“The Ugandans have agreed to release you. Peter told them you were not involved with Al-Shabaab. They had thought you could give them some descriptions, you know, of the fighters, but Peter has promised to do that himself. You should leave now, before they change their minds. Do you know where you will go?”
I nodded slowly.
“Peter told me your mother died recently. I am so sorry,” she said, and her hand squeezed mine. For a moment, I wanted to put my head down there too, so that she could stroke it like my mother used to when I was frightened. But this is not my mother. I pulled my hand away. I was not angry, but it was time to pull apart these worlds that had collided.
“I will leave now.”
I got to my feet and walked away quickly.
And I am still walking. I feel like walking tonight. I am not scared, I feel invisible, and my tiredness seems to be slipping away with the night. I am one of the living dead. In my other life, Nadif had a comic book with stories about zombies. He got it from a friend in the days before it became impossible to have such things.
I remember the pictures. Skinny people in rags, walking with their arms stretched out in front of them. They called them the living dead. We are all the living dead here.
The sky is grey now, and I escape the city for the seashore, the only place where you can turn your back on this place and stare at something beautiful, something pure, an ocean that stretches to other lands where people live on streets that are clean and silent. In these other cities, I imagine the day breaks softly, sunlight bringing hope, and that priceless sense that nothing will change. In the distance, I can make out the misty shapes of ships on the horizon, and onshore, the tall cranes at the port. They are stretching their arms to heaven, but I don’t think there is anyone there.
My father was a Muslim and a man who loved life more than the promise of the afterlife. He drank, he smoked, he smiled, he loved, as if love and laughter were his religion. I suppose I am a Muslim too although we have never been strict about religion in my household. We prayed every day when my father was alive but the habit died with him. Some people find comfort in their faith at such times. We did not. My mother obeyed the obvious rules, doing the things you need to do to get by, but you could tell her heart was never in it, and as the list of what you had to do became longer and longer, her lips tightened and her eyes hardened. I think whatever little was left of her faith disappeared in the dull, dusty thud that tore Nadif apart.
I can’t imagine my mother dying with any hope of an afterlife. But I wasn’t there. They say people change when their time comes. I like to believe that she didn’t. I expect nothing from the afterlife. My family is lost to me here, what further punishment can the afterlife contain? And if there is no punishment, how can there be reward? I cannot believe that all this suffering is leading to some great glory. I have no reason to believe this and so many reasons to believe the opposite.
I walk along the seafront and down onto the beach. I take off my flip flops because they are sticking in the wet sand. My toes are stained with drops of blood. I walk into the shallow water to clean them. The tiny waves tickle my toes. Even here in this dangerous city, even after everything that has happened, I enjoy this feeling, and the sand between my toes, and the tang of salt on my lips. I realise I am thirsty and hungry. I walk past colourful boats swaying in the sea. I make my way slowly towards the old lighthouse. My father always used to tell Nadif and I to stay away from here.
“It’s falling down and dangerous. Full of khat chewers, and layabouts, and criminals. No place for good boys.”
We loved this place. We used to come down here sometimes instead of going to school. We would climb the crumbling staircase inside the tower, Nadif always running ahead, daring me to go faster, to be more reckless. We would sit at the top, looking out to sea, hoping somebody would catch a shark. I loved watching the fishermen carrying the sharks and swordfish across their shoulders as they headed up the beach to the fish market in Hamarwein. With the sun at their back, casting them in shadow like moving statues, they looked like magical beings, half fish, half man.
But today, I do not want to go into the lighthouse. It is still too dark, and I fear the memories that may rise out of the shadows. The sun will be here soon, and then I will go and see my mother, and Nadif, and my father. But for now, I want to sit here and watch the sea.
Beyond the lighthouse, there are square stones like giant steps. I will go and sit there, and let the spray wash over me. Nadif used to dare me to jump from one giant step to another. And he would laugh, with his head thrown back, when I stumbled and swayed on landing. Then, we would sit together, he would smoke, and I would wish the steps would stretch all the way to the horizon, so that we could jump away from here, step by slippery step.
