“Did the British have any information about how he is? I know Don told you I spoke to him, and he sounded okay, I mean he sounded…”
I struggled to find the right word. Did I mean calm? Nervous? I actually couldn’t remember exactly what Peter sounded like during that brief call. Did he sound scared or is that just what I think he must be? Like that time I tried to teach him to ride a bike in the Bois de Boulogne. We had taken his stabilisers off and he was so eager to get going. His friends were already riding up and down the street everyday, doing wheelies in the cobblestoned square near our apartment. But he was so scared. A delicate, heartbreaking mixture of determination and pure fear. I held onto the back of the seat, as he pedalled carefully, his knuckles white on the handlebars, his legs wobbly, his head bent, his eyes focused on the road, as if he feared it would suddenly rear up and attack him.
“Are you there, Mum? Are you there, Mum? Don’t let go!”
I ran after him, holding the seat. Then as he gathered speed, I gave him a push.
“There you go, see, you are doing it!”
He wobbled away from me.
“Mum, are you still holding on?”
“No, but you’re fine, you’re fine. Good boy!”
He turned his head to look at me and I caught a glimpse of terrified eyes before he crashed to the ground. He wasn’t hurt, but his eyes were hard.
“You let go!”
Maybe I always expected too much of him.
Edward was staring at me. I flipped a tear away with the tip of my finger. I have less shame now.
“No, I have no definite information on his condition. My contacts in Whitehall say they have confirmation from a reliable source that he is still alive. Who knows who that source is. Maybe someone who knows the bandits, or someone who works for us in Somalia. They may not be officially present, but you can be sure MI6 have people working around there, especially with all the young Brits heading over to join up with Al-Shabaab and the other foreign fighters from Al-Qaeda.”
Edward spoke calmly. He clearly knew his subject.
“Have you been to Mogadishu before?” I asked.
“Yes, a couple of times.”
He paused, the kind of pause that acts as a full stop.
“How about you?”
“No, I’ve never been. I lived in West Africa in the late seventies and eighties, and I’ve been to Nairobi a few times, but never Mogadishu. It wasn’t really a very big story when I was in my prime. By the time the US soldiers were killed in 1993, I was already doing travel pieces in Europe. By then, I had my eye on a slow, steady drift to retirement. My last big assignment was Iraq in 1991. Not much call for women over the age of forty in journalism firefighting.”
He smiled. How could he imagine not being useful? It will come to you, I thought with a hint of malice. It comes to us all.
The plane was on time. Edward helped me lift my bag into the overhead bin, and then pointedly buried his nose in a book. I didn’t mind. I don’t like talking on planes. I have always thought that it is best to rein in any desire to chat until the plane is on its way down. At least then you won’t run out of things to say, or get trapped for too long in a soulless conversation about plumbing or cars.
I looked out the window at the baggage-handlers hefting suitcases onto the conveyor belt that would carry them into the plane. I closed my eyes. I always liked long plane journeys, except when Peter was small, of course. Before, when I travelled alone, across West Africa or back to England, I welcomed the vacuum created by being suspended in the air, caught between worlds in the ether, able to think but not able to do anything. Reflection without the need for action.
Sometimes I fantasised that the plane wasn’t actually going anywhere, that it was all some kind of optical illusion and that hundreds of little men were moving the scenery around outside us, while the plane’s engines hummed meaninglessly, and the air circulated loudly, and we sat, watching movies we didn’t want to see, reading books, and avoiding our neighbours’ eyes.
Mogadishu was hot. Hot is hotter when you’re older. Everything is more when you get past sixty. More wet, more slippery, more bothersome, more steep. A Ugandan soldier, a green giant in combat gear and armed with a heavy sub-machine gun and a toothy smile, met us in the airport’s basic VIP lounge – all massive armchairs with delicate, inappropriate lace back covers.
“Welcome to Mogadishu,” he said jauntily.
Then, as if only just remembering that we were not relief workers on a donor trip or diplomats on a whistle-stop, credential-boosting fly-through, he stopped smiling. He shook my hand gravely.
