CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
PETER
When I left Somalia, I did not know where to go or what to do. We use that phrase, ‘I don’t know’, so often, and it has grown to mean so little. It can mean confused, a little lost, unsure. I was beyond that. I don’t know if it was a delayed reaction to my captivity, or to the trauma of my escape with Abdi, but things had changed. I had changed.
I was passed around. I answered questions, and more questions, my voice boring even myself. I didn’t have much to tell the nameless men, all hewn from the same rock: hard-faced, hard-eyed, the angular men. I didn’t know where I had been held, I didn’t know anyone’s name, except for Burhan and Abdi. And I wouldn’t tell them about Abdi.
They probed, their disappointment sharp behind their glasses, and in the twitchy fingers ready to scribble down anything I gave them. I like to think I gave them nothing useful. It’s not that I am ungrateful. I know the British helped rescue me. At times Edward Chadwick, pops up in my thoughts, but he is always a shadowy figure. He came with me to Nairobi, but I never saw him again after the first day. I imagine he returned to wherever he came from.
We did not speak on the short flight from Mogadishu to the Kenyan capital. I leant against the window, watching without feeling as we flew over the pristine beaches, over a land crisscrossed with green lines of scrub on a sandy background. From the air, it looked like the very earth of Somalia was fracturing, pressed upwards by some giant determined to shove it off his shoulders.
“Where will you go afterwards?” Chadwick asked as our diplomatic car drew up at the British High Commissioner’s house in the richly quiet, green suburb of Muthaiga. I was numbed by the journey, by the endless traffic jam that had kept us on Nairobi’s Mombasa Road for over an hour and a half. I had used up all my energy not thinking. I felt that if I engaged my brain, it might explode.
“I don’t know,” I muttered, and as I said it I realised this was true. The implacability and irreversibility of those words hit me with the force of a jackhammer. I turned from the window, noticed the car had stopped, and repeated, “I don’t know.”
This answer lit a slow-burning fuse that went off hours later as I lay in my room, alone for the first time in the blur of days that had followed my weeks of near total solitude. I wept like a baby, curling in on myself, still in my dusty clothes on top of the soft, cool duvet. I traced its pattern of gaudy irises. I recited names through my tears: Michelle, Esther, Godwin, Mum, Tim, Abdi, Guled and Ahmed. Each name made me feel nauseous with guilt. Even then, I knew I was crying out of self-pity, not just because I had failed all these people in the little things, and sometimes the big, but because I now could not deal with this burden.
When I woke again, the television was flickering and the bedside light was on. As I lay there, wondering if I was expected to get up again, I knew that I had left one name out of my litany of self-confession. Shaun. I said it out loud just to hear myself. I tried to imagine the face that went with the name. I had nothing. For the first time, I felt curious. It was a faint stirring but I dared myself to believe that filling that blank where my father’s face should be would help me. I could redefine myself. I could change. I could at least try.
After Nairobi, and the endless, pointless briefings, I headed back to Paris. I landed at Charles de Gaulle airport as dawn broke. Exhausted by the steel, the corridors, the customs officials and the sheer regularity, I sat in the soulless pavilion and ordered a coffee. I had not spoken to Michelle since my escape. After my mother confessed she had told her about Godwin and Esther, I thought it would be crass to call. I would either have to ignore the fact that she knew, or explain something that even I couldn’t understand, over a bad phone line from Mogadishu.
Michelle did not call me either. There was too much to say and nothing to say at all. I knew she wouldn’t want me now. Michelle hated secrets – her first serious boyfriend was a serial cheat, who loved her, but not only her. Years of deception and painful, tear-filled reunions had left her with a horror of even the most trivial of omissions. I once asked her how she knew I remained faithful when I was away. On reflection, the question was callous, and my cheeks burn now remembering my casual cruelty. It was a smug, condescending humour. It should have been beneath me. It was certainly beneath her. She was blending soup and when she did not answer immediately, I assumed she hadn’t heard me. I was glad as I was already regretting my rash defiance of common sense.
