by Finn Óg
“And now you help us into Ireland,” she said, the irony not lost on her.
“Not through choice, Alea, I can assure you.”
“How did you get them out, the women?”
“Over my shoulder mostly,” said Sam without thinking.
“You carry?”
“Sometimes.”
“Just women?”
“No, anyone really who was in a shit shape.”
“This I don’t know.”
“Anyone that my friend said needed help. She would call me and I would go, get the person, take them to the docks or the airport or whatever, and she would pay for them to get home.”
“Why did you do this?”
Sam sighed. “Look, Alea, I didn’t ask a whole lot about it. I just did what she asked and she paid me. Most of the time.”
“Sometimes you do without money?”
Sam ignored the question. He wasn’t about to tell her that he often shook down the pimps and madams who ran the women. That he considered the fleecing of shipping companies or gang masters as reward for risk.
She looked to sea, musing. “What is her name?”
“My friend?”
“Yes.”
“I call her Charity.”
Tassels stood at his desk his head hanging between his shoulders listening to threats with a resigned endurance.
“If you do not find me someone soon, this racket is over. I will expose you.”
Tassels lifted his face to give his cousin a long, hard stare.
“I have nothing to lose,” the doctor went on. “My license is already gone, I have no job, I can’t even work the black market because nobody in Egypt can get any drugs or medication. You need to honour your agreement. You need to get me out.”
“I have been looking for a doctor, you know that.”
“You have not been looking hard enough. There have been dozens – maybe hundreds of migrants coming through. You have seen them all. You should have been checking their papers.”
“It’s not that easy,” said Tassels, frustration creeping into his voice.
“Why?” pressed the doctor.
“Because I do not have as much control as you think.”
“You are running this racket,” said the doctor dismissively. “You told me they come with papers.”
“They do, but the rat – he keeps the papers.”
“They leave Egypt without them?”
“I do not know,” said Tassels. “I do not know.”
“You need to get those papers,” said the doctor. “You need to find me a doctor I can swap places with. You need to find me someone whose identity I can take. Then you need to deal with that person.”
“I need to deal with that person?” said Tassels, incredulous.
“Yes,” said his cousin. “I am not in the business of taking life. My line of work is to save life.”
Tassels scoffed. “Then why are you not a doctor any more?” he sneered. “You betrayed your oaths easily enough in the past. You just don’t have the stomach for it.”
“Perhaps,” said the doctor. “But you do. I have seen evidence enough of that over the years. And evidence is what I possess, so find me a doctor and do what you agreed.”
The doctor turned and slammed the door.
Something was bothering Alea. He could see her below, moving around, pausing as she tidied, placing things back on shelves, grabbing them as they rolled around the floor. The debris of sailing through a storm. He felt sure she was going to ask him straight out but on the occasions she’d glanced at him she became distracted by another job and moved away from his line of sight. She played with the girls and fed them and listened to music. She pretended to read but seldom peeled a page. At least her body had become attuned to the perpetual movement of the boat. Eventually she came above and sat in the cockpit. The going was steadier and Sam had both headsails out and had shaken the reefs from the main to keep up the speed as the breeze had eased.
“What is it?”
“Is what?” she said, but she knew what he was talking about because she declined to even look at him.
“You might as well just ask.”
She waited a few minutes before beginning. “What if Charity not help us?”
“I told you. She will try. I promise you she will do her best.”
“What if she not able?”
Sam realised they were slowly getting to the root of the issue. “Why might she not be able, Alea?”
“Europe has laws. They not like migrants. Nobody want Arabs. Nobody want Muslims. They think we all are bin Laden.”
Sam hadn’t the energy to disagree. There was some truth to what she was saying, he imagined. Not that he kept close tabs on society’s opinions, or much cared for that matter.
“She’ll try,” was all he said.
“They will send us back to Tripoli,” Alea said, resigned, staring at the darkness.
“Well, if they do, at least you’ll be alive.”
“Maybe not for long,” she said.
“Alea, what are you not telling me?”
She gradually turned to look at him, her eyes sparkling with emotion, with fear. And then, slowly, she began to speak.
Habid’s mouth hung open. It looked to Tassels like saliva might drop from his lip at any moment. He was leering, loving every moment of the conversation.
“You need to help me. If we don’t find a doctor, my cousin will disrupt this whole flow of business. He will go to the authorities and have us arrested.”
Habid remained silent. He was almost quivering with joy at Tassels’ pleas. The bent copper had no choice but to press on.
“Can you not see that this is dangerous for us? That doctor knows who you are – he can identify you. He knows me, he knows that big idiot who interrogated you. He has even tended to some of your Libyans. I mean, what he is asking for is possible, isn’t it?”
Habid’s expression didn’t change. His eyes were alight, his return stare almost ravenous, as if he’d been deprived and was staring at an indulgence.
“So will you help me? Will you help us?”
Habid suddenly snapped out of his avaricious imaginings and focused on his former torturer.