“We are praying for your son. I had the pleasure of talking to him before his capture. He came to the base when he arrived, just to let us know he was here.”
I grasped the big, toothy man’s hand hard. At last, a tangible link to my son as he was, is, in Somalia. I had to stop myself from taking his hand in both of mine.
“I am Colonel Francis Mugweri. I will take you to the base now and you will speak to the AMISOM force commander. He will tell you what we know and what we can do.”
Later, I sat alone in the shipping container-cum-bedroom they had assigned me. Edward had left the base. He didn’t say why or where he was going but I didn’t really want to know. I sat on the bed and started to unlace my boots. I had stepped in a puddle by a newly washed truck on my way across the yard outside, and my soles left footprints on the bare lino floor. Footprints that led straight to the past.
I lay on the bed and drifted back to Monrovia, back to 1980, to the place where my life came off its tracks, back to the start of Peter’s story, the beginning of the journey that led him and me to Somalia thirty years later. Back to the footprints that promised so much, and led nowhere.
CHAPTER SEVEN
NINA
I met Shaun Ridge in Monrovia in the crazy April days following Samuel Doe’s coup. I was living in Abidjan at the time, covering West Africa for an American newspaper, the Chronicle. Tim and I had moved to Ivory Coast in 1978. It was our Big Adventure. We had married in Paris the year before and we wanted to get out of Europe.
When Tim got a job as regional director for a Canadian NGO based in Abidjan, it seemed like a godsend. We packed two suitcases each and moved to that sweaty, lush, smelly city on the lagoon. We lived in a low, cool house not far from the landmark Hotel Ivoire, watched bright lizards do push-ups on the rim of our pool and waited with childish excitement for the bananas to grow on our only banana tree. They grew, we admired them for a few days and then, one night, they were stolen.
Our new life was everything we had dreamed of, and we were happy. Maybe that was the last time I was really happy. Not delirious, but excited, and untroubled by the complications that would come to be such a part of my life. Later, I would have to look for happiness, and grasp it firmly.
We both travelled a lot in those days. It was an exciting time to be a young journalist in West Africa and although my editors only had a limited attention span, especially for news from French-speaking countries, I found enough good stories to keep me busy. I flew into a febrile Accra after a young air force officer, Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings, was broken out of jail by his friends and seized power. I travelled to Freetown to report on a new one-party state. I reported on the end of the Paris-Dakar rally in the bougainvillea-scented Senegalese capital. Years filled with one-room airports that shook when planes took off, rickety aircrafts carrying nervously fluttering fowl, bone-crushing journeys in low-slung cars on roads that barely deserved the name. Sweet coffees on wooden stools under corrugated iron roofs, blessedly cool Cokes after hours riding in the dust, cold bucket showers in shabby, closet-sized hotel rooms, and beers in lean-tos on the edge of vast, chittering forests. I loved it all.
Tim was dealing with the fallout from the perennial droughts and floods that ravaged the region. After years working as a press officer for a pharmaceutical company in Paris, he had found his life’s calling. We were apart a lot and when we me
t on the road, in run-down, dirty hotels halfway between nowhere and the back-of-beyond, we were usually so exhausted by what we had seen or done that we just lay side by side on our vaguely itching beds, holding hands and silently sipping giant, lukewarm beers.
Liberia was always the big story for me. The country was set up as a haven for freed American slaves in 1822 and became independent just over two decades later. So, for my editors, this was a little bit of America in Africa. There was something romantic about the country, about the very concept behind its creation, about its name and the name of its capital, which honoured James Monroe, one of the founding fathers of the United States. These words were round, substantial and full of potential. They conjured up elevated dreams that might one day become reality: Liberia, Monrovia, Utopia. Liberia was also an important Cold War ally in those paranoid decades.
The first big shock came in 1980 when Doe, a bulky, thick-lipped, almost illiterate master sergeant, seized power in a rush of blood and brutality. The coup marked the end of the political and economic dominance of descendants of the American slaves, who had ruled the country as their own personal cotton ranch since independence. Doe was a Krahn, a member of one of Liberia’s largest native tribes, and now, it was his people’s turn at the trough.
