, Cameron and Jenny

  [ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

  I’d like to thank all those responsible for the expert advice I received in the writing of Captives. Dr. Philip Clayton answered with his usual clarity a number of medical questions I had. Alastair Reid and Professor Mike Gonzalez helped me immeasurably with matters linguistic and cultural. Together with Professor W. George Lovell and Leslie Clark, Alastair and Mike have shared their deep knowledge of Latin America with me over the years. Individually and collectively they have enlarged my sense of the possible. Compañeros.

  I began writing Captives while in Cuba thanks to a Scottish Arts Council Writer’s Bursary. I wish to acknowledge that here and also to thank Glasgow University Crichton Campus for granting me time away from work.

  I am grateful to Harriet Wilson and Delia Huddy for their enthusiasm for Captives in its initial stages. I wish to thank my editor, Lucy Walker, for the sensitivity of her work on the novel and my agent, Jenny Brown, for her unfailing support.

  Delia Huddy showed concern for Captives, even when facing the hospital operation from which she never recovered. This novel is for her, and, as ever, with love and gratitude, for my family—Julie, Cameron, and Jenny.

  Tom Pow

  Dumfries, Feb 2006

  In the high sierras

  Where juniper fills the air

  Or in the deep green forest

  Where the water’s at its coolest—there

  And around each blue fringe

  Of this, our island home,

  You cannot help but hear

  The bones of the dead ask

  As if in prayer

  What have you done

  With our gifts? The wind

  Thickens in the south. Clear your throat—

  It is time you prepared an answer.

  —Rafael Portuondo

  [PROLOGUE]

  His father came on, paused briefly at the top of the stairs, as he would have been told to do, and acknowledged the studio audience’s applause. He did so with a cursory nod of the head—he was not a pop star, after all—and then came down the stairs to join Callaghan, the host. To this part at least, Martin knew, he would have given a lot of thought, and he took the stairs lightly and quickly—a man of energy and action.

  He shook hands with Callaghan, eased himself onto the black leather chair, and checked the lay of his jacket. Martin leaned back on his bed and pressed the volume control of his small bracketed TV up a couple of notches.

  “Well, Tony, as we said in our intro there, it is an amazing story—or perhaps drama would be the better description.”

  “Yes, it is. It sometimes seems like a dream now.”

  “Or a nightmare, more like?”

  “Indeed, a nightmare. An absolute nightmare.” Martin saw his father recognize the mistake he had made and his quickness in rectifying it. They had to get the category right after all—file under nightmare, not dream.

  “Well, Tony, just to take you back to the island of Santa Clara for a moment and to remind us all what you went through, here’s the photograph of you and the other hostages that was syndicated around the world.”

  A large projection showed a handful of glum westerners in shorts and T-shirts in a forest setting. Two men, one heavily bearded, and a woman stood behind a boy squatting between another woman and a girl. The girl’s grimace could almost be mistaken for a smile.

  “You can see in your faces the torment you were going through. And that was what—a week or so after your capture?”

  “Yes, that was after a week. It’s hard to look at that now, you know, to see how worn down we all look, yet there were still another three weeks to go before we were freed.”

  “And living all that time not knowing whether you’d ever get out alive?”

  “Exactly. A month doesn’t sound like a long time—but in those circumstances it felt like … well … forever.”

  For Martin, the shock of the picture still lay mostly in seeing himself there in the jungle, squatting beside Louise. If it was a dream to him, the clearest part of it was that: their thighs touching—a small nakedness, this, but one that stood for all the strange intimacies they had shared.

  As for his father, the man in the picture was closer to the one he knew—or had known—than the man on television with his elegant black suit, the polished black loafers, and the clean-shaven face. The open-necked white shirt Martin recognized as another gesture to the kind of man his father was: successful, but still very much an individual.

  It was a small concession, but an important one, for it gave Martin the only link between this man and the father he had known: the bearded, always dishevelled father, who was beginning to sigh into middle age, who found teaching less of a satisfaction and more of a drudge; whose war with the headmaster over his wearing of sandals to work had become less a point of principle and more a distraction from the fact that, the sandals apart, he found less and less to engage his passions.

  The screen cleared.

  “As I said, Tony, that picture was in newspapers around the world, but what made your story such a drama for us all was the televised plea by your younger son, Nick.”

  His father was nodding. “Yes, of course, we knew nothing about it, but—”

  “If you can bear to watch it one more time…”

  Martin grimaced as, on the large projection screen, his thirteen-year-old brother appeared wearing a football shirt before a battery of cameras and microphones. They missed out the part where the MP had spoken of the unusualness of this “event,” while stressing that the family, and Nick in particular, wanted to do anything it could to advance the safe release of the hostages.