“The doctor will receive what he is due, assure him of that. As will you – that is a promise.”
Tassels could barely swallow.
“You cannot understand,” she said, “you are military man. Gaddafi was your enemy.”
“Alea, Gaddafi was everyone’s enemy. I’m not pretending to know a whole lot about it but he didn’t even get on with the other leaders in the region – other Arabs, not really. He was a total rocket.”
“A rocket?” she said despairingly, lost as to what he meant.
“A maverick, a loose cannon. Totally bingo.”
She stared at him in bewilderment.
“He was mad,” he tried.
“Yes,” she accepted, “but he kept control.”
“He armed the IRA and they killed kids in Ireland. The IRA used his guns and his Semtex to kill people, including their own. He blew up passenger planes. Didn’t he rape and abuse people in his big fuck-off tent?”
“You can never understand. Country like Libya needs strong leader.”
“A rapist and murderer?”
She looked away again.
“No,” she said, “but when the leader in power, people had chance. Now it raining bullets from sky in Libya. Mad men everywhere, shooting in air, killing each other. One katiba fighting another.”
Sam was familiar with the phrase; it meant battalion or military unit. He took her to mean the tribesmen battling for supremacy.
“I know you don’t want to go back there, especially with Sadiqah, but surely it’s got to be better for women than it was under Gaddafi?”
“You think we are all like al-Qaeda,” she spat. “For women – when Gaddafi there, life is OK. I go to work every day, no coverings. I can drive, I can study. But now,” she said, “now is not p
ossible. Islamists try to change things so women cannot do these things.”
Sam had no point of reference and no argument to make. If what she was saying was true, then he could well imagine that the lifestyle of a widow and her child could be grim.
“There is more to it than that, though, isn’t there, Alea?”
He let that hang in the air for a while.
“What you mean?” she said eventually.
“For you to return it would be particularly dangerous, wouldn’t it?”
She didn’t flinch, apparently ignoring his remark.
He pressed. “Your husband,” Sam said, “he wasn’t a banker, was he?”
Silence.
“Did he work for Gaddafi?”
She refused to reply.
“You had to hide because you were known Gaddafi loyalists, weren’t you?”
“I was not,” she said eventually, “but my husband was a part. But not always.”
Sam didn’t really need to know any more than that.
“I don’t know if that information would help or hinder your asylum application in Ireland,” said Sam, “but if I were you, I’d keep it to myself.”
If Alea understood, she didn’t acknowledge it. She seemed defeated. Eventually she rose and went below and Sam shook his head again at the incredible twisted mess he had landed in.
Waleed stared at the rotten flesh assembled on a stainless steel table. There were fragments of clothing, a buckle, some shrapnel. A pathologist was explaining that as far as he could tell this was all that remained of the suicide bomber. All Waleed could think about was what the parents of the girl whose remains were assembled like a flea market jigsaw would think if they could see her now. Most pieces were missing. Some hair had survived. Her gender had been confirmed only by eyewitnesses who had seen her climb aboard the bus.
Arish had returned to normal. The blood had been washed away. The deformed bus had been dragged off to a holding shed.
His investigation was pointless. He knew what must have happened: IS. Islamic State. Daesh. ISIL. It had plenty of names and plenty of people. They swarmed like locusts devouring all in their path, including young women who were put to work, raped, sold, whipped, killed. Waleed had read all the intelligence reports – dozens of accounts. They’d been headed his way, so he’d taken an interest. He looked again at the lumps assembled on the shiny table and imagined the young woman before IS had arrived in her town. She had probably been subservient to the men in her family and she may well have spent most of her day covered, but at least she’d have had some degree of freedom. When the glorious fighters had arrived to instil their ideology on her village she would have been taken from all that she knew, probably all that she loved. Her father may have been shot; her brothers probably executed.
Iraqi Special Forces had liberated towns and cities and forced these revolutionaries west and south. They had taken women with them and left old folk to tell the tales of genocide. Conditions for this girl had most likely got so bad she had willingly volunteered for the operation. When faced with the choice of heaven or being handed about like a shisha pipe, Waleed wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have done the same.
One hundred miles offshore Sam swept around inside the hood of the chart table for something he hadn’t used in a long time. Eventually his fingers ran across the smooth screen of the smartphone Charity had given him. He pulled it out and plugged it in to charge before taking a staple and popping out the SIM holder. Wrapped in a piece of Blu-Tack and stuck to the timber bulkhead in front of him was the SIM card she’d supplied him with. He wondered whether she’d kept paying for the account given that he hadn’t been in touch for months.
He snapped it all back together and the phone came to life. He waved it around with little expectation – they were still too far from Ireland to catch any service. That didn’t stop him checking it far too frequently though, as he ruminated on what he might say to her. He wondered if Charity was upset that he had just disappeared. The last time they’d spoken he’d left her with quite a mess to tidy up. He reckoned she would understand that Isla was his priority, and if she didn’t get that, well, that was just the way it had to be. But there was something about the woman that made him regret treating her as he had – being out of contact for so long without even telling her they were ok.
