Hostage Three

by Nick Lake

  Mohammed looked mystified.

  — Taste?

  — Try.

  — Try?

  I took a breath. I mimed chewing, pointed to his mouth again, then to me, to show what I wanted.

  He gave a surprised laugh, then reached into his pocket. He took out a cloth bag, from which he drew a little handful of leaves. He gave them to me.

  — There, he said. Try.

  I packed the leaves into my mouth and started chewing.

  Oh, fuck.

  It was awful – it tasted bitter, and kind of hurt my cheeks and tongue. It was astringent, too, pulling my mouth inwards, as if my cheeks and tongue wanted to fold themselves around it, bury it, stop me tasting it. But I smiled at him.

  — Hmm, I said. Good.

  Mohammed shook his head in disbelief, but the moment of terrible tension between us was gone.

  — Come, he said. Outside.

  Then he dragged me out of the room.

  Out on deck, in the light, the pirates were gathered, all apart from Nyesh. He had returned to the beach on the same boat he arrived on, like some kind of commuter, in his suit, going to and from work.

  Standing there, held fast by Ahmed and another pirate, was one of the goats. Ahmed had a knife in his hand. Mohammed turned to me and grinned, then winked.

  — They’re going to kill it, said the stepmother.

  The goat, I thought. The goddamn goat. It’s only the goddamn goat. I suppose we had run out of tinned food, so it was time to move on to the living supplies.

  As the men prepared, I surreptitiously spat out the khat.

  They did it on the diving platform – so that they could hose the blood down into the sea, I realised afterwards. Two of the men held the beast upside down by the rear legs. The muscles in their arms stood out, trembling.

  Ahmed had a big knife. It looked shiny and new, so I figured it must be from the galley. I thought he was going to be the one to kill the creature, but then he walked over to Farouz and handed him the knife. Farouz nodded. He went up to the goat, which was strangely still, hanging there. He knelt by it and whispered something.

  I watched him carefully. This was Farouz, who’d been gentle, who’d told me stories, and he was kneeling by the goat with a big knife in his hand. Then he put the blade to its throat and made a very deliberate, very precise sawing motion. I saw the muscles tense in his arm, the veins visible.

  Blood gushed.

  The stepmother screamed, but the goat didn’t. It twisted, eyes bulging, mouth opening and closing. Every time I thought there must be no more blood inside it, the red stream kept coming, pooling on the deck at Ahmed’s feet, running in the cracks between the wood, like the blood of the pirate who got shot, making a hard wet sound as it continued to drip from the goat’s throat.

  So much blood. I could smell it, too – an iron smell, one of those smells that seems so familiar, the smell of large amounts of blood, even though you have never come across it before. As if all those wars and battles and slaughtered animals, through all of human history, have embedded in us a memory that we’re not even aware of. As if I, you, all people, know the smell of death, the same way we know to close our eyes when something flies towards our faces.

  Farouz killed the goat, I thought. Ahmed asked him to, and he did.

  Would he kill me the same way? Would he just saw through my throat, the muscles in his arms, his tendons, his bones, working together to end my life?

  Eventually, the goat stopped moving. I didn’t feel sick, exactly, but I felt dizzy, like the yacht was rocking more than normal. This was partly the lingering effect of the khat, I think. I was feeling a kind of unpleasant buzz, like when you drink too much coffee.

  The sun was a white-hot ball in the sky above, pale and blazing. It must have been two hundred degrees. As always, the sun was in one spot in the sky, but the light seemed to be coming from everywhere, levelling the world, making it shadowless and without depth. Everything – the dinghy and the lifeboat, the scuba equipment, the goat that Ahmed was beginning to carve up, even as he waved us back inside – looked flat, drained, colourless.

  — You OK, Amy-bear? said Dad, taking me by the arm. Come on, let’s get you inside.

  I staggered into the shade with him. In the corridor, things popped back into existence – the paintings on the wall, the fire extinguisher – and the world was three-dimensional again.

  — I’m not eating that, said the stepmother.

  — Want to bet? said Dad.

