by Finn Óg
“Anyone famous?” asked the doctor, probing.
“You obviously know I had a famous patient,” snarled the Libyan, “otherwise you would not have asked.”
The doctor shrugged. “Gaddafi cannot have been an easy man to look after.”
“No,” agreed the Libyan, softening.
“What was your area of expertise?”
“Cardiac,” said the doctor. “Angioplasty. The leader was highly strung.”
The doctor sniggered. “We could tell. Even here in Alexandria we could hear him shouting.”
The Libyan relaxed a little as the doctor listened to his chest and peered into his throat, ears and eyes.
“Your own heart is strong and your BP is fine,” concluded the doctor. “Now, take these – they will help with any seasickness. You would be advised to avoid illness on the boat as the skipper has orders to drop dead weight into the water.”
The Libyan had expected little more. This was a mercenary business and every man for himself. He popped the pills offered without querying it further.
“Now,” said the doctor, “join the others and I wish you safe journey.”
By dusk the group had assembled on the beach and the Libyan physician was dead. There was gentle sobbing from two women who had grown attached to him while in the hole in the desert. Tassels’ cousin had joined them, examined the body and declared life extinct. Habid took control.
“This man was selected because he was a doctor. I do not want you to go to sea without his skills.”
The rat’s deviousness knew no bounds. He somehow managed to make his business sound benevolent while twisting every turn to his advantage. Alarm rose on the faces of the migrants. They felt their opportunity slipping away with the life of the Libyan physician. They began to plead with Habid to allow the journey to go ahead regardless. By arrangement Habid looked to the doctor.
“These people wish to go to sea, doctor. I cannot allow that without proper care. They have paid handsomely for the privilege. Will you take that man’s place?”
“What?” feigned the doctor. “Leave – now? Just like that?”
“Please!” wailed the women, lighting on the idea.
“Where would I go? I cannot start a new life just like that. I do not even have any papers!”
Habid looked to the women and then to the dead man and then began a body search. The women whimpered – not so much in grief as in hope. Habid hoisted a sheave of documentation aloft theatrically.
“These may help!”
The doctor took the papers from Habid and examined them.
“But – these men and women know I am not the man referred to in these papers.”
Habid looked to the assembled group questioningly.
“We will say it is you.” They all began to nod. “We know him well. We can tell you all about him. You can become him!”
Desperation delivered the plan better than the doctor had hoped. He could not resist laying it on thick.
“And you really want me to come with you, to keep you well?”
“Please,” wailed the women.
One of the men fell to his knees in appeal.
“Ok,” said the doctor reluctantly, turning to Habid. “I will go with them.”
“Hurry on then,” said Habid, disgusted at the doctor’s ad-libbing.
Habid watched the dinghy warble over the waves, listening to the rev and fall of the outboard engine. He hoped against hope that the doctor would drown.
“Will you look who it is, fuckin’ Houdini.”
“Shut up,” he heard Charity hiss. Sinead. He made another mental note to stop calling her Charity otherwise Isla would drop him in it when they met.
Sinead’s sister ignored the request. “So to what do we owe the pleasure?”
The troublesome sister, as useful as she was irritating. He pitied the man or woman who would end up sharing her sarcasm daily.
‘Will you please be quiet,” he heard Sinead say.
Sam realised he hadn’t yet said a word.
“How are you, Sam?” Charity assumed control. Sinead. Sinead assumed control.
“You have me on loudspeaker,” he said.
The drone of a vehicle suggested the pair were on the road and he was patched through the Bluetooth.
“Yeah, but I’m not listening to ye,” snarked the sister.
“Áine, would you ever just give it up?” Sinead snapped. “Sam, give me a second.”
He heard a snap and a bang and Áine complain that you shouldn’t drive while using a phone and then Sinead was back.
“Where are you?”
“At sea,” he said.
“How are you?”
“Grand,” he replied. “How are you getting on?”
“Busy,” she said. “It’s good to know you’re ok. How’s Isla?”
“She’s here, she’s good. Getting big.”
“Ah, stop,” she said, as if she was all too familiar with growing children, which he’d always assumed she wasn’t. He found himself wondering, for the first time, whether she had any kids. It confused him – why he hadn’t considered it before. It unsettled him but he didn’t care to admit why.
“Are you too busy for a wee job?”
“You’re asking me? I’ve had jobs coming out me pores and I’ve been trying to reach you for months, and now you ring me asking if I want a job.”
“Sorry, Sinead.” It was the first time he’d ever actually used her name.
It wasn’t lost on her. She was silent for a moment. “You’re grand,” she said, as he somehow knew she would. “What’s the job?”
“Can you come to the south coast?”
“It’s a long coast, Sam. Where?”
Sam didn’t like to give too much away on the phone. He knew a lot about interception due in no small part to the sarcastic sister sitting beside his friend.
“Well, where are you now?”
“Dublin, strangely enough.”
The pair lived in Dublin together. Unfortunately. He thought again about why he’d imagined she had no children and wondered if their living arrangement had led to the assumption.
