“Excuse me, are you a journalist?”
I looked up, annoyed at the interruption, a frown ready to repel the idly curious or seedily opportunistic, and saw a dark-haired man, his pallor startling in the tropical heat, smiling down at me. He had a camera around his neck and another slung over his shoulder.
“Good guess. Can I help you?” My tone was frosty.
“Well, I’ve just arrived and I’m basically looking for a little information.”
He paused, eyebrows raised expectantly.
I hated this: foreign journalists parachuting into Africa and seeking me out to poach my local knowledge before heading off self-importantly to cover stories I considered mine. But there was something engaging about the way the gangly stranger had asked, straight up with no pretence. And his smile was disarming.
“You’d better join me then,” I said.
That’s how it happens. A gesture, an open palm motioning towards an empty chair.
He sat down gratefully, placing one heavy camera carefully on the table.
“Shaun Ridge.”
He stretched his hand across the grimy, fly-speckled table.
“I’m a freelance photographer from London. I mean, I’m not from London. Obviously. I’m from Colorado but I live in London.”
The smile again. I couldn’t help smiling back.
I introduced myself, told him I lived in Abidjan. At least he knew where that was.
“Ah, a real Africa hand. My lucky day,” he said. “Well, I know you are probably thinking how presumptuous of me to just waltz in here and badger you for information, but would it help if I bought you a beer?”
My face lit up at his accurate strike, but I accepted the beer. By the time the waiter returned and laboriously opened two large, almost-cool bottles, Shaun had told me a lot about himself, speaking quickly as if to justify his request for help, to prove his credentials.
He was a regular visitor to Africa and had worked in Ghana, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia and Angola, but never in Liberia. He had spent time in Nairobi, and Johannesburg, but was now based in London.
“You’ve been here before obviously,” he said, sipping his beer and fixing big green eyes on me. I felt uncomfortable under those eyes. They seemed to miss nothing. They were smarter than his face, which was a little too pretty, perhaps.
“Yes, a couple of times. Last year, during the rice riots, of course. Mind you, it doesn’t mean I have much more of a grip on what’s happening now. It’s a little crazy, and Doe is something of an unknown quantity. I mean, his character is obvious. A typical bully with a massive chip on his shoulder. But he’s not just a buffoon. He’s way too dangerous for that.”
I liked the way he listened. Actively, with those eyes never moving from my face. I tried to look at his lips instead, but that didn’t help. I was unsettled, but I wasn’t sure I disliked the feeling.
“I wonder where’s a good place to get some street pictures, you know, people going about their lives, shopping at the market maybe?”
He tucked his too-long brown hair behind his ears. They were small, I was surprised.
“I’m not too sure yet. I’m meeting up with a friend soon, Don Struddle from Reuters in Paris. Do you know him?”
He shook his head.
“He happened to be in Sierra Leone, working on a story, and flew here when Doe took over. I’m meeting him in about half an hour, then we’ll go out, drive around, try to find out what’s going on today.”
I hesitated. Don would not be thrilled to have an out-of-town stranger tagging along. But then again, like he said, it was safer to travel in a group.
“Do you want to come?”
Five little words. That’s all it took.
Shaun headed off to his room to get ready. Safety in numbers, I thought as I went to get my stuff too. Even then, I had a foreboding, or no, not even that. Just a vague sense that Shaun Ridge would not just be an on-the-road acquaintance.
I spent a lot of time with Shaun over the next few days. Don was wary, terser than usual when he joined us that first day, but he relented. You couldn’t dislike Shaun. That sounds a little dismissive, like saying he was ‘nice’, but it was true. He had an innate charm, an ease of being and a sincerity that just melted resistance because it was clearly not put on.
We worked hard, tearing around Monrovia in a battered Ford with a garrulous driver called Stephen, who kept us up to date with the latest rumours. And there were many. People were disappearing every day, mutilated bodies were turning up overnight, as though some mysterious plague was scything through this shabby city by the sea. People were terrified but Stephen was not one of them. He belonged to Doe’s tribe, the Krahn.
