by Nick Lake
— Um, he said. Right, well, yes, if you want it, then of course I can get it. I hid it in my room, I can –
— Dad, I’m joking, I said. You’re right. I don’t need it.
— Oh, good! he said. Then he flushed. I mean, I’ll get you another present, when we get home. Something better. When we get back, just tell me what you want and I’ll get it for you. Anything at all.
— I’ll hold you to that, I said.
And he smiled back.
Then Tony was calling us over, and the moment was broken.
We all played charades, and it was a little island of silliness despite the drama of everything. Damian, it turned out, was very good – he should have been an actor. Dad, predictably, was terrible. Seeing him flapping around, doing One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is kind of tattooed indelibly into my memory.
I was on my way back from the toilet, before going to sleep, when I bumped into the stepmother.
— It was nice to see you and your dad before, she said. You know, talking to each other like that.
— Er, yeah, I said. Right.
— He loves you very much, Amy.
I raised my eyebrows.
— I know, I said.
— Do you? He paid for the cake, you know that?
— What do you mean, paid for the cake? I frowned. It’s not like there are any bakeries round here.
I hadn’t even thought about the cake. I guess I’d just figured that there was some kind of cake mix on board.
— Eggs, said the stepmother. You need eggs for a cake. And milk.
A possibility, a likelihood, was starting to form in my mind, like a house being revealed by the sweep of a car’s headlights.
— You mean he paid the pirates to get some eggs?
— Yes. He had five thousand dollars hidden in a shoe or something. He gave it to Ahmed, and Ahmed sent that boy, the one –
— Farouz, I said. My head was a chorus of clicking, of gears falling into place.
— Yes, the one who speaks such good English. He went off to the shore and he came back with eggs. God only knows what he had to do to get them – he had bruises all over.
— Jesus, I said.
— That’s how much your dad loves you, said the stepmother. He wanted you to have a cake.
— OK, I said. I swallowed. Thank you for telling me.
It was a struggle to say those words, believe me. And even more so because the stepmother was obviously so thrilled about it; delight was rising off her like fairy dust.
— You’re welcome, Amy, she said.
And she turned and went back into the cinema room.
But listen, this is what an ungrateful bitch I was to my dad. She was right: it was nice what he had done. But I was mainly thinking of Farouz. I was thinking of how he’d gone to get stuff for my cake and he’d got himself hurt.
It made my stomach ache.
So, yes, in the end, you could say I deserved everything I got.
*
I felt weird the next day. I was eighteen. I was an adult. It was meant to be a big deal, one of those birthdays you never forget. Of course, I wouldn’t ever forget mine, but that was hardly for the right reasons.
I couldn’t really settle anywhere, and I couldn’t very well go and talk to Farouz, ask him why fetching eggs had got him those cuts and bruises. In the end, I retreated to my room and listened to music for a bit – we were still allowed to go in our cabins, but not to sleep in them. My heart wasn’t in it, though.
Then I saw a gleam of wood out of the corner of my eye.
It was my violin. The pirates must have taken it out of its case, then realised it wasn’t anything of use, because it was lying sort of half in and half out of the velvet padding, in my wardrobe, which was open a crack.
I went over to the wardrobe, opened it. Then I picked up the violin.
— You play? said a voice from behind me.
I turned around, but I already knew it was Farouz.
— You shouldn’t be here, I said. My dad doesn’t want me talking to you.
I don’t know why I said that, because it wasn’t like I cared what my dad thought. But I wanted to hurt Farouz, like he’d hurt me by scaring me, and I figured that boys are scared of girls’ dads; it’s something that’s got to be true everywhere, and that includes Somalia.
Of course, at the same time, I wanted him to stay. It was like I was my own worst enemy.
— Your father is speaking with Ahmed, on the bridge, he said.
I sighed and put down the violin.
— I hear you helped with my birthday cake, I said.
— A little bit, he said with a shrug. Your father paid.
— Well, I’m glad you did, I said. It was good. Thank you.
— That was not my doing, he said. Your stepmother made it.
— Oh, I said. She did?
I hadn’t even thought about who made it – the spoiled little rich girl strikes again. But if someone had asked me, I’d have said Felipe.
— Yes, said Farouz. It seemed very important to her.
I blinked.
— Oh, I said again, like some kind of stuck record. Weird that we still use that analogy; I mean, I’ve never even used a record player.
— Are you all right? said Farouz. You seem far . . . distant.
— We say, you look like you’re a million miles away, I said.
— Ah, thank you, said Farouz. You look like you’re a million miles away, then.
— I suppose I am, I said.
I reached up and touched my face where his cut was on his own.
— What happened to you?
— Nothing, he said.
— You’re joking, right?
— That other coast-guard group, he said. They saw me. He raised his shoulders. There was a fight. But it was OK, no one had guns. And I had some friends there.
Get the fuck out of here, said a voice in my head. Get away from him. He’s dangerous.
But I didn’t.
He walked over to where I’d put down my violin.
— Do you play? he asked.
From his tone, it was clear that the whole conversation about his face was over.
— No, I said. Not any more.
