by Nick Lake
Outside, when I finally got out, there were clouds for once, obscuring the stars.
Farouz was already there, standing at the rail, blowing smoke out over the water. When he saw me, he turned and smiled.
— Hostage Three, he said.
— Pirate, I said.
He grinned. He beckoned me over to where he was standing. Below him, the sea was burning blue.
— Phosphorescence, I breathed. I’d seen it before, but now it was even brighter, like alcohol on fire.
— Pretty, isn’t it? he said. Then he touched one of my piercings, the one in the side of my eyebrow. Does this hurt? he asked.
— What, now?
— Yes.
I tapped the silver ball where it protruded from my flesh. I hadn’t really thought about it since I’d been kicked out of school.
— No, I said. It hurt when they were done. And in the sun, sometimes, because the metal gets hot. But not now.
— Oh. And what do they mean? He was looking curiously at the rod through my eyebrow, the stud in my nose, the ball below my lip.
— What do they mean? I said dumbly.
— Yes. That is what I asked you.
— I don’t know, I said. Don’t people do things like this in Africa? I’ve seen TV programmes. Women with stretched necks, big dangling earlobes, massive sticks pushed through their skin.
He gave me a look that was half-tender, half-patronising.
— In Africa? he said. Africa is big.
Of course it is, I thought, feeling super-stupid. Some African tribes did that kind of thing, but that didn’t mean people in Somalia did it, too.
— So you don’t know what they mean? he asked, looking at my nose stud now.
— They don’t mean anything really.
Farouz threw his cigarette into the sea; it flashed red above the blue glow of the water, then fizzled out and was gone.
— Then why do you have them? he asked. Does your father like them?
I laughed.
— He’s never said anything about them, I said. I guess not, I suppose.
Farouz looked at me hard, then.
— You do this to your face, and your father says nothing?
I nodded slowly.
— Strange father.
I said nothing.
We were walking back to the sunloungers when we heard a footstep inside the door to the deck. Instantly, Farouz melted into the shadow under the overhang of the bridge, leaving me standing there alone.
Mohammed opened the door and saw me standing there. He leered at me, came out on to the deck, walked towards me. I was shivering the whole time, even though it was hot, even though I knew Farouz was there. But then what could Farouz do to protect me? Would he even want to protect me?
Mohammed stopped, too close to me, beyond the invisible barrier that people usually respect, that keeps a safe distance between bodies. He stared at me for a moment. Then, abruptly, he put his hands into the pockets of my jeans. I froze, terrified. His fingers searched around inside, curling, like some terrible, many-limbed creature. Then he pulled the pockets, turned them inside out. An old cinema ticket fell out on to the deck, and a five-pence coin. He pulled his hands away.
— I look watch, he said.
I was shaking. I turned to go back inside, but he stopped me cold – not with a touch, exactly, but just with an inflection of his body, an accent to his stance.
— Soon you die, he said. He drew his finger across his throat, miming a cut. Like animal.
— I’m sorry?
— We get money, he said. But we kill anyway. Ahmed has decided.
— I’d like to go back inside now, I said. Otherwise I will start to scream very loudly.
I knew about the fines, of course. I hoped they might scare him, even if only a little bit, that the idea of being docked thousands of dollars just for touching me might put him off.
Mohammed snorted.
— OK, OK, he said. He turned and made for the door. As he went through it, he looked back at me. He made that throat-slitting gesture again. You all die, he said. You, your father, your mother. You all die soon.
He was wrong, she wasn’t my mother, but I didn’t correct him.
When Mohammed was gone, Farouz resolved out of the darkness, became physical again. He came over to me.
— It’s not true, he said.
His body was a warm presence close to me, making my skin tingle.
— No? I said.
He made a tsk kind of sound, accompanied by a complicated hand gesture that no one in London would make.
— We don’t kill, he said.
— You said you did, I told him. When you first came aboard. You were filming on your phone and you recorded a message for the – I caught myself in time – ship’s owners, saying you would kill us if your demands weren’t met.
— That was for show, he said. And anyway, I didn’t know you then.
— Right, I said, wishing I could believe him.
— We would never hurt you, he insisted.
I was hanging back from him.
— What if they refuse to pay, the company that owns the yacht? What if you don’t get any money?
— We always get the money.
— And if you don’t?
— We always do.
I sighed.
— What if you don’t this time?
He hesitated.
He still hesitated.
Oh god, I thought. He’s not going to answer the question.
That was when the machine gun fire started, from somewhere behind us, unbelievably loud in the still night.
*
There was gunfire, too, when Farouz lost his parents, though he didn’t tell me about it till later.
What happened was, the rebels were clearing out his district in Mogadishu. This was 1991, so Farouz was a little boy. It turned out he was a lot older than I thought he was at first. It wasn’t the only thing I got wrong when it came to him.
In Mogadishu, fighting had been going on for months in the outskirts of the city, and now it had reached the quiet quarter where his family lived. Farouz remembered trees lining their avenue. A view of the sea, distant but gleaming, the white tower of a minaret rising above it.
