by Nick Lake
Then I remembered the smartphone and the video, and I stopped feeling amused.
It was easier now to get a sense of the numbers. In addition to Ahmed, Farouz and Dead Eyes, we passed two guards in the corridor on the way out to the rear deck. There were three others out on deck by the diving platform, and I guessed more at the front of the yacht. So somewhere around ten pirates, at least, for six of us hostages. No wonder they weren’t worried about us escaping.
Men came in and out of the interior of the yacht. All of them, apart from Farouz, were bearded. All of them carried machine guns, apart from Farouz, who had his pistol on that piece of string, and another man, skinny, who carried the bazooka or rocket launcher or whatever it was. The thing looked heavy, but he carried it easily, despite his small frame. As well as guns, the men also had random items. One came out with a laptop – my laptop, I think – which he threw into one of the two little wooden boats. These were tied to the diving platform, to the eyelets where Tony had secured the knotted ropes that were meant to choke the pirates’ outboards.
It seemed like a hundred years ago that I’d watched Tony tie those ropes. Now, in their place, the little boats bobbed in our wake, which was gentle at the moment since the engine was off. It was unbelievably hot with only the sail up and no engines running. The heat was like something heavy you wear – a forced embrace, stifling, a fur coat in the height of summer. It pushed at you, not a temperature, but a pressure.
— Excuse me, said Dad. We need water.
One of the pirates looked at him blankly.
— Biyo, I said, pointing to us. Biyo.
Dad looked at me, surprised. But the pirate nodded. He went inside and came back five minutes later with a six-pack of mineral-water bottles, which he set down in front of us, and, bizarrely, my hair straighteners, which went into the little boat. What he thought he was going to do with them, I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t know what they were for. He was wearing my beige French Connection trench coat, so I guess anything is possible.
Above us, the sun continued to shine. I thought that was incredible, impossible – that simple things like that should carry on being, carry on unfolding, as if nothing had happened. As if we weren’t prisoners on our own yacht.
— That’s my bloody Prada jumper, said the stepmother, as another guard – or was it one we’d seen before? – walked past.
— Darling, you have to try to . . .
I wasn’t really listening to them. I was looking at Dead Eyes, who had just come outside. He spat a black gobbet of khat on to the deck, rolled his head on his shoulders with an audible crick-crack of bone against bone. But that wasn’t what caught my attention.
He was wearing my watch. My vintage Chanel watch that my mom gave me.
I stood there, and I guess I must have blanched – I mean, my distress must have been obvious – because Dad frowned, then walked over and touched my elbow.
— What is it? he said.
I pointed to the watch.
— It’s . . .
But my voice caught, and I couldn’t finish. Dad followed my finger, though, and saw the watch. I guess he hadn’t completely forgotten about Mom because he tensed, and I felt his fingers grip my arm.
— I see, he said in his I’m-going-to-sort-this-out voice.
— No, Dad, it’s OK. I don’t –
— Ahmed!
Ahmed had come out on to the rear deck, a cigarette between his lips. He turned to look at Dad.
— Yes?
Dad walked over to where Ahmed stood and spoke to him for a while, his voice low. I thought, oh god, we’re all going to die. But I was strangely calm about that, probably because, since the Event, a hidden part of me had secretly wanted to die.
I waited, my mind blank.
But nothing happened. Ahmed didn’t even raise his voice or anything.
Then Ahmed faced the other pirates.
— No more steal, he said. We give back. Now. He repeated it in his own language then, I think.
He grabbed the arm of the man passing him, who had the stepmother’s pink iPod in his hand. Reluctantly, the pirate handed over the iPod and Ahmed presented it to Dad, sort of solemnly.
— Here, he said.
— Ah, thank you, said Dad.
— Of course. We guests. We not steal no more.