— I play the oud, said Farouz.
— The . . . ood?
— It’s a stringed instrument. Like a guitar, a bit. Or a lyre. It has a fat belly. You pluck the strings, but you can slap the belly, too, make percussion.
I was surprised Farouz knew a word like lyre.
— I’m surprised you know a word like lyre, I said.
— My father taught music, said Farouz. At university.
— Oh, I said. I knew his father was a professor, but hadn’t realised what he’d taught.
— He played me the oud, said Farouz, when I was born. In Islam, the father is supposed to say a prayer to the baby. It is meant to be the first thing the baby hears, the first thing their father tells them. But my father, he played me an old song on the oud.
— That’s nice, I said.
— Yes. But my mother was furious! She said, music is not a prayer. My father stood up straight, next to my crib. He said, yes, music is a prayer. It is the greatest prayer of all. He used to tell this story often.
I smiled, imagining the scene, thinking how weird it was, the way that stories could do that. I had never met his parents, I didn’t know what they looked like, but in my head there was a picture – of a crib, a man and woman arguing, but maybe with a bit of affection in their anger – all of it something I wasn’t there to see. Something Farouz never saw, either, only heard about from his parents, a story of his birth.
— My father loved the oud, said Farouz. It is a very old instrument. Though there are young people using it, too. There is a guy in London who does amazing things. We watch him on YouTube. You may have heard him. Aar Maanta?
— Sorry. I shook my head.
— Well, maybe I will play you one of his songs sometime, said Far
ouz. I didn’t play for years after my brother and I left Mogadishu, of course.
There was a tone in his voice I hadn’t heard before – wistful, I guess you would call it.
— Losing my oud, it was the worst thing, after losing my parents.
— But you have one now?
— Yes, he said. It was the first thing I bought after my first mission. My share was small, then, but enough to buy an oud. He looked at me. Why don’t you play any more? he asked.
I shrugged. I didn’t want to explain how there was a Before and an After, and the violin belonged to Before. I mean, I’d told him about my mother, you know that. And he’d lost his parents, I knew that. So he was the perfect person to understand why I couldn’t play that violin, why even just looking at it made me think of my mom, and how unbearable that was.
But how do you explain a feeling like that? You can’t. I don’t think I could explain it even now. If you know what I’m talking about anyway, if you’ve lived it yourself, then I’m sorry.
I won’t explain how my mom’s suicide changed me. All I’ll say about it is this one thing, and then maybe you’ll see, just a little bit.
This was maybe three weeks After. I was in the shopping mall in Kingston. It’s one of those ones with lifts like glass cabins, so when you’re going up and down you can see all the shopfronts on all the levels.
I was going down. And then, there at the bottom, by KFC, on the WH Smith side, I saw her, in her green-flowered summer dress – waiting for me, I guess, waiting for me to get down in the lift. I wanted the lift to hurry up, so I pressed the ground-floor button again. But then we stopped on level one for a woman with a pushchair, a curly-haired toddler crying inside it, to get in. I turned back and, for a second, the woman below, by KFC, was still my mom.
And then she turned around, two decades’ and several skin-tones’ worth of Not My Mom, not to mention the tattoo of little stars on her neck.
What happened to me was this. Right in front of the woman with the pushchair, my legs buckled, like someone had cut the what? – the tendons? the ligaments? – in them, and I fell to my knees in the middle of a glass-sided lift in the middle of a shopping mall containing approximately eighty per cent of the population of Kingston, which was where I went to school.
This makes me sound like a moron, but that was the first time I realised – I mean, really, really realised – that Mom was dead. That only happened once. But maybe it gives you an idea.
That full realisation, it might just happen once, but the loss happens every day. You see, when someone dies, you think: that’s it, the bad thing has happened. And the idea is, you grieve it, and then you move on. But it doesn’t work like that. I knew my mom all my life, it goes by definition. I remember her – I remember weekends, and holidays, and birthdays, and trips to the cinema, and digging for worms in the garden. Anything I see can remind me of her if I’m not careful, can call up some image or movie of her in my mind. Even the smell of her.
So you see, it’s not that she died once. She dies over and over again every day. A person isn’t just a head and a body and legs and arms. They reach out in space and time, and spill into possessions, bank accounts, email addresses, memories. A person is too big to fit into the word dead. The legs go, the head, the flesh. But the other stuff stays. A person is too big not to remind you of themselves, all the time, when you come across something they owned, something they gave you, or someone who calls up because they didn’t know they were dead.
All of this was going through my mind, as I stood there with the violin in my hand, and also how I was still furious with Farouz over him practically telling me that he would shoot me if he had to. And then it crossed my mind that, really, what else was he going to do? Farouz was a pirate. Aside from anything else, it was his job, his livelihood. But also, his brother was still alive, and Farouz had the power to free him. If I had a chance to get my mom back, wouldn’t I take it? Wouldn’t I do anything to make it happen?
Maybe we weren’t so different, Farouz and I.
And also . . .
And also, was it actually so hard to explain to him why I didn’t play any more? I put the violin back down.
