His ring had cut my lip. The physical sting was a pinprick compared to the pain of losing the phone, losing that crackly lifeline.
“Tell her you are being treated well and to pay the ransom,” he growled.
He handed me the phone again. I could hear my mother’s breath, short and ragged.
“Mum?”
“Peter, what are they doing? What’s going on?”
“It’s okay, Mum, I’m okay. They are treating me well.”
The Eagle nodded and granted me a patronising smile. I wanted to smash those stained teeth into the back of his throat. I had never felt so powerful an urge to break a man, to pound him into nothingness. It felt good to yield to my anger. I closed my eyes, letting the wave roll over me.
“I love you, Mum. Please talk to Don, and the others. Tell them to do what these men want. I want to come home.”
And then I was crying. Like a child. My mother’s child. Abdi grabbed the phone, clicked it off and they were gone. I slumped to the floor and slowly curled into a ball on the mat.
Later, Abdi came back, alone. He had my food. I ate, noisily, gracelessly, ignoring the pain in my burst lip. I had cried myself empty.
Abdi offered me a cigarette. He joined me, and the smoke spiralled above our heads, silver sylphs gyrating as shy sunrays peeked through the bars high up on the wall. He smoked loosely, languidly. Not so much a man who didn’t have a care, as a boy-man who didn’t care. I wondered why. And then he spoke.
“Your mother is alone?”
His voice was soft, barely a whisper. The English was heavily accented but good, a little self-conscious perhaps.
“Yes, she lives alone in Paris.”
“Where is your father?”
“He lives in Ireland.”
Abdi looked puzzled.
“They are divorced.”
“And your brothers and sisters?”
“I have none. I am an only child.”
“And your wife? Where does she live?”
“I am not married.”
Thirty years in a nutshell. The bare details I give up when people ask me about myself after I have interviewed them, when the tables turn and they justifiably seek to know something about the reporter who has just mined their lives, their feelings, for his own glory.
Maybe people need an observer, a listener, someone to make what is happening real by putting it on paper. Otherwise, everything might just be taking place in our heads. It’s the only explanation I have found for why so many people have opened their hearts to me over the years.
Now, I am the one who needs someone to record what I say – a stenographer of my soul – to convince myself that I am not dreaming this.
“I have a son,” I offered, and immediately felt ashamed.
You are not supposed to give any information to your captors. We learnt that on the hostile environment course. Don’t give anything up. It made sense at the time, but they didn’t tell us how lonely it would be. How everyone needs to share, everyone wants to give their lives meaning and shape through narration. Especially when time’s frame has been smashed, and dreams meld into nightmares. I spoke to remind myself that I existed beyond these four walls. My shame was in my weakness, and in the impure use of a boy I had neglected for so long to define my humanity.
“He is with your mother?” Abdi asked.
“No, Godwin is with his mother. They live in Liberia. Do you know Liberia?”
For a moment, I thought he wouldn’t answer. Maybe this conversation was just an interrogation. I felt like a fool for falling for it. Angrily, I stubbed out my cigarette. It had burnt low and singed my fingers.
“I have read of it. That place is fucked up.”
He uttered the expletive delicately, as if unsure of its exact import, and shook his head, his face solemn. I couldn’t help it. I laughed, a little too loudly, a little hysterically. The new sensation hurt. Abdi stiffened.
“You are laughing at me? Don’t laugh at me, infidel!”
He picked up the plate and turned to leave.
“I’m sorry, Abdi. I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just funny. You, a Somali, talking to a kidnapped journalist in a shed in God knows where, in a country shot to hell, saying Liberia is fucked up. I’m not laughing at you. It’s just funny.”
I hoped his face would crack into a smile. I needed to know he wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t see the humour in this. I craved Abdi’s approval. Not because of any fanciful dream of escape. He was just a teenager. No match for the men around him. I just needed someone in this timeless underworld to react to me so that I could still believe I existed.
He walked out, slamming the door behind him.
The next day, he spoke again, but this time it was to hurt me. To avenge his teenage humiliation.
“We are going to sell you. To Al-Shabaab. You will die. Even if they pay the money, you will die.”
He twisted his lips into a grimace, a half-smile so bleak it scared me more than his words.
“Yes, it is also fucked up here.” He lit a cigarette and put the packet back in his pocket.
I was quiet. I did not want him to go yet, and I was digesting the new information. If I were sold to Al-Shabaab, all hope would be gone. A British journalist working for a US paper would be a massive coup. They could get the ransom and still cut off my head. And then post the pictures on the Internet.
I thought of the videos I had watched on assignment in Baghdad. How long it had taken that aid worker to die. The screams turning to gurgles as they hacked a toothless, monster-mouth into her neck.
That video haunted me for years. I still dream of it, the images distorted and reconfigured by my malevolent subconscious. I am being cut. I am hacking. It is my mother. It is my father. Sometimes, I dream of Esther’s arm. Even though that was not on any video.
When they chopped off Esther’s right arm in the forests outside Freetown, there was no need for cameras. The young boys with the stained, blunt machetes were not trying to frighten anyone outside Sierra Leone. Their only targets were the people locked inside the killing fields. The people who could not escape, including sixteen-year-old Esther, whose arm was sawed off below the elbow, and who became the mother of my son, Godwin.