I flew in on April 14th, sweeping low over the forbidding mangrove swamps and rigid rubber trees, two days after Doe, who had been trained by US Special Forces, burst into the presidential palace. One of his men stuck a bayonet into the terrified, sleep-addled president, William R. Tolbert Jnr, spilling his guts onto a plush, purple carpet at the door to his bedroom.
The killing was still going on when I arrived. Doe had captured around a dozen of Tolbert’s cabinet, including the dead president’s elder brother. The execution of these men on a beach in Monrovia marks the beginning of Peter’s story, and the start of a new chapter in my life. As I watched their bodies jerk and slump forward, the wires used to tie them to the wooden stakes cutting into suddenly lifeless flesh, I caught Shaun’s eye and, in that terrible moment, all the suggestions, hints and doubts of the past week hardened into the certainty that we would be together. And that night we were.
I won’t use this as an excuse. I wanted Shaun. But I was also probably in some kind of shock. The executions on the beach beside the army barracks were messy and cruel. Four of the condemned were forced to watch the others die as there were only nine stakes. The executioners were lousy shots, it took a long time for some of the men to die. Some of them trembled, urine staining the legs of their crinkled trousers. Some tried to preserve a little dignity, raising their eyes away from the dancing, jubilant crowd. An unspeakable fear blazed from some of the men’s eyes as the killers cocked their rifles. Seagulls wheeled overhead and the waves crashed, and all these sounds were so normal, such an affront to the extraordinary horror taking place.
Shaun and I were in the crowd, but then he moved forward, crouching and bending so that he seemed almost to be dancing himself. I still have some of his photos – years later I found them online and printed them out – but I don’t need them. I will never forget that scene, those eyes, that terror. Today, as I lie here on this cot bed in Mogadishu, those eyes burn inside my closed lids. But now they are Peter’s eyes.
I met Shaun a week earlier at a beachside hotel, just hours after I had arrived, flustered and agitated, from the maelstrom that was Robertsfield Airport. Crowds of people desperate to leave a country turned on its head, tense soldiers with guns held like shields, grasping hands, and rising above the cacophony, the peremptory screeching of officials.
I had stayed at this same hotel during the rice riots the previous year, when Tolbert ordered his soldiers to shoot at crowds protesting a new tax on their staple food, an order that led directly through time to the bayonet that eviscerated him. This was the journalists’ hotel – every African city has a place like this, with fixers, sporadic water, belching generators, and a bar that is open for the asking.
Sylvia, the receptionist with the hooded eyes and long neck, welcomed me warmly.
“Miss Nina, you have come back. Ah dese times, dey are strange.”
“They are, Sylvia, for sure,” I said, dropping my duffel bag on the floor and slowing my speech, adjusting to the rhythms of the place.
“But, at least, they give me a chance to come visit again. Are there any rooms?”
“But, Miss Nina, as soon as we knew you was coming, we kept your room. Certainly. You can go straight. You need anytin’?”
“No, no, thanks, Sylvia. Is there water?”
“Water there be, Miss Nina. Of course, now it is not hot. Now is late.”
I smiled, picked up my bag and headed up the dark stairs. The lights were out, but since it was daytime, they had not put on the generator.
In my dank, dark room, I sat on my bed, catching my breath after the rush. It was starting to rain, big, slug-like drops slapping onto the broad leaves of the trees in the courtyard below. I stood on the balcony, filling my lungs with the rich, rotten smell of soil at the start of a downpour. I have always loved that smell. So full of promise but with a sinister whiff of things unseen, buried in the soon-to-be-swirling mud.
“Nina!”
The shout came from the other side of the balcony that ran around the second floor of the building, circling the pitter-pattering courtyard of oversized plants and obscenely bright flowers. Through the curtain of rain, I saw Don Struddle.