This is the strange effect my dad has on people: he can sometimes charm them into doing what he wants. He chooses the right words, uses this special tone. I guess that’s how he ended up so successful, because he pretty much spends his life asking people to give him their money, and counting on the fact that they will.
A sort of pained look crossed Dad’s face.
— My daughter . . . he said. She will be safe?
Ahmed actually looked offended.
— We not touch, he said.
— Because if anything happened to her . . .
— We not touch! Ahmed waved a hand angrily to encompass the yacht. This boat, worth nothing. You, worth much. All of you. So we not touch, OK?
— OK, OK, said Dad.
— Girl is precious, said Ahmed. We need her safe to get money.
— Right, said Dad. She’s precious to me, too. So that’s good. He smiled at Ahmed, used that magic again, and suddenly the two of them were not friends, but something understood. Colleagues.
I smiled at Dad, then. I was proud of him, which was a rare thing.
Then I turned to look for Dead Eyes, to get my watch back, and he was gone.
Soon after we were boarded, the first supplies and reinforcements arrived. We heard the commotion and went outside. It was a relief to be out of the cinema room. It was starting to smell of sweat and was always hot and close, and even though you couldn’t see steam rising from all the bodies in there, I couldn’t help but imagine it.
On deck, the pirates were waiting. A third little boat was making its way towards the yacht. There was only one man in it, but there were also two goats, and that was a surreal sight, believe me. It was welcome, too, though. There was something awful about being on that yacht in the middle of the ocean, with all that blue blankness stretched out around us. What’s the word? Agoraphobia? I think so. And then, at the same time, the opposite thing. Claustrophobia. On the one hand, we were trapped on what was really quite a small boat, with these pirates everywhere. On the other hand, there was nothing but sea and sky around us, right to the horizon.
Thinking about that made me dizzy, so when the little boat appeared, a dot far away that moved slowly closer, it was like we became a bit more anchored somehow. Like the boat was tracing a line that joined us to something else – another ship, land.
What I mean is, I looked at that boat and I didn’t only think about the boat; I thought about the place it came from. I thought about land, earth. A beach, or a port. It wasn’t just a boat: it was a possibility of another place.
Then, when I saw the goats, I stopped having those kind of philosophical thoughts and I just stared. This guy chugged up to the diving platform, standing by the outboard motor, the goats in front of him, dark-furred and white-bearded, bleating at the low waves. The sun was setting behind him, which just added to the craziness, red lava pouring on to the sea over the horizon, setting it on fire.
It was goats, on a boat, in the middle of the sea. I’ll never forget it.
Also on the new wooden boat were boxes of all sorts of stuff. The first two boats had heaps of boxes, too, as it turned out. I guess all this cargo had come from the mother ship, as Tony called it.
There were:
Like, a hundred cartons of cigarettes, at least.
Massive cartons of dried pasta.
A gas stove.
Tins with French writing on them.
Lots of bottles of booze.
Thousands – I mean, thousands – of litres of water in big bottles.
All of these things were in just huge quantities, which I didn’t take as a good sign at all. And I could tell from the look on the stepmother’s
face that she didn’t, either. I found out after, from Farouz, that all this stuff came from a French container ship that the pirates had taken the previous month. It was clever, really, to reuse the spoils from a previous mission. Actually, I don’t know why I say really, because, as I quickly learned, the pirates were very clever indeed. And very organised.
So yeah, it was smart. And it meant, I realised sickly, that they could be here a long time.
Right then, though, I was watching the pirates carting cigarettes – they loved cigarettes – up into the yacht, watching them drive the two goats up on to the deck, where they tethered them.
It was total chaos, as you can imagine. The goats did not want to get on the yacht, and they resisted the pirates’ attempts to move them, squealing in a creepily human way and kicking. When one of the goats was finally forced on to the diving platform, it bolted, clattering on its unsteady hooves through the door, into the dining room. One of the pirates had to plunge in after it, and emerged a few minutes later, cursing, bleeding for some reason from his nose, pushing the complaining goat ahead of him. It was a good half an hour before the goats were tied up.