“We have suffered for too long, eh. My brother will do good by us,” he would say, even as he swerved to avoid another decomposing corpse.
One day, we attended a hastily convened press conference in the executive mansion. Convened is the wrong word. We were summoned. The big man strode in, almost bursting out of his grand uniform with its fake medals and stolen stripes. His speech was nearly unintelligible, like trying to catch bubbles and put them in your pocket.
I listened to Doe expound on the future of a country he was bleeding of its people. Spit showered from his fat lips, his hands flashed gold and silver. I tried to note down a few full quotes but the bubbles floated away, crazy ideas that would survive only as long as this crazed bubble-master lived to breathe them out. I didn’t think he would live long. As it turned out, I was very wrong.
That evening, we sat in the hotel bar, bantering the day away over beers and greasy samosas. After a while, Don excused himself. He had to check in with his editors. I was done for the day. Shaun had managed to find a driver to take his film to the airport in time for the evening flight to Freetown. He had a man there who would send the rolls of film on to London. With luck, his pictures would be in his newspaper’s office in four or five days. Maybe because of this, he was happy, despite the stultifying heat that would soon liquify into rain, the mosquitoes buzzing around us, and the almost inedible samosas.
“Do you enjoy living in West Africa?”
I liked the way he spoke. Not a drawl but not a rush. As though every sentence was perfectly thought out and he had no doubt about it. Or about anything else.
“I think so.” The way he talked made me want to take my time too. With Tim, we tripped over each other’s sentences, rushing to find the right words, or better jokes, or smarter asides. Ironic really when we had all the time in the world.
“It can be tough sometimes. Everything seems to take longer, to be more complicated, and then there are the bugs and the illnesses, the heat. But it beats living in Crewe.”
“Is that where you’re from?” I nodded, taking a sip of beer, swallowing some jokes, some put-me-downs. I wanted to be careful here and I was trying very hard not to wonder why.
He talked a little about his hometown in Colorado but it seemed so far away from Monrovia. So we talked about common ground in London. He had moved there with his wife but they were divorced three years ago. I was curious to hear more about this failed marriage, but I didn’t want to presume too much intimacy. And maybe I didn’t want to talk about Tim. I remember how guilty I felt already. Not because of what I had done, not then. But because of what I wanted to do and because I wanted to do it despite Tim. And what did that say about me, about him, about us?
I can’t remember everything we talked about that night. I remember when it started to rain, he moved his chair around the table so that we sat side by side watching the rain waterfall off the thatched roof of the bar. We could barely hear each other, so we bent closer. I remember marvelling at his long lashes.
Finally, too late and too soon, it was time to go to bed. We walked upstairs together. His room was around the other side of the courtyard. I fumbled to get my key from the pocket of my jeans. I finally tugged it free and turned to say goodnight. He was leaning against the railing, smiling slightly. I could just see his mouth
in the feeble light thrown from the lamp above my door. The rest of his face was in shadow. He stepped forward. Slowly, he ran his finger down my cheek, lightly brushing away my damp hair.
“You’re a lovely woman. Goodnight, Nina.”
Then he walked away.
They executed the politicians three days later. That night Shaun and I slept together. I had filed my story from the restaurant downstairs, unhappy with my inability to reproduce what I had seen, what I had felt. All my words were not enough. Shaun had disappeared to send his film. I climbed slowly up the dim steps to the second floor, the images I had failed to convey flashing in the dark corners of my mind. He was standing outside my door. We didn’t say a word, but as soon as I turned the key, he pushed past me, slammed the door and pulled me to him. We kissed feverishly. I remember finding the soft hair at the back of his neck and clutching him to me. By then, I had stopped thinking. I had stopped wondering why, and what if, and why not, and what next. I was just a mouth and hands and skin. Everything was touch.
Of course, it was lust and desperation. This happens all the time in places where death is all around, making the body ache to live, to affirm life in the most basic way. Maybe it was just a one-night stand. Maybe it could have been more. Those ‘maybes’ have tormented me ever since.