  I couldn’t finish my film. Hours later, they called us out on to the deck again. All the blood had been cleaned up, so you wouldn’t know a goat had died there. Except . . . I took a breath. The goat’s head was lying on its side, staring up at the evening stars, its throat cut raggedly from its body, the white shaft of the spine sticking out.

  The pirates laughed when they saw me staring at it. They had this gas-fired stove, with an enormous, scratched metal pot on it. One of the men – Yusuf, I think his name was – was stirring the stuff in the pot with a big spoon.

  Ahmed gestured for us to sit. He had a stack of bowls next to him, which he handed to Yusuf to fill. Yusuf poured stew into the bowls, then started handing them out to the pirates, Farouz last, because he was the youngest, I guess. They passed them around until all the pirates had some.

  Then I noticed there were no more bowls – it seemed like we weren’t getting any. We, the hostages, I mean. Maybe the stepmother was in luck after all. Maybe she’d get her wish and starve to death.

  Ahmed took a piece of meat from his bowl, with his bare fingers, and ate it. Juice ran down his chin.

  — We are the lion! he said. We eat all.

  Dad and the stepmother looked at him blankly. I suppose I did, too.

  — The lion! he said. We are the lion. What you say?

  Dad kind of straightened up, the way he does when he’s not happy with a waiter.

  — We don’t understand, he said slowly.

  Ahmed scowled, spat on the wooden floor. He waved at Farouz and said something in his own language. Farouz nodded.

  — Ahmed is saying that we are taking the lion’s share, he said.

  — So you’ll have more than us, is that it? asked Dad. He looked annoyed, and I hoped he wouldn’t say anything stupid. He was so used to getting his own way.

  — No, said Farouz. We will have all of it. The whole goat. That is the lion’s share.

  — What? said the stepmother, who had obviously forgotten about not eating the goat. I didn’t blame her. It smelled really good, actually. Like a curry, only different.

  Ahmed said something else irritably.

  Farouz did a sort of calm down gesture.

  — Ahmed wants me to explain, he said. We have a story about the jungle beasts, you see. They had killed an animal, a gazelle, and all of them were gathered together to share it. The lion is the king of the beasts, so he asked the hyena to divide the gazelle fairly. The hyena said, we’ll give half to the lion, then the rest of it we will divide between ourselves.

  — I’m sorry, but can we sit down now? interrupted Dad.

  All the pirates were eating, and we were just standing, listening.

  — Hostage One, shut up, said Ahmed. Listen Farouz.

  — So the lion reached out with his big paw, said Farouz, and struck the hyena’s head, tearing off his jaw. The hyena limped away, screaming. The lion turned to the fox. You divide the gazelle, he said. The fox thought for a moment – the fox was not a fool, you see. We’ll divide it in two, he said. One half will go to the lion and the other half will go to the lion, too, said the fox quickly. The lion got all the meat, so he was happy, and that was the end of it. So you see, Ahmed is saying that we are the lion. You are the other beasts. I am sorry.

  — We don’t get any food? asked the stepmother, sounding disappointed.

  Ahmed nodded in agreement.

  — Good, he said, good. Now you understand.

  — But – began Dad.

 
; — No, said Ahmed. He waved his hand to indicate the yacht. You people, you are always the lion. Now it is us instead. He lowered his eyes to his bowl, as if we didn’t exist any more.

  Dad turned to walk back inside, and the stepmother turned, too.

  At that moment, Ahmed burst out laughing. He laughed until tears came to his eyes. Then he reached behind him and brought out another stack of bowls.

  — Sit, sit, he said, when he had stopped laughing. Eat. We are generous, forgive joke. Maybe we not lion. Maybe we fox.

  At the negotiating table, Nyesh spread out some papers. He was wearing a different tie today, I noticed. Red. The last one had been blue.

  Ahmed said he didn’t have painkillers for his children. In a place like that, a man with two ties must be rich. Nyesh must also, I suddenly realised, come above Ahmed in the hierarchy. I suppose I’d been thinking of Ahmed as the ultimate leader, which was stupid, considering how big Farouz had told me the organisation was.