I sit until the sun rises. It is beautiful. The soft purples and pinks come first, and then the sharp golden light as the sun eases over the horizon. For a moment, the sea is golden, the spray that spatters my face is cool. I shiver a little but I savour the moment because I know that later I will sweat. The fishermen drift onto the beach. They prepare their nets, and load them onto their low blue-and-white boats and head out into the golden waves. I imagine it feels good, to head out into a huge ocean, to feel free, to believe for a moment that you could just keep going.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
NINA
I am getting used to the heat. Or maybe I am just rediscovering the joy of sweating profusely, and publicly. I remember that from Abidjan. When Tim and I first arrived from Paris, I was horrified to discover visible sweat patches under my arms and on my back. The stains would break through before 9am, and linger stubbornly for most of the day. I carried spare T-shirts, reapplied deodorant throughout the day, and once even bought one of those little hand-held fans on a trip to South Africa, but the patches were not to be tamed by such man-made frivolities. Finally, I learnt to live with my imperfections. It is the same here but the process has been quicker, maybe because my vanity did not survive my fifth decade.
It has been three months since I came to this military base. I still live here but I hope that one day soon, I will be able to join Aisha, Ubah and Lila in Medina where they live on a noisy street of tumbledown shops decorated with child-like drawings of loaves, fish and unidentifiable car parts. Their two-room home is near the hospital where Ubah works as a volunteer nurse. She is paid irregularly, whenever the Red Cross is able to donate some money for wages. I have been to visit her with Dr Mugyenyi, who does some consulting there on his increasingly rare free days. The fighting has died down since Al-Shabaab withdrew most of its forces from the city in August, but the streets are now filled with the small, patchwork tents of the hungry. They have come from the barren fields to the south and to the north, a human tide of silent rebuke washing over the slowly reawakening city. Their fragile shelters fill the empty spaces between shot-up buildings, rising like the domes of coloured Easter eggs across the sand, and turning the entire city into a refugee camp. Internally Displaced People is what they call them here. It is a clinical term for a recurring tragedy.
The first time we visited the hospital, honking and swerving through jammed, narrow streets in a three-vehicle convoy that seemed both obscene and useless, I was shocked. It is a place of blood, broken windowpanes, crooked and creaking iron beds, dirty tiles and mattress-filled corridors. In Mogadishu, the hospitals are honest: they don’t try to hide the truth behind clean curtains and disinfectant. I have seen this before, of course, but this place, built from echoing shipping containers, made me think of very large, steel coffins. A place where dying is a luxury.
For the first twenty minutes of that first visit, I was depressed beyond words. The consideration and pride of the young doctor with the stained apron, barely-there moustache and fuzzed chin made everything worse. But when Dr Mugyenyi put on his own white coat and got to work in the wards, with me trailing behind like a wide-eyed shadow, I felt the first stirrings of hope. The way patients grasped his hands af
ter he examined them, the gratitude, the flurry of activity that followed his every pronouncement. By the time I left, I was elated, and I had a new purpose.
That was about a month after Peter left. At first, I stayed in Mogadishu more out of apathy than because of any notion that I could help. I did not make a decision and that was it. I wandered around the dusty base, visiting daily with Ahmed’s family, teaching Lila to draw with biros and paper magicked up for me by Private Nabakoba. At first, the little girl was bemused by my imperfect drawings of teddy bears and rabbits, but she became comfortable enough to laugh at me, and in that time of confusion, those high-pitched chortles became my lifeline. There were tears as well, for her father. But she could not really understand his death. More heartbreaking than the tears was the look on her face whenever anyone knocked on the door of the container that had become her home. That look has faded now.
Nobody asked me to leave the base. So I stayed.
