Fractured: International Hostage Thriller

by Clàr NÕ Chonghaile

  Legend Press Ltd, 175-185 Gray’s Inn Road, London, WC1X 8UE

  info@legend-paperbooks.co.uk | www.legendpress.co.uk

  Contents © Clár Ní Chonghaile 2016

  The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

  Print ISBN 978-1-7850798-2-5

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-7850798-3-2

  Set in Times. Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays Ltd.

  Cover design by Gudrun Jobst www.yotedesign.com

  All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Clár grew up in County Galway in Ireland, the eldest of seven children. She left Ireland aged nineteen to work as a graduate trainee journalist at Reuters in London. Clár has worked as a journalist for over twenty years and has lived in Madrid, Paris, the Ivory Coast, Senegal and Kenya.

  While in Nairobi, she freelanced for the Guardian and travelled to Somalia to cover the African Union’s battle against Al-Shabaab and the plight of thousands of displaced people. Clár returned to London in summer 2014, where she lives with her husband and two daughters.

  Fractured is her debut novel.

  You can contact Clar on Twitter

  @clarnic

  For David, Lucy and Rachel

  CHAPTER ONE

  PETER

  My name is Peter Maguire. That much I know. I don’t know what day it is. Or where this room is. Or what time it is. I can hear those avian punks, the birds with the spiky tufts and long tails, yammering outside. It must be daytime. I can smell the outside; I can hear it; the low thrum of traffic and the shuffling of people overlain with the staccato rhythms of war. That other world that doesn’t seem to notice I am no longer in it.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been here. The prickly mat beneath my cheek is black and green. My blanket is woven poverty, a brown-grey nothingness that says even colour is a luxury. These things I know because for the past few days, a thin teenager has brought me a bowl of greasy stew and a jug of tepid water. He comes in with a torch and waits for me to finish. He never speaks but he fills my mind. I need something to occupy my thoughts.

  First, I hear his flip flops slapping towards me. Then a ten second pause when he puts the tin bowl and jug down and gets the keys. The clunk of the padlock being opened. Another pause. About five seconds this time. I imagine him bending down, picking up the bowl and jug, and then maybe shrugging his shoulders to nudge his AK-47 back into place. I spend a lot of time imagining what he does outside this room.

  Once, a long time ago, or maybe not, I decided to run. I heard the flip flops and crouched down by the door. I waited until he lifted off the padlock, and then threw myself at the door. It gave and I thudded into the skinny teenager, my rage, desperation and throbbing fear acting like a force field. He collapsed, drops of spilt stew spattered around his screaming mouth, his torch rolling on the floor. I got about halfway up the corridor before they came. I think there were three. The memory is fractured like a Picasso painting: an out-of-place eye, a snarling mouth in a bearded face, a fist, the butt of a gun, blood on my T-shirt, a perfect drop falling and breaking.

  The first blow was to the side of my head. I fell to my knees. Someone kicked me. They were screaming. I think I was too. I looked up. The skinny teenager was standing above me, his face still dripping. His hand shot out and he slapped me hard across the face.

  They threw me back into the room. I woke to pain like passion. I don’t know how long I lay on this mat. I could taste blood in my mouth. One eye wouldn’t open. I wanted to stop breathing, just to stop the pain piercing my ribs. I tried to hold my breath. I thought I could kill myself by omission. They didn’t feed me for two days. I didn’t care. Despite my travels, my CV full of ‘danger zones’, I had never been beaten like that. It broke me. And as I lay there, unable to move, I wondered what kind of man breaks after one beating.

  A woman came to wash my wounds. She slipped into the room like a dream. A woman without footsteps tending a man without a shadow. Black eyes meeting mine over a breath-stirred veil as soft hands lifted a dirty cloth from a basin of cold water. This is a country of eyes. She bathed my face, stroked the cloth across my nose, let the cool water drip over the stubble on my chin. My tears ran into the dirty water. I shivered. When she was finished, she rose from her knees.