We didn’t talk much afterwards. There was nothing to say, and everything to say, and no way to say it.
I woke to a soft knocking. The bed was empty. I shuffled across the damp boards to the door. Shaun was standing there, dripping in the relentless rain.
“Hi,” he said, sounding a little uncertain. “I’ve brought you some coffee.”
I wanted to stroke the drops that were sliding down his cheeks. He put two blue-and-white china cups with tepid coffee on the bedside table, and then stood awkwardly facing me.
“I don’t know what to say,” I finally murmured.
“Me neither,” he said. “I’m not sorry. I’m happy, but…”
He smiled now but his eyes seemed troubled. He had lost that easy composure, and looked younger.
“I’m not sorry either,” I said finally. “Well, I don’t think I am. I don’t know what to think. I’m not sure what happened here.”
He didn’t answer. Outside, we could hear the irregular thud of distant gunfire. Another day for Monrovia. He came to me and hugged me. I buried my head in his chest, breathing in his mix of chemical-smelling hotel soap and dank rain. Even today, I can remember that precise smell. We stood together for a long time, listening to the drops drumming on the roof, the whistling birds and the distant bullets. When he walked out, his heavy boots left muddy footprints on the wooden floor.
When I was younger, my cousin was killed while driving his motorbike along a road lined with fields and placid cows near Crewe. He wasn’t speeding, he wasn’t drunk, he wasn’t high. He came to a corner and a woman in a small car came the other way, and she cut the corner a little too much, and hit him. He was thrown off the bike over a stone wall and hit the soft part of the back of his head on a rock when he landed. That was it.
If the car had been an inch to the other side of the line, if a more conscientious farmer had chucked the stone to the edge of the field while wandering around, if my cousin had been five minutes late that morning. I have always been fascinated by how random our lives are. I like stories about the almosts, the ‘what ifs’, the ‘might haves’ of history. If Halifax had not gone to the dentist, Churchill might not have been prime minister. What if John F. Kennedy had decided not to travel in an open-top car? What if I had not gone to the hotel bar that first day, what if Shaun had found someone else to question? But what Lord Random giveth, he taketh away. I, of all people, should have known that.
Shaun, Don and I went out later that day to see what was going on in town. We decided to go to the Masonic Lodge, an imposing white building that stood on a hill, frowning down on the sea and the city through long windows protected by self-important columns. Tolbert had been the Grand Master of the Lodge, and it was dominated by Americo-Liberians. Most of the men shot on the beach were Freemasons. Stephen drove as usual, swerving dangerously and stepping on the brakes so hard that we slammed our heads into each other and into the car doors.
Shaun sat in the front and I was glad. I didn’t want to deal with our new intimacy in a tiny car in front of Don, who was part of my other life. I did not want to let that in yet. There was no place for the real world in this sinister otherworld of goons, and villains, and lust, and maybe love. But I felt that Don sensed something anyway.
He gave me one of his sharp looks soon after I joined him and Shaun in the lobby. I greeted them both casually but I was probably blushing. I have always blushed. And maybe my questions about where we were going were too quick to be casual. Or maybe I just looked different. I did try to avoid looking at Shaun. Maybe that was it. Now, I wish I had feasted my eyes on him.
It happened so fast. We were outside the Lodge, which seemed quiet and subdued, suddenly too visible and too vulnerable behind its white stone outer wall. We scanned the street for soldiers, armed men and beggars, anyone who could target or trouble us. Don was saying something about how the Lodge looked like it had been plucked from America’s deep south, when Shaun fell. We didn’t even hear the shot. Of course not.
I found out afterwards that it had been fired almost a kilometre away, somewhere on a nearby hill where two soldiers I would never know, or ever meet, were arguing over a stolen car. Shaun fell without a word.
He died instantly, they said, the bullet tearing a hole into his skull just above one of those shell-like ears, ears that only hours earlier I had been kissing. I didn’t realise he was dead. Don and I dropped to our knees, yelling his name. Stephen started the engine, screaming at us to get in.