I sat for hours with Aisha and Ubah, who had been allowed to remain on the base, again, I suspect, more out of apathy and inefficiency than because of a conscious decision by the authorities to shelter them or help me honour my promise to Ahmed. On those hot, sweaty days before the rains came in October, I felt like a time traveller. I sat on a woven mat with the other women outside the container, and we stared ahead of us, our eyes resting lazily on the soldiers cleaning cars, laughing and smoking in corners, or filling sandbags, seemingly endlessly, making soft bulwarks against steel. God knows, sand is one thing this place has in abundance. Sand, and the bullets to bury in it.
And then I visited the hospital and discovered a purpose in its clanking, sombre, green-walled rooms. I helped Ubah get a job there, and now I help out too. I have learnt to decide quickly which patients need immediate care, and who can wait. It’s not as easy as it sounds when really, every single one should be seen immediately. I can stitch basic wounds and set up IVs. I am keenly and gravely aware that I would not be allowed to do this anywhere else. I feel privileged and lucky that I can, despite my age, be of some use. I have been reborn here but the price of that may be a total and irreversible renunciation of my previous life. I am not yet sure. I have not yet had to make that decision. It is as though time is standing still. I am happy here and I suspect that happiness is fragile. If I went back, my contentedness would evaporate and all I would have would be those fragmented memories that sometimes make you smile when you least expect it.
I guess I will have to go back to Paris one day, at least for a time. There is a flat to get rid of, dead plants to throw out, a fridge to turn off. The other day, I tried to remember where I kept the cereal in that kitchen. I can’t. It’s as though my life there is a photograph fading in the sun, so that the details are losing their edge. Soon the print will turn to sepia, becoming an inherited, treasure-box trinket showing people and places that no longer exist. In a way, when I go back, I will be doing my post-death clean-up. What Peter would have had to do if this had not happened. I like the idea of sparing him that. There is still too much on my life’s credit side. I feel guilty because of what I did to him or, more precisely, because of the burden I bequeathed him.
Part, and maybe a large part, of what I am doing here is seeking redemption. It is a common idea, but what are we if not stereotypes? I am not here because the Somalis, or Aisha and her family, need me, I know they don’t really. And not because I feel responsible for the deaths of their men, although you could argue that I share some measure of guilt. I am here because I need this place. If it seems selfish to demand personal salvation from a place like Somalia, I agree. It is. I have long abandoned any pretence at perfection. I am who I am, and I need what I need, and I am trying to make up for my failings as a wife and as a mother, too late, I know.
I play with Lila because I did not play enough with Peter, not in those first years. Of course, I did not blame him for who he was. But my baby, with his flailing fists, piercing cries, and wide, green eyes, was also my conscience. His long lashes berated me. I was terrified that Tim would one day ask why Peter did not look like him. But then of course, Tim thought he did look like him, or like his family, a cousin today, a dead but fondly remembered uncle on another day.
We see what we want to see. I always saw Shaun in Peter’s eyes. The same long lashes and lazy lids. But as he grew older, he developed his other father’s mannerisms: a hint of lilting Cork in his accent, something you would never notice unless you were looking for it; the way his middle finger scratched his thumb when he was anxious.
My fears faded as the years passed and my secret became more of a memory and less of an unexploded mine buried in the expanding no man’s land between Tim and me. I knew I would have to tell Peter one day, but I learned to live in the now, and I also learnt to love him for who he was, not for what he represented. That took time and those first years of trepidation and uncertainty took their toll, on me, on Peter, on my marriage.
I lived in denial and eventually, because I had got away with it for so long, I wondered if really I needed to tell Peter. I know my decision was selfish. Age brings self-knowledge and if I still do not know why I fell so madly, swiftly, and ridiculously for Shaun, I know why I did the things I did after that. I did not want to get hurt, or cause hurt, and the two are interchangeable.