Farouz’s father was a professor. His mother taught English at a high school. When the gunmen came, both parents were completely unprepared. Farouz told me, a mixture of admiration and disappointment in his voice, that his father actually went to the door and tried to reason with them. He told them that he was just a professor, that his wife was –
And that was when the guns fired, a rattling explosion in the confines of the house. Farouz was eight at the time, which made him twenty-five when I met him – older than I’d thought, but it was too late by then, I was already half in love with him. His brother was ten. They were sitting on the stairs, so they saw their father fall back into the hallway, jerking, bleeding, and then their mother come running, screaming, to kneel by his side, and the soldiers shot her, too. Farouz said he saw her head burst – like a watermelon, a red watermelon.
Then Abdirashid made a decision that saved their lives. He grabbed Farouz by the hand and quickly dragged him up the stairs. Instead of hesitating, he pulled him through to the back room, opened the window and made his little brother jump out on to the bushes of the garden below. And then he followed. They were both scratched and cut, their legs sore, but neither of them broke anything, and they rolled through the bush before getting to their feet and running.
The men shot at them, but missed in the dark night. Farouz and Abdirashid jumped the fence to the next garden, and the next, and then they were on the street. Farouz could smell blood and gunpowder and grass, damp grass that had soaked his feet with dew. They kept close to the houses, creeping through the suburbs of the capital city, avoiding the streetlights that were left. They passed rebel soldiers advancing, tanks, jeeps. The government forces by this point had completely abandoned their district – that’s
what Abdirashid told Farouz afterwards, anyway.
They walked past houses, then, after a while, past warehouses and factories. Finally, the sea breathing darkly and hugely to their east, they emerged from the city on to the main north road. There, they merged into a river of refugees, just a tiny tributary of two little boys joining the general flood. There were thousands fleeing the city on foot. Coming the other way, still, were rebel soldiers, and Farouz said that on occasion they would shoot the people walking away for no reason, just for fun. He and his brother were so scared by then that they barely flinched when this happened – they just figured that Allah would either protect them, or not.
The hardest part came when they left the city behind and entered the countryside, which was really just desert and scrub. That was when things got seriously dangerous.
They saw old men give up and sit down in the road to die.
On the second day, they saw a mother burying her baby in the thin dry soil – and it wasn’t the last time they saw that. Now Farouz was so scared that he envied these dead babies: they were safe under the earth, tucked in by their mothers.
They also saw people prey on the weak – not just rebel soldiers, but also people from the villages they passed, who couldn’t resist the lure of the women, the few belongings being carried, the money.
Farouz and his brother had just passed a group of huts when the men found them. They were walking through a clump of trees, shadows dappling the ground, birds calling, and these guys stepped out. Farouz didn’t know if they were soldiers or what. They had guns, though.
Farouz doesn’t remember what the men said, or what his brother said back to them. But he does remember what Abdirashid told him after the conversation with the men was over.
His older brother took hold of his shoulders and said:
— Little brother, you must stay here while I go away with these men for a while, and not come after me, no matter what you hear, OK? You have to keep very still.
— No, said Farouz. I don’t want you to leave. You stay with me.
— I’m sorry, said his brother. But you must stay here for a while. You will be safe. If you move, I’ll know. And then something bad will happen and I will die and you will be alone.
He turned to the men, and Farouz remembers this bit. It has been burned into his mind. Abdirashid said:
— You don’t touch my little brother. And one more thing. I would like a knife. To keep.
One of the men, who was holding a machete, laughed.
— A knife?
— Yes. For protection.
— Protection from who?
— From people like you, said Abdirashid, all bold.
The man kind of shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He took a small sharp knife out of his pocket, a hunting knife.
— Like this?
— Yes, said Abdirashid. Like that.
— Forget this, said another of the men. This one was missing his front teeth – Farouz always remembered that, too. Let’s just do it, then kill them. They are dead, anyway, on this road.
Machete-man got angry.
— No. The boy has a deal. Then he turned to Farouz. Remember what your brother did for you. He is a brave little man. Don’t forget that.
And I guess that’s why Farouz remembered, because the guy told him he should.
After that, the men took Abdirashid away to the other side of the trees, where Farouz couldn’t see them. And Farouz heard his brother screaming, of course he did, but he didn’t move, because his brother had told him to keep still, that Abdirashid would be killed if Farouz stepped away from the patch of shadow, the shade of the tree, where he was standing.
If he crossed that dark line, he would lose his brother.
So he stood there, very still, while his brother’s cries rang out, making the birds flee the trees.
Sometime later, Abdirashid came back, without the men. Farouz could see that his brother was crying, but he was holding a knife, too, the one the man had taken from his pocket and shown them. For a moment, Farouz was afraid his brother was going to do something stupid with that knife – there was a kind of crazy look in his eyes, like their father used to get when he had been drinking too much – but he put the blade in his pocket.