  “Please, help me,” I croaked.

  I meant to whisper but I got the pitch wrong. It’s strange how quickly you forget. In a film, she would have looked into my eyes, a potent connection would have been forged, defying convention and credence. But she didn’t falter in her exit.

  It’s hard to say exactly when that happened. Time has lost its edges in here. What is an hour, a minute, even a day? I live by other measures. My life is determined by feeding, sleeping, the creak of a door, the thwack of a rubber sole on concrete. What does it matter when these things happen? They happen, and as long as they do, I am alive.

  This tomb is made of rough bricks. They smell and taste dusty. I know because I licked them, just to do something new. There is no light here. I hear sounds, but from a distance, like shouts made unintelligible by a beachside breeze. Birds sometimes. Dogs barking. Raised voices, gruff and male. I have my blanket, the mat and a bucket to shit in. At first, I was on it for hours but my bowels have adjusted to this unlife. They have turned sluggish, like me.

  In the early days or maybe hours, I shouted, banged the door, screamed and made that one attempt to escape. How long did that impulse, that ridiculous hope, last? Maybe a few days. My mother always said I had life too easy. I won’t deny it. At least, I wouldn’t have. Maybe all that good karma – the genes that gave me green eyes twinned with ‘Black Irish’ cheekbones, those no-effort good grades, the shy smiles from fresh-skinned, naughty-eyed girls, the easy camaraderie with blustering boys – was being totted up and entered somewhere into life’s ledger. Someone has decided my account is in the red and that it’s time for me to pay the bill. It’s as sensible a reason as any I can think of for winding up in a dark hut somewhere in Somalia.

  Today was different. The teenager came with my stew and water. I was sleeping, although sleep is not really the right word for what happens in here. Out there, sleep is an option, a respite, a conscious act. Here it is none of those things. My dreams are more real than the nothingness around me. I have eaten butter chicken again with Michelle in that poky restaurant in Paris where the sweat-seared, hand-wringing manager served us lemony liquor in china thimbles with pornographic pictures inside. I have walked again from my apartment, along the stinky, silvered canal to Place de la République. I have swum again in the roiling waves off Monrovia. I have kissed, caressed, stroked, made love. Not just to Michelle. I have also felt Esther’s shea-butter smoothness and watched her apple cheeks swelling as I entered her.

  And all the girls before. Sometimes, they come into my dreams fully formed, their speech and habits perfect, as though my brain is reveling in this new, absolute power. Sometimes, they are composites and I wonder vaguely whose hair is sweeping over my face,
making my whole body tingle.

  The teenager must have been watching me for a while. I squinted into the torchlight, hauling myself onto my elbow and then pushing back to lean against the wall behind me. I like sleeping beside the wall, as far away as possible from the centre of the room. I always sleep on the edge of my bed. Always used to. Ready to flee, Michelle used to joke.

  I ate my stew, burning my mouth. I welcomed the pain. The food isn’t always hot and the blisters give me something to focus on between visits. I’m a casual eater, and have never been very good at identifying different meats, but this had the chewiness and mildly beefy taste of camel. I chewed rapidly and swallowed thankfully. My taste buds have also adapted to this new reality.

  I used to wonder how the AMISOM peacekeepers posted here managed to stomach camel meat. Once, during a previous trip, I went to an AMISOM forward base on the road from Mogadishu to Afgoye, and three Burundian soldiers invited me to share their meal, offering a big tin bowl with wide smiles and frantic nods, as if they were afraid they might change their minds if I hesitated too long. I ate with them, crouched low in the meagre shade of a thorny bush, surrounded by yellow jerry cans, bat-sized cacti and bulging sandbags. Their khaki tents crouched low among the scrubs and bushes that stippled the sand.

