by Nick Lake
This, like everything, is for Hannah
CONTENTS
PART 1
Chapter 1
PART 2
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
PART 3
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Also by Nick Lake
THE COAST OF EYL, PUNTLAND, SOMALIA
October 2008
We stand on the diving platform of our yacht, in the brutal sunlight.
Dad’s arm is around my shoulders. I can smell his sweat, the tang of it. This is fairly unusual. In real life, Dad smells of Clinique’s moisturiser for men and a casual day for him is taking off his cufflinks. Now he’s in a torn, short-sleeved shirt. But then this whole situation is so far from normal it’s ridiculous.
There is a gun pointing right at my head.
The pirates are above us, the blazing ball of the sun overhead, frying us all, bleaching the barrel of the gun to a searing, dancing white.
Ahmed, the leader, is shouting about a navy dinghy that’s getting too close.
— Turn dinghy around, he says loudly into the VHF handset. Turn around or we shoot hostage.
The dinghy does not turn around. It keeps bouncing over the waves towards us, and I can see navy soldiers in it, uniformed and armed. No one is meant to be armed, I think. That’s part of the deal.
I tense up, feel my own shoulders hunch and my knees bend a little, as if someone has tied invisible but powerful string to my extremities and is pulling the ends, sharply, together.
— Don’t worry, Amy, says Dad. No one’s going to get shot.
— Shut up, Hostage One, says Ahmed.
We have numbers, you see:
My father is Hostage One.
The stepmother is Hostage Two.
I am Hostage Three.
I think this is to make it easier for them if they have to shoot us, though they say it won’t happen if everyone follows their orders.
We all watch the dinghy, which is showing no signs at all of stopping. My skin is stinging all over from my sweat and from the loud blasting of the sun.
Ahmed thumbs the VHF handset again.
— Turn around! he shouts. Or hostage die.
At first, I was annoyed that the stepmother came before me, that she was Hostage Two and I was Hostage Three. It seemed typical – her, being more important than me. Standard operating procedure, ever since she came out of a taxi a year and a half ago, drunk from an office party, and into our lives. But that – me being annoyed – was before, before this stopped feeling in any way like an adventure and things started to fall apart. Now the stepmother’s place in the hostage hierarchy is the last thing I’m worried about.
And I figured that if things went really badly wrong, she would probably get shot ahead of me.
Our crew also have numbers, but they’re standing a little way away. Our family unit is like a force field, keeping the hired help at a distance.
— Stop dinghy, Ahmed says into the radio, or we shoot girl.
Oh, I think. So Hostage Three gets shot first anyway. The way I think this is strangely detached, like it’s someone else who’s about to get a bullet in the brain.
The dinghy does not turn around. Ahmed keeps his thumb on the transmit button.
— Farouz, shoot Hostage Three, he says.
Is that his voice breaking a little?
You don’t want to do this, Ahmed, I want to shout to him. I know you don’t want to do it. But what if he does? What if he really is prepared to see me die?
And what if Farouz is prepared to do it?
Farouz trains his gun on me, his hand shaking slightly. It’s a pistol of some kind, the one he usually wears on his waistband, tied to it with string. I don’t know what model it is, what calibre. That’s not the kind of thing I’m interested in back in real life, though suddenly it seems terribly important to me, like if I die and don’t know what precise model of gun killed me, I might never be able to rest.
— What kind of gun is that, Farouz? I ask.
— Shut up! Shut up! he shouts.
His hand is waving all over the place now, and I think maybe he’d miss anyway. But then Ahmed would shoot me, or one of the others. Ahmed and the other two have AK-47s. That’s one of the guns I do know, and only because the terrorists always have them in films.
— Shoot her now, says Ahmed.
The dinghy is about thirty metres away. I can see a sailor on it, binoculars to his eyes. The whole scene is very focused, very sharp; and that’s the right word, sharp, because it seems like everything – the waves, the white sail of the yacht, the collar of Dad’s shirt – all the things around me would cut me if I reached out and touched them. This feels especially true because in this heat my piercings have turned against me; the sun heats the bolts, and when I touch my face and move them, they scorch my skin.
— Kill her! Ahmed roars.
The stepmother begins to weep.
I stand there, waiting for the bang, but then I think, no, I won’t hear it, will I? It’s like lightning, a gunshot. Standing here, at the point of impact, I won’t be aware of anything. There will be, for me, only energy and violence, and no sound at all.
I close my eyes, and wait to be killed.
My name is Amy Fields.
But the men call me Hostage Three.