He was heading towards me with the hunched-over, hopping walk of a man who is sensitive about his height. He folded me in a bear hug. I had met Don in Paris, just weeks after I moved there to take a job as a junior reporter at UPI, a once-mighty newswire. He was working for Reuters, and also looking for his big break. After journalism school in the States, he had spent a year in the south of France, working in bars and picking grapes to improve his French. He was already losing his hair, and had a great line in terse put-me-downs, as well as a much older hack’s disrespect for hierarchy and the bullshit of getting ahead by pleasing your superiors. I was a little in awe of his easy confidence, his writing, his professionalism. In those early days, I wondered if something else might happen between us, but then I met Tim, and Don faded a little from my life as I immersed myself in my new relationship, barely able to believe that I had found love in the city of lights. I was twenty-five and still believed in a fairytale ending.
“So good to see a friendly face,” Don said, wiping a thin sheen of sweat off his forehead. He had already grown the scratchy beard that would become as much a part of the man as his staccato sentences.
“Did you just get in?”
“Yes, when did you arrive?” I said.
“This morning. I was in Sierra Leone. You know that story on the diamond mines that I told you about? Well, they finally sent me last week. So when this shit blew up, I hopped on the first plane – mind you, that’s a bit of a misnomer for the crate I came in.”
“So, what’s the latest?” I said, lighting a cigarette and offering Don the packet. He lit up, took a drag and sighed.
“It’s crazy, Nina. This is such a fucked-up place. Doe’s like a cartoon character, he’s too bloody colourful to be real. You couldn’t make him up. Mad of course, evil. But some seem to like him. Guess the others weren’t much better, although they didn’t wear their craziness on their sleeves. The killing hasn’t stopped. More bodies on the streets every day. God knows when it will end.”
“What have you got on this afternoon?” I asked.
“Going to head out to the centre of town, try to get some colour. Maybe cruise past the presidential palace, see what’s going on.”
“How is Doe with the press?” I asked.
“Okay, well, so far he hasn’t caused us any trouble, but it’s a bit dicey out there. The boys on the roadblocks are high on booze, power and blood. Best to travel in numbers. Do you want to come?”
I agreed to meet Don a few hours later. He strode off after asking about Tim and giving my arm a tight squeeze.
I went back to my room to call my husband.
The line was crackly, and an irate woman kept breaking into our conversation. I could just about make out Tim’s voice. I imagined him slouched on our battered sofa, looking out at the pool and the lizards.
I filled him in on the journey, the roadblocks, the state of the hotel, and then started to talk about meeting Don, but the repeated interjections of the woman and the disconcerting two-second gap between what I said and when he heard it rendered the whole effort ridiculous.
Frustrated by another delay, I snapped. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you later.”
I felt bad immediately and could only hope the static had swallowed my senseless rebuke.
“I miss you,” I said, overcome suddenly with tiredness, sapped by the thought of the work ahead.
“What? Oh yes, I miss you too. Do you know yet how long you are staying?”
I told him no. It would depend on the story. It always did and Tim always understood.
After a few more minutes of interference-ridden, mistimed endearments, we hung up. I lit a cigarette. So often, these phone calls left me wanting more. A side effect of the unrealistic expectation that a phone call could somehow make up for solitude, that it could effectively transmit the level of your longing, that simple words could convey the almost physical sensation of missing someone.
And maybe even then, there was something else.
I do remember vaguely worrying at that time if our travelling was a tribute to our individual independence, or just a way of obscuring cracks in our relationship, fissures that would otherwise have demanded treatment. I don’t know why I felt so morose sitting in that hotel room. Maybe it was the rain, or the chaos outside on the streets. Maybe I was just tired. Sometimes, the big changes in life demand little more.
I decided to get a coffee and headed down to the bar. Three Lebanese men were hunched over a plastic table, whispering like spies in a bad movie. Two Liberian teenagers were perched like dolls on wobbly bar stools, their hair laboriously straightened and dyed red and blue. Their skirts were short, skimming plump buttocks, their tops tightly stretched over full breasts, their heels high, their eyes empty as they scanned the bar’s few occupants.
Fractured: International Hostage Thriller Page 8