My mother had recently told me about Shaun, and I had just that week received a letter from Esther, with a photo of my one-year-old son. I was leaving for Baghdad early the next morning and Michelle was making dinner. I don’t know why I wanted to provoke her. I remember, at the time I had the distinct feeling that my life was spinning out of control. All my certainties had turned out to be mirages.
The blender stopped and the silence felt heavy. I could feel Michelle’s eyes on me so I lifted my head from the rucksack I was packing with delicate superstition – everything arranged according to a precise order in special pockets. The journalist’s equivalent of a footballer putting on his boots and socks in a particular way. She didn’t look angry, but there was something fierce about the set of her mouth and her slightly too-open eyes.
“What kind of question is that?” she said quietly. She paused. “But if you must know, I don’t worry because if you do screw around, I will always find out. And if I do, I know what to do. I will never live with lies again, and you know that.”
She turned back to the blender, and its angry buzz filled the kitchen.
I finished my coffee. With nothing else to do, I left the airport. Outside the concourse, the chill of an early September morning made me shiver. I had missed the taxi rush and gratefully sank into the first car in the queue. As I leant back into the seat, trying to draw warmth from the cold leather, I realised I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t want to go straight to our flat. Michelle would be there. After a few moments hesitation, I gave the impatient driver my mother’s address. We left the rank with a squeal of tires, as if he was trying to make up for the seconds I had foolishly squandered pondering such a basic question.
My mother’s apartment was cold, and as soon as I walked in, I felt sure she would not live here again. After that night at the base, when she climbed onto my camp bed and held me, we hadn’t spoken much. As I waited to board my plane out of Mogadishu, standing on the tarmac with Ugandan soldiers huddled nearby exchanging insults and cigarettes, she hugged me for a long time. The wind was roaring, the sea was in a fury, and her hair was whipping around her face. She looked more like herself than she had in years.
“Be safe,” she whispered. “I’ll call you when I know what I am doing.”
I hugged her back but I had nothing to say. I knew I was going to be safe. I had already talked to Don about a leave of absence. He said yes to everything. I am not the only one lugging a satchel of guilt through this life.
My mother stayed on the tarmac until the plane took off. I leant into the window as we taxied away from the terminal, towards the sea. I doubted she could see me, but I pressed my head so hard against the plastic that it hurt. I could not stop myself waving as we picked up speed. Of course, she did not see me then, but then sometimes goodbyes are more for ourselves than the ones we are leaving.
Her apartment seemed to have said its own goodbye to the woman who had lived there for so many years, trying to create a fantasy family out of a shrouded tragedy. What secrets could these walls tell me about the woman I never really knew? The woman who lived inside the mother? What despair did these walls see, what sighs did this sofa hear, what tears were shed on these pillows? I will never know and though part of me feels like the story of me-and-her-and-him-and-him needs an ending, what happened in Somalia has left me with a distrust of logic and endings, and maybe even beginnings.
I spent two days sleeping in the flat. On the third day, I phoned my father. I had spoken to him in Nairobi, of course. Then, he had sobbed down the phone
, thanked God, asked about my health, and repeated how worried he was until it became a mantra, to fill the awkward silences.
I couldn’t talk about what had happened. I had put him through enough. I had pinned him like a butterfly to a board. My very existence had probed the recesses of his marriage. My captivity had smashed the tranquility he had every right to expect in his final years. He did not escape the reporters, although thankfully their interest was brief. Tim is a shy, reticent man. He is a man I have always admired, the kind of decent man I thought I could one day become. But then my faith in some kind of delayed genetic goodness was dashed. Perhaps I already knew I could never match him. My philandering, my fickleness, my inability to return love. These faults were magnified in the light of his sacrifice, even if, initially, it was unwitting. He had loved me, and raised me, and cherished me as a son. I could never match him. I had abandoned my own son, and his mother.