  Speaking of Farouz, he was sitting opposite, studiously avoiding looking at me.

  Well, good, I thought. We’re back to normal now. He’s a pirate. I’m a captive. I’m Hostage Three. I could tell on him, tell Ahmed he touched me, touched my hand, and that would be a thousand dollar fine for him.

  No, I thought. Maybe that would stop him bailing out his brother. I wouldn’t want that.

  Outside, through the sliding doors to the rear deck, we could all see the outline of the navy destroyer that had turned up in the night, silently pulling up and then dropping anchor, a mile or so out to sea, arriving like a ghost. I expected one of the pirates to say something about it, but they barely gave it a glance, even Nyesh, when he came aboard from his little commuter boat.

  The satellite phone on the table rang. Nyesh gestured for Tony to answer it.

  Tony put the receiver to his ear, listened for a moment.

  — I understand, he said. All right. He turned to Nyesh. Five million is too much, he said. They will pay three.

  — You have to be kid– started the stepmother.

  — It’s OK, Sarah, said Dad. Just let Tony –

  — Shut up! said Nyesh. Everyone. He took a pistol from his pocket, swung it till the barrel was pointing at the stepmother’s head. OK. It’s five million. Or I shoot this woman.

  Tony spoke urgently into the phone, explained the situation. Then he turned white. Oh no, I thought. This isn’t good. He put his hand over the mouthpiece.

  — They say you won’t shoot, Tony said to Nyesh. His voice was a little unsteady. They say if you do, you’ll get nothing. The hostages are your only bargaining chip. You don’t care about the yacht.

  Nyesh grinned.

  — Ha, he said. But we can keep hostages for years here. The navy can’t board. We have too many guns. He paused. 4.5 million, he said.

  Tony relayed that and then listened.

  — Four million, he said after a moment.

  — OK, said Nyesh. Four million. We will work out a game plan for the handover. We want to do it in two days’ time.

  — That’s too soon, said Tony. We need time to pull together the funds, to –

  — No, you don’t, said Nyesh. You have two days. Your company will have appointed a broker already, and the navy are just outside that porthole. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that we have not done this before.

  — Two days, Tony said into the phone. He waited a moment. Right. He looked into Nyesh’s eyes. OK, he said.

  Tony stayed with Nyesh to work out the handover. The rest of us were dismissed.

  My memory of days and time is fuzzy, but I know for a fact it was that day that Farouz disappeared. I know because we’d just been told we might be free in two days, and straight after that Farouz was gone, and I remember thinking: what if I don’t ever see him again?

  And then I remember thinking: Amy, what the fuck are you doing? You asked him if he’d shoot you and he didn’t answer. This is taking the whole bad boy thing to the next level.

  Still, it did freak me out when he vanished. He was there, strutting around the deck in the afternoon, and then in the evening I realised I hadn’t seen him for hours. I didn’t see the little boat go missing, but I did notice when I was out on deck that the diving platform had one less boat tied to it.

  The thing was, he never went to shore. The others did, the soldiers, as he called them. But Farouz was an officer. He was one of the leaders, the translator, and he didn’t have to ferry stuff to and from the yacht.

  I bumped into Ahmed on my way back inside.

  — Has Farouz gone to shore? I asked.

  — Don’t know, Ahmed said. He shrugged.

  I looked him in the eyes, but his glance wouldn’t hold; it went away from me and to the sea, like butter sliding across a pan. Then he made a kind of coughing noise and walked off.

  The fuck? He was lying, obviously. But why?

  Well, there wasn’t much I could do about it. Anyway, I was angry with Farouz, I reminded myself. Only, what if something had happened to him? Was that why Ahmed was acting so weird?

  Sitting in the cinema room, I thought up explanations:

  A) Farouz had fallen overboard and drowned and been eaten by sharks.

  B) He had won some kind of Somali lottery and had gone off to Egypt to start a new life.

  C) He had got a job as a general dogsbody on a rich person’s yacht and was now sailing around the world.

  D) Or, you know, someone had just killed him.