  On the way back to our armoured car, a Ugandan officer took me to a perfume factory that Al-Shabaab had been building before they were driven out a few months before. One room was full of sacks of dried limes, sharp-smelling brown balls that also covered the floor. I scooped one up, sniffed it, and put it in my pocket – Michelle would love it.

  “They were building factories and markets,” the urbane commander told me. “They were here to stay. Unfortunately, they were on the wrong side of history.”

  And now so am I.

  The teenager watched me carefully, his almond-shaped eyes narrowed below arching eyebrows that seemed tasked with providing the perfect frame for the picture below. A thin beard perched uneasily on his chin. Can I get out? Not by the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin. Maybe I can huff and puff and blow this place down. Blow myself back to Paris, or Monrovia, or even just as far as Mogadishu. Assuming I am not actually there. Or that there is not here.

  When I had licked my fingers with their black nails and red knuckles, fingers I don’t even recognise anymore, I sat back, waiting for the teenager to leave. I did not expect him to speak. His head was still tilted as if he found me mildly amusing. He reached into the pocket of his shapeless black trousers and pulled out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. He removed a cigarette, holding it the wrong way round for an instant before spinning it and placing it between his lips. The lighter clicked and the acrid smell of cheap tobacco filled the room. I sucked his exhaled smoke through my nose, my eyes closed. I felt giddy already.

  When I opened my eyes, the teenager was holding the packet towards me. I grabbed at it with both hands. He frowned, pulled it back and took one out, handing it to me with his long, bony fingers. The cigarette stuck to my dry lips as I dragged deep, tearing the skin when I removed it. I didn’t care. I was as happy as I had been for days. Who cared where I was? What about the future? All I knew was that I had a cigarette. A silent teenager had given me a cigarette. Someone had noticed me.

  They moved me the following day. Four men with black scarves tight around their heads and loose across their faces, came into my room and pulled me from the corner where I had crab-crawled when I heard them in the corridor. They hauled me to my feet and pushed me out the door. I was terrified, the trembling that had subsided a little came back. I wanted to say something. I felt it was important to say something but I was petrified. I didn’t want to be beaten again. I didn’t want to die.

  They looked like men who shoot as others breathe. It’s not as absurd as it sounds. I have seen many such men. And women, and children. The children are the worst. Before I started working in conflict zones, trying to interest an over-stimulated, addled readership in wars too complex to condense, I thought you could reason your way out of anything. I had a journalist’s misplaced belief in the power of words. But I am wiser now having seen too many young-old faces at roadblocks, cold, bleary eyes staring above the barrel of a gun gripped in steady hands. You know you are in trouble when these kids laugh. It’s a chilling sound – the insane giggle of a child high on drugs, with nothing to live for except the moment.

  The guys propelling me down an uneven corridor towards a sliver of light were a little different though. Just as Somalia was different from almost anywhere I had ever been. The skinny teenager wasn’t with them. I felt unreasonably bereft.

  “Stop!” A hand grabbed the loose robe that flapped around my knees. Cold, hard fingers spun me and a scratchy sack stinking of garlic was pulled over my head. They turned me around again. I remembered playing blind’s man bluff with my cousins on an arrow-shaped peninsula south of Kinsale in Ireland. I had hated the blindfold, but the worst part was being spun around and around, rough fingers on my shoulders and my waist, grassy tussocks making me stumble, my strangely accented whimperings tossed on the wind and jeered into pieces by the older, tougher boys.

  Then I was outside. Light filtered through the tight weave hanging over my nose and being sucked into my mouth. I tried to breathe more carefully. After the dark of my tomb, even the filtered brightness hurt. I squeezed my eyes shut, grateful for the sack. I heard an engine, and below, like a baseline, feet on sand and other cars, seagulls and the faint sound of a muezzin, calling from a minaret.