— My mother used to love it when I played, I said. She’s dead, so now I don’t play.
There – it was as easy as that.
— I understand, said Farouz.
And you know what? I was looking in his eyes, and I thought he did understand.
I went over to him. There was a porthole in my cabin, and you could see the navy vessel through it, dark and low in the water, bristling with guns.
— Aren’t you scared? I asked. Of them? I hooked a thumb at the porthole.
— The navy? No. Are you kidding?
— But it’s the navy! They have helicopters, rockets, massive guns . . .
— And if they shoot those massive guns they kill you, too. We say in Somalia: dabaggaalle ar diley ma aragteen.
— What?
— It means, the squirrel beats the lion. We are not afraid of the big ship. We are the squirrel.
— Ahmed said you were the fox.
— Oh no, said Farouz. We are the squirrel. We are small and the navy are big, but we always win.
— What’s special about the squirrel? I asked, but Farouz made a dismissive gesture, like it wasn’t important.
— I will tell you, he said. Another time.
I was still watching the navy ship, wondering what they were thinking over there, wondering whether they were listening in on the negotiations. I guessed so. I guessed they were probably going to help with the handover.
— How much will you get? I asked. Of the four million, I mean. How is it divided?
— The sponsor gets thirty per cent, he said. The hijackers fifty per cent. So that’s shared between me, Ahmed, Mohammed, the other men who took the boat. Ahmed and Mohammed, a bit more than the others. Ahmed is Officer One, and Mohammed is Officer Two. Me, too, because I’m the translator. The man with the bazooka? He’s Technical Military. He will take down a helicopter if it tries to attack. He has already killed three people. So he gets more, too. All of this is being worked out in detail now by Nyesh and Ahmed. Then the guards who have done shifts from the shore, they get twenty per cent between them.
— What about Nyesh?
— He is on a salary from our sponsor. He doesn’t take any risks in the hijacking, but he does all the accounts. He is paid a lot. Bonuses, too.
— So . . . wait. There were, what, ten of you who hijacked the yacht?
— Nine, since one died.
— So it’s four million divided in half, divided by nine, give or take . . . Shit. That’s a lot.
— Yes, said Farouz. Minus fifty thousand for my brother. That is all that matters to me, my brother.
— I know, I said, hoping that I believed it; deep down, thinking that I believed it.
— Well . . . he said.
— What?
— Also you.
— Also me what? I looked at him blankly.
He touched my hand, and electricity sparked. I could almost see it, a blue arc.
— You matter to me, too, he said.
— Oh, I said. My voice sounded very small, like it was a frightened little person inside me who was speaking.
— You asked me before, what I would do if Ahmed asked me to kill you. This is what I would do: I would kill him first.
— The other pirates would shoot you, I said.
— So? he answered. I would rather die than hurt you.
I stared at him.
— That’s a bit over the top, isn’t it? I asked.
— I am a pirate, he said. And then he smiled.
I smiled back at him. I stepped forward to give him a kiss on the cheek, on impulse, but I misstepped and tripped. He caught me. I was struck by how strong his arms were, how he smelled of sand and petrol, and sunshine. Suddenly our faces were very close together, and the waves were a rhythmical tapping on the hull, and the star
s outside the porthole were gleaming.
And then, just when I thought Farouz was going to step away, he kissed me, his arms folding around me, pulling me in.
How can I describe that kiss?
It was like . . .
It was like I was a device – a TV, say – that had never been plugged in before, and now I was plugged in, connected, and electricity was coursing through me, and I realised: oh, this is what I am for; I light up with shining pictures; I glow. It was like my body found its purpose, and it scared me a bit, though at the same time everything was just his arms, his lips. Before this, it was like I hadn’t been breathing, just sucking bits of air into my lungs.
Farouz pulled away for a moment.
— This is a thousand dollar fine, he says. If I get caught.
— Ha, I said. Count yourself lucky. If my dad saw us, he’d fricking kill me.
Farouz smiled weakly.
— You are surrounded by danger on all sides, he said.
He said it in a joking way, and when he did, I laughed. But it was only afterwards, lying in the cinema room, trying to sleep with the tingle of his mouth still on mine, that I replayed what he said in my head. The thing was, he was right.
I was in danger. All the time. And what if, by making friends with Farouz, or whatever it was we were doing, I was making things much worse?
— We’ve coordinated this handover plan with the bank and the navy, Tony said, as he sat at the negotiating table two days later. And the pirates are on board with it.
He didn’t seem to be aware of the irony of using that expression on a yacht boarded by pirates. He spread out a document on the coffee table in the cinema room.
— I want all of you to study this, he said. Anything goes wrong with this, we’re all screwed.
The plan was written in English and Somali. It had been emailed by the navy to the yacht. Tony had been allowed to open it when the satellite link came on at 6 p.m., but only with Farouz looking over his shoulder, making sure he didn’t send any emails back.
My dad looked through it first, then it went to the stepmother, then to Damian, then to me. Felipe winked at me – we were always the last.
Finally it came to me, and I glanced down it. I couldn’t believe how detailed it was.