THREE AND A HALF MONTHS EARLIER
Parakeets exploded, squawking, out of the tree above me, clattering into the air, wings clapping together with a sound like gunfire.
I jumped, nearly dropping my school bag.
Damn birds, I thought. No one knew where they had come from. Some people said they escaped from a private zoo. Someone else once told me they were brought over for a film shoot at Teddington Studios. They were Himalayan parakeets, which explains why they got on so well here in London, where it’s mostly not very warm. You get them all over the city actually, but according to Mom, who knew about all sorts of weird things, we had the biggest flock. You’d be walking down the river path towards Richmond, and they’d be there in the trees, little flashes of green and yellow, making their horrible racket. Mom used to say, the more beautiful the bird, the uglier the sound, which is why nightingales
look like tiny brown nothing, and parrots screech fit to wake the dead.
That morning I was on my way to school – my last day of school, in fact. It was my final A-level exam. I was walking across the common to the 65 bus stop, like I did every morning.
School was a girls’ college in Surbiton. We lived in Ham, which is in London but is also a little village with a common and a pub and a church. London has grown around it and left it unchanged, like a wedding ring buried in the flesh of someone who got really fat.
Ham means village in Old English, apparently – like as in Buckingham, Cheltenham. Obviously so little happened in Ham, even in the old days, that it was only ever just Ham, just a village, absolutely nothing to set it apart. Except that, in a strange way, you could say that even though nothing happens there, it is kind of interesting. I guess because it’s been marooned in the past, like a ship that gets separated from land for so long that the people on it end up speaking a slightly different language. So there is something strange about the place, like it comes from a storybook.
For instance, it has a real-life, honest-to-goodness place called Cut-throat Alley, which is a tiny lane that runs down to the Thames. There’s also a big patch of woodland between the common, which is where we lived, and the vastness of Richmond Park, and it’s called – I swear I’m not making this up – the Wilderness. It actually is wild, too. It looks like the kind of place people get murdered in, on TV shows.
But the weirdest thing is that flock of parakeets.
Wherever they came from, you always saw them around – sitting on power lines, flying across the sky – and if you were like me, you never really got used to it. They were so colourful against the green and brown and grey of London. They made me think: how long does it take before you belong? Those parakeets have been there fifty years, according to some people. At what point do we accept, well, now they’re British? I mean, we learned in school that the Romans brought pheasants to Britain a thousand years ago, and now we think of pheasants as the most British thing you can imagine.
I was a bit like those parakeets. I’m half-English, half-American, and I had only been living in England for a few years. I didn’t fit in that well, apart from with a couple of girls who I called my friends, Carrie and Esme. They were obsessed with American TV, unlike some of the snobbier kids, so they thought I was great. They would always want me to repeat things because they liked my accent, to learn new expressions from me. But, those two friends aside, I wouldn’t say I was popular. So I often looked at those parakeets and wondered how long it would be before I was really British.
My point, my real point, is that if you’re one of the few people who’ve been to Ham, you know what the common looks like, and the houses on it, which means you’ve already worked out that my dad is mega rich. He worked for one of the investment banks – he ran it, in fact. He’s English, whereas Mom was – you guessed it – American. From Arkansas originally, if you can believe that, though she left there when she was eighteen; walked off her parents’ farm, all horizontal fields to the horizon, and swapped it for the upright world of New York.
She and Dad met when he was working over there in Manhattan, at the American branch of his firm. I went to school there till I was twelve. Then Dad got the job in London and brought us both over. Mom didn’t need to work, of course, but she had this job at a science magazine, which she loved, and so when we moved she transferred to the London office. It’s one of those magazines whose name everyone knows, even people who don’t know anything about science.
All of which is to say that, in my world, getting thrown out of the school grounds, personally, by the head teacher, was not something that people usually did.
I got on the 65 bus and was sitting on the right-hand side when Esme and Carrie got on, so they didn’t notice what I’d done at first. Esme was excited about her parents going away for the weekend – she flung herself into the seat beside me, babbling about it, while Carrie sat down behind, much more carefully, which, to be honest, tells you everything that you need to know about my two best friends.
And when I say best friends, I don’t mean I loved them, like they were my soul mates or whatever. They were OK. They just didn’t hate me, like most other people.
— They’re going for two whole days, Amy, said Esme. Total empty house. Forty-eight-hour party people! She didn’t say hello or anything; she wasn’t that kind of girl. It’s going to be immense, she continued.
— But your snotty brother will be there, too, said Carrie.
— I don’t know, I said. I think Jack is kind of hot.
— Ugh, said Esme. Don’t perv on my brother.