I found it hard to speak openly to my father after I discovered my mother’s secret. I knew she had told him, but we never really discussed it. It was too late. We had lived without that shared knowledge for so long that to embrace it, or even acknowledge it, seemed pointless, almost cruel. So instead, we contented ourselves with platitudes, banalities that cast shame on me, and that betrayed our shared past. But he was too old and tired to fight, and I did not know how to reach out. Of such little tragedies is life made. None of us is immune, I suppose, but we work hard to quash individual pinpricks of pain, because if we felt each one, we would be like prisoners dying from a thousand strokes of a torturer’s thin-bladed knife. And after all, life must go on, or so we believe.
This time, my father was calm and the conversation was less stilted. I told him where I was, and where I was going. He listened. I wanted to tell him, pathetically, that it was not about him but about me, not about our relationship but about a gap that I needed to fill, it was additional, not instead of. But that wouldn’t have been entirely true, and I have always favoured silence over the outright lie. It’s one of my virtuous vices, I suppose.
He wished me luck and said goodbye, but the phone didn’t click and I held on, not wanting this to be the end, although unable to articulate what I felt I should say. This man who had taught me to talk, and walk, to catch a ball, who had read me Hardy Boy stories until my eyes closed on dreams of derring-do. He deserved a moment. He, a man of courage always, filled it.
“I have always loved you as my son, Peter. At the beginning, of course, I knew no different,” he said, his voice melting into his home lilt as it always did when he was upset or excited.
“But then I loved you as my son, because you were my son. The details didn’t matter to me. I’m sorry they do to you. But I understand. I think I might do the same if I was in your shoes. What I have learnt over these many years, is that not knowing is worse than knowing, and that imagination is a powerful foe as well as a friend. Sure, I’m guessing you know that better than most now. Go n’eiri an bothar leat, a mhac,” he said. Then the line clicked.
May the road rise with you, son. It was one of the few phrases I knew, handed down over the years by a father who had left his land and his language but needed to hold onto a few straws to steady himself in the world’s wild winds.
After hanging up the phone, I packed a rucksack and left. My mother would sort out the apartment. She would know how much of her life here she needed to keep. I felt sure it would not be much. I felt sure she would not come back. I made her bed though, in case.
I walked to the bank, weaving my way awkwardly through the people thronging the narrow, cobbled streets. Paris always has tourists. When I lived here, I felt a native’s disdain for the camera-clickers, the sky-gawkers, the gaspers. But my favourite time to be in Paris was actually at the height of the tourist season – August, when the city’s residents head for the beaches, mountains and lakes further south, or to the cool, clear north, seeking adventure while acknowledging that nothing better is to be had outside their sacred borders.
I withdrew all my savings. It wasn’t much but it would do for now. I only had one mission. I was incapable of planning beyond my immediate destination. But before I left this life behind, I had one more thing to do.
I stood on the steps of the bank for a moment, looking for something to explain the rushing crowds, the charging cars, the shiny shops all selling the same thing. From the steps, I gazed across the road to Les Halles, and the Saint-Eustache cathedral, that giant, unwieldy, smog-stained building. It seemed diminished by the clutter around it, the shoppers strolling from Rue Montorgeuil, the teenagers heading towards the escalators that led underground to a sunken mall where they could cruise cheap, slightly seedy shops in a half-world that always smelt of urine. I turned away, heading towards the other side of the city, towards the canals, down roads I knew so well, but that looked garish and strange now. My mind had changed, and the world had not changed with it. The ordinary would have to be relearnt. I was not ready for that yet. It was the perfect time to leave.
I texted Michelle to say I was coming. It had been two months since I had seen her, and I had missed her. Despite it all, despite what she might be feeling, I had missed her. I ran down the steps from the street to the path that ran alongside the water. I wanted to be as alone as possible in this crowded city.
Small yellow leaves crinkled under my feet. They had gilded the edges of the softly lapping water. The sun was soft on my bare head, there was a slight breeze. I thought of the harsh heat of Somalia. It must be another sun.