We pulled Shaun’s lifeless body into the backseat. I jumped in beside him. At some point, I thought I heard someone screaming. It took me a while to realise it was me. I rested Shaun’s head on my lap. His beautiful green eyes were closed, his lashes still. His blood was on my fingers as I stroked his soft hair.
I sobbed his name over and over like a prayer. But Lord Random has no time for prayers. We took him to JFK Hospital, but I don’t remember much about that. There was nothing to do. Later, Don took me back to the hotel, I closed the door on him and lay on my bed, eyes dry from crying. It was then that I saw Shaun’s footprints on the floor. The mud had dried but the imprint was clear. I crawled from the bed and traced the outline with my hand. I slid down until I was resting my cheek on those marks. In that awful, dark, endless moment, they were all I had left. But of course, there was also Peter.
It is late now. I came out of the container to get some fresh air, to stare at the bobbing lights out on the softly seething Indian Ocean. The moon is up, and the city beyond the base’s sandbagged walls is quiet. I return to the container, turn on the air conditioner and crawl under the thin covers. The bed is too small and the slender mattress is going to wreak havoc on my back. But I am tired. I don’t know where Edward has gone. I will find him tomorrow. Maybe he has learnt something about my son. About our lost, lonely son, our Liberian love child.
CHAPTER EIGHT
PETER
Footsteps. They are coming. I am lying on my mattress, face to the wall and I do not turn around, not even when the door bursts open. The footsteps are in my cell now, along with heavy breathing, and the offensive, threatening smell of unwashed men. Someone clicks off a safety. They don’t need to threaten me. Something broke inside me when Abdi told me Al-Shabaab were coming. Hope has no place in here now.
“Get up.”
It is a new voice and the familiar accent catapults me into the past. I am in Soho on a rare, real summer day, sitting at a metal table perched precariously on the narrow pavement, outside one of those tiny cafés that cherish continental aspirations, dreams that have been thwarted by the British climate.
“I said, get up!”
The voice is harsher now but still very London. I stand sl
owly and turn around. The Englishman is shorter than me, and that is the first surprise. Dark, lazy eyes assess me through rimless glasses. He tilts his head and his eyes disappear as the sunlight catches his lenses, making him look like a sci-fi villain. He is dressed like the others but his foreignness cannot be contained by the black-and-white chequered scarf or the khaki fatigues. He is wearing expensive hiking boots, while the four men next to him have flip flops or sandals hemming in knobbly, poor-man toes. Abdi stands by the door, his gun in his hands. He looks different, somehow lost, or maybe I am just imagining this. It is the least of the hallucinations that have tormented me these last few hours. Beside him is an older man in a striped shirt and red-and-orange macawis, bony ankles peeking from the bottom of his sarong-like skirt. He is smirking. He whispers something to Abdi, but despite the self-satisfaction on the older man’s face, they are clearly on the fringe of this event.
The Eagle is in the room too, his big nose covered by his scarf, his eyes restless. He is standing behind the Englishman, another almost-irrelevant watcher. He is only a minor character after all. This is a new story, and it belongs to this slender youth with the glasses and the boots. I realise he is younger than me too, and that this is not necessarily a good thing. Youth can distinguish itself by its cruelty, a kind of unfettered, irresponsible excess of energy.
“You will come with us today,” the Englishman says. “You are now in the hands of Al-Shabaab, Allahu Akbar.”
The others echo the final words, and I begin to shake. I am adrift between this accent, its provenance, and these words. I am losing the fragile grip I had on this new sub-life.
I do not answer. There is nothing to say. I have said all I am going to say in my letter, and I can only hope that Abdi will somehow get it to Mogadishu and to the African Union forces there. They will know what to do with it. By then, my name might be known, if it is not already now. My face will be known – a bloody image hopefully hidden deep in the Dark Web where only the initiated will find it. Or a black-and-white dated photo in the bottom right-hand corner of a British broadsheet with seven paragraphs about what happened to me. The what, the where, the when, the how, but never, the why. No one will ever know the why, because the real whys are always too big to include.
Fractured: International Hostage Thriller Page 9