“About two hours from you. I’ll ping you the place in the usual way.”
Sinead’s twin had set up the process: a message through an encrypted app which the authorities hadn’t yet gained permission to monitor – at least officially.
“When?” asked Charity. Sinead.
“Soon.”
“We’re on our way to see a band,” she said.
“Not that soon, but after,” he assured her.
“Ok, so. Will I come on my own?”
“I would be enormously grateful if you would,” he said, swiping away images of Áine, the talented torment of a sister. He just did not have the energy.
“Right,” she said.
“Sinead?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s nice to speak to you.”
He cut the call.
Waleed didn’t like frayed edges. They nagged at him, festered in the back of his mind. Waleed was an organised man. He liked to tick things off in short order because he knew more tasks with new pressures would arrive at any moment. IS was taking care of that. His responsibility was enormous, his jurisdiction unmanageable; all he could do was hope to contain the militants, and through it all was the nagging knowledge that an end as loose as the trousers on a malnourished former friend needed to be dealt with.
Ordinarily he’d have formulated a plan of action by now because so much time had passed since the oversized thug had presented himself in Sinai. Waleed was rarely short on options; his position was one of power in a country where consequences for stepping outside the lines were few, yet Big Suit had somehow managed to prick a nerve. It was unfathomable how such a stupid man had managed to identify a secret that Waleed had successfully kept for twenty years.
He worked through the options. As a senior commander – and a young one at that – in an elite Egyptian unit, Cairo would
surely be reluctant to lose him, but then the rules were quite clear: no Coptic Christian had a place in the intelligence services. None. It had never happened before and the policy was unlikely to change. Even if his bosses deigned to overlook the revelation, his men wouldn’t. They were likely to turn against him. Sectarianism was seldom spoken of in Egypt because Copts were such a minority but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist.
Waleed decided to wrap up the Arish investigation as quickly as he could. Then he would try to clear his mind of the irritation languishing in the desert jail. How he would do that remained unclear but one way or another he had to keep his secret and he had to deal with the cumbersome problem. Quickly.
Sam couldn’t see the gust approach in the dark but he felt it building. An instinct – a breeze before the breeze that any seasoned sailor can detect – a sense, a change in pressure, a whisper in the air. For the first time in days he felt his tightened stitches complain as he moved to shorten the sail. He hauled and furled in the big genoa, his lacerations whining with the winch. His wounds had become accustomed to the sedentary hours since the gale had passed through and he didn’t relish the prospect of more expenditure of energy, more forceful stretching of thin skin. The wind hit them just as he was calling the girls to tuck in. Immediately the boat heeled and items lazily discarded started to tumble onto the floor.
“It’s ok,” he shouted, “just get in behind the lee cloths. We’re nearly there anyway. Alea, pass me up my oilskins, please.”
She did as she was bid but not before the sweep of rain hit him on the face with a ferocity that would ensure his discomfort for the next twelve hours. He flipped on the peak cap that was tied to his life jacket. It would keep the rain out of his face and allow him to see the instruments – the GPS, the radar, the chart plotter and wind indicator.
A few hours wrestling with the wheel broke the darkness. Sam could just make out the gloom of the Comeragh Mountains as the clouds barrelled into them and split around them, forced forward by the building easterly that was rising with the grey sun. And then the rain: deafening. Wet rain, Sam’s grandfather would have said. Curious how some rains left barely a damp patch, others saturation.
The approach was tricky. For Sam to shift his head in either direction was a challenge. The cold breeze had seized his limbs and his movement was robotic and slow. He hadn’t the heart to make any of the girls come on deck to help, so he opted for an outer harbour wall where he tied up with less diligence than normal before clambering back on board to consult the phone and open the app.
Confirmation. She’d sent the last message as she was leaving, two hours previously. He tore open his ocean jacket and held his fingers under his armpits trying to coax some movement out of them. The screen often failed to register his touch, not least when his fingerprints were geriatrified by overexposure to moisture, raisin-like and unidentifiable.
We’re here, he managed to tap out eventually.
Where? came back immediately.
Are you here?
Statue in the square.
We’ll be up now, he hammered. “Right, ladies, get your stuff, we gotta go.”
He couldn’t have hoped for more. He wanted no “Parting Glass”, no maudlin gathering. Speed, he hoped, would distract his daughter. The downpour and what was left of the darkness only added to the urgency.
He watched them gather the little they had into a bag he’d stitched from old sailcloth. Alea brushed her hair and went into the heads, presumably to consult a mirror. Despite the available excuses, no woman would ideally meet another after two weeks at sea. She emerged almost radiant. Sam had no idea what she’d done but in the low light of the cabin he noted how well she looked regardless of her nervousness.