We moved as far away from the animals as we could. Already, one of them had shat on the mahogany slats of the deck. I could smell them, too, that sour, musky smell of animals that feed on grass.
— I make good curry with goats, said Felipe, who up till this point hadn’t said very much.
— Goats? said the stepmother.
— Yes. It’s quite sensible, if you think about it, said Dad. They don’t have to worry about meat perishing, and the goats supply milk as well as –
— Oh, shut up, James, said the stepmother.
*
Later that first night, when we were inside, there didn’t seem to be any plan, or any sense of what we were meant to do. We asked Farouz if we could go to bed, and he shrugged and walked away, as if it were a matter of total indifference to him what we did. Even when he shrugged, I noticed how he moved kind of liquidly – not graceful, exactly, because that makes him sound like a dancer. More like someone comfortable in his own skin.
That struck me because it was so different to the boys at school, who didn’t seem to have settled into their post-puberty bodies yet. The word people always use for that is gangly. But a lot of those boys weren’t gangly – some of them were pretty bulky, or average size. They just didn’t move like they knew their bodies very well. Or it was like their bodies had been made for some other mind to move into. Farouz, though – he moved like his body was a glove and his mind was the hand.
Tony had insisted on going outside to see what was going on, but he needed to lean on Dad’s shoulder and Damian’s to do so. He wasn’t in terrible shape, but he wasn’t doing well, either. He had gone quite pale. When we got back to the cinema room and had put him on the couch, I tapped Dad on the shoulder.
— Let’s go and see if we can get him some painkillers, I said.
Dad nodded. He told the stepmother to wait with Damian, Felipe and Tony, then we went to look for Ahmed.
On the way, we passed our cabins. I was puzzled to see little paper signs with amounts of money written on them over the doors. I guessed the pirates must have stuck them there:
$500 on the door to my room.
$1,000 on Dad and the stepmother’s door.
And, on the door to the bridge, $5,000.
I pointed them out to Dad, who splayed his hands out in an I-don’t-have-a-clue gesture.
We found Ahmed on the bridge. He was watching the radar screen – I suppose he or Farouz must have known how to turn it back on, because I’d seen Damian surreptitiously turn it off when we were boarded. On it, a pretty big dot, glowing and bleeping, was slowly moving towards us from the east. I thought, that’s the navy. And I was glad – it felt like the cavalry were coming to get us, which is pretty stupid in retrospect. You don’t send commandos to liberate a yacht when there are men with guns on it. Too much chance of collateral damage, which is a polite way of saying that me and Dad and the stepmother and Damian and Tony and Felipe might get riddled with bullets.
— Hostage One, said Ahmed, when he saw us. Hostage Three. What want?
Ahmed was the only one of the pirates who wasn’t wearing our clothes. He’d told them to return our stuff, though this seemed to be a slow process. Instead, he still had on some kind of Somali hooded cloak, a djelleba, apparently, that went down to his knees. He didn’t wear shoes, but went barefoot everywhere, his feet surprisingly clean.
— We need painkillers, said Dad. For, ah, Hostage Four.
— Pain?
Dad thought for a moment. Then he mimed pain in his leg, clutching it and moaning, before going through the motions of swallowing a pill and sighing in exaggerated relief.
— Oh! said Ahmed. OK. We don’t have.
— No, that’s all right, said Dad. We have.
— You have?
— Yes. In the medical supply cupboard. If we can just take them . . .
I think Dad thought that Ahmed would let us go to the medicine cabinet and take what we wanted. Maybe he had some kind of idea of radioing for help, too, while we were at it. I could see it on his face – the desire to be a hero. But Ahmed wasn’t an idiot. He lifted the VHF handset from in front of him and spoke some words into it. Someone gave a reply, and he hung it up.
— OK, he said. You show me.