Carrie pulled a disgusted face and was about to say something, but the reason I could see her pulling a face was that I’d turned round to look at her, so that was when she saw.
Carrie stared at me.
— Oh my god, she said. Your face.
— Amy! Esme shrieked. You’re going to get expelled. This is totally incredible.
— It’s totally stupid, said Carrie.
I had bolts through my eyebrow, my nose, my bottom lip, my ears, all with little spikes screwed to them. I liked that – I liked the idea of presenting sharp edges to the world.
— They can’t expel me, I said. It’s my last day.
— Oh, yeah, said Carrie. You don’t do French, do you?
French was the last A-level exam – everyone who wasn’t doing French was finishing earlier.
— Non, I told her.
— Lucky bitch, she said. She examined my bolts again. What did your dad say?
— Nothing, I said.
— Wow. Your dad’s cool.
I shrugged. He wasn’t. Actually, he’d probably hate the piercings, but it wasn’t like he ever came home from work or paid any attention to me, so he hadn’t even noticed. That was the whole point of getting them done, to piss him off, so the fact that he wasn’t pissed off made me pissed off.
We went straight to the gym, where the exam was taking place. On the way, though, Miss Fletcher, the drama teacher, stopped us. As always, her glasses were lopsided and her hair made her look like she had been sleeping in a bush. She was looking at my face like it was a snake in her living room.
— Miss Fields, she said, what do you think you’re doing? You know the rules about . . . body decoration. It’s an expellable offence.
— It’s my last exam! I said. Then I’m out of the school for ever.
— Exactly, said Miss Fletcher. You’re still in the school now and the rules are clear. Come on, young lady. We’re going to see Mrs Brooks.
Mrs Brooks was the head teacher. I rolled my eyes at Carrie and Esme.
— See you later, I said.
— Er, yeah, see you later, said Carrie. She looked a combination of impressed and worried.
Miss Fletcher waited outside. When I entered Mrs Brooks’s carpeted office, her expression changed to sort of sad and patient, like a parent with a wayward child, which I guess was pretty much the situation, the way she saw it.
— Miss Fields, she said. You know that this school has allowed you a lot of compassionate leniency. But you’re really pushing it this time.
— It’s my last day, I said.
— I know that. And I know that it was your mother’s birthday recently, and I know that it’s only been two years since, well, you know . . .
I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of hearing me say anything.
She looked down. I could see the grey at the roots of her blonde hair.
— All right, Mrs Brooks said, still examining the oak desk in front of her. Do the exam. But you leave straight afterwards. No hanging out in the common room. I don’t want you setting a precedent.
— Fine by me, I said.
I walked back to the gym on my own. I was, like, two minutes late for the exam, so I had to be quiet as I went to my desk and turned the paper over. I chose the problems I understood the most and filled in my answers in pencil. When I looked
up, the big clock on the wall by the monkey ropes said that we had five minutes to go.
Five minutes, and then school was over for ever.
I checked the invigilators. One of them was reading a book, the other was gazing out of the window, hands laced behind his head.
I reached into my pocket, took out a cigarette and put it in my mouth. The girl at the desk next to mine turned and looked at me, her eyes wide. Then I opened my pencil case, got a little box of matches and struck one. I held it to the end of the cigarette, listened to it crackle as I sucked in smoke.
Then I breathed it out, and the invigilators were instantly on their feet, hauling me out of the gym. A few minutes after that Mrs Brooks turned up, and she escorted me off the school premises.
— Very clever, she said, as she marched me to the bus stop. You’ve made your big statement now. You’ll fail this exam automatically, of course.
— What? I said. Are you serious?
— I’m afraid so, she said. You have to understand consequences, Amy. Behaviour like that . . . there has to be a line.
I looked down, silent.
— So, she continued, you’ve really messed things up now. Do you feel better?
No, I wanted to say. No, I don’t.
That last exam, the one where I lit up in the middle of the gym – and, so Esme tells me, went down in school legend – was physics.
This was fitting.
See, in physics we learned about dynamics: the laws about the movement of liquids and air. And there was a time in my life when I thought I knew all about rules and how things unfailingly are. I understood how water is supposed to flow downhill, and air is meant to lose pressure when it’s moving fast.
I also understood some other things:
You get wiser as you get older.
Money makes you safe.
People who die are old, like my granny and grandad.
I thought I understood these things, same as I understood that if you keep pouring water into a container it will eventually spill over the top.
But I was wrong.
That night and the next I did the obvious thing: I went out clubbing. The school had called my dad, of course, and he left me, like, a dozen messages about it. He even sent a text. But he didn’t bother coming home from work to see me.