  I was lifted into the back of a truck. Someone shouted at me and I was pushed to the floor. I was on my knees, my head bowed, my stomach turning as I inhaled the chemical fumes of an ancient exhaust. Someone kicked me between the shoulders. I could feel boots on my back, on my legs. I tried to stay alert, to notice the smells and sounds as I had been taught in my hostile environment course. After the instructors ‘kidnapped’ us as we drove down a gravel lane just yards from the ivy-covered manor where we ate curries, drank in a too-twee bar, and slept in four-poster beds, they praised me for behaving so calmly, describing me as ‘a cool customer’. Pride before a hell of a fall.

  Here, all I noticed was my breathing – stupidly fast despite my efforts to calm down – and the thudding in my head. I have no idea how far we travelled. I didn’t notice any smells or any sounds beyond the thundering of the engine and the crunching of the wheels. I pushed into the steel floor, making myself as small as I could, trying to disappear, trying to forget the boots on my shoulders, ribs and the backs of my knees.

  We stopped. My ears rang after lying on the floor for what seemed like hours but could have been as little as fifteen minutes. Everything has that dreamlike quality here. As if the regular rules of time, space and distance no longer apply. Welcome to Somalia, leave your measurements at the door. I felt sick and hoped I wouldn’t throw up in the sack. It’s odd how we cling to the little trappings of normalcy. What did it matter if I puked in the sack? I was probably about to be shot, or worse.

  I was pulled out and thrown to the ground, a sack of bones, flesh and fear. I wondered if I should lie down again but no one kicked me. The sun hammered my head. Just as it battered Meursault in L’Étranger.

  I have been thinking about that book a lot. I studied Camus in my pretentious, problem-riddled high school in Paris, and I was fascinated by Meursault’s absurd “four short knocks on the door of misery”. Meursault killed time in prison by listing everything in his apartment. He said a man who had only lived one day could live for hundred years in prison, passing time by reliving the surroundings and events of those twenty-four hours.

  It was all about killing time. My fourteen-year-old self underlined that phrase, but I didn’t really understand it. I thought it spoke to my boredom in class.

  In this place, I have tried Meursault’s prison survival plan, but I am not focused enough to pull it off. Or maybe it is the fear of dying. This dread, lying like a snake in my stomach, makes rational thought impossible. Or maybe the pr
oblem is that I don’t want to spend too much time thinking about my life. Until I was taken, I excelled in avoiding self-reflection. My former girlfriends all agreed on that.

  They weren’t wrong about my failings. But they were wrong in attributing them to an inability to express my emotions. It has always been deliberate. I prefer to live life one day at a time, in the now. My personal self-help programme to avoid the past.

  My captors pushed me into the shade. Someone snatched the sack off my head. Fresh air flooding my lungs, light exploding in front of my squeezed eyes. Nothing but sensation, overwhelming in its physicality.

  When I finally opened my eyes, I found myself looking into another half-covered face, but these eyes were new. They looked at me for a long while. Then a hand came out from under a blue robe, and pulled back the red-checked scarf. A beaky nose over thin lips, hollow cheeks making me think of the fish faces my father used to pull to stop me crying when I was a child. Don’t think of that now.

  “Peter Maguire, this is your new home.”

  The voice was hoarse, the English halting but accurate, although he stumbled over my surname, giving it an Arabic cadence. Maquir, perhaps.

  We were standing under a spindly acacia tree in a small compound. There were three houses, simple mud-plastered wood structures with corrugated iron roofs. A brick shed in a corner near the heavy iron gate looked new and raw. Chickens pecked the hard ground around a tilting blue truck, which was missing its headlamps, radiator and half the windscreen. I couldn’t see beyond the high walls, which were topped with shards of coloured glass. The sky was flawlessly blue and unforgiving.

  The four boot-men stood behind me, guns at their sides but hands on the barrels.

  “I prefer my old home,” I said, turning back to the head guy. My attempt at sarcasm sounded pathetic.

  He smiled, an awkward slash that had little to do with mirth.

  “You belong to us now,” he said. “This will be your home until we decide otherwise.”