What else happened on the way to Galkayo? Abdirashid found water – Farouz told me that once, as we were watching the stars. He followed the tracks of hyenas until he came to a watering hole, and he and Farouz drank till their stomachs hurt. That water probably saved their lives. They heard afterwards that many of the refugees who left Mogadishu did not survive because of humble thirst.
Another time Abdirashid, instead of heading back to the road, got Farouz to hide in the undergrowth until night fell. Abdirashid, meanwhile, climbed into the lower branch of a tree a little distance away.
— When an animal comes near you, burst out, he said. If the animal is between you and me, then run towards me. That will drive it to where I am.
Farouz waited for what felt like hours. He was crouching, and his feet went to sleep, but he didn’t dare move to get rid of the pins and needles in case he showed any of the night creatures where he was. Finally, when there were tears on his cheeks, and he felt like he couldn’t stay there any longer, a hyena came padding across the hard, cracked mud in front of him, heading for the water.
You had to be desperate to want to eat a hyena.
And Farouz wanted to eat it.
He jumped out, but his legs cramped up, and he stumbled and fell. He thought Abdirashid would be angry with him, except the hyena ran in the right direction by itself, and Farouz’s brother dropped from the tree, knife blade flashing in the moonlit gloom.
So Abdirashid was the boy who killed a hyena, when all the old stories were about hyenas stealing children. He skinned it and built a fire and, even though the flesh was disgusting, that probably saved their lives, too.
Later, Abdirashid became another boy. The boy who hung out with pirates, even though he wasn’t one himself. Who started to drink and take drugs, because Galkayo had an economy for these things now, now that there were pirates, with Western money taken from Western ships.
He became lost, that’s how Farouz put it. Like his body might still have been there, yet his mind was gone.
But that’s not how Farouz remembered him. Farouz remembered Abdirashid going away with those men, winning that knife, killing that hyena.
That’s why Farouz needed the fifty thousand dollars.
So he could pay his brother back.
Because, really, he could never pay his brother back.
We ran down the walkway to the back of the yacht, neither of us speaking. Guns were still going off – why I was running towards them I didn’t know, but Farouz was, and it didn’t occur to me not to go with him.
Dad, I thought. I even, weirdly, thought about the stepmother, hoped she hadn’t been shot. Fear was a fish, squirming in my stomach.
But when we got there, I could see that none of the passengers was involved. The pirates – Ahmed, Mohammed and a couple of others whose names I didn’t know – were kneeling on the rear deck, firing out to sea. At first I couldn’t make out what they were shooting at, but then a blaze of muzzle-flare came from the darkness out there, and I spotted a little boat, bobbing on the waves. Whoever was out there fired again and again.
Farouz yanked my head back. He pushed me against the side of the boat, then took his pistol and levelled it out to sea, started firing. He was, like, one pace away from me. If I said that the noise was loud, you wouldn’t understand. Partly that’s because films are always lying to you, showing people firing guns and then talking to each other – probably because if they showed the truth, that after you’ve fired a pistol or one has gone off near you, you can’t hear anything, not even the sound of your own voice, it would really limit the amount of dialogue films have.
But this is the truth: the noise was like the colour of whiteness, filling my head and my ears. I t
ried to shout out to ask Farouz what was going on, but my own voice was gone, was nothing but a buzzing far away.
I saw one of the pirates on the deck go down, without a scream, just suddenly, like someone had kicked his legs out from under him. Blood spurted from his head, then began pooling on the ground where he lay.
Farouz kept firing. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. The way he was shooting that gun it was obvious he had done it before. And his face had gone kind of blank, like a shop window dummy. It scared me. It was like he was a different person. A dangerous person.
A pirate.
The world kept being gone, kept being just a roaring kccchhhhhhhh sound, like an untuned radio. Then there was a dull crump behind that sound, percussion underneath it, and fire bloomed from the little boat out there on the dark water, lighting up the whole scene for just a second: the patch of shining sea between us and the little boat, the men silhouetted by flame, like a photo negative, and then –
Like a light being switched off, an instant darkness.
This blackness reverberated, the image of the burning men still lingering against my retinas, like ghosts.
The other boat must have exploded, I realised. The outboard motor, packed with diesel, was probably hit by a bullet, maybe even from Farouz’s gun.
Our pirates – I was already starting to think of them as our pirates – lowered their guns. They moved to the man on the ground, touched him with their toes. Farouz seemed to have forgotten about me. He went forward, began speaking to Ahmed, who was looking down at the dead man with a look that, to me, mingled sadness with irritation. How Farouz could hear anything to have a conversation, I had no idea. But he didn’t turn to look at me, so I guessed that he no longer knew I was there, or that he was expecting me to disappear, so no one would know we had been together. I took one last look at the blood, spreading in the light of the deck lamp, streaming in red filaments between the boards of the deck, and then I turned around and crept back to the front of the boat, and from there back inside.
— Where have you been? Dad said, when I got back to the cinema room – at least, his lips did. I could still only hear that dead radio-wave fuzz. What’s happening? he asked. His hands were tight on my shoulders.