  No, I wasn’t going to go there. He had left on some kind of errand, that must be it. But why hadn’t he told me he was going somewhere? He didn’t owe me anything. I knew that.

  But still.

  I sat there worrying, as the sun disappeared and darkness fell over the water. The stepmother asked me what was wrong, but I ignored her.

  Outside the porthole in my cabin, the sea was tapping against the hull, over and over, unstoppable. As if it was giving a message, like Morse code or something, only what it was saying, or who it was trying to say it to, I didn’t know.

  The next day, when I went out on the deck for breakfast, Farouz was there. As soon as I saw him my heart gave a jolt. He was slicing up watermelon, crouching there, large as life.

  When he looked up, I gasped.

  There was a cut running from his ear to his eyebrow, as if someone had tried to slash out his eye and missed. His other cheek was bruised and his lip was split. I almost went over there immediately, almost called out to ask what had happened, but I checked myself. There were other people around.

  Instead I forced myself to sit down and take a piece of watermelon, and wait for no one else to be near. I felt pulled in two different directions: I wanted time to rush past so I could talk to him; at the same time I wished he hadn’t come back. I wanted to know, and I didn’t want to know. What if he’d got into a fight with other pirates? What if he’d killed someone?

  But I guess I was too stupid, then, to heed my own warning systems.

  Eventually we were more or less alone. I walked over to him, pretending to ask him for more watermelon.

  — What happened? I asked. Where did you go?

  — Nowhere, he said.

  Then he started to walk away.

  I stood there silently for a moment. I couldn’t believe he’d just said that – it was such an obvious, ridiculous lie. A teenager’s lie, and I’d know, because I’m a teenager. And a liar sometimes, but mostly to myself.

  — Wait, I said, when my tongue had loosened in my mouth. Don’t you just walk . . .

  But he was gone.

  So you can imagine I wasn’t in the best mood when I went to the cinema room after dinner that night.

  That made it even more of a surprise, what happened next.

  I opened the door, and there was just blackness on the other side. I reached for the light switch, but then someone struck a match; I heard the tsch of it, and a flame jumped into being, conjuring my dad’s face out of the dark, his cupped hands.

&n
bsp; Then the flame moved, and a candle appeared, a big candle . . . stuck into a cake.

  Happy birthday to you, they started singing.

  More matches were flared, and people materialised out of the gloom, holding candles. I could see now that they were the yacht’s emergency candles – even the one in the cake, looking absurdly big in what was quite a small, dark cake.

  — Is that . . . chocolate? I asked, when everyone had stopped singing.

  It was just the crew and my family – no pirates to be seen.

  — Yes, Amy-bear, said my dad. Happy birthday.

  — It’s the sixth of October? I said.

  — Well, yes, he said. Obviously.

  — Wow, I said. Wow. So I’m eighteen.

  And then I burst into tears.

  *

  I calmed down, of course, and I ate some of the cake. It was lovely, actually. I mean, it was sort of saggy in the middle and it didn’t quite taste like chocolate should, but it was pretty good, considering the circumstances.

  It seemed odd, somehow, that it was just us hostages there, but I guess it would be more odd to have pirates at your birthday party. Everyone was a little bit hysterical. Tony made some joke about the emergency candles and how we didn’t really need them any more, and everyone laughed much more than they should have. The stepmother gave me a kiss on the cheek and I didn’t even mind.

  — Charades! said Tony. Come on, everybody.

  — You start, said Dad. We’ll just be a second.

  He took me aside, and then fidgeted with his hands.

  — I don’t . . . he started. I mean, I did . . . That is to say . . .

  — You don’t have a present? I said. I meant it to sound flippant and funny, because why should he have a present for me when we were being held captive by pirates, but I obviously got the tone wrong, because he looked stricken.

  — No, I did, he said. I had a present. But now I think maybe it wasn’t a very good present. It was just some jewellery. Expensive jewellery. I don’t know. It seems stupid now.

  — Oh yes, I said. I smiled. Don’t, whatever you do, give me expensive jewellery. How awful.