We led Ahmed back down the corridor, down the steps towards the rear deck. We stopped by a recessed cupboard door in the wall, one you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t looking for it. This was the medicine cabinet. Mom, being American, would have called it a hurt locker, which seemed like quite a good name for the situation we found ourselves in. Locked up by people who could hurt us.
Dad opened it up and inside were rows of neatly packed first-aid supplies: bottles of pills, bandages, plasters, even hypodermic needles. Dad reached in and took out one of the pill bottles. He checked the label and put it in his pocket. Then, for good measure, he took some iodine, a needle and thread, plus a bandage.
— For? said Ahmed.
— Infection, said Dad. To clean. Yes?
Ahmed nodded. He had a certain expression on his face – of what? wonder? sadness? both? He raised a calloused hand and touched the things inside the cupboard, like someone might touch a holy relic.
— What is it? said Dad.
— Is medicine things, said Ahmed patiently, as if Dad were stupid.
— No, I mean, what’s wrong? Are you OK?
Ahmed shut the cupboard. His brow furrowed in concentration.
— My children . . . when sick, I can give nothing. No medicine. Here, on yacht, is easy.
My stomach did a little flip. He had children? This guy with the scar on his face, and the AK-47? Well, of course he did. He must have been forty. Suddenly, and for the first time, I had a flash of what this yacht must look like to them. To people with no medicine to give to their children. With no shoes.
Then Ahmed’s face went hard again, like it was clay that had come out of an oven.
— You tell captain we move tomorrow, he said.
— Move? I asked. I was thinking of the ship on the radar screen, the steady blip as it got closer; the navy coming to get us, I hoped.
— Move. To Eyl.
— Where is Eyl? said Dad.
— Is small town. In Puntland. In Somalia.
My heart sank. I’d been longing for land, thinking about the scary feeling of being adrift in wide, open ocean, and how nice it would be to see a beach. But I guess, in my head, it had been a neutral beach, not somewhere that made us even more powerless. Somewhere that we could . . . maybe . . . escape to. I’d been thinking vaguely of Robinson Crusoe, I realised, picturing us swimming away in the night, finding ourselves under palm trees, eating coconuts.
Somalia was not neutral. Somalia was home territory for the pirates. We could swim away, maybe, but not far enough away.
It seemed from the radar like there was a ship
coming to rescue us – that was the irony – but we were leaving. Leaving to go to Somalia.
Like I said, the first time the stepmother came home with Dad was after an office party. I have a feeling they thought they had hidden it from me, but I heard them, the giggling under their voices, after the taxi dropped them off at 3 a.m. This was, I don’t know, months After. Way too soon, anyway.
The next morning, I watched out of the window as she sneaked out, then walked across Ham Common to the 65 bus stop. She was wearing purple high heels, a dark blue dress, and she was pretty. I remember being annoyed that she was pretty.
It wasn’t long after that that my dad brought her home for dinner, so I could meet her. He’d mentioned her name a few times already, just casually – stuff she’d said or done at work. She must have been fairly high up, I suppose, for him to be spending time with her, but I never really asked what she did.
When she came, she brought me a CD and some expensive make-up. She stood on the porch and held them out. I didn’t even have a CD player, just an iPod. She had blonde hair, and eyes so incredibly pale blue that it was as if you could see right through her head to the sky behind.
— I hope we can be friends, Amy-bear, she said.
I thought, don’t use my name like that. I didn’t even reach out for the presents until Dad dug his elbow into my ribs and I had to. A CD! It was a joke. She must have thought we were going to be best friends – it was like she got her idea of teenagers out of a magazine.
The whole time over dinner, she kept talking about bands, and TV, and male actors and stuff – to bond with me, I guess. It was just excruciating. And she kept putting her hand on Dad’s arm when he made jokes, smiling at him. Like I couldn’t see what she was doing – coming into our house, which was basically a mansion, getting her feet inside the door.