I tried to compose my apology to Michelle in my head. I had brought a photo of Godwin with me. I still was not sure if I would show it to her. I didn’t know what I hoped it would achieve.
Would there be tears? Would Michelle cry over what we had lost, or rather what I had destroyed? Or would she be angry, beat me with her fists? I realised I did not know her well enough to even hazard a guess. The thought slowed my steps.
I knocked softly on the door, my door. The key was in my pocket but I had forfeited the right to use it.
Michelle must have been waiting because the door opened immediately. She looked beautiful and tired and sad and resigned, like a Renaissance Madonna. She stared at me, and I could see the emotions glide across her face. I knew I looked different too. The man who had stared at me from the mirror that morning was haggard, unshaven and pale. She motioned to me to follow her down the hall.
We went into the sitting room, and sat opposite each other. I felt the room and its furniture, its pictures, its smells reaching out to me, goading me with their implacable certainty. I knew this place, I should feel at home here, and yet I did not.
Michelle sat quietly opposite me. Her eyes raked my face. I could not meet her gaze. She was looking for sorrow, and that there was. She was looking for love, and that too there was. And above all, she was looking for a reason, and I still did not know what to say. My brain felt slack under the enormity of this burden.
“How are you?” I surprised myself with the triteness of my question. We always fall back on what’s gone before. There is no other way.
And for a moment, the Michelle I knew, the woman I left in this apartment before I went to Somalia, was back. An ironic smile twisted her lips and she raised an eyebrow. I smiled back.
“And you?” she asked. Perhaps it was convention, perhaps she did care. I chose to believe the latter. I needed to tell her, and she needed to hear. We were locked together in a macabre dance of truth and we would not be able to move on until the last note had faded.
“I am… I am lost, Michelle. I can’t find my way back to whatever it was that I had before.” I spoke like a child, each word pushed out laboriously, filling the air with prisms of pain and neglect and remorse, and yet it was not enough. I had to try harder. I needed to find the right words to explain something that was, still, inexplicable to me.
“I am so sorry. I didn’t mean for all this to happen. It’s not an excuse I know, but it’s the truth. I didn’t set out to be unfaithful. I was
so young, and stupid, and careless about what I had. I didn’t mean for you to find out from someone else in this… this terrible way. It broke my heart to know that you would. I am so ashamed, Michelle. And so sorry.”
I lifted my head. My hand rose from my lap, hovering somewhere in the air between us, unsure where to go. I lowered it again. It was not yet time.
“Did they hurt you?”
Her voice was reluctant. I understood her effort. I loved her for it, and hated myself even more.
“No, they beat me a few times, but it was nothing really. There was a Somali man, his name was Abdi. He became my friend. Well, that’s probably too strong a word for it. I think he pitied me. I don’t think friendship can be built on pity. I guess love can’t either.”
I needed reassurance, but it was not mine to demand. I was in the confessional, Michelle was the priest. I had to keep going until my sack of sins was empty. I knew there would be no absolution.
“He helped me escape, and we ran to a village where he had friends. I think, in some ways, he was as lost as me. He was as much a prisoner as me. It’s hard to explain.”
I stopped. This was not the story Michelle needed to hear.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked, her head bowed.
“I’m leaving. Today. I’m going to go to Colorado. I need to find Shaun’s family. I can’t explain it, Michelle. I feel as though I have been beaten, pulped into tiny fragments. I have no sense of myself anymore. This is my only chance to put myself back together. Maybe it’s post-traumatic stress, but I don’t think so. I think it’s something that goes deeper, maybe some kind of nervous breakdown that has been brewing since I found out that my father was not my father. Maybe that’s it. Maybe what happened in Somalia just provided the trigger. Maybe I’m reading too much into it all. But I feel like this is the only thing that will keep me going right now. Otherwise, I might just stop. I might just lie down and not wake up.”
Fractured: International Hostage Thriller Page 19