  “I don’t know,” Nick began hesitantly, his eyes on the paper before him, as the Spanish subtitles ran along the bottom of the screen—“No sé si recibirás este mensaje, pero…”—“I don’t know if you’ll get this message, but if you do, please set my family, and the other family, free unharmed. You’ve made your point, and my family have never done anything wrong, so please, they don’t deserve to suffer any more, and if they can see this at all”—and here his face lifted; a boy’s face bathed in light and tears—“Love you, Mum, Dad, Martin, and I miss you so much. Come home safely…” His uncle Ralph’s arm came around him then and Nick slumped forward, burying his face in his ha
nds.

  It was some performance, thought Martin, even seeing it for the umpteenth time. He could be sure that downstairs his mother would be wiping the tears from her eyes and cuddling Nick against her on the sofa.

  Martin’s father had dipped his chin into his chest, in an act of gathering himself before the next question.

  “You must be very proud of your son, Tony.”

  His father lifted his head. “Yes, very. Of both of them.”

  Oh, hurray, thought Martin.

  “Yes, of course, the whole experience must have been a terrible one for your older son, Martin. How’s he doing?”

  “He’s doing just fine. I think, after all that time living so close together, he’s enjoying finding his own space again.”

  “Of course, no matter what happens to them, ‘own space’ at that age is important, isn’t it?”

  “Seems to be, yes.”

  “I mean, our son treats us like meals on wheels and the closest he gets to the wilderness is a mooch around the park with his mates.”

  It was the light part of the interview: both men were smiling and the audience laughed. So what, if Martin had been skated over? He knew there were barbs to come and he worried for his father, now looking so relaxed, so like a real celebrity on Callaghan’s Saturday Night Talk Show.

  “Now, Tony, the diary. You don’t take any prisoners yourself.” Callaghan smiled, liking the line.

  His father frowned. “I wouldn’t put it like that. I just think that if you are going to do something like this, there’s no point if you’re not going to be honest.”

  “Even about your wife. You are a brave man, Tony.”

  “Yes, well…” said his father, pausing to choose his words. “I happen to think my wife is a very brave woman too. She was just as determined that the truth be told as I was.”

  “Agreed, Tony, agreed. But just on that point, is the diary word for word as you wrote it? I mean, it must have been written in very trying circumstances, yet there’s no end of detail in it.”

  “That’s true, and obviously, for publication, parts of it have had to be worked up and clarified for the reader—while remaining true to the experience.”

  “I see,” said Callaghan with a twinkle in his eyes. “Tony, the diary’s been a great success, hasn’t it?”

  “Well, I…,” and his father smiled faintly.

  “Oh, don’t be so modest. Wherever it’s been serialized, newspaper and magazine sales have rocketed. And it’s been translated into Lord knows how many languages.”

  “Six, so far,” said his father. It was a brief flare of pride; forgivable if you knew that this was a writer who’d waited most of his adult life to be published. But it was a miscalculation Martin knew his father would pay for.

  “Six, begorra! And there’s talk of it being turned into a book and a film. Who do you see playing yourself? George Clooney?”

  His father didn’t rise to that one, thankfully, only smiled out of politeness.

  “I think it just happens to be a story people can identify with. You know, ordinary people in an extraordinary situation.”

  “Nightmare, as you say, nightmare.”

  Callaghan had said it twice, as far as Martin could tell, to let the word settle, to act as a brake on all that had gone before. Because now, with the smell of blood in the air, he was smiling sympathetically.

  “Tony, if we may,” and he paused, as if the next words were hard to find, “just touch on the rather public falling out between you and the Deschamps family.…”

  “Of course, but can I say now that nothing saddens me more than this, after all we went through together?”

  “I’m sure we all”—Callaghan swept an arm round the audience—“understand that. Nevertheless, what do you say to their accusations that you are profiteering from their misery? I mean, you are making a profit, aren’t you? Six translations and counting, as you said yourself.”

  There was a glow about Callaghan now, his silver hair still immaculate, his suit crisp, as Martin’s father began to shift uncomfortably, out of his depth, in his ill-fitting black designer suit.

  “No, I wouldn’t deny that the diary has made money.”

  “And the Deschamps, as you know, Tony, claim that that was your intention from the start. They say that the only ‘voice’ speaking to you out there was one saying you could make a lot of money out of the experience—that you concentrated your efforts on your diary to the exclusion of all else.”