And then Sam’s jaw began to ache as he watched his little girl approach her friend. Isla held a package wrapped in tissue paper. She presented it with bashfulness, nothing said, her eyes averted. Her lower lip was gripped taut and Sam knew she was one word away from tears. He doubted again the wisdom of casting these women adrift but he didn’t know what else to do. Sadiqah did the crying for Isla. She received the parcel and set it aside, reaching for her little pal and hugging her for a full two minutes. Sam and Alea just stood and watched, unsure whether to make a similar gesture or what message that might convey. Oh, to be a child again, thought Sam. Alea eventually looked up at him. Those eyes. And the ache again. She smiled a sad, sad smile.
“Your friend, she is here,” she stated.
“Mmmm.”
“Let us go now, Sadiqah.”
Despite the unholy hour there were a few rum-looking teenagers kicking about the square, gathered for shelter around a single cigarette. The locals probably called them knackers. The youths’ eyes followed every move of the little troop, each stooped against the lashing, headed towards Sinead’s car exhaust. They lit up in the red glow of her rear lights. The only heat in a windswept town.
She emerged from the car, tall and handsome, turning her collar up, her head tilted forward – through nervousness or against the rain Sam couldn’t tell but her eyes looked up at him, gentle, inquiring, vulnerable.
“Sinead,” he almost whispered.
“Ah, Sam.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?” she said gently.
“For coming,” he said.
“You knew I’d come.”
He turned quickly before he allowed himself to read too much into that.
“This,” he paused, “is Isla. Say hello, darlin’.”
“Hello,” she said, her little nose dripping.
“So you are Isla,” said Sinead. “Do you know that you are the apple of your daddy’s eye?”
Isla smiled bashfully.
“You’re a beautiful young woman. I love your coat.”
Sinead appeared to know how to talk to children. Sam wished he did.
“This is Alea,” he said, “and Sadiqah.”
He gestured them forward. They had walked behind him the whole way. Alea pushed back her hood a little, sodden, but still stunning.
“Pakis!” shouted one of the youths from the doorway.
Sam tensed and turned but Sinead placed her hand on his arm. It was Isla, though, who spoke the words of her mother.
“Don’t get involved, Daddy,” she said.
The maturity of the comment astonished him.
“Let’s get going,” said Sinead. Familiar with Sam’s skill set, she was keen to avoid a confrontation with the natives. She opened the rear door. “Alea, why don’t you jump in the front and we can have a proper chat.”
Alea appeared confused at first. Sam looked at her and she at him. Sinead copped the awkwardness and looked a little flustered by it, put out even. She turned away with a surprised look on her face and chose to help Sadiqah buckle in.
Alea looked straight at him, no hint of a tear. “You are complicated man. Yet simple.”
Sam stood silent, unsure whether he was being complimented or criticised. He let her carry on.
“I am grateful. And I am sorry.”
Sam stared at the freshly widowed woman and then dropped his gaze to shake his head at her fortitude, her strength of character, her submission to the unknown. He hadn’t the words. “Take care, Alea,” was all he managed.
And then the car doors slammed, Sinead turning to Sam one last time. “This time keep in touch,” she said brusquely, and he knew then her feathers had been ruffled and that the tide between them had ebbed as quickly as it had flooded.
He was confident that the car journey between the women would correct any misunderstandings. “I’ll call you when we’re settled. You know, see how they are.”
“See how they are,” she repeated, her eyes boring into him.
“And how you are. How … you’ve been.”
“That would be nice,” she said, although he couldn’t be sure she meant it.
And then they were gone and the Angelus called, and the wind howled, and not a tear was shed.
> An end, he hoped, to an encounter he could have done without.
A fitting departure. From Dungarvan. In the rain.
Part II
Chapter 19
There was no screaming, which Sam struggled to understand as he beat the man out with his good offshore jacket. Despite the seriousness of the act all he could really think was, this is my best sailing kit.
His instincts were telling him to turn around and walk away. Don’t get involved, as Isla would say. Let the man burn. But he couldn’t because he’d recognised the man the moment the liquid had ignited. He’d spent a few weeks in his menacing company, after all. Perhaps that’s why he was able to hammer the flames with such vigour. The fire was out in moments thanks to the beating. Every cloud.
And then there were guards and questions and denials from Sam: no, I don’t know him. I was just passing. He set himself on fire, so I put him out. Grand. And then Sam melted into the crowd, charred jacket in hand.
“What the hell has happened to you?” Sinead asked.
“I’ll tell you in a minute but why don’t you fill me in on your bits first?”
The pair had been meeting every few weeks as Sam fulfilled his promise to Isla to keep an eye on what was happening with her little friend.
“Well,” said Sinead. “Alea has had a better week. Sadiqah – not so much. After what they saw and what they went through there’s a lot to get out, and Alea’s determined to keep moving on because of Sadiqah but she’s also really worried about her.”
“Have you made the asylum application yet?”
“Not yet. I’ve been looking into it. I don’t know the system that well because – well, I’m more about getting women out of the country, which now looks to be easier than getting them into the bloody place. I’m told that as soon as an application is made they could be taken to Mosney.”
“Mosney?”
“Did you never go to Mosney when you were small?”
“No, what is it?”
“It’s like a Butlin’s holiday camp. Not a great place for kids, or anyone for that matter.”