“My son is five.” I’d spoken before I realised it. The atmosphere in the room shifted.
Abdi swatted a fly from his nose. When he spoke, it was reluctantly.
“So, you live in Liberia?”
“No, I live in Paris. I do not seen my son. It’s complicated.”
I waited for another question. I thought I could sense curiosity, but Abdi finished his cigarette in silence and left.
Complicated. Three decades on this planet and that is the best I can come up with to describe what has happened. Complicated does not come close to explaining why I have a girlfriend in Paris who wants me to marry her, a son in Liberia born to a one-armed beauty with eyes of coal and a gift of silence, and one father on a farm of fat cows in Cork.
Of course, Michelle does not know of Esther, or Godwin. Michelle, who said, as we sat in front of the television watching a report on the release of a British contractor who had been held in Baghdad for three months, “God, I would hate to be kidnapped. All that fuss when you come out. Photographers everywhere. My eyebrows would be out of control, I’d have a moustache. Can you even imagine?”
That makes her sound superficial. She isn’t really. No more so than any of us are when we live safe lives in safe places where our horrors are drawn from daily life. If we want more, we simply go see a scary movie. Or become firefighter journalists, hopping on a plane whenever the dull dreads of daily life become too much to bear.
I was fleeing again when I met Esther in 2005. Michelle and I had just started seeing each other, somewhat regularly and almost exclusively, and I needed to be gone for a while. I did like her. It wasn’t that.
We were having fun. Climbing onto the wide ledge outside my eighth-floor apartment to look over bejeweled, brash P
aris. Sunday brunches in dim bars built to hold secrets, where we drank tart Bloody Marys and sent smoke-wraiths twirling to the ceiling. Kir royals at sunset. Ice cream by the Notre Dame. These were good times, but I’m not good with good.
I was sent to Liberia to cover the presidential election. I met Esther at a rehabilitation camp for former child soldiers. She had moved to Liberia with her family after the rebels took over Freetown in 1999. Frying pan to the fire. But they had relatives next door and Charles Taylor was in power and it seemed a little more stable. That was a few months before rebels started to creep out of the north, heading towards Monrovia. And so began Liberia’s second civil war. It would end in 2003 when Taylor finally left the country, boarding a plane in a white suit, looking for a moment like a bewildered old man as security officers prodded him up the steps, past supporters crying into comic-book-sized cloths on the tarmac.
For most of that second war, Esther and her family lived in the bush around Sanniquellie. After Taylor left for exile, Esther came to Monrovia and got a job serving food in a camp for former child soldiers. When I came to interview the tiny Italian nun who ran the compound, Esther served me a bowl of rice and bitterleaf sauce, carrying the chipped blue china bowl carefully in her one hand and setting it down on a wooden table speckled with flowers that had fallen from a purple bougainvillea bush overhead. I asked Sister Maria about the girl with the smile.
“Oh, she is not one of our charges,” the elderly nun said in a faint, fluttering voice that sat uneasily with her no-nonsense muscled arms and solid, can-do face.
“She came from Sierra Leone. She was not a child soldier but, as you can see, she suffered. She has been here a year now. She says her family crossed over in 1999. They have relatives in Nimba. After what happened to her, they could not stay near Freetown.”
I asked if I could interview her. Even now, I don’t know why I wanted to speak to her. It didn’t fit my story. Of course, the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia were linked, and of course, people crossed borders into countries more fucked than their own, but those realities did not fit the linear narrative I needed to construct to explain the story to my readers in New York and Omaha. Liberia was doing well, about to elect a new president, a new day was dawning. I would never be able to find room in my piece for the woman who had lost her arm in a separate war that nonetheless sprang from the same hunger for wealth and was directed by the same big men.
Maybe I just wanted her to like me, maybe it was as simple as a smile, her smile. I wanted to see her face light up, and feel that flush of warmth that meant I had snared another soul. Maybe I just wanted to prove, now that I was seeing Michelle regularly, that I could still attract a woman. Maybe I was trying to prove to myself that, at twenty-four, I was not tied down to one woman, one colour, one class, one definition of beauty. Or maybe it was simple lust.
Esther did smile. She did not say much during the interview, but she agreed to meet me for a drink later. She didn’t waste words, she didn’t look for affirmation of herself, or myself in chatter. She fascinated me. We made love in my mildewed hotel room under a fan that caressed the soupy air that clung to our bodies.
I stroked the stump of her arm, filled with hot anger and pity for the girl she had been then. For her and all the others. I kissed the hard, bumpy flesh. Her eyes widened but she did not say anything.
And that is how my son Godwin came about. That night, or one of the other fragrant, flesh-filled nights during those few intense election weeks. Some would call my son a mistake. And yes, there was a condom that split. Such banalities lie behind life’s transitions.
But I think the real mistake is everything I have done since then. Or rather everything I have not done. Even here, as I lie under the bared teeth of the window-monster in this outer space of reality, my face is hot, and my shame clings to me like a shroud.
“Why did you go to Liberia?”
Abdi was back, lounging on the mattress, his gun leaning against the wall beside him. Without the weapon, his body was again an ordinary teenager’s, all legs and arms. I sat on the mat, my back curved, my head lowered to suck up any cool air I could.
I knew I shouldn’t talk to Abdi but I didn’t feel like making a stand on privacy when I might only have a few days left. Abdi might be the last person I would have a relationship with. These might be my last conversations. Maybe if I kept talking, I wouldn’t die. I was Scheherazade to Abdi’s Shahryar. The servant is king but I am still the storyteller.
“I’m a journalist. I go where there is news. I have been to Liberia many times but my son was born after I went in 2005, to cover the elections. You know, the people voted for Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. She is the first woman to be elected president in Africa.”
“Why did they choose a woman?”
“She’s a clever politician, she promised the voters what they wanted to be promised. Reform, change, peace and money. After so much killing I think the people were tired of men and boys running things. There had been too much suffering. They thought maybe a woman could do better.”
“Women can be strong, but they cannot be leaders.”
It was not offered for debate and the words had the dull ring of rote.
Abdi took out another cigarette and offered me one. He threw me the matches. I threw them back. He fumbled the catch, his fingers shooting out awkwardly, flicking the box down. He grabbed the packet off the mattress and stuffed them in his pocket. I pretended not to notice.
“Your son’s mother, she is black?”
“Yes. She’s from Sierra Leone. She was living in Monrovia when I met her.”
“Why did you go with a black woman? You have a white woman too? You can marry many women in your country?”
Morality lessons from a teenage kidnapper. I could hear my father’s voice, with its faint Cork sing-song, ‘Naught as strange as life, Pete.’
“No, you cannot have many wives. I have a white woman in Paris but I am not married.”
“She would not make a good wife?”
“I don’t know. She’s nice. She’s smart. She’s very pretty. But I am still young. There’s time enough for marriage.”
Or maybe not. That’s the problem. We always think there is time enough for everything, even when we are complaining about the days being too short. We believe tomorrow will always come. Even people like me, who should know better.
“And the black woman? She would make a good wife?”
“She might. She too is beautiful. But I don’t think I can live that life. It wasn’t the plan, you know. It wasn’t my plan to have a baby there. It just happened.”
“Why didn’t you try to live there? You can go wherever you like with your passport.”
I didn’t know what to say, and after a while, Abdi peeled himself from the thin mattress and pushed open the heavy door. For a second I glimpsed the outside; the dusty courtyard, a scraggy thorn bush in the middle distance, a sky bleached white by the heat. When the door closed, the over-bright flash of outside stuck on my retina, growing fainter and fainter. I closed my eyes.
The next day we talked some more. I had not seen The Eagle again. I assumed he was busy negotiating with Al-Shabaab. Abdi seemed less reticent. Maybe he too needed to have some last conversations. This time I asked the questions.
“You are not married?”
“No.”
“You have family here, I mean, in Somalia?”
“My mother. My father was killed. My brother also.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you are not. Why should you be? I don’t need your pity. I have suffered. Now it is your turn. It comes to everyone. It’s just a question of when.”
I paused, taken aback by the brutality of his words.
“What was your father like?”
“He was a strong man,” Abdi said curtly.
I worried I had assumed too much intimacy. Maybe I was not allowed to ask questions. I thought we were becoming friends. Or at least fellows. Fellow inmates.
These chats kept me going. Not because of what we said but because they stopped my mind from torturing itself with its endless focus on me. Other words. Other ideas. Not these same damn thoughts going round and round until I thought I would collapse from the sheer, terrifying monotony of my own company.
Meursault was wrong. A day was not enough of a life to make imprisonment bearable. It was either insubstantial, or too substantial.
“My father was a teacher, but he was killed by a mortar. Four years ago. My brother died in June. They say he was a martyr. He blew himself up. Now, it is just me and my mother.”
The information came in a rush, as though Abdi had made a decision. The words streaked out before he could change his mind. I didn’t say anything for a while. I felt as though this rush of personal information had embarrassed him.
“Your English is very good. Where did you learn?”
“At school, before the fighting became too bad. And from the television, before it was banned. I used to watch a lot of football at the kiosks and bars. I am a Manchester United fan. So was my brother.”
“I’m a City man myself. You know, Manchester City.”
“I am sorry for you, my friend.”
And finally, Abdi smiled. His sterile handsome features bent into something less perfect, but more beautiful.
The sight of my boy-man jailer smiling was like a knife in my gut. Something wonderful and terrible was happening. I was seeing Abdi. And he was seeing me. In my work, I rarely managed to break through meaningfully into another person’s world. Often, it was unnecessary for the stories I was writing. But also I think there has always been something frivolously selfish about me. I want to be liked but I don’t want to invest too much. Then, there is always the next story.
Here, now, I had done it. I was investing. Around Abdi and I, the world was wrong. Everything was distorted. But in this room, in the few metres that encompassed us both, normalcy was fighting back.
Fractured: International Hostage Thriller Page 5