  “That’s crazy—I mean, not crazy, but absolutely mistaken. After all, none of us had any idea we were going to get out of there alive. I just thought that if we did, then it was—and is—a story that deserves to be told. As a tribute to everything we went through and especially…”

  “To little Louise.”

  “To Louise, yes.”

  “Because, Lord, it must have been horrendous never knowing if Nick was alive or dead—but that’s not quite the same as losing a daughter.”

  Martin saw the statement as a trap, something to draw some ire from his father or a few more beads of sweat under the lights. His father swallowed and remained calm.

  “I would never, in a million years, claim that it was. And I don’t think anything I’ve written or said would give that impression.”

  It was, however, the impression, or something like it, the Deschamps had taken. Martin glanced to the foot of his bed, where the crumpled newspaper article was spread out. He’d saved it from the bin into which his mother had thrown it. AT OUR DAUGHTER’S COST, read the banner headline. Below it, the Deschamps, recently separated (“The loss of Louise,” Melanie Deschamps tells us, “was a pain we just couldn’t share…”), outlined the case against Tony Phillips and his wife, Carol. Whenever there was work to be done—the setting up of a camp, the digging of a latrine, the gathering of firewood—the Deschamps claimed, Tony Phillips would be lost in his diary and his wife in those crude line drawings that now illustrated it.

  The girl who appeared in the main photograph—there was a smaller one inset of the smiling family of three—was naturally more groomed than she had looked in the famous Captives photograph. This was a school photograph, after all. She wore her auburn hair long over her shoulders;: the studio lighting had emphasized its reddish hue. Martin remembered the day when she’d insisted it be shorn because of the heat. He remembered her long neck; the trail of light hairs that led down to her back.

  The uniform and the pose naturally gave the picture a formality, but there was a light in her eyes, an openness that took in the joking photographer. To those who could see it, there was the same light in the eyes of the girl whose knee lay against his in that forest—a slight pressure he felt more keenly than almost anything that had touched him in all the days since.

  There had been the briefest pause in the interview, as if Callaghan knew this was the time to let Martin’s father off the leash; either to offer a credible defense or to bury himself. His father took his chance.

  “Can I say here, as I’ve said before, that I—or any other person with an ounce of feeling—would do anything to change the end of the story? But fighting isn’t going to bring Louise back. As for profits, I’ve offered to set up a scholarship or some kind of trust fund in Louise’s name as a memorial—”

  “Which her family reject.”

  “Unfortunately, at the moment, yes.”

  “What reasons do they give for this decision?”

  “I really don’t want to speak for the Deschamps. They have their reasons. All I would say is that I too recognize a young life is beyond price.”

  There were a few claps from the audience, during which his father turned to the side table, lifted the tumbler, and took a good gulp of water.

  “I’m sure we all agree with that sentiment. Lastly, Tony, what do you say to their criticism that you present the guerrillas in a favorable light?”

  Oh, Dad, you old hippie, Martin thought, you’ve been rumbled.

  “Oh, that. Well, naturally, I
utterly condemn their actions. I hope that’s clear in the diary.”

  “Certainly it is. But there’s also a way in which their leader emerges as a figure of dignity, a poet to boot—he and his sidekick, Maria.”

  “Maria couldn’t really be described as—” his father began, then changed his mind. He sensed time was running out. And he had an important point to make.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said. “I think that’s really for the reader to decide.”

  His father’s instincts had been right. For immediately, Callaghan was thanking his father for “coming on the show” and “being so candid” and “sharing his incredible story with us all on such an un-tropical night.” “Good luck with the film” was his final comment, a clear indication of the line he had been following throughout the interview. But, as his father nodded briefly at the audience’s applause and shook Callaghan’s hand, Martin thought it could have been a lot worse, and his last answer about “letting the reader decide” had been a good one.

  He flicked off the TV and reached for the stack of four Sunday supplements that currently made up the published diary. But there were steps on the stairs. He threw part of his bedcover over the magazines. His mother opened the door, enough to pop her head in.

  “Did you see it?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I thought he came out of it OK.”

  “Me too. Quite a relief.”

  They exchanged fleeting smiles.

  “Aren’t you going to come down to join us?”

  Us.

  “Nick would like that. Dad’ll be home soon. We could watch a video.”

  “It’s a DVD these days, Mum.”

  “Yes, sorry, of course, a DVD.”

  “Maybe later.”

  “All right … You OK up here? Warm enough? It’s perishing outside.”

  “I’m fine. Like, we do have central heating.”

  “Yes, sorry, of course. What are you going to be doing?”

  “Just reading. Listening to music.”

  “Oh.”

  His mother stood in the doorway in silence, as if frozen there.