It was only when Godwin was born that something in me clicked. The birth of my grandchild – Shaun’s grandchild – made me realise that this secret was not mine to keep. Perhaps it was the tenuous, unresolved nature of Peter’s relationship with his son. When he told me about Godwin, haltingly in my little sitting room in Paris, I imagined this child, so different from me, so fundamentally different from his father, and I knew that I could not hide the truth any longer. I could not risk betraying another child. A child I had not met then, and still have not met, and shall probably never meet because that is the path I have chosen from the roads I was shown.
When Peter paused, after telling me that he would care financially for Godwin but could not commit to anything more right now, I told him about Shaun. The blunt, raw facts that made up his very being.
What else was there to say? Peter looked hurt, disbelieving, and betrayed. I expected nothing less. He did not speak then, though later, much later, he would ask me to explain the inexplicable. Before he walked out, without his coat, without his phone, I asked him to forgive me. But his step did not falter, he did not turn around.
He returned after midnight. I heard the door open, his steps rang hollow in the hall. I heard him enter the sitting room, those empty steps again, and then the soft click of the front door, closing. In the morning, his phone was gone. We did not speak for months.
I have not heard from Peter since he left on August 16th. The British were keen to get him out. His gaunt face did make the newspapers, and his quotes were as banal and cookie-cutter as we had both hoped and feared, but they were mercifully hidden away on the inside pages. Peter had to give one or two phone interviews but with a sex scandal hogging the British headlines and a hurricane threatening a beachside retirement village in Florida, he was, at best, a filler. To be honest, he didn’t give good story. A single man, to all intents and purposes, held for only a few weeks, a journalist rather than an unfortunate civilian. He lived, and so his past remained buried. Except to Michelle, and that too was my fault.
He was debriefed by AMISOM and some British suits, who turned up with Edward the day after that macabre standoff on the road. Peter and I talked about the killing later the same day as we lay on our separate camp beds in the shipping container. He spoke quickly, as if expelling the words would expel the memories. He did not tell me much about his captivity, but then again what could he tell me? I wouldn’t be able to imagine his fear, his boredom, his panic. He did tell me about the foreign fighter from Al-Shabaab, and if there was fear in his voice, there was also wonder.
“He sounded just like anyone else, Mum. I mean, like everyone else I have ever met. I expected these people, these fighters to be somehow exotic, t
o sound different from the ordinary. Like blockbuster villains. I wanted him to be as bizarre as the life he was leading. But of course, it was only bizarre to me.”
He paused.
“I wrote you a letter, but I tore it up when we escaped.”
I had to strain to hear his voice. It echoed with the metallic ring of the container. It was a new voice, a voice for here, not the voice of my son, the man I thought I knew.
“I wanted to apologise for all the time I spent being angry at you, for all the time I locked you out. I never apologised before, not properly, and I thought I was going to die. The fear, Mum, it was like a physical pain in my stomach.”
“Darling, you have nothing to apologise to me for. And you never will,” I said, feeling my eyes fill and my cheeks flush. My punishment is eternal and I must forever seek forgiveness. It will never be mine to grant.
I couldn’t bear the distance anymore. I went to him, and lay on his bed. I held my boy’s head against my chest while he sobbed. I didn’t need words. Neither of us did. As I held him, I remembered all those other times, and I was a mother again. At last, the complications were superfluous, and the distance that had grown between us evaporated. We cried together, a flood of tears to cleanse the world so that we could start again in our dark, humming, metal womb.
A few days later, Peter was flown to Nairobi, where he was going to be debriefed again at the British High Commissioner’s residence, before heading back to Europe. At the time, I had no idea what he was thinking. I suppose I should have guessed.
If I could not summon the energy to go back to my life, why did I assume that Peter would just pick up where he had left off? I suppose because that is what we are supposed to do. Keep going. I had opted out, but I didn’t think Peter would be able to do the same. I was wrong. I underestimated what had happened to him. Or I overestimated his strength, just as I have always done.
Fractured: International Hostage Thriller Page 18