In truth she’d not been out of his mind much as he’d tried to make her so. He declined to allow her to form part of his imagination, yet she came knocking anyway. He refused her the space, reserving it for Shannon, who still whispered to him, who guided him, who still made him cry at night. But he and Shannon spoke less often now and he hated that; that she was drifting, that the smell of her perfume was wearing off the T-shirt he kept in the drawer beside his bunk. He’d put it in a plastic bag to try and prevent the perfume being replaced by the aroma of teak from the boat’s furniture, yet still it weakened. He was scared that one day there might be no scent there at all.
The rat unfurled a page as if he were a courier in ancient times about to make an announcement. He stared at his document, plucked at random from his shallow sea scroll and scanned the list and descriptions. His gaze fell upon one name and he paused for a moment, deliberating. He peered into the darkness of the shelter behind his desert hole and called for the man to come forward. There was a shuffle and a patter of sandals, and a ragged head emerged from the gloom.
“You are a doctor?” Habid inquired.
“I am,” said the man.
“A medical doctor?”
“Yes.”
“You have references?”
“References?”
“If you go to Europe, can you get work as a doctor?”
The man looked wary and confused.
“Can a hospital call your employers and confirm you are a doctor?” Habid rephrased.
“Of course, but my former colleagues, they hate me.”
“Because you worked for Gaddafi. Well, keep that to yourself for now. When you get to Egypt there is a man who will ask you questions. You do not need to tell him your references are … questionable.”
“What is this about?” asked the man, excitement building that he may be the next person to be extracted.
“You do not need to know,” said Habid. “Have you got credentials? Have you got something to prove you are qualified?”
“I have a medical card. It gives me access to the hospital, or at least it did. And I have my certificate at my home.”
“Address?” Habid barked. He had become accustomed to the process of rummaging through the houses of his charges. If their bank details could be found, they made it across the border. If not, they remained in the desert.
The man duly obliged.
“I’ll be back,” said Habid, “if I can find your proof.”
“It was on the wall in my study,” said the man, pleading. “Whoever lives there now, they may have taken it down. Please look everywhere.”
I will, thought Habid. I will.
Twenty-five hours, Sam reckoned. Five knots of speed, just under one hundred miles, and any amount of uncertainty ahead. His options were many: he could aim for a small harbour and hope to approach unnoticed, but the chances of that working out were slim. Irish Customs had proved pretty efficient in recent years at checking sailing boats. He had benefitted from their diligence after all. The yacht that was home to him and Isla had once been a drugs boat bought for cash in the Caribbean, laden with cocaine and sailed across the Atlantic. Customs, whether acting on US intel or on their own initiative, had intercepted it, thrown the crew in jail and unceremoniously ripped the boat apart. At least he had managed to pick it up cheap at auction.
Crosshaven was his preference as he knew it well from his days working at boats, but Cork Harbour was one of the island’s major ports and approaching vessels were likely to be picked up on radar and stood a good chance of being intercepted for routine questioning. Sam didn’t fancy that. He’d spent a lot of time disrupting people traffickers and he’d
given the notion of being considered as one a whirl and it wasn’t appealing. Besides, he was reasonably confident his past behaviour would be recorded somewhere in a law enforcement database and arrest was a prospect he could do without.
Sam dipped the diesel tank confirming they’d be sucking air soon. They had enough food to see them through two more days, but the wind was dropping and he didn’t fancy a drift around the south coast. Isla eventually broke his dithering.
“Daddy, can Sadiqah come and live with us?”
“What? No,” he said, without thinking. “No, love, there’s not enough space on the boat.”
“I know but we could live in a house when we get back to Ireland,” she said, rolling her tongue around the landmass as if it were now unusual and exotic to her.
“Houses cost a lot of money, wee love.”
“There’s lots of money under the floorboards,” she pointed out unhelpfully.
Sam mused at how little he could conceal from her as she became more alert, more worldly-wise. Boats weren’t places fit for secrets unless – it appeared – the secrets were being kept from him.
“Not enough to buy a house,” he said, which was almost true.
Sam didn’t rate his chances of getting a mortgage for the remainder given that his means of income was invisible and a tax investigation would do him no good at all. But the conversation served to confirm that they couldn’t afford to put in at any major port. They’d be much safer going somewhere small, somewhere sleepy. He asked her to bring up the chart of the Irish south-east coast.
“How long?” Alea looked up from the galley. She’d gradually added an extra piece of clothing every day since they’d left the Med and he’d caught her shivering a few times.
“One day. Nearly there.”
She climbed the steps of the companionway. “Then what?”
“Good question,” said Sam, taking the map Isla offered from below.
He’d noticed how his daughter had declined any opportunity to get between him and Alea when they were speaking. He wasn’t sure why. Any other time a stranger spoke to him she’d been right in the middle of it interrupting or